Firewall

by Sean Rodman

  “I’m going offline. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say to Griggs.

  “Chicken!” I can hear him clucking at me until I tap the key to disconnect from the game.

  I slide my headphones off and rub my eyes. Jane. We grew up across the street from each other, started first grade together, always hung out, played video games together as we got older. Then high school and hormones hit, and what had been a good friendship started to edge toward something more. And then I had to move. Another thing that sucked about Valleytown.

  I power up my phone and scroll through the contacts. Jane Yu. Screen name—JANEY. Status—online. I tap the Video camera icon, and green letters pop up on the screen. [Video chat initiated.] And then she’s there, looking startled.

  “Josh?” She hasn’t changed since I last saw her. Black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Smooth almond skin, made pale in the light from her laptop screen. She’s wearing a black T-shirt, no logo, with a plain silver chain looped around her neck.

  “I don’t—where have you been?” she says.

  “Nowhere. Here,” I say. “It’s been a while.” My fingers drum against my thigh nervously.

  “Yeah, it’s been about three months and a hundred text messages. Did your phone break? Or they don’t have cell reception out in the boonies where you are?”

  “It’s not like that,” I say. “Anyway, I just thought…” I can’t do this. “Look, I’ll call you back later. I’ve gotta go.”

  “Josh, come on.” I can see the concern in her eyes. As pissed as she is with me, Jane wants to talk.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” I mumble.

  “Well, you were pretty clear before we left. We would message each other every day, you said.” She fiddles with the silver chain with one hand, twisting and untwisting it.

  “And I wanted to,” I say. The words start slowly, then tumble out faster. “But it’s really weird being out here. After the divorce. After the move. There was nothing familiar, nobody to hang out with. It sucks. It really does. And at first I wanted to call you. I wanted to tell you about it. But then…talking to you was just going to be a reminder of how great things were back in Chicago. It was easier just to block you out. Block everyone out. It felt, I dunno, safer.”

  Jane stares at me through the screen. “It sounds like a firewall—you know, the software that stands between your computer and the Internet? You put too many holes in the firewall, you expose yourself to all sorts of trouble. But if you block everything out—well, the firewall just becomes a problem. It becomes a prison, not a castle.”

  “Janey, I don’t think I explained it right…” I say.

  She leans in toward the camera. “Listen, I’m on the other end of the line, right? But you’ve got to let me in. I can’t do it on my own. Call me when you’re ready.” I can see her reaching toward her keyboard to disconnect the call.

  “Wait!” I say. “I called you for another reason too. I found this site, this mod of Killswitch. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. A total recreation of the town I’m living in. Like, everything. My house, my school. I don’t know how he did it. Must have taken months.”

  “Taken who months?” she asks. “Who built it?”

  Mysteries and puzzles, preferably related to programming, have always been Jane’s kryptonite. She can’t help asking more questions. I fill her in as best I can about the virtual Valleytown and its weirdness.

  “All right,” Jane says eventually. “Text me the details. I’ll check it out with you. I’ll meet you there tomorrow, five o’clock your time.”

  “Awesome!” I say, wincing at how eager I sound.

  “But be on time,” Jane says. “I’m fully expecting you to bail on me. I’m not going to wait around for you.”

  Chapter Six

  The next morning doesn’t start well. I slowly open my eyes to see bright sunlight slicing through my closed blinds. Usually when my alarm goes off, my room has a gloomy, cave-like quality to it—not helped by the layer of dirty clothes and comic books littering my floor. But right now the sun is clearly high in the sky, which means…crap. I grab my phone from the bedside table to see what time it is. The screen stays dark. Which means the battery is dead. Which means the alarm didn’t go off. I scramble into jeans and a hoodie, grab my backpack and thunder down the stairs. Dad’s left the radio in the kitchen going—he’s old-school with his technology. But the announcer clues me in about the time.

  “…is Newsradio 1430, with our nine o’clock local news. In our top story, fire crews responded last night to a fire on Bendis Crescent that destroyed a family home…”

  Nine o’clock. Which means I’ve missed the bus. Dad’s already at work. Which means I’m walking to school. Well, running. I do the math as I start jogging. I have first period off, so if I can get to school by nine thirty-five, I can avoid a late slip and detention. Because detention means I won’t be home by five—and Jane will be gone.

  By the time I bang through the double doors of McCallum High, I’m wheezing. Despite the cold October air, my face is covered in a thin layer of sweat. First period has just finished, and the halls are filled with the crush of students. I shove my way through the crowd. Rushing, I carelessly wheel around a corner, and my backpack swings out and smacks a girl in the chest. She turns, shocked expression framed by her flat, blond hair.

  “What the hell was that for?” she says. I don’t answer, turning away from her and stepping toward the open door of the English classroom just down the hall. Got to make it in there.

  “Girl asked a question,” says a deep voice. Aaron Carnavon steps in front me. The meathead from the bus. Valleytown Vikings linebacker. “It’s Josh, right?”

  “I’ve got to get to English,” I explain. I try to squeeze past him, but he shifts a little, enough to block me.

  “Show some class. Apologize to Emily.” Over his shoulder, I see Mr. Dyson closing the door to my classroom. Crap.

  “Sorry, okay? It’s not a big deal,” I say and lightly shove Aaron in the chest, trying to get by him. A futile move—the guy is built like a tank.

  “Don’t make this a big deal,” he growls. I duck past him and through the half-closed classroom door. A couple of students look up at me briefly, and a kid with shaggy dark hair smirks at my heavy-breathing arrival as I slide into the seat in front of him. Mr. Dyson furrows his brow at me but doesn’t interrupt his lecture. Through the door’s window, I see Aaron and Emily walking away down the hallway. So I made it. I wipe my hand over my sweaty face. Barely.

  At the end of the school day I’m vomited back out onto the parking lot with the rest of the student body. Griggs finds me in the crowds and we walk, as always, past the pod people to the school buses. We don’t talk much, beyond making plans for gaming tonight. I stop midsentence when I see Aaron waiting in the parking lot. I swear and turn around, heading right back into the school.

  “What are you doing?” says Griggs, running to catch up. “I thought you needed to get home.”

  “Yo, Josh!” Aaron yells out. Too late. He’s seen me. I slowly turn back around as Aaron limps toward us. “We’ve got something to discuss.” Griggs moves into position between us.

  “Aaron!” he says with a big smile. “You coming to Molly’s party this weekend? It’s going off…” Griggs’s voice fades as he sees the furious look on Aaron’s face. He turns back to give me a quick glance and says, “What the hell did you do, Josh?”

  “I tell you what he did. Josh disrespected my girlfriend. He was all, like, Get out of my way—big man coming through. Then he started getting pushy with me. Dude needs to learn some manners.”

  My heart starts pounding nervously, but I try to keep my voice level. “It wasn’t like a big deal or anything. I just bumped into her.”

  “You hear that, Aaron?” says Griggs. “He said he was sorry.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” he growls. “He said it was no big deal.”

  “Whatever,” I say. I ca
n see students filing onto our bus. “This is a waste of time, Griggs.” Brave talk, but as I step around Aaron, I’m hoping that he’s all talk. Or at least can’t catch me with his bad knee. Behind me I can hear Griggs talking him down.

  “I’ll talk to Josh, all right?” he says. “He can be a total jerk sometimes.”

  By the time I’m on the bus, it’s mostly filled up. Griggs drops into a seat in front of me, then turns around.

  “Aaron’s a pretty good guy, but you keep pushing his buttons and he’ll show up with all his football buddies. Just to make a point. Anyway, you owe me for saving your ass. Twice.”

  The leftover adrenaline from the face-off with Aaron turns into a sudden rush of anger. My words come out sharp edged.

  “Griggs, I don’t owe you anything. And I heard you taking his side, calling me a jerk.”

  “Actually, you can be a jerk sometimes. It’s like you don’t know how to deal with people.”

  “They’re pod people, remember? Everybody at this school is like an alien. That’s what we said, right?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I don’t care what they think, all right?” A couple of guys turn around to look at us, and I realize how loud my voice is.

  Griggs looks surprised at the ferocity of my words, then confused. “How can you not care?” he asks.

  “I’m not like you,” I shoot back. “I don’t need to be friends with everyone. And I don’t need you fighting my battles for me.”

  “All right. See how that works out for you.” He snorts, then turns away to face the front of the bus. “You’re on your own, Josh.”

  Chapter Seven

  It’s down to the wire, but I make it online by 4:58 PM. My warfighter waits in the main square, near the church. The game has shifted into nighttime mode again. The windows glow warmly in the storefronts, and the streetlights spread puddles of light down the length of Main Street. A flat moon hovers above a slightly pixelated tree line in the distance.

  There’s the sizzling sound that indicates someone new is joining the game. I spin my warfighter around and see her, a different version of my soldier, dressed in dark-blue armor with a long sniper rifle slung across her back.

  “You made it!” I say into my headset.

  Jane’s voice crackles back to me. “Don’t sound so surprised. I always show up.” Ouch. But her voice softens. “Anyway, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  We tour around Valleytown as I explain the discoveries Griggs and I have made, like the school filled with cutout figures. We end up at the burning house on Bendis Crescent.

  “And all these places actually exist? Like, this house?” she asks, as we watch flames snap and writhe around the building.

  “I think so. I mean, I haven’t actually gone to this address.” As I say it, I have another moment of déjà vu. Something about a fire on Bendis—where did I hear that?

  Jane interrupts my train of thought. “And you don’t know who made this?”

  “No clue. And I’ve never seen anyone else in here. It’s like a ghost town. Nothing moves except for us.”

  “Weird,” Jane says. “Crazy. And kind of awesome. I’m glad you showed me.”

  “Me too. I almost didn’t, you know? I thought you might not be into it.”

  Her warfighter turns toward me, the flames from the burning house reflecting off the smooth metal surfaces of her armor.

  “So what made you change your mind?” she says.

  “Griggs, actually. I told him you were a kick-ass coder, and he thought maybe you could help us figure out how to get access privileges to mod things in here. We’re locked out.”

  There’s a pause before she answers me. “You’re unbelievable.”

  “What?”

  “That’s why you got in touch with me? After all the times I reached out to you? You wanted to play in your sandbox here and needed me to give you the keys? You care more about this game than you do about me.”

  “It’s not like that—”

  “It is exactly like that,” she says and swings the sniper rifle off her back. She takes aim and fires two quick shots into my warfighter’s head. The view shifts crazily as my character collapses. A red X appears above my head. I tap furiously on the keyboard, trying to resurrect myself as quickly as possible.

  “Jane?” I call out, but she’s broken the audio link. By the time I get my warfighter back on his feet, Jane’s character has vanished from the game as well. I wander around the empty streets of Valleytown for a while, looking for her. But I know I’ve blown it. She’s really gone.

  An hour later my phone trembles on the desk beside my laptop. It’s a text from Jane.

  Got into mod server, gave you root-level access. Should be able to change whatever you want in the game now.

  Awesome. And maybe she’s not that mad? I chew on my lip, thinking. I don’t want to blow it again by saying the wrong thing, so I just send back the simplest thing I can think of.

  Thx.

  She texts me back immediately.

  You’ve got your stupid game. Blip. Another one.

  But you don’t have me. Blip.

  Goodbye, Josh.

  I take a heavy breath. Pick up the phone, scroll to her contact. Look at the glowing green Phone icon. Should I call her, fix this before it becomes something permanent and awful? I watch the clock at the top of phone’s screen click through the minutes. I feel like a computer that’s locked up, a little icon in my head spinning and spinning. Frozen. For the millionth time, I realize I don’t know how to do this…stuff with people. I wish there was code that explained it, that I could rewrite conversations. Rebuild relationships like I can fix buildings in Killswitch.

  Frustration starts to bubble into anger. I put the phone down on the desk, hard. Then log back into Killswitch. My warfighter appears in the Valleytown central square. Still a quiet summer night. There’s a blue van parked right in front of me. A generic type I’ve seen scattered around the game.

  Jane. Griggs. I don’t need them. With a grunt, I punch the side of the virtual van. The entire side of the van caves in. I stare at it stupidly. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

  Up until now, everything in the game was indestructible. Jane has changed the rules for me.

  I raise my radium gun at Jansen’s Hardware store and squeeze the trigger. A brilliant burst of green lightning slams into the big plate-glass window. The deafening roar rattles through my headset, and the entire store vanishes in a cloud of flames and smoke. Chunks of debris arc out of the explosion. I turn to a tree next to me and switch to flamethrower. There’s a satisfying whoomp as the tree ignites. I start walking down Main Street, lobbing grenades at houses, stores, cars—anything in my path. I don’t care.

  Blowing crap up should make me feel better. Instead I start to feel even angrier. Then I realize why. Nothing is fighting back. I want something to take me on. And then it occurs to me that if Jane gave me admin rights, I can create anything I want. Not just destroy.

  I stop at an intersection and put away my weapons. Tapping a few keys, I pull up the mod editor. Just like before, my screen splits in two—half of it has the in-game view of my warfighter, while the other half is filled with options for changing the variables of the game. I click on the toggles to generate a new creature and a message pops up:

  [Permission granted. You have root-access privileges.]

  A black mechanical spider appears next to my warfighter in the middle of the street. I give it a pair of laser cannons—not too powerful—then switch back to game mode to activate it.

  The spider leaps at my warfighter, locking onto my chest with powerful legs. I press my fist into its underbelly and unload my mini-missile into it. The spider detonates satisfyingly, chunks flying onto nearby lawns.

  I smile. Destroy. Create. Time to make some changes around here.

  Chapter Eight

  I sometimes imagine my life as the pages from a comic book.

  Panel 1.

&nb
sp; Black and white. Me at school, frowning. The teacher—a bug-eyed monster—yammers in the background. There are little thought bubbles floating above my head as I dream up new things to create in Killswitch.

  Panel 2.

  Black and white. Me walking home, frowning, past crowds of students. I’ve become half invisible, faded out. They all ignore me, even Griggs. But I don’t notice. My thought bubbles are starting to fill the panel with spiderbots, bugchoppers, warfighters.

  Panel 3.

  Black and white. The thought bubbles have grown again, crowding everything else off the page. People run screaming from my monsters.

  Panel 4.

  Full color. Me, dark bags under my eyes from sleep deprivation. Sitting in front of my laptop. The ideas from my thought bubbles are now contained on the screen. Becoming real. Big smile on my face. The sun is rising as I finish another epic addition to my new world.

  The panels repeat, again and again. Eleven days and nights pass by like this.

  Each day, my virtual world grows bigger and more beautiful. And the real world just seems to get dimmer.

  Chapter Nine

  On day twelve, it’s Halloween. More important, it’s when I get the idea for my fortress. Something with thin steel towers like knives. A blade castle. The pencil sketches on blue-lined paper in my binder don’t look like much. But they have potential. I’m not sure where to put it in the game though. Build it over top of my real address? Or maybe put it right in the middle of Havenwood Park—that might fit the castle vibe better. I casually cover the whole thing up with my textbook as Mr. Dyson wanders down my aisle, but he’s busy talking about Greek myths. Across the aisle Griggs is flipping his pen between his fingers, a nervous habit I’ve seen him do before. He scribbles something down on a scrap of paper. When Dyson isn’t looking, he throws the folded-up note over to me.

  Don’t be a wangster. LAN party with the guys after school. I’ll get pizza.

  I crumple up the note, shaking my head. Why doesn’t he get it? I don’t want to hang out with anybody else. I don’t need anybody else.