The Annihilation of Foreverland

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