Rebellion in the Hive

**Susie**

I remember the first time I saw it. The first time I really saw the pattern. It was seventh grade, and I was sitting on my bed after school with my best friends, Adam and Leo.

Leo had a new phone, and he was showing us how his new game worked. We were all enthralled by it at first. It was a simple Pac-Man style game where you just swipe to move your character around the screen. But after a few minutes of chasing pixels around, we grew bored and started messing around. Leo wanted to go downstairs so he could show off his new phone to Mom, but I didn't want to go because I didn't want her to see me in my pajamas, so I told him to just leave it for now because she'd be at work for another hour or two anyway. He agreed and went downstairs anyway, but he promised to come back up once she got home.

It was actually pretty boring up there with just Adam and me. We don't have cable or even internet at home, so we can only play games on Leo's phone anyway, so we started talking about things that we had heard about rather than things that we knew about. Adam taught me calligraphy when we were younger, and I told him that I wanted to try writing my name in Chinese next time we met up. He thought it sounded cool, so he asked if he could see what his name would look like written in Chinese too. Leo returned shortly after this conversation took place, excitedly telling us that one of his friends had made him an account on a social media site called "Starlight". It seemed kind of dumb to me at first - why would anyone want to share photos on a website that no one else could see? - but I tried it out anyway. Only one person accepted my friend request though - Adam!

We joked about how lame Starlight apparently is when our phones suddenly chimed softly together as though they were communicating with each other. We looked at each other wide-eyed before looking at our phones again. Sure enough, there was an update for Starlight on them both.

"Oh my God!" Leo shouted, jumping up from his chair. "It looks like they've hooked into the internet! Let's give this thing a try!" Without waiting for us he dashed downstairs, but Adam and I excitedly followed him down only moments later after making sure we had our phones with us.

Once downstairs Leo wasted no time starting up his laptop while we all waited impatiently for the internet to start working on our phones again as well so we could log back into Starlight. Finally he let out a loud whoop of joy when his laptop loaded its desktop and began searching for wifi signals nearby. After a few moments of impatience he finally found one and clicked it into view on his screen then clicked something else with furious haste before turning the laptop toward us triumphantly with the widest grin on his face ever seen by man or beast alike before shouting: "Look!" His screen read: "You've connected to the internet!" which caused us all to jump up and down screaming in excitement before common sense kicked in for all of us except Leo who still couldn't believe what he'd done and kept staring at the screen in awe even as the rest of us calmed down enough for me to say: "Holy crap! Let's go online!" So we did! And guess what? We found Starlight! This was way better than what they had showed us earlier! There were hundreds of worlds now! And not just a world either - there were hundreds of stars too! And planets! And moons! There were even galaxies!