The Assignment

Alexander was eleven years old, and like most eleven-year-olds, he believed that the brilliant, glowing websites of the world were built by wizards. Not real wizards, exactly — though he wouldn't have ruled it out — but a secret tribe of geniuses who knew things ordinary people simply did not know.

He had no idea that his own grandfather was one of them.

It was a perfectly ordinary Tuesday when the assignment arrived, near the end of class, when most of the students were thinking about lunch, or the bus, or nothing at all.

Alexander read it twice. He almost laughed. A number, a button, an answer — that was all? No logins, no passwords, no enormous tangle of files. Just one small trick.

"That's easy," whispered the boy beside him, already zipping his bag shut as though the thing were finished.

The teacher heard him, and smiled in the particular way teachers smile when they know something the students do not.

Alexander went home, opened his laptop, and made a new file. He called it index.php, because that sounded like the proper name for a real, important web page.

He built a heading. He built a box where a number could go. He built a button that said CALCULATE, in nice bold letters, and a little line underneath where the answer would one day appear.

He leaned back and admired it. It looked, he thought, exactly like something a wizard might have made.

He typed a 7 into the box.

He pressed the button.

Nothing happened.

He pressed it again, a little harder, as though the button might respond to effort the way a stubborn jam jar does.

Nothing happened a second time, and a third, and the page sat there looking back at him with the calm, infuriating innocence of something that has done precisely what it was told and not one scrap more.

It was the first thing he said about the matter.

It was also entirely wrong.