Lexicon

never do that again.”
    “Okay.
Okay
, Jeremy. I was just playing.”
    After a while, he sat. She leaned her head on his shoulder. She felt very close to him. “I promise not to turn you into my thought slave,” she said, and felt him smile a little. But she had thought about it.
    • • •
    The next Tuesday, she hung around the school gates but Jeremy didn’t show up for their slushie run. She trudged back to the school. Something must have come up. Some class. He was getting busier. But she passed the front lawn and there he was, lounging with his friends, his pant legs rolled up in the sun. They were talking in the way of older students, no one laughing or even moving much, every sentence dripping with irony and layers of meaning, or so Emily guessed. She stopped. Heads turned. Jeremy glanced at her, then away. She walked on.
    She understood that they couldn’t be seen together too often. They could not be attached. She knew this. She reached her room and sat at her desk and opened a book. If she turned her head, she could have looked down to the lawn and seen Jeremy and his little group of conceited friends. But she did not. Occasionally she leaned back and stretched her arms, or fiddled with her hair, because she knew he could see her, too.
    • • •
    From time to time she saw students with ribbons tied around their wrists. The ribbon was red or white; if it was red, it meant a senior taking his final exam. The rule was not to talk to them, or even look too closely, although of course Emily did, because one day she would be wearing that red ribbon, and she wanted to know what that meant. She had once seen a red-ribboned boy building a house of cards in the front hall. He was there for two days, making the house taller and taller while he grew thinner and haunted-looking and it got so that people avoided the hall, in case of drafts. Then one morning the cards were gone and so was the boy. Emily never found out what had happened, whether he passed or failed. Another night, she woke to an odd bell and went to the window to see a girl leading a cow up the driveway. An actual, live cow. Emily could not deduce anything useful from this.
    At the end of her second year, she found a slip of paper beneath her door, notifying her of a room change for Higher-Level Machine Languages. But when she turned up, she was the only student there. The teacher, a short, balding man named Brecht, handed her a white ribbon. “Congratulations. You’re ready for your junior exam.” She tied the ribbon around her left wrist, feeling excited.
    Brecht told her to make a computer print the word
hello
on its screen. This sounded like something she could do in about two minutes, with a command like PRINT or ECHO. But Brecht said not to leave the room until it was done. She sat on a cardboard box, because this was not a classroom so much as a crypt for the corpses of prehistoric computers, and flipped open a laptop.
    So the catch was the laptop didn’t work. She crawled around, testing power supplies and fans. She found a monitor that powered on but had a burned-out VGA input. Everything in the room was like that, she discovered: sabotaged in key ways.
    She assembled a machine, Frankenstein-style, from the innards of different devices. It had a hard drive and a monitor and it powered on but wouldn’t do anything else. She had a blinking cursor that refused to respond to the keyboard. The operating system was sabotaged, too.
    Her bladder pinged. She had drunk half a bottle of water on her way here, which was unfortunate. Her new goal was to finish this test before she needed to pee into a bag. She uncovered a BIOS problem and then a hole in the boot loader. By the time she got to the operating system, an actual responsive prompt, she knew what she was going to find: All the useful commands were broken. She began searching for bugs. There was one in each level. One deliberate flaw in each layer of software that lay between the screen and the ECHO command. There were so many layers—it was kind of crazy, how much code sat behind ECHO. She hadn’t appreciated that before. There were scripts and libraries and modules and compilers and assembly code, one built on top of the other. Technically, none of it was essential; you could accomplish the same end by manually constructing circuits and moving wires, manipulating pixels one by one. But what the layers did was distill that power into commands. They let you make electrons flow and