SandBoxed Paradise...or is it a Prison

CHAPTER NINE

Dagger clicked the back button to erase the command he failed to execute over a dozen times that day.

"I'm sorry Jeannie, I can't do it."

He knew Jeannie would want him to execute the worm, the computer program that would eat the code away one line at a time, erasing the first virtual region they created. Officially, they called it "Sheryl's Sandbox," but its significance was more monumental than the name suggested. She wouldn't want the risk of that scumbag husband tainting her special place. In truth, Dagger should have done it right away. Jeannie made him promise so many years ago.

"If anything ever happens to me, execute the worm program to evaporate the Sandbox. That's Sheryl's place, our place. I know we made it difficult to find, but promise me anyway."

It was almost midnight of their anniversary, the first day he booted up his personal systems since receiving the tragic news, but he still couldn't do it. During this final attempt to fulfill his promise, he got other ideas.

Would it really hurt anything if I kept the Sandbox for myself? Maybe I could visit and even learn to forget the reality of this pain for a while. Isn't that one of the many reasons we created the Sanctuary in the first place?

Once those thoughts gained life, he changed his course of action. Instead of destroying the region with the worm, he set himself up to do a solo entry from his basement. Xander may have revoked and banned Dagger's credentials from the S.O.S. Building and Internal Server System, but there was no command listed in any notes or system logs that could lock him out of the Sandbox. He could enter it directly from here.

Just like the old days.

No one else even knew the region existed. He and Jeannie had intentionally kept it that way. Sheryl's Sandbox was a sacred, secret place. You'd have to break through far too many firewalls, and decipher some of Jeannie's secret code, to figure that one out. It was hidden deep in the server core and yet, separate from all other entities. Only Jeannie could cross the bridge from one to the other on the inside, and only Dagger could control what happened to it on the outside.

Well in actuality, Jeannie could do whatever she wanted no matter what side of the virtual screen she was on, but that is how they worked best. He would manage the console and server work, while she immersed and worked from the inside.

At fourteen, Jeannie was a master at server design; and, in the fifteen years since they met, she never ceased to astonish him with the things she could do. There were only three people that could read the language of the core system, Dagger being the only one of them still alive. It was an encrypted language created by two young girls, originally designed so they could 'pass notes' to each other in school.

Dagger had laughed at that one. Most girls just wrote notes and slipped them into each other's locker, but not Jeannie and Sheryl. They created a language all their own and hid messages for each other behind icons, firewalls, riddles, and games. It was their way of having fun in an environment that was far too serious for pre-teens.

Dagger still didn't understand how Xander managed to get legal control of S.O.S., but Jeannie had trusted him completely with the business stuff. In the end, her signature was confirmed on all the relevant documents. She would never have done that knowingly, but that didn't mean she couldn't be tricked. She was pure of heart, an innocent. Jeannie never would have suspected the man she married to cheat her.

What puzzled him more than the question of legal control, though, was how Xander avoided the endGame activation. Dagger, of course, knew he didn't disable it himself. He could only guess that Jeannie had done so for some unknown reason and forgot to tell him. That was the only logical answer, but it still didn't make sense to him.