It was eleven thirty, and I was sitting at my desk in my room on a calm Sunday. The sun was shining, birds chirping away. I could even see my neighbors playing with their dog across the street. I flipped to another page of the mystery novel I was reading. Halfway through, the murderer was getting clever—more vicious. I cheered on my detective as he closed in, got duped, then started the chase again. I knew he would get him in the end, but nothing could ever be straightforward.
A chime came from my phone, and I picked it up to see who had messaged me.
It was Jimmy. He was a good friend, but a bit off the deep end. He stayed up all night surfing the web and hacking cyberspace—so much so that when he showed up at school the next day, his panda eyes would search the air for invisible pixels. I enjoyed sci-fi, so he and I got along pretty well.
The message read:
“Tim! Whatever you do, do NOT accept the terms and service. Click the top right of the window one hundred times.
Then run. Get underground.”
I set my book down and re-read the message. Jimmy was a bit nuts, but he never texted more than the usual “let’s hang out” or “what are you up to?”
I put the phone down and reached for my book—then a window popped up in my vision.
It was a gray box straight out of Windows 95. At the top, it said Terms of Service in bold, and below was scrolling text that repeated endlessly. At the bottom of the window was a button:
Accept.
I looked around. The window stayed in the center of my vision, like a speck on my eye. I closed them. It was still there in the blackness.
I stood up immediately and spun around. Looked in all directions. Strained my eyes in every way I could.
The window remained.
I could hear my family downstairs start yelling, and my sister began to cry. I reached toward the window—and somehow, I could touch it. Move it. Resize it. As if my eyes were a desktop. The window was always in focus, and it pierced straight into my mind. I couldn’t not focus on it.
I looked toward the top right. There was no X like a normal window. I pressed my thumb into the top corner. To my surprise, the window closed.
Then immediately reappeared. A glitch in the system.
I pressed rapidly, counting each time the window vanished and returned.
Ninety-nine. One hundred.
At the hundredth press, the window didn’t return. I stood stunned—it had actually worked.
Run!
I bolted out of my room and ran downstairs to my family. I found them sitting at the dining room table, eyes glazed over, mouths slightly open.
“Mom.” I shook her slightly, then did the same to my dad. “Dad, come on. We have to run. Tiffany—” I turned to my younger sister.
They sat in a trance, staring into nothing. Their bodies barely moved, taking in the bare minimum of oxygen to survive. Then a hum began. Faint at first—but growing louder. It reverberated from all directions, and I shut my eyes to keep my vision from shaking.
Get underground.
I stumbled to the basement steps. The house shook with the hum. Plates and silverware rattled in the kitchen. Windows creaked. I opened the door through blurry vision and slipped down the stairs. As I descended, the humming grew fainter, but it was still audible. I crawled to a corner of the room and clamped my hands over my ears.
A deafening sound came from outside, followed by a massive crash that threw me from the corner and into the couch. Loud bangs, like fireworks, came one after another, shaking everything with systematic force. I screamed, but the overwhelming noise drowned me out. The final bang knocked the breath from my lungs, the vibrations pulsing through me. I doubled over, clutching my chest, struggling to pull in air.
Silence. Stillness.
I coughed, rolled onto my back, and listened. Nothing moved upstairs. The hum was gone.
I crept up the steps and into the kitchen. It looked like a bomb had gone off—broken plates, collapsed shelves, shattered windows. Everything glistened in the sunlight, fractured into multicolored bits. I turned to the dining room.
My family was gone.
Outside was foggy. It sat low, leaving the sky blue and the sun bright. It was dense—thick enough to obscure the house across the street. In the distance, I saw massive black pillars extending into the sky. They filled my vision like mountains, even from so far away. Four of them stood staggered across the horizon. They disappeared into the atmosphere above.
“Psst.” A voice from the fog. “Tim.”
I knew that voice anywhere—third period, whispering about some new computer chip.
“Jimmy!” I called out.
He sprang out of the fog, waving his hands toward the ground with wild eyes. His brown, side-swept hair was a mess, and he was decked out in cargo gear and black. “Shh! Not so loud. We gotta go, Tim—right now, yesterday, yesteryear—we’re the past!”
“Jimmy, what the hell is going on?” I asked as he grabbed my hand and pulled me down the street. A horn blared from the direction of the pillars.
“Remember that signal I picked up from space last year? Aliens, right?” We kept a steady jog. “But not organic. Quantum, man—our minds. We’ve been chasing ourselves this whole time. But it’s too late. We got hacked, Tim. Those AI sons of bitches hacked us.” He laughed as we turned left toward the park. I’d seen him disappear there more than once.
“But they must’ve learned from a terrible programmer. Their system’s full of holes. That’s how I figured out closing the terms. Stupid androids.”
In the middle of the park was a creek and a large sewer pipe we used to play around. Jimmy slid down the side and entered the massive round entrance. I hesitated.
“You serious, Jimmy?” I asked, peering into the murky dark.
He reappeared. “When am I not? Come on, trust me. I don’t rummage around down here for fun.”
I followed. We walked for about ten minutes in darkness, a foul-smelling stream flowing past our feet. I did my best to keep my new shoes dry. Eventually, a faint orange light appeared on the right wall.
“Look—you know my parents are well-off.” I nodded. “And you know they know what I know. They haven’t been home in six months. So let’s just say I used their resources to build this and to find them.”
He pushed through a large steel door, and I followed.
A narrow hallway led down to another door, which opened into a massive cavernous room. Warm light bathed everything. The hum of servers and fans filled the air.
“Jimmy,” I breathed, “this is incredible. It’s like a command center.”
“It is a command center,” he replied with a grin. “Please don’t ask how I got this stuff down here. I do not want to relive the pain, frustration, or the arguments.”
The floor was layered with rugs. To the left was a table littered with monitors, keyboards, and mice. In the back, three server towers hummed under active cooling. To the right, a raised platform held a couple of beds, a table with chairs, and a small kitchen.
Jimmy sat in front of the monitors. I joined him. He began clicking around.
“My parents, like I said, are missing.” He took a breath. “They’ve been captured by whatever came to town. I need your help to get them back. As smart as I am, they’re smarter—by a lot. If we save them, we might save everyone else.”
I thought of my family at the table. Everything had happened so fast, I hadn’t had time to feel it all—the panic, the sadness. I put my head in my hands.
I left them.
Frustration and shame bubbled up.
Jimmy leaned back. “I’m sorry, Tim. I really didn’t know this was going to happen until just before it did. You didn’t have time to warn them. That really sucks. What did you se—”
I sat up. Something in my eyes stopped him.
“Maybe later. It might be important.” Jimmy turned back to the screens, quickly. Silence fell between us. He stared at the monitors. I stared at the ceiling, collecting myself.
There was nothing I could do for them then.
But I could do something now.
I slapped my cheeks lightly. “We’re here now. Let’s deal with it. I’m out of my depth, Jimmy—you’ll have to catch me up. Let’s get on the same page.”
Jimmy’s somber face cracked into a smile. I knew he was scared too. But he was good at hiding it—getting lost in worlds, daydreaming, solving problems.
“Great. Yeah, we can do this. If we find people on the way, we can definitely do this.”
“First—” he clicked rapidly, bringing up a familiar screen. “Let’s find out what’s in this Terms and Service.”
Pop-ups are the worst. So are terms and services. They’re so long, and you never really know what you’re signing up for when you hit accept—which you have to do for basically everything these days.
So what if a terms of service invaded your personal space? So much so that all you wanted was for it to go away. You hit accept just to make it disappear. But what did you actually agree to?
That’s where this story came from.
Be careful what you accept.
You never know what’s behind it.
Cheers!
