An Ordinary Day An ordinary day. That’s it. An ordinary September day. That’s all there was before the insanity began.

That night-that last night-I was in my room, working on my homework as usual. I had a history paper due. “What Is the Best Form of Government?” A classic Mr. Sherman assignment. Mr. Sherman liked to pretend he was some kind of radical. He wanted us to “question our assumptions” and “think outside the box.” It never seemed to occur to him that sometimes the simple, most obvious answer might be the right one. “What Is the Best Form of Government?” I wanted to title my paper, “Constitutional Democracy, You Doofus, What Do You Think?” But somehow I figured that might not be the best way to get a good grade.

So as ten o’clock rolled around, I was sitting at my computer, working on my arguments. About how people had the right to be free and choose their own leaders. About how leaders who thought they should be in charge no matter what, who thought they had all the answers or some super-duper system that was going to make things fair and perfect for everyone-people like kings and dictators and Communists-always wound up messing their countries up in the end, telling everyone what to say and do and murdering the people who didn’t fit in with the way they wanted to run things.

It was hard work-and it didn’t help that, at the same time I was polishing my deathless prose, I had Josh Lerner-GalaxyMaster, as he calls himself online-on the Instant Messenger. GalaxyMaster was watching an ancient episode of Star Trek on YouTube and sending me a message every time something cool or stupid happened. Which was, like, every two seconds. And which I could see for myself anyway because I had the same episode running on the upper right-hand corner of my computer, even though I’d turned the sound down low so I could listen to George Strait piping out of my iPod dock.