Julio Cortez muses that "all I ever wanted to be was a fighter pilot!" In an ironic way, that is what he becomes. Trapped in a virtual prison, his mind undergoing brainwashing techniques via computers, he uses his experience in computer flight simulators to find a way out of his prison and onto the Internet, where he seeks out his friends in a flight simulation competition. There, as a master pilot of several different kinds of aircraft, he finds his friends and manages to elude his captors long enough to eventually tell them where he is imprisoned. Although he dies, in the end he is what he always wanted to be: His alter ego in the flight simulator remains, manifesting itself to help a friend. That piece of Julio is a fighter pilot.

Sixteen-year-old Matt Hunter and thirteen-year-old Mark Gridley are the first to...