The Annihilation of Foreverland

by Tony Bertauski

  Sid took one more long breath and let out a roar. He lifted his tree trunk arms, flexed the dagger-tipped claws, and slashed downward. He would dice Danny into cubes. He would put him back together and do it again. And again.

  He was going to do it all night.

  But then Lucinda arrived.

  She emerged from the ground like a ghost.

  She smacked the edge of the sundial with her fist. It rang like a gong struck with a hammer. The vibrations shook Foreverland.

  Danny staggered. His vision doubled.

  Only Lucinda remained in focus, unaffected by the tremors emanating from the sundial. She had let loose a never-ending earthquake.

  “If you love this place,” she said, “then you will never leave it.”

  Lucinda walked toward Sid as he lost his balance. She plunged her hand into his chest. He continued to convulse, but slowly – very slowly – he began to settle like a bell reaching the end of its ring until he was as unaffected as Lucinda.

  His eyes were wide. His mouth was open.

  He shrank back to normal-size. When she gently placed him on the ground, he had become Sid, the gangly kid back in the Haystack. His expression was not angry or scared.

  It was vacant.

  She took Danny’s hand. Warmth penetrated his arm and filled him. And then they fell through a trapdoor that opened on the ground.

  Into the grayness of the Nowhere.

  Danny was on his knees when the circular room appeared.

  His hands were splayed on the floor. Twenty fingers were jiggling out of focus, the sundial ringing between his ears. His stomach turned and twisted. He thought he might vomit, then thought it weird since he was a digital body and hadn’t really eaten anything.

  He closed his eyes, focused on the tiny dot. In and out, he breathed until things settled. When he opened his eyes, he had ten fingers again.

  “He’s a bad kid.” Lucinda was sitting in the lone chair, center of the room. “I saw what he was doing… in the others’ thoughts.”

  “I thought the fight was a clue. You just wanted Sid.”

  “He tortures Reed,” she said. “He deserved what he got.”

  “What’d you do to him?”

  “I gave him what he loves.” She crossed her legs. “I gave him Foreverland.”

  It sounded like a bad thing.

  Danny sat up, allowed a few moments to adjust before standing. The floor swayed a bit. He felt like he just stepped off a roller coaster. A chair appeared. He grabbed the back but didn’t sit.

  “What’s that mean?” he asked. “How’d you give him Foreverland?”

  “He’ll never leave.”

  “You can do that?”

  She glanced away. “You’re all coming here, Danny Boy. You all join the voices in the Nowhere.”

  “I don’t understand, Parker was better. He couldn’t have stayed here.”

  She shrugged.

  He’ll join the voices? She couldn’t have that right. Parker was there, he was back. It had to be some mirror image that remained in Foreverland, perhaps the ghosts of ideas and thoughts that weren’t real to begin with. Perhaps that’s what the program was about, cleansing our minds of impurity, erasing the habits of self-destruction and reprogramming us with desirable thoughts.

  But then who would be deciding what to program? And who decided what was desirable?

  Zin might already be scattered in the Nowhere.

  “He is not,” she said, sensing his thought. “But he’s close.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know… he’s with his girlfriend. He’s a good person, Danny Boy. I like Zin.”

  But none of that would matter if Danny couldn’t do something because she was right. They were all heading for Foreverland. If they were really helping them become better people, then a satellite landing on the island wouldn’t harm anything.

  But if they weren’t helping…

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  Danny let go of the chair and nodded. She stood up and the chair disappeared. He took his place in the center.

  Thought-commands lit up the room.

  He was in the eye of a data storm.

  The colors swirled around the room. Sometimes they appeared as shapes that connected with other shapes, sometimes merging, sometimes snapping together. Other colors were blurs or streaks or dots that interweaved and interlocked and became something larger.

  Danny stood still, eyes closed.

  He forgot he was in a room. Forgot he once inhabited a body. He had become the data, swimming through the ethereal universe of networks on the island, searching for the conduit that would let him leak out and spread across the outside world— The colors stopped.

  He opened his eyes. The room looked like the inside of a kaleidoscope.

  “What’s wrong?” Lucinda asked.

  “It’s too easy.”

  Danny walked the perimeter, thinking. He wanted to be sure. If he fell into a trap, everything ended. Game over. He made one loop around the room, started another. By the end of the second one, he was positive.

  A bubble appeared in the middle of the room, hovering off the floor. Its surface swirled with colors reflecting from the walls.

  “That’s like the firewall that seals the island from the rest of the world,” Danny said. “Last time, I exploited a line of communication.”

  He put his finger on a black dot floating on the surface.

  “They only stay open for a millisecond because snoopers scour the entire firewall a thousand times a second looking for these inconsistencies and closing them. I was able to slip through one before they closed it.”

  “So? Do it again.”

  “But I shouldn’t be able to. Snoopers are learning programs, they would fix the gap. It shouldn’t be there.”

  The lights from the bubble scattered over her face, glimmering on her electric red hair.

  “I think it’s a trap,” Danny said. “They might know what I’m doing.”

  “Then why set a trap?”

  Good question. “I can’t chance it. If I blow this, it’s all over.”

  Lucinda gazed at the bubble. She gave him the space to think as the clock inside Foreverland ticked closer to the end of the day. Closer to his return to the Haystack.

  “Is there another way to get out?” she asked.

  A red dot began glowing in the center of the bubble. It took the form of a building with five floors and a smokestack. Danny reached inside and touched it.

  “I’ll go deeper.”

  Danny had become the colors, again. He had become the data streaming through the network pipelines like blood through the body’s arteries. He swished through the Ethernet web, spreading out and observing the flow of data, reading its content, following multiple directions and destinations, searching for the center of activity. He experienced the sensation of shooting across space.

  Lucinda watched quietly.

  Many times, he disguised himself as quantifiable data as the security snoopers trolled the network for potential intruders. And then he’d be on the move again. But the closer he got to the center of activity – the mainframe processor – the slower his progress became. He spent long chunks of time idle. One slip and the security snoopers would trace his presence back to an identity known as Danny Boy. He had cloaked his identity, but they would eventually unravel it. And then everyone would know what he was up to. And on an island, it was hard to run and hide.

  He began to doubt his intuition about the outer firewall, but he knew it was just wishful thinking. His new path was slow and tedious and dangerous, but he couldn’t take forever. At some point, the needle would withdraw from his body and he’d return empty-handed.

  His senses adjusted to the new reality of colorful data. He began to see it and feel it. The room reflected his experience. Lucinda watched as his experience reflected a recognizable reality in the room. They soared through slippery tunnels and past doorways and stopped inside empty
rooms. They flew down hallways, beneath doors. Sometimes they went so fast it was just a blur. Something silver formed ahead of them. It was down a long hallway. It came into focus.

  An elevator opened.

  Danny moved for the first time in hours. He walked toward the elevator and then appeared to go inside it. The doors closed.

  Lucinda wouldn’t see him come back.

  The Milstar communications system consisted of five satellites – each weighing approximately 10,000 pounds – positioned around the world to meet wartime requirements with a price tag just under $5 billion.

  They’d notice one missing.

  Danny went up to the fourth floor of the Chimney where the bulk of computer activity operated and streamed through a major conduit of data that was transferring updates to the outside world. He did a quick search of the Milstar program and found it linked to three locations: Los Angeles Air Force Base, Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, and Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado.

  He was careful not to set off any alarms while snooping around each location. Since he resembled data, it only took seconds to cross the country for preliminary observations. Once he was certain, he penetrated Schriever Air Force Base.

  There were very few gaps to exploit and the multi-layered security system was covered with alarms. But it wasn’t evolving like the Chimney. Danny easily disguised himself as a top-secret document and streamed onto a secretary’s computer in one of the outer offices. From there, he leaped into the network and passed through encrypted firewalls as a variety of updates and system maintenance. He avoided any sort of forced entry that might trigger a lockdown. He needed things to be open and fully operational.

  Once he cleared security, he migrated to the central command processor and located the geosynchronized orbit of the satellites. He could take complete control of all five, if he wished, shoot all of them at the island like falling stars. But that was risky. Alarms would be triggered and there was a chance that a system override could derail his actions. They would know the coordinates and likely investigate, but that wasn’t as sure a thing as dropping 10,000 pounds of metal on the Mansion.

  Danny tucked Trojan horses into the system that would lay dormant until one of the satellites was positioned over the island. Then they would send the satellite hurtling toward the South Atlantic. At that point, there would be nothing Milstar could do to restore power in time to alter the $1 billion belly flop.

  Estimated impact: ten hours, twenty minutes.

  Danny double-checked his work. When he was satisfied, he drifted back into the network. He took his time reentering the same portal inside the Chimney, trailing an email that was downloading onto the server. He ended up in the middle of the main database that contained phone calls, emails, and documents. He filtered through the information disguised as system maintenance, integrating with the content.

  There were lists of clients, none of which Danny recognized; surveillance video showing “prospects” of teenage boys that were sometimes in hospitals, alone in poverty or abandoned in remote areas. Prospects had psychological evaluation documents attached to them, evaluating them as either viable candidates or not.

  Nothing explained what they were doing with them.

  Danny ventured out of the system, past highly secure compartments that controlled all the buildings, food storage, power and security features. He could shut down the island, if he needed to. But that wouldn’t do any good without someone coming to the rescue.

  He was about to return to the Nowhere when something stopped him. It was a large database called “Records”.

  Danny hesitated. Records would mean histories. The past.

  Who I am.

  Night had arrived in Foreverland.

  Danny hurried inside the Records.

  42

  The atmosphere transformed into images. He was no longer amorphous data that streamed along the colorful conduit. The Records database took shape of something that resembled an enormous library with vaulted ceilings and hanging lights. The floor was hard and shiny and the walls covered with bookshelves. But there were no tables or chairs; there was no need to reach for the symbolic books that held the records of the island. Danny only needed to think and the information streamed into his consciousness. He could absorb and comprehend the data about everyone, but he was only interested in one person.

  [Search for Danny…] he thought-commanded, suddenly realizing something he had been missing every since he woke up.

  I don’t know my last name.

  It didn’t seem important before. He was Danny and that was all he needed. It didn’t even feel like he had a last name, like it had been erased.

  The walls shifted. The bookshelves rotated and changed positions. Three books floated off the shelves and levitated in front of him, each with the name Daniel on the cover. He didn’t recognize any of the last names, but two of them had two small words lettered in red just below the name.

  Crossover Completed.

  Danny sent them back to the shelves. The third one centered in front of him.

  “Daniel Forrester,” he said. “Let’s see what you got.”

  He touched the cover. The book opened. There were no words on pages, only the colors of raw data. He put his hand on it and knew.

  I’m Daniel Forrester.

  Daniel Forrester was born in Gilbert, Arizona.

  A healthy boy and an only child. His parents were John and Maggy Forrester. They were both only children, as well. The grandparents all deceased. The only extended family was a great aunt that lived in Rockford, Illinois. She was in her eighties and suffering from dementia.

  Ideal candidate, it said.

  That’s what Danny was labeled, an ideal candidate for the program. He didn’t know if that referred to his health or the dementia. Or maybe the lack of extended family.

  His father was a finish carpenter.

  Memories emerged of his father coming home when it was dark. Danny would be parked in front of the television when his truck pulled into the driveway. His father smelled of sweat and cedar. Sometimes he’d lug his double-saddle tool belt into the house loaded with every tool ever invented and work on a project at home, fixing a doorframe or building a new room. He knew where every tool was located in the tool belt, finding it without looking. And when he was done, he always slipped it back where it belonged, without looking.

  He was very good.

  Until he fell from a roof and severed his spinal cord.

  Danny was nine when it happened. He was on the computer in the attic when his mother took him to the neighbor’s house. She was crying and didn’t tell Danny anything. She didn’t come back to get him for three days. She didn’t talk much then, either.

  His father died on the operating table.

  Danny held her hand at the funeral. It was cold. When he squeezed, she didn’t squeeze back. Her eyes had become blank. No family attended, only neighbors and woodworkers. The house was very quiet that night.

  His mother was not home much. She worked a lot. She had a prescription drug problem and washed it down with gin. She often never made it off the couch. This suited Danny’s lifestyle just fine.

  Danny learned how to hack computers when he was six. It started with online games. He and his friends hacked Xbox and PlayStation databases, rewriting the code for unlimited weapons. They downloaded free music, movies, and games. Sometimes they had games before they were released.

  By the time he was nine, it wasn’t even a challenge. After his father died, he stepped up the stakes.

  They hacked into the school and planted porn in the principal’s inbox. They changed all the jocks’ grades to Fs. They set off fire alarms ten times in a month.

  They hacked their first bank when he was 10.

  They set up a dummy account with false ATM deposits. They never let the balance go over five hundred dollars and they never withdrew the money as cash, simply used it to pay for things online. Because his mother was never home, they had clot
hes, shoes, computers and software shipped directly to his house.

  It was a parole officer that busted him.

  Danny skipped school, sitting up in the attic on the computer for days at a time. The cops came to the house and wanted to speak to his mother. It pissed Danny off, so he swiped the officer’s identity, repossessed his car and foreclosed on his house. The man’s credit was trashed. They couldn’t prove he did anything.

  He had all the money an 11 year old would want, but he wanted more. He began trolling Las Vegas casinos. At first, it was just jacking accounts and hacking online poker games. But the real money was in Vegas. His friends came over. It took a weekend and a case of Red Bull, but they managed to set up a dummy account with three million dollars and a penthouse timeshare waiting for them at the top of a resort. Their biggest problem was the fact that they were a bunch of eleven year olds.

  But they ended up with bigger problems.

  At first they thought they’d been discovered by Vegas security and they’d lose all the bones in their thumbs. They were relieved that it was just the FBI. They’d be in trouble, but at least they wouldn’t be hung from a hook through the tongue.

  The rest of them wanted to stop, but Danny wasn’t going to lie down. He planted a data bomb inside the FBI network and wiped it out. Their evidence disappeared. But not all of it.

  They came to the door disguised as the UPS man dropping off another package. Danny answered the door in his sweatpants. They put him in the back of a black Suburban. His friends sat next to him.

  He was back home by the time he was thirteen.

  Despite the federal shadow watching his every move, he went back to his Vegas accounts and set up two more. He could retire when he turned eighteen.

  That’s when the house burned down.

  That’s when Danny’s life – as he knew it – ended.

  Danny Forrester was acquired by Franklin Constantino.

  The file said he’d been acquired by this man.

  Acquired.

  Franklin Constantino made his money in real estate and other businesses. He had lung cancer and had not been seen in public for quite some time. Some reports stated he had died in a boating accident.