Terri’s daughter Hannah is actually a very responsible girl. She made dinner for her sister Chloe, cleared the plates and loaded them in the dishwasher, and finished her homework.

Then she went to her phone.

She now has a chat going on the senior class group text (the secret one, not the one everyone knows about) and a running text commentary on the chat with her best friend, Emma, and she’s swiping and liking a bunch of stuff on Instagram while she waits for responses. She doesn’t actually spend a lot of time on YouTube. Too many creepy videos out there for her.

But then her phone gets weird. A link popped up on all of her apps at the same time.

what’s this?

she asks her friend Emma, but Emma has the same question.

She’s not about to click it, because she’d been fooled by dick pics before (she’s never told her mother, because her mother would freak and take the phone away), but her phone shakes and buzzes and begins pulsing with new images.

She frowns but she doesn’t look away. It looks like a game, only not one she’s seen before.

She tries to swipe back to Emma. She gets the app back.

is your phone doing this?

Em?

u there?

Then the game is back. It’s a swirling wheel of fortune. CLICK THE WHEEL FOR PRIZES! it promises. Ugh. Another pop-up ad.

She tries to swipe past it. It won’t go away. She’s about to shut the phone down and start over when the wheel begins spinning.

LIFE OR DEATH, it says. CHOOSE.

A little cartoon devil dances by the wheel, grinning at her.

That’s creepy.

The spinning gets faster. Something in her head hurts. She wants to drop the phone. She’s not sure why. She keeps watching anyway.

The wheel turns into a blur, and Hannah can’t blink. The lines and colors become a pulsing strobe, and pure code pours into her eyes. Her mouth opens slightly.

Dr. Edgar Sax uploads his virus into her, like he is doing to all of her friends and their classmates and their little brothers and sisters.

It is so easy. He is pure code himself now. He can jump right through their optic nerve, past their frontal lobes, past all the pieces of mush that these children think are their selves. They are subroutines and programs. Easy to hack. He takes control.

Upstairs, on her bed, Hannah’s sister Chloe was watching CookieSwirlC on YouTube; now her mouth is open, and she’s drooling slightly.

Across town, Hannah’s friend Emma is long gone, stranded in some distant field of her mind. She clicked the link right away.

A boy named Parker sits like a statue, a forkful of mac-and-cheese halfway to his face as the images play over his eyes.