Milan in School

November 8, Thursday 11 A.M.

Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer?

This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing.

3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact!

“Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.”

Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher.

Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive.

The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist.

Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan.

Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go.

“God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it!


“PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth.

“HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.”

The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something.

“Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.”

“YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal.

Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square.

Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat.

After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know.

Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’

That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:

                       [FRACTAL IMAGE]

when you pass, code is:’

                      [FRACTAL IMAGE]

Kool! Fractal programs!

Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan.

Oh crap!

Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight.

Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool!

Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero.

That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick.

Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller.

Milan entered:

                    [FRACTAL IMAGE]

and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and sick again and then there was a flash of blinding dazzling light which morphed into a shape which turned into the study hall window.

“Hey, Stemberg, what do you think you’re doing!?” Mr. Vuga demanded with gritted teeth as he yanked the study hall eyeVid off of Milan’s face. Crap! It had to be him! Mr. Vuga, the Hejn Secondary Dean of Discipline, was on study hall duty. Not good. Mr. Vuga was a dogmatic zealot when it came to the rules, and he sure as hell had no sense of humour.

Milan couldn’t think just yet. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just weird and, well, totally way too hyper-real, which was normal. Real always felt too real after SIM.

“Sorry Mr. Vuga, I... I was just surfing a little...” Milan looked up at Mr. Vuga, blinking as his eyes adjusted to Real. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He was treading water.

“I’m surprised at you, Stemberg,” Mr. Vuga said, trying hard to not raise his voice too much and thereby violate strict study hall regulations, or worse, set off the noise monitor alarm.

Vuga was large and formless, and except for the face, his front side pretty much matched his backside. Legend had it that he could fart out of his belly button. He wore cheap made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart suits, always rumpled and brown or beige. He held Milan’s eyeVid as if it were toxic evidence of some heinous enviroCrime.

Everybody in the study hall was now staring at them. Milan felt the blood rush to his face. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong!

“You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?”

Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while in the school eduZone. Yes, that was it, it was just a misunderstanding, but from the look Mr. Vuga was giving him one would have thought he had been caught with a vial of dreamWater or a week’s supply of Bulgarian tripTabs.

Milan uneasily shifted in his chair. It felt uncomfortable. Everything suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet could be serious, and that it went on your record. Which meant your parents were notified, and that definitely sucked.

“This is a misunderstanding Mr. Vuga, I wasn’t really offNet,” Milan lied as he looked up, brushing away a strand of hair so that Mr. Vulga could gaze even deeper into his big innocent brown eyes. It didn’t work.

“That’s enough, Stemberg. I’m taking you straight to Ms. Dietze’s office.”

The headmaster?! Crap! Milan’s heart sank. It didn’t help that the grrrls over at the next table were giggling.


“But I wasn’t doing Xgames or anything,” protested Milan. “It’s a misunderstanding.” The depth of the hole he was in was now dawning on him. He was sitting in the “student’s chair,” facing the headmaster of Hejn Secondary who was on the other side of a very large desk. Milan was trying hard to channel Dano kool. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t working, but he hoped that at least he wasn’t fidgeting too much.

Ms. Dietze, the headmaster, was a striking, slim, refined woman of about forty-five with coolly knowing blue eyes. Today her lipstick was very dark and her eyelashes whitened to match her hair. The collar on her black and white houndstooth suit framed her face and lent her an almost Elizabethan air of authority. The lack of chip jewelry was conspicuous, unusual for a woman of her position. She leaned back in her chair and stared at the holo screen hovering above her desk. The room was agonizingly quiet as she silently followed Milan’s offNet trace.

“You may leave us now,” the headmaster eventually spoke, addressing Mr. Vuga, who was hovering behind Milan like a hungry vulture, “and please close the door behind you.”

Mr. Vuga was visibly reluctant and disappointed, what with missing the pleasure of punishing a student, but he had no choice.

“Young man, the truth is that my hands are tied,” Ms. Dietze said as soon as they were alone. “First, you lied. You were offNet.”

“But it was due to a misunderstanding and I wasn’t doing Xgames or anything,” repeated Milan almost mechanically, quite sure by now that his situation was hopeless.

“Yes... your trace shows that... but nevertheless I have no choice. You were offNet. Regrettably for you, the rules are quite clear... and you were, after all, caught in the act.” Ms. Dietze spoke in a forbidding measured tone that turned students into intimidated blobs of wobbly jelly. She absently tapped her long fingers on the huge desk, the clicking of her sharp blackSilver nails making the only sound in the awkward silence.

Milan could think of nothing to say so instead he looked straight ahead, trying hard not to stare at a flash of red lace that poked out of Ms. Dietze’s low neckline.

“But unfortunately there’s more, isn’t there?” she eventually spoke again, with pauses just long enough to be unnerving. “This portal you were playing around with is very seriously off limits, young man... and... I see here that attempting to hack this portal is an infraction of the Freedom and Liberty Act... meaning it is considered by CivDef and the Ministry of Freedom to be... potentially... a terrorist matter?” There was perhaps just the tiniest touch of sarcasm in the headmaster’s voice.

Ms. Dietze wears a red lace bra?

“Milan, I’ve known you for years and I cannot begin to catalogue my gratitude to your mother for all she has done for this school and for education in general. You’ve always been a good student. And I know you consider yourself a gRazer. Whether or not the gRazer community agrees, I don’t know. I do know that your portal entry attempt was, to put it charitably, extremely ham-fisted, and then you made no effort to hide your trace. You are a very foolish young man and in very serious trouble. You obviously lack both the knowledge and the talent to be Switch, yet only someone associated with that particular community would have access to the codes you so clumsily attempted to use. Clearly someone passed them on to you...”

Milan was quite certain his mother didn’t own any red lace bras.

There was another long silence.

“You keep insisting there was a misunderstanding. Perhaps you’d like to explain that and tell me what’s going on? You can start by telling me where you obtained these portal codes...”

Milan put away thoughts of red lace bras and silently cursed Audrey. It was all her fault. Of course she should have known that he just had a junky old app, and that he was in study hall and using the school eyeVid. She had to have known. But, as much as he felt like he could kill her right now, he wasn’t going to turn her in. Not Audrey.

Milan hesitated at first, but then he decided that he had nothing to lose if he opened up and honestly explained how he got into this fix in the first place.

“Well, it’s about Dano...”

“Who?”

“Dano. Dano Kalen.”

“Dano Kalen? Yes, I remember him,” the headmaster noted frostily. “It’s a shame someone so bright didn’t graduate with the rest of his class.”

“He hasn’t been around for three days,” replied Milan.

“And... ?” Ms. Dietze asked. “His reliability, if I’m not mistaken, was never exactly unimpeachable, was it?”

“But ma’m,” Milan blurted out. He tended to talk fast when nervous, and he was getting more and more nervous as this went on. “Well, like, that was school, but, well, that’s not it, not what I’m talking about now, I mean, what I mean is that what he says is always juice, and that’s the problem... and I looked for him everywhere. I looked in all the places, and I looked to see if there was something in SIMface or some Weibo or something somewhere, and, well, there wasn’t and...”

The headmaster held up her hand for Milan to stop. A white gold bracelet slid down a black lace sleeve.

“Young man, you’ve looked for Dano everywhere but in Real, which is where I would expect to find someone of the gRazer persuasion, no doubt amusing himself in some utterly disreputable place.”

“But, but—what I’m tryin’ to say is that there’s a really weird thing going on, ‘cause it’s not just like he’s just disappeared, it’s like he’s really disappeared. There’s nothing anywhere. Like try googling. You keep getting...”

Ms. Dietze held up her hand again. She scanned her holoVid for a while, and as she stared at the screen the look on her face morphed from frosty to dead serious.

“My advice to you, young Stemberg,” she said after a pause, her voice hardened, “is to cease searching for Dano Kalen. You will not find him simply because, as far as we are all concerned, as of today, he doesn’t exist, and never did.”

With mouth wide open in astonishment, Milan stared at the headmaster.

“Catching flies will not change things, young man. I repeat, Mr. Kalen no longer exists, and if you know what’s good for you, you will stop searching for him.”

What? No. This couldn’t be happening. Ms. Dietze knew Dano! Hadn’t she just said so? So how could he now not exist? But before any of this could sink in, she continued. “And you, you are in deep, deep trouble. I understand your panic at discovering your friend had vanished, but unfortunately that doesn’t change things. I cannot overlook your offNet violation.” The headmaster’s wintry eyes sliced into Milan’s. The point was inescapable.

“I will, however, overlook your botched hacking into the portal, as the Freedom and Liberty Act is, officially, not strictly speaking a school concern. I will say nothing, but I can’t promise the authorities won’t come looking for you. Still, given who your mother is, maybe they won’t.”

Milan mumbled something which Ms. Dietze dismissively waved away as she quickly made some entries on her holoVid.

“I don’t like what has happened to your friend Dano, and unfortunately there is very little I can do about it, but I do know someone you can talk to. I have no idea if he can help, but you can trust him.” Ms. Dietze quickly scribbled a note on a piece of paper and handed it to Milan. “Hide this,” she said somewhat mysteriously, “in your pocket. Now!” It was clear she meant it.

Just then there was a loud knock and Mr. Vuga, all red-faced, breathless and uninvited, burst into the office.

“Sorry to intrude, Ms. Dietze, but I, ahh,” Ms. Dietze had always made Mr. Vuga feel somewhat awkward, “thought it might be a bit of an, umm, emergency, as it were. Your vid went dead a few seconds ago. Is, ahh, everything in order? You never know with students these days...” Mr. Vuga growled as he looked at Milan, clearly thinking (or at least wishing) that maybe young Stemberg had gone berserk.

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Vuga. I know that by bursting in here you are quite correctly following regulations,” Ms. Dietze threw a knowing little dark-lipped smile. Mr. Vuga felt uncomfortably disarmed. Milan just sat there, stunned, wondering if it was he or the world that were going more mental by the moment.

“I’m not sure how I managed, but I crashed the system. You know how these things are, and unfortunately I’m not too good at computers,” Ms. Dietze lied, “but, there, it’s up now.”

Mr. Vuga seemed unconvinced, but there was not much he could do. He stood there wiping sweat off his face with a grimy old handkerchief, looking sullen and awkward and not certain how to act. This was the first time he had ever barged in on the Headmaster. The CCTV had never blanked out before.

“I think we’ve taken care of matters, then,” Ms. Dietze said, in her deliberate way. “You may both go... and Mr. Stemberg, remember, I will schedule a date for you to face Mr. Vuga’s disciplinary committee. Until then I will be keeping a close eye on you...”

As Milan stood up Ms. Dietze gave him a sharp look. Milan hastily exited the office, wishing he knew what it meant.