Battle Royale

Shinji nodded and gripped his pencil. I've been waiting for something to happen since morning. Yutaka tilted his head, his pencil down. Announcement that game has been canseled. I'm still waiting.

Yutaka looked surprised and tilted his head in bewilderment. Shinji grinned at him.

When I got access to school comp, I found all backup files. And file search apps. Then before I downloaded, I infected them all with virus.

Yutaka silently formed the word "virus?" with his mouth. Hey, Yutaka, how about writing it out?

Shinji wrote, Virus would enter school comp system if they search files or backups. Would wreak havoc on the system and freeze game.

Impressed, Yutaka gave several brief nods. Shinji knew it was a waste of time, but wrote it out anyway, I designed virus. It's cool. It's like getting athlete's foot, but 100x worse.

Yutaka held back the urge to laugh, but gave a broad grin.

It'll destroy all data and play "The Star Spangled Banner" on repeat. It'll drive em crazy.

Yutaka held his stomach, doing his best not to laugh, and pressed his hand against his mouth. Shinji also did his best not to burst out laughing.

Now they've discovered me, maybe they won't get those files. Then game will have to stop. But it hasn't. So they've only done rutine checks. I didn't go through any main files.

"Why don't we go find them then?"

"Isn't that dangerous?"

"Yeah, but we have a gun."

My plan: make them get files. Will activate virus.

Shinji pulled his laptop over and showed Yutaka the document he'd been looking over. It was a 42-line text file.

The data download had been interrupted, but of all the copied files this was the most important one. The horizontal text. Each row began with a listing on the left, from "M01" to "M21," followed by "F01" to "F21," in succession. Each listing was accompanied by a ten-digit number resembling a phone number, all in succession as well. Finally there were what appeared to be random sixteen-digit numbers. A small comma was inserted between these three listings. The file name at the heading was cryptic. "guadalcanal-shiroiwa3b"

What's this?

Yutaka wrote.

Shinji nodded. These are the #'s assigned to our collars.

Yutaka gave a huge nod as if to say, Oh. So "M01" was Male Student No. 1 (Yoshio Akamatsu), and "F01" was Female Student No. 1 (Mizuho Inada, that weird girl).

Collars are like cell phones. Each band has a number and password. Use numbers to set them off. So

Shinji stopped and looked at Yutaka. Then he continued

If data's infected with virus we won't have to worry about collars blowing us up. Virus will keep spreading. If they have backup files they can't stop it. If they reprogram to stop virus we'll be in trouble, but it will still buy us time.

"How about tossing pebbles at certain places to see if someone comes running out?"

"Wait, what if it's a girl? She might scream. That could be dangerous, not just to us, but the girl. I mean, assuming she's not 'bad.' "

"Huh."

How will you make them do it?

Outside school building did you see room for SDF?

Yutaka nodded.

Computers in there, remember?

Yutaka's eyes opened wide again as he shook his head. I couldn't afford to.