Gunpowder
Chapter Seventeen

Poppy still couldn’t believe her eyes when Axis left the room. The place was beautiful, every part of it. She loved her bed that resembled a motherboard, she loved the spring colors that adorned the walls, she loved the shining spruce wood of the desk, but most of all, she loved the laptop.

She loved it all.

Barely able to hold in her excitement, she raced over to the desk, pulling back the folding chair that was tucked under it. She sat down, opened up the laptop, and watched with a fast-beating heart as the machine came to life.

A gray screen. That was the first thing she saw. A gray screen with the words, “Welcome to Quaker.” From the words printed beneath the screen, Poppy knew that “Quaker” referred to the brand of the laptop. Within a few seconds, the words changed to a page with two buttons on it. The first button read, “Begin tutorial,” while the other read, “Skip tutorial,”

She didn’t have to think about which option to pick, quickly clicking on the “Skip tutorial,” button. The screen froze for a few seconds before turning to a bright red. At first, Poppy thought there might be something wrong with the device, then she recognized what the red was. It was a large picture of a drawn curtain, like the kind there would be at old plays. The curtains drew back, revealing what she had expected to come up: The desktop.

It was empty except for three icons off to the side, all of which were to be expected to be on any default computer: Recycle bin, a folder labeled “sample” and a web browser named “Tour.” The desktop background was an ambient blue picture of what looked to be a coral reef.

The first thing she noticed about the device, however, was the tiny yellow caution sign blinking in the corner. She knew what it meant; It meant that the device was not connected to a network.

Poppy clicked the button. She felt like she was back to her normal self, working with technology and the like. Just like her old life.

She shook her head at the thought. It wasn’t her “old life.” She was eventually going to get back to it, right?

The idea had been rolling around in her head for a while. She wasn’t a traitor, at least she didn’t want to be, but wasn’t she already a traitor? She had accepted their help, let them bring her into their hospital, and was now living with one of their police officers. Surely such would amount to being a blatant turncoat, right?

When she had first been taken into, um, “custody,” escape was all she could think of. But, she had seen how nice everyone was. She had eaten a proper diet of food and wasn’t being talked down to as some sort of pest. If this was what being a traitor was like, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to her “old life,” under the rule of the new world order. They had taken her home, taken her family and taken her friends. They had destroyed all of France, for Pete’s sake! But, still, they had kept her alive. She had been under their orders for almost all of her days. She had worked diligently under their rule.

And look where that had got her: Deep into enemy territory, irradiated, been starved nearly to death, gotten chased by the enemy, and eventually ended up in a car crash. And they had done the same thing to everyone she knew and everyone she loved. She was lucky to have lived through such an ordeal.

But, still, they had raised her since she was young. They had given her a use. They had spared her when they had destroyed France.

Was that truly what she believed? That these people who had hurt her so badly would be the ones she wanted to spend her whole life with?

She shook her head, trying to clear the thoughts, at least from her immediate head-space. Poppy attempted to focus on the tech in front of her.

Her suspicions about the tiny blinking caution sign had been correct. She didn’t have a connection, which was truly not a hard problem to fix.

There was only one signal. Password protected. But a password had never stopped her before.

Poppy tried to think about all her experience with similar problems and clicked on the network. The laptop hummed for a moment, attempting to join it. Then it prompted her for a password. She entered the default sample password: “Password,” just to close the window. As to her expectation, the network hadn’t allowed her into its systems. But she didn’t need it to.

She had the IP now. And that was all she needed.

Poppy set off to work, her fingers flying over the keyboard as if she had rehearsed the whole process.

This was her domain.

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