Hacked

• Ryan Lay, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2018

My fingers flew across the board, as if dancing to ‘flight of the bumblebees’. Clicking sounds echoed and reverberated in all directions, perfectly executing the sound of a nest of ants that were wide awake and alert. Intense concentration was reflected off the screen, typing in the commands that were steadily whisking away the encrypted codes. Gigabytes of data disappeared in an instant as I went on, careful not to cause any disturbance in the system to set off alarms.
Soon, a firewall had stopped me in my tracks. It was scorching, with the temperature rising at an incredible amount of speed. The atmosphere was stifling and boiling, as if it was encased in an overheated oven. The wall gleamed a furious, ready-to-explode red, heat steaming off the crevices between the bricks. It was brand new, I could tell from the rapid rise of heat and the bricks that radiated a strong, glowing red. Flames had now scorched and consumed the top of the wall, igniting sparks of anger and it gave no hesitation to attempt to protect the system.
Droplets of rain had singed off its body, a futile attempt from me, in hopes of eradicating it from the system. It inched closer and closer with each second that passes, and I was internally panicking. It was only a couple of centimetres from me now and I could feel the heat evaporating the water out of me. Soon, I was in an almost suffocating state from the levels of heat that filled the atmosphere. “I can’t give up,” I thought. It was for her. She needed to be safe. I finally found the energy to press ‘enter’ as it almost smothered me to ashes. It stayed there, still, as if time had stopped. Soon, I glanced water in a bucket above it and crossed my fingers it took enough codes to make it spawn, and there was only a few left. It started to tilt, slowly but steadily. Next, gushes of water as much as the Pacific Ocean fell, cascading onto the firewall.
The wall fell to reveal the majestic world of ones and zeros. A single golden path led me straight ahead, to a document that was contained within a glass case. It shone in the pitch black surrounding, awaiting for me to extract it. I strode over and casted away the glass case with a single code. I plugged the USB in, and a click confirmed it to be connected. A file appeared nearby and I grabbed the document from its pedestal. To avoid getting caught, I scanned the document for any viruses or tracking devices with a couple of codes. It was getting full now; the system couldn’t hold much more commands. With one last line, I threw the document into the file and the information began to be extracted. Once it had finished, I smiled and faded away into reality as a single message popped up- ‘document was successfully extracted’.