The Annihilation of Foreverland

sorry. It’s just… he hurts so much… and you’re our only chance… and I never…”
    She trailed off. She had difficulty finding words, like she had to search for them.
    “You mean Reed?” Danny asked.
    She nodded, hugging herself again.
    “Who are you?” Danny shook his head. That sounded rude. “I’m sorry, I just don’t know much about Reed. Or you.”
    She thought, staring blankly. “I don’t really know, Danny Boy. I just woke up here…”
    Danny remembered the confusion of waking up on the paper-covered table and Mr. Jones staring at him with his white lab coat. He didn’t know anything before that moment. She had the same experience, only she woke up in Foreverland.
    Is she real? Definitely rude. But is she a memory? Reed’s memory? But she’s here, alive. She had to be something other than a memory, right?
    “If you’re in here, how do you know about Reed?” Danny asked.
    “I see the boys’ thoughts. I see what they bring in from the island… I know the suffering they go through… before the needle.”
    That’s how she knew about the half-pipe at Christmas. She saw it in my thoughts.
    “Then you know Reed is—”
    She began shaking her head and rocking in her self-hug.
    Damn.
    She was still muttering about Reed. Danny stopped her. “How can I help?”
    Her oversized eyes were glassy. Her brow furrowed when she pointed at the chair.
    “Sit.”
    Danny went to the chair. When he sat down, a desk appeared from the floor and circled all the way around him. Several keyboards appeared.
    “You don’t really need the keyboards or the monitors… but you’re familiar with that medium… so that’s what you’ll start with.”
    She glared at him.
    “You need to understand… I’m as much a prisoner in here as you are out there.”
    “But Foreverland is a computer program.”
    “I don’t know what this is, Danny Boy. You need to help us find out… what it is.”
    “How?”
    She lifted her arms and the walls flickered like the entire room was a monitor. The walls were blue with white puffy clouds, like the wallpaper of a computer desktop. Danny brushed his fingers over the keyboard and felt something for the first time since arriving.
    A familiar thrill.

    A bead of sweat trickled down his cheek. Strange, this was an illusion but his body believed it.
    It took several minutes to get familiar with the 360-degree monitor and multiple keyboards, but the keystrokes were the same as any computer. He accessed the mainframe and was soon sneaking around the security firewalls. The system was like one he’d never encountered. The code seemed to evolve like a living organism. Maybe it was a program that believed it was alive, just like he was sweating.
    He synchronized several programs and let them run like digital wrecking balls smashing holes in databases and security code. He spun on his chair to unravel the next layer of the firewall. The security system operated like a virtual vault that continued to change the combination. Danny learned its tendencies and began to solve the complex code. His fingers blurred across the keyboards but it wasn’t fast enough.
    I’m inside my head. I don’t need the keyboards.
    He began to call out commands instead of typing and they were executed just as if he’d pecked them on the keyboard. He swiveled around to watch geometric shapes of computer code connect, shift and reconnect like organic chemistry. He stopped seeing the numbers and letters and began to see the computer language in three-dimensional objects that began to float off the walls. He shouted at them, made them change direction, change form, merge or divide. He was looking for the arrangement that would open the door to the system that was driving Foreverland.
    Still, he was behind the evolving firewall that was always half a step ahead.
    In the mind.
    He focused inwardly, forming his next command into a sharpened thought instead of a spoken word. Then he created another one. And another. The shapes began to move again. Silently, Danny looked around the room and sent the thought-commands out. The room was in continuous movement, washed in morphing shapes and colors. Danny stopped looking at what they were doing so that he wasn’t limited by his eyes. He connected with his mind; he began to construct the code, predicting outcomes, glancing only to verify what they were becoming. He was in the center of another universe that operated on numbers and formulas and colors, looking for the