Again: I did not have a problem with HIVE. But if I did—this moment in time, with me cleaning up the torch and test tube pieces all around my feet, in a school spookily abandoned before the final Friday bell had even rung—this would have been a perfect moment for me to reflect on why I did have a problem with HIVE. Which I did not.

Maybe, as I swept up all that broken glass, I would have thought about how HIVE had seemed so innocent when it first started. How it began as an arcade game, born just as arcades were dying, where for too many quarters you could sit on a giant throne with some Velcro gloves and goggles and play one of a handful of mini-games, or just wave hello to someone in another run-down arcade in another far-off country. Quarters, if you’re wondering, were like those coins you’re supposed to unlock in HIVE treasure games, except you could exchange them for real human things, like gumballs or the ability to play HIVE treasure games. Look, I know it sounds weird, but this is just what my mom told me, and she should know.

After all, she was the virtual reality pioneer who helped turn HIVE into what it became.

That’s something else I could have thought about.

But I didn’t. Because I didn’t have a problem with HIVE.

Instead, I thought about the final Friday bell, which now actually was ringing. I thought about putting the broom back where I’d found it and figuring out how to click the butane torch back into its holder. I thought about Gus, and how the next time I saw him I’d pick his brains about what I was already deeming The Jason Incident. I thought about—

Wait a second.

Gus.

Click.

I snapped the butane lighter back into place just in time to recall: If it was Friday, then Gus and I had date night, which always began with us meeting in the parking lot by my car. And if the bell had already rung, then I was already late.

I snatched my copy of Pride and Prejudice off the desk and bolted for the door. Then I realized I’d forgotten my backpack, bolted back, picked it up, slid it on, and re-bolted, flicking off the lights and taking off down the hall in that terrible elbows-out run that is the curse of any backpack wearer. My braid slapped up and down furiously as I ran, and my favorite black boots sent echoes through the halls, making me sound like a one-woman stampede.

At least there’s nobody here to see this, I thought, huffing down the stairs two steps at a time. Then: Wow, there’s really nobody here to see this as I ran through a completely empty foyer and burst through the front doors. Seen through a squint in the bright afternoon sunlight, the parking lot looked like the outskirts of a ghost town, with my lonely little car parked at the back of the lot like the world’s laziest tumbleweed.

This, of course, would have been another perfect moment for me to think about HIVE, and how everything had changed when it went portable. Kyle and I had come downstairs one day in December to find that our mother had snagged us a pair of prototypes—two headsets and some strap-on gauntlets. I’d never been a huge gamer, but even I had to admit: It was cool to stand in my own living room and play something my mother had worked on. And if you found the right games for your personality, it was almost as fun as getting lost in a good book. Almost.

For the rest of the world, there had been no “almost.”

When the home headsets hit wide release just a few weeks later, HIVE became the hottest thing on the planet. It was the best gift for your family, the best way to spend time with your friends, the best way to spend time if you didn’t have any friends, and certainly the best way to spend money. It didn’t take HIVE long at all to announce their first pay-to-play games, showing up within the world of HIVE as new golden hexagons that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be made of gold coins. And then, before anyone had much time at all to worry about that, the first big Update rolled out, and the whole world pretty much vanished into HIVE—including, it seemed, just about everyone in and around Bullworth High.

And my mother.

Absolutely none of which I was thinking about. Because I was late for a date. And was fine with HIVE.

Except: A sinking feeling stole over me as I closed the distance between me and my car in the self-driving car section. There really was absolutely no one in the parking lot, and the thing about there being absolutely no one was that Gus was absolutely someone, and therefore—spoiler alert!—not in the parking lot.

I pulled out my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed a text. Nothing. And nothing pinging or dinging in the half-dozen or so messaging apps Gus may have used to get in touch with me, either.

Well.

There was one I hadn’t checked.

As I unlocked the car with one hand, I pinched the bridge of my nose with the other and tried not to think about how the easiest way for me to log in to HIVE was also a gesture of exasperation.

Bzzzzz. The familiar sensation-sound of a bootup rose from the back of my neck and tingled around my ears. As I slid into the driver’s seat, my vision didn’t change (I would have had to be wearing my headset for that to happen), so I was acutely aware of how silly I looked when a chipper voice announced, “Hello! Welcome to HIVE. How may we help you?” To which I responded, out loud, to no one at all, “Check messages from GoodGusNoRe, please.”

Right. So. That first big Update: That was the BrainSTIM Card. It wasn’t nearly as cheap as the headset, but it bought you, in this order: some local anesthetic; an extremely micro microchip; two minutes in a surgeon’s chair; and then a miracle. The miracle was the ability to really feel like you were in HIVE. This wasn’t just having your gloves vibrate across your knuckles when you punched a virtual villain; now you could feel textures like you were using your bare fingers, talk to people as if they were standing right next to you, and even smell.

Weirdly enough, it was that last thing that really caused HIVE to blow up. If you could smell, you could taste, and if you could taste, you could eat. The first HIVE businesses were the HIVE restaurants, blue hexagons popping up between the increasingly vast selection of games, serving foods and tastes that had never existed in the real world, or that hadn’t been tasted for years—foods like fried dodo, or glowing ice cream with pixel sauce, or giant cheesecakes that had zero calories (because all digital food had, when you got down to it, zero calories).

And with the HIVE restaurants came the HIVE economy. And with the HIVE economy came … just about everything. Special HIVE chairs for people who played so long it gave them back problems. Special HIVE nutrient feeds for people who bought those chairs and then didn’t want to get up to eat. And finally, for people who didn’t want to get up after they’d—how do I put this?—used those nutrients: completely immersive chambers, located in centralized clusters called Apiaries. Like arcades, except you weren’t hanging out in the physical world—you were in your own chamber, next to your friend in their own chamber, both hanging out in HIVE. And so everything had come full circle. Folks still had the option to play whenever and wherever, but HIVE was once again something people could go somewhere else to do.

Possibly people like your forgetful boyfriend on your Friday date night.

Or maybe not. Maybe Gus had also just rescued a long-lost acquaintance from a bully, and was even now racing toward me from, I don’t know, the woodshop room! No need to blame HIVE (which I was okay with). Everything was (probably) fine.

But it couldn’t hurt to check.

“No messages found,” said whichever Drone was inside my head that day. “Would you like to send a message?”

“Yes,” I said. “ ‘Hey, everything okay?’ Send.”

There was another Bzzz, this one made to sound as if it was rapidly flying away from the car, carrying my message into the digital expanse like so much pollen. Then, before I even had time to turn on the engine:

“Message read at two forty p.m.,” said the Drone chipperly, as if it wasn’t spitting in my eye.

“Oh, you’re kidding me,” I muttered, quickly turning around to fish through the flotsam and jetsam of my back seat.

“Send ‘Oh, you’re kidding me’ to GoodGusNoRe?” asked the Drone.

“No!” I said, throwing a Bones & Narble bag to the side and digging through what was underneath. “No, I’ll— Where is— Ah! I’ll tell him myself.”

Finally, I had found my headset, the same one I’d had since that day in December. Any devoted HIVE user (so basically anyone alive, really) would have been horrified to see such precious cargo buried in the back of a dirty car, but I wasn’t quite so delicate with my tech. I basically kept it around for social gaming, meeting up with friends, and times when I wanted to play The Skims.

Well, and times like right now.

It was that new Update, was what it was. As I turned back to the front of the car, sliding the headstrap under my braid and letting the goggles rest on my forehead, I suddenly remembered what Jason had said: I have to get to the Apiary before the big Update.

Now that I thought about it, I’d been hearing about this all week, from snatches on the Digicast as I drove to school, or from excited murmurs in the halls as kids speculated about what Eric Alanick, the famed founder of HIVE, had in store for them this time. Previous updates had brought beloved features like Sidekicks, cute and customizable buddies that could follow you from game to game, or Modifiers, which allowed you to exchange game points (or your good old actual money) for cool upgrades to your HIVE self. Like horns or wings or, say, cute black boots that looked just like your real-life favorite boots (shut up). Or—

Suddenly, I was gripped by a memory.

“Double jumps,” Aaron had said, gesturing emphatically with a chicken tender. Like a lot of Aaron’s gestures, it got a bit out of hand, and the chicken finger wound up falling into his strawberry yogurt.

None of us flinched. For one thing, we all knew Aaron’s cerebral palsy, mild as it was, still resulted in the kind of spasticity that could lead to small spills. For another, Aaron had often been known to dip his chicken in his yogurt of his own free will. We had been watching him eat his cherished strawberry-chicken concoction for several minutes now.

“We already have double jumps,” Sammi reminded him, picking up a napkin and dabbing yogurt from the lunch table while Aaron fished his tender back out again. “Like, half the games you play have double jumps.”

“Yeah, but … but imagine if all of them did,” Aaron said, throwing both his arms wide, and everyone laughed. Even me, and I only had half a clue what we were talking about. I had just decided to reread Pride and Prejudice that morning, and I was at that moment tearing through the second chapter. Still, I was in my happy place: book in hand, lunch on table—and on chicken tender day, no less—plus Gus on my left side and our friends on my right. And also my left. It wasn’t a huge lunch table.

Gus squeezed my hand lightly, and I looked up just long enough to make eye contact with him and smile.

“You wanna know what I think it is?” asked Sammi, waiting absolutely zero seconds for anyone to respond. “A universal language app. How cool would that be? We already play with people from all around the world. Imagine if we could understand them.” She brought her hands up to her head and then flicked them away in the universal sign for mind blown.

“You can understand them, Sammi,” Gus pointed out. “You speak, like, eight languages.”

“Gus, buddy … there’s more than eight languages.” Sammi knocked on Gus’s head, took a baby carrot from his tray as if it were a fee for slowing down her thought process, and then turned and tapped her baby carrot on the edge of my book.

“What about you?” she asked, happily gnawing at the pointer/carrot. “What do you think the big Update is gonna be?”

I’d just gotten to a good part, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I quickly marked my page and looked up. “What are we talking about?”

“HIVE,” Aaron said. “This weekend there’s supposed to be a— Ow!”

Aaron cut himself off quickly, almost as if someone had kicked him under the table.

“Oh, right,” he said, “Sorry, Kara, I forgot your mom— Ow!”

“I think Kara’s not as hopelessly nerdy as we are, guys,” Gus said in a loud, determinedly cheerful voice. “Well, she is, but in a different way. I’m sure she doesn’t care. Anyway, it’s probably just gonna be some update to the privacy policy or the Terms and Conditions or something. You know how no one ever knows what’s going on with those. Hey, does anyone think Mr. Mulsoff and Ms. Bailey are dating?”

Sammi and Aaron jumped on this conversational bait instantly, and I briefly considered steering the conversation back—Wait, no, I can talk HIVE, too, I’m cool!—but Gus squeezed my hand like he’d done me some big favor, and I would’ve hated to burst his bubble. And I really was getting to a good part of my book. So I squeezed his hand and went back to reading.

That was one of the things that I liked about being in the same room as Gus: He loved to talk to people, real people who weren’t just in books, or talking about books, and he was happy to do enough of that talking for him and me combined.

Of course, we had to actually be in the same room for that to happen. And now, sitting in my car, I had a pretty good idea why he wasn’t here with me. He, like everyone else in town, had gotten so excited about this new Update that he’d forgotten about the rest of the world completely.

Which would have been fine, except the rest of the world happened to include me.

Now I did a cursory check to make sure all my car doors were locked. As far as I could tell, there was nobody around—like, to an almost spooky degree—but better safe than sorry. Everyone knew that going full HIVE in public was practically an invitation to get yourself mugged. Everyone went ahead and did it anyway, but still.

There were, of course, other ways to handle this. I could have just sent Gus another message, or even made a voice call. You didn’t have to be all the way inside HIVE to talk to someone who was playing (otherwise, moms would never be able to call their kids to dinner), but I couldn’t think of anything more cliché than literally being the nagging voice in my boyfriend’s head.

So I sighed, chucked my copy of Pride and Prejudice onto the passenger seat, lowered the goggles over my eyes, and thought something that maybe, arguably, could have been described as the slightest grievance against HIVE, which was:

Elizabeth Bennet never had to deal with this crap.

Then I gave my nose a second, much harder pinch, and entered the world of HIVE.