The ding of the elevator informed me that it had arrived on my floor, ready to carry me off elsewhere. I lifted my head from the water fountain and wiped my lips with the back of my hand. The shiny, metal doors slid apart from each other, revealing two others already in the elevator—a man and a young woman—looking quite distraught at the delay in stopping at another floor to pick up another patron.

I don’t have a lot of time. They’ll find me soon.
My name is Aiden. That’s it, just Aiden. No last name. You might have heard of me on the news lately, if you still get the news in your area. Those of you reading this—those of you who care—are why I’ve momentarily stepped out of the shadows, however dangerous it may be.

– I –

“Mail to Johnson!”
The Captain held up a single, white envelope before tossing it on the table he was standing behind. He had a short crew-cut haircut, like the rest of the soldiers in the room, and was still in uniform although the day had already passed.
The room smelled of Man and sweat, but everyone had gotten used to it almost immediately when the Team had marched in four months ago. Aiden Johnson and his team had had a hard day in Training and were ready to call it a night after opening their mail.

Imagine you’re standing in your dusty garage. It’s completely empty aside from you and ten cardboard boxes lined up in a row on the concrete floor in front of you. In each of these boxes are your personal documents, organized in chronological order. The boxes are closed, so how do you know what is in each box?
You look closer at the sides of the boxes and notice that each one is numbered: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on. “Okay,” you think aloud, “but where is the TPS report I’m supposed to have? Lumberg needs it by this afternoon.”

“Sam, come push me!” Henry yelled excitedly as he jumped onto the park’s merry-go-round. “Sam! Push me! Sam!”
Sam and Ralph were over on the park swings, thrusting their legs back and forth as they swung to see who could swing the highest. Ralph was in the lead, and he squealed happily every time he hit the peak of his backwards swing, facing straght downwards to the woodchips nearly six feet below. Only centripetal force kept him on the swing, but he was much too young to know about that.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Justin said, unbuckling his seatbelt and looking around the plane. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
His dad, a middle-aged news reporter, was coming home from a business trip that he’d brought his son on. “You’re supposed to stay in your seat,” he said, pointing to the lit seatbelt light. There had been a bit of turbulance that started a few minutes back and the pilot had switched on the light to keep people from getting hurt if the plane jerked around.

“Do you want this strawberry?” Dr. Steven asked calmly.
I looked up at him, and then at the strawberry in his hand. It was a small strawberry, clearly not the best in the bunch. But it was a strawberry, and I love strawberries. Even a tiny strawberry would be a joyride for my starving tastebuds. I quickly responded, “Sure, I’ll have it.”
The doctor smiled gently at me and closed his hand around the strawberry. He strolled to the opposite end of the table that I was sitting at and set the fruit down on a small, white coaster.

When someone first starts programming, the whole concept of “interpreted” languages and “compiled” languages might seem a bit confusing. Luckily, you have someone super smart like me to explain them to you in a manner that even your great grandpa could understand — even if he’s dead!
All decent programming languages are either compiled or interpreted. What language you’re programming in determines whether you need to download an interpreter or a compiler to run the programs you create. There are a few differences between the two types of languages.

There was a college philosophy class that students always tried to get into because of how cool they heard the professor was. They said he gave open-ended writing assignments and provided ample time for debate and discussions in the classroom. Although he was lenient in the classroom, he always made sure the students learned by his dreadfully hard tests. His system worked well; students heard about how hard the tests were, so they tried extra hard to learn the material they needed to pass.

“You know, stealing’s not as hard as they say it is.”
That’s what she said. “Stealing’s not as hard as they say it is.” That one sentence very well might have ruined my life. She was so apathetic, yet so… mysterious, that I couldn’t help but reply. She caught me off guard, so all I managed was, “Really?”

The model cracked her case open only slightly to look inside before showing it to everyone. When she saw the low dollar-amount, she smiled and threw the case open all the way. The gameshow contestant loudly rejoiced and the crowd screamed in excitement.
Almost immediately, the studio’s lights switched to red. A phone on stage dramatically rang, echoing through the audience, and Howie Mandel stepped over to it to answer.

Single-dial combination locks are a common appearance in safes and places such as locker rooms and school hallways where tons of locks need to be used in many different places. These combination locks unlock by spinning a dial clockwise to the first number, reversing the direction to the second number, and rotating clockwise again for the third and final number (assuming the padlock only has three-number combinations, which this guide will cover).

This year marked the first white Christmas since 1997 in my city. On this Christmas, my younger brother woke me up early to open presents with the family. One of us sat patiently on the living room couch while the other excitedly bounced off the walls at how many presents Santa had brought this year. Ugh, I’ll give you two guesses which one of us was the calm one. I had arrived at my parents’ house late last night and didn’t get enough sleep to do much more than close my eyes and relax on the couch for a minute before being woken up the next morning.