Antarctica [discontinued

Chapter 2

The darknet isn't as "dark" as the name might imply, nor was it as fancy as the well known "Internet". While the internet is appealing visually, the darknet has many advantages, most notably hiding your IP address from anyone, along with the advantage of only being shared amongst trusted peers. While visiting pages on the internet added points to your rank on the game system, the darknet was better for collecting data, especially data that you don't want shared with anyone.

Quickly, I accessed the government servers via the darknet, numbers running through my head as I translated the binary values to text which I was typing into a virtual keyboard.

Most people don't hire hackers because they needed sensitive information and not let anyone know they had it-that was easy enough-but because most people couldn't type or translate binary to text fast enough. Translating without a computer program was easy enough, but doing it fast was the problem. And because of that, hackers are ofter hired in political quarrels to illegally obtain information.

I read through what I had just typed, once the stream of numbers stopped, and it seemed to make sense. Branden Levy already scouting out the brightest of the year, with the list of names already. Alyssa was on top, as I expected.

It wasn't safe to stay in the darknet for a long period of time, so I sent the file on its way, the contents permanently filed away in my memory.

||The Next Morning||

Shit! Am I going to be late again? I should quit hacking someday and get some quality sleep before I sleep through my alarm again. Thankfully, I didn't have any of those stacked up on me for the next few days so that I could get some extra sleep. Honestly, taking five jobs in a row, night-to-night is pretty rare for me.

I probably ran by at least fifteen people on my rush to school, but I only pushed one kid over.

That happened to be a surprise, since I never normally ran anyone over.

"Sorry!" I apologized hurriedly, trying to move on, but he stopped me.

Chauncey Alvarez. This was almost worse than having Richard Snyder kick me out of a desk.

"Hey, uh, I'm new here," he said.

I know you are.

"So, uh, can you show me to class?"

"Sure," I replied, "who do you have first?"

"Browner, for chemistry?"

"Our class is full."

"I think they dropped a kid named Prichard Snyder?"

"Richard," I corrected instinctively.

"Oh, yeah. Him."

I started walking, and he followed, not asking questions.

I didn't expect him to, after all. After using "our" in reference to his first class, only an idiot would not know I was going to class.

"Miss Parry, you're late!" Browner seemed to hate me, and I still couldn't get over how he forced me to answer yesterday.

Both ways, it was unfair.

"Brought a new student," I answered.

"Hi, I'm Chauncey Alvarez?" he walked up in front of me, introducing himself.

Today, my usual seat was not occupied, so I took it, and the chance to hide the majority of my face behind Cassandra's hair.

In contrast to yesterday's spot, I could actually see the board.