What timing, Alex thought as he walked the rest of the distance to his house. I know she isn't avoiding me, she's been complaining about this for the last month. I don't even know why I care so much, it's junk! I should have deleted it as soon as I opened it.

Then a perfect copy of Alice's voice played in his head. "I thought it said to wait for me!" In his mind, he knew she wasn't upset about it, but for some reason he still felt like he'd let her down, betrayed her. She could do that to him. Every word she said seemed to have a hidden meaning to him. He liked to think that it was just because she was an introverted, deep person, who rarely expressed herself. So it only made sense that when she did, she would try to express a few different things at one time. Nobody else seemed to feel the same, however.

That's because they never get to know her, he thought. Nobody sees her for who she really is. He hated himself for the thought that always followed that one, but the feeling was there regardless. If more people did, though, she'd be too popular to ever be seen in public with a guy like me.

By the time he'd slammed the door behind him he was already headed to his computer, tucked away in the corner of his room on the second story. The stairs creaked under his sneakers with every step, but there wasn't anybody home to notice. His father worked most of the day, every day, so the house was mostly silent. Especially since Alex's mother hadn't been heard from in over ten years.

This suited Alex just fine, though. He had the house to himself, had whatever he wanted for dinner, and could do pretty much whatever he wanted since there was no one to tell him otherwise. He'd avoid getting in trouble, of course. There's no point in ruining a good thing. But if, say, someone was giving him a hard time at school, he didn't have a problem in the world with hacking a few facebook accounts.

Alex closed yet another door behind himself, this time the one sitting sentry at the entrance to his room. He pressed a button and was met with the comforting sound of a fan whirring to life. With a sigh, he sat back in his old chair, watching as the screen flicked through it's usual routine.

There were a million things for him to do; specifically, 35 notifications needed to be responded to in their own unique ways. Instant messengers needed to be logged into. Statuses needed to be updated. But he was drawn to his email client first. He just had to look one more time, see if there was something, anything, he could have missed.

From: Anon@ymous.net
To: fs11235@gmail.com
Subject: For Alex and Alice. (Open together)

00111 00011 00001   11111 11111 01111   11111 00111 01111   11000 0110 0110   11111 11111 00001

000 010101 111 010101 000 010101

He stared hard at it. He'd already thought it could be binary, but it only came up with errors when he tried. Besides, binary came in multiples of eight characters, and there were 129 characters there, excluding the spaces. He'd counted it twice. But that only made him more curious, because it brought his attention to the spaces. Several times it was double spaced. But what could that possibly mean? It has to have some meaning, doesn't it?

He was starting to get the feeling that someone was toying with him. At the same time, he thought that was crazy. Who would ever send him a message filled with 1's and 0's, expecting it to drive him crazy trying to solve it? It was a stupid idea. But then, what in the world did it mean?

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Author guidance for This story

Just ask before you write, so I can tell you all that I have planned out. (Honestly it's not much. :P)

As always, if you see a particularly rough part, or just have an idea for a future chapter, let me know!

updated Jun 24 '10 by chaosbeing