Connected

Chapter 1: Anonymous

I was running to my bus, and I was in such a hurry that I forgot to brush my teeth, or even comb my hair.

Ugh.

This isn't unusual for me. My mom gets really cranky if I'm not out of the bathroom before 6:30, but I can't help it. I'm really bad when it comes to sleeping in.

You may know some people who could sleep to 12:00 on Saturdays, but I'm far worse than that. If I wanted to, I could sleep for almost 36 hours. Hopping onto the bus, I realized I forgot to grab my backpack. Within that, my homework.

"Hey, Brandon. What's up?" Trey smirked.

This is my best friend, Trey. We've known each other for almost 9 years now. He is loud and an attention star, while I am the polar opposite. Surprisingly so, this is one of the biggest reasons we get along: he keeps the attention away from me.

"What's wrong?"

I looked at him with a disheartened face. "I forgot my backpack, which had my math homework in it."

"Well, that's not too bad, You can just grab a new sheet and copy off of mi­-"

Buzz!

Trey peered at my pocket. "That's odd, why would your phone go off? Who would be texting you this early in the morning?"

"I... don't actually know," I responded. "Probably just the wrong number."

Buzz!

What the heck? I went to check what the message was.

"That's... strange," I remarked as I looked at the notification.

"What is it?"

"It's... I don't know. Looks like it's a string of 0's and 1's."

"This is odd," Trey said as I handed him the phone.

He handed it back. "Whatever. Most likely some broken text sent to the wrong person. Might as well just delete it."

"I... don't know. It looks an awful a lot like binary code. Would you possibly happen to have a converter?"

Obviously, I knew he would have one.

He grinned. "Of course!"

Called it.

"Here, send me the message," I said as I sent it to him.

| 01000011 01101111 01101110 01100111 01110010 01100001 01110100 01110101 01101100

01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 01110011 00100001 – Brandon. |

"Strange," Trey replied. "The conversion isn't going through."

"The text?"

"What else?"

"Here, show me your phone." As Trey handed me his phone, the conversion finally completed.

This is strange, I thought aloud.

"What is it?" Trey took his phone back.

Trey looked at it. "It says... 'congratulations'?"