Free Stormfuhrer by E. R. Everett Page B

mathematics.  Her mind kept drifting back to the game, what she may have done wrong that resulted in her avatar's death.  Maybe she didn't do anything wrong.  The inmate's death may have simply been unavoidable—she was fragile, skinny, weak . . . and pregnant—had been all of these when Dana first began using her in September.  The cards were stacked against her from the start.  She knew that dying early wouldn't cause even a point deduction in Mr. Hayes' class, but still it kinda sucked that some students could be guards, some politicians, some military police, some soldiers, and she had to be a pathetic little Lithuanian Jew stuck in Dachau, skinny and pregnant.
    There had been that German nurse that saved her life, the one with the syringe who killed the guard.  They were going to take the baby then, she thought, or maybe kill her and the baby with one injection.  But kill a guard?  It was stupid, really.  What would the German nurse accomplish by wasting her own life in that way?  And what was Dana supposed to do about it?  Certainly the nurse knew that she, the inmate, was going to die either way.
     
    She wondered whether or not the girl who saved her was an avatar or just a computer character.  Maybe everyone in the game was a person behind an avatar.  It was even possible, she thought, that hers was the only avatar in her game, with all the characters simply being computer-generated, and that everyone in Mr. Hayes' classes were simply playing their own independent games.  He never came out and said that this wasn't the case.  She whispered to herself while appearing to be attentive: “He rarely talked about the inner workings of the game, only about how we should report on our own experiences, what we were learning, how it applied to history and our own lives.”
    Dana was called on to work one of the problems projected on the screen.  She worked it without having to look either at the book or at her own paper sitting on Julia's desk beside her.  Julia had left the problem unfinished.  Dana's answers, however, were perfect.  Another student was then randomly called upon to work the next problem.
    Her mind drifted back.  Thankfully, she wasn't “in” her avatar when they took the fetus the next day.  She had simply logged in and was lying on a brown straw mattress on the floor of a small cell.  There was no more pregnancy, just a wide bandage.  She had been relieved that her avatar might then have a chance in the camp, but she was sad, very sad.
    When the grading session was over, Dana handed Julia's paper back to her.  It had no marks on it.  Julia smiled.  Though Dana didn't fill in blank answers with correct ones, she at least didn't mark the ones wrong that actually were.  Julia knew that it would be Dana's ass, not hers, if Mrs. Villarreal happened to look at some of Julia's answers and notice the grading errors.  Dana didn't care.
     
     
    Apart from a few exceptions, no one knew the identities of any others in the game.  The European war involved millions. There were literally thousands of camps both inside and outside of Germany, and there were only 143 seniors.  Not all found themselves in camps, but most somehow ended up in one, one way or another.  Some students had been to several camps by the end of the first semester, and it was all in real time, so an eight-hour drive in a truck took an actual eight hours; a week on a train took just as painfully long. 
    Students also knew that closing the browser didn’t mean everything would continue as it was when you opened it again.  Things would happen in your absence, during the other 23 hours of the wakeful day, and you’d have to catch up, without letting on to other characters in the game that you weren’t actually there, for unnatural behavior was often rewarded with long imprisonments and sometimes a phenol injection.  Afterward, one could expect to see a black screen for days and then finally appear as someone in a