End Code

by Jaron Lee Knuth

  “If you force your own log-out like you did in the Trash Bin-”

  “They can track the denial of service hack.”

  “We can't let them follow that to your account signal. They'd know what E-womb you're using.”

  “There's no time to bounce the signal. I'm going to need to leave the domain.”

  “When DgS arrives, they'll open the front door.”

  “That means fighting my way out.”

  “You up for it?”

  I smile and say, “Like you need to ask.”

  As soon as I return to the entrance of the data-bank, the steel wall that covers the front door is lifting. I see the red and blue flashing lights behind the silhouettes of twenty-seven DOTgov Security officers.

  I'm offended they sent so few.

  I don't wait for them to attack. The shield and battleaxe appear in my hands as my right foot digs into the floor and I push off, throwing myself at them. There's too much ground to cover in one leap, so I throw my ax at the closest one and activate my “glass skin.” The ax twirls through the air and sinks into an officer's chest. The officer disappears and the weapon falls to the floor. The DgS sensors start to cut through the hack, decoding the algorithm that's allowing my invisibility. I only have half a second, but that's enough for me to reach the battleaxe and swing it at two more officers.

  As the third officer is logged-out by my blade, their decoding software cuts through my “glass skin” program and I reappear in the middle of the confused group. They lunge at me, like a bear trap snapping shut, but the NPCs spin me like a top, directing my shield and battleaxe perfectly. The officers' hands are either knocked away or sliced off completely. Seven more officers disappear.

  The NPCs alert me to a hole in the grouping and I roll toward it, bursting through their surrounded positioning and out the front door. A few avatars are gathered on the sidewalk, watching the commotion of the DgS, but more stop to gawk when I appear in the street holding medieval weaponry.

  I have an instinctual need to leap into the air and do so without hesitation. The NPCs save me from collision with a sleek, white car that zooms underneath me. When my cowboy boots clop against the pavement, I waste no time in running to the opposite side of the street, dodging vehicles and eventually diving into the crowd of onlookers. A few officers try to follow on foot and two of them are struck by data-carriers, enormous trucks full of information being moved to a different storage space. Their bandwidth lines cross and both the officers and the trucks are stalled by the lag.

  One officer follows me on foot while the rest open their menu screens, selecting their transportation options. I'm able to keep my distance from the officer following on foot, but soon I hear the popping sounds of the other officers teleporting directly behind me as I run. I'm only keeping ahead of their positioning software by a few milliseconds. I glance over my shoulder and see a mob of them chasing me, their glowing red hands reaching out, their fingers wiggling a few inches away from my avatar.

  “You need to-” Cyren starts, but I already know what she's going to say.

  I swipe my hand in the air, making the simple gesture with my fingers to open my secret menu. A list of programs scroll down in front of me. I slam the palm of my hand into the one labeled: MIN/MAX. A nickel-plated dial appears in front of me and I spin it to the left.

  My avatar disappears.

  The officers stumble into themselves as they stop their pursuit. They all open their menu screens, activating their location-decryption software, but it returns a negative response. According to their software, I'm right there, standing in front of them. There's no invisibility hack, or shadow cloak, or mirror bounce. I'm right there.

  And it's correct. I'm standing inches away from them. Only now my avatar is just over one millimeter tall. It's a stupidly basic hack, breaking through NextWorld's restrictions on the minimum and maximum avatar height. Simple... and maybe a little genius.

  My tiny avatar dodges between their enormous boots and I hop off the edge of the curb. I select a piggyback hook from my inventory and attach it to the next vehicle that passes, hopping from car to car, account to account, in an attempt to throw off their already directionless pursuit. After a few minutes of causing a little more bewilderment, I'm on my way out of the domain.

  Once I'm out, I detach from the vehicle alongside the thousand-lane super-highway that connects all of NextWorld. I spin the nickel-plated dial that represents the MIN/MAX hack back to the center and my avatar grows to its original size.

  When Cyren's image appears next to me, she doesn't need to speak to tell me the results of the decryption. I can read it on her face.

  “They didn't find anything.”

  “Just your run-of-the-mill domain information. A few DOTgov fund-shifting records.”

  I glance up at the sky, at the reflective sphere of the DOTgov domain. The single blinking red light on the exterior looks back at me.

  “We should let Grael know.”

  Cyren flashes me a weak smile before disappearing. She knows this will do nothing to embolden Grael. But it's not Grael I'm worried about.

  Xen.

  Raev.

  Fantom.

  Even Worlok.

  I need to save my friends.

  I select my own vehicle from my inventory: the same huge tire with extra knobby tread and a control seat where the axle should be. It's what I've always used, but I've had some time to make a few modifications.

  The image grows from my inventory screen and appears full size, parked next to the curb. I climb inside the seat and grip onto the controls with both of my hands. I stomp one of my spurred boots onto the acceleration pedal and the wheel grinds into the pavement. With a jerk of the controls, I slice into the nearest lane. Once I reach fifty exabytes, I flip a switch above my head. The tire tilts to the side while my seat remains perfectly balanced. When the tire is spinning horizontally, I pull back on the controls and lift off the pavement. Rocketing into the sky, I choose to ignore the roadways and use the shortest path toward DOTfun.

  01011001

  I track down Grael's account inside a game called Iron-Strike. It's a newer game, one I haven't had a chance to play yet, but gaming is as intuitive as breathing for me. I slip through character creation menus quickly, and before I know it, I'm sitting in the cockpit of a giant robot built for combat.

  Extensive arms made of beams and gears and wires and tubes jut out from either side of the spherical body that houses my avatar and my controls. Two claw-like feet are digging into the sand of the desert floor below me. I scan the displays and take hold of the two joysticks extending from the console. As I move them, the arms of the robot move. My feet buckle into two pedals on the floor, and when I lift my right foot, the robot's right foot lifts from the sand. Pressing it back down makes the robot step forward.

  I yank both joysticks to the right and the spherical body spins, allowing me to take in the view that surrounds me. It's your typical post-apocalyptic vision, complete with irradiated wasteland, ruins of a long-forgotten war jutting out from the blowing dunes, and the remnants of a bombed out city on the horizon.

  I open a menu on the console and see a tab with the words “friend list” displayed. I select it and type in Grael's name. It takes a few seconds, but he accepts the friend request and an arrow appears on my heads-up-display, directing me to him. It points toward the city, where I see the flashes of an explosive battle. I lift my feet in repetition, and with immense strides I cross the desert floor.

  Cyren appears in the cockpit next to me, sitting sidesaddle on the armrest of the command chair. She places her hand on my shoulder and peers out through the windshield of the cockpit.

  “This is a waste of time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Grael. Playing these games.”

  “He's unwinding.”

  “He should be working, looking for more data-banks, writing more decryption keys.”

  “His work would suffer if he didn
't have some downtime, some time to decompress.”

  She peers down at the floor and says, “It's not like I don't understand wanting to play. I just want to be able to relax when I do it, without the worry of what's happening to our friends hanging over me. I'd give anything to get lost in another world with you.”

  “At least we're together.”

  She looks away from me. “It isn't the same. For all intents and purposes, I'm here for you. You can see me and feel me and hear me, but...”

  “The same isn't true for you.”

  She takes a deep breath, collecting herself. “There's a feedback loop. I can sense myself through your nanomachines. I can feel what you feel. And that's... something.”

  “But it's not the same. Not like the real thing.”

  “I hate to use the word 'real,' but yes. It's like a copy of a copy, degraded in some intangible way that I can't quite describe.”

  “But it's still there.”

  “A metaphorical thorn in my side.”

  I stop the robot's progress and reach out to her, giving the leather-strapped hand resting on her knee a gentle squeeze. “That's why we're doing what we're doing.”

  “Thorns?”

  I smile, knowing she's perfectly aware of what I meant. “Thorn removal, actually. We're going to get you and the rest of the NPCs out of my head so that you can all experience NextWorld like it should be.”

  Her face scrunches up. “Wait. I'm confused. Are we the thorns in your metaphor?”

  I let her hand drop back onto her lap and slap her arm playfully. “You know exactly what I'm trying to say.”

  She kisses the top of my head and says, “Always.”

  I grip both joysticks again and lift my feet in sequence, bounding across the wasteland toward the city of ruined buildings.

  As we cross over a barbed wire fence that surrounds an old trench, the desert in front of me bursts into the air, covering the glass of my cockpit with a wave of sand. The NPCs in my head are screaming commands at my limbs, but I'm already thrusting both arms forward and squeezing the triggers. The Gatling guns mounted on both arms spin, streaming tracer rounds into the granules of earth that create the cloud in front of me. I hear metal strike metal and lift my feet in sequence, back-stepping as my fear is realized.

  When the sand dissipates a bit, I see another manned robot standing a few yards in front of me, one arm raised to block my onslaught of bullets with a crackling energy shield. The mechanical body has a thinner frame, with longer limbs and shinier armor, obviously built for more agile movement than my own robot.

  Gripping the triggers tightly, I move the joysticks in a figure eight, trying to sneak a few rounds past the enemy's shield, but it's able to adjust the angle of deflection and not a single bullet lands against the robot's hull. Its other arm lashes out to the side and a glowing energy blade sizzles into shape. The weapon is nearly as long as the robot itself.

  The enemy robot crouches down, still deflecting every round I fire at it, then leaps into the air. I try to raise my arms, but my machinery doesn't want to move that fast. The robot stays well above the trail of bullets I'm chasing it with, leaping high above me, then dropping straight down at me.

  Its feet crash into me first, then it plunges the energy blade straight through the cockpit. My control panel is split in two, and the point of the weapon is sticking right into Cyren's image. If she wasn't a figment of my nanomachine's imagery, she'd be dead.

  My own robot smashes into the desert floor, lying on its back. The robot on top of me yanks the energy blade free, and raises it back up for another, final strike.

  My thumbs press down on the alternate fire buttons atop the joysticks and the launchers mounted on both of my robot's shoulders let loose a cluster of rocket-propelled death. Small but effective explosions cover the enemy robot, knocking it from my frame.

  I scramble my foot pedals, trying to get my clawed, mechanical feet under my robot's body. At the same time, I'm shoving both joysticks forward, aiming my Gatling guns at the damaged enemy. I manage to crawl to my feet, my cockpit hanging open, spraying sparks and oil from the tear in the hull, but the other robot is moving faster.

  Tiny jets on the side of the machine shove the robot to the left so that it's strafing around me. This thing has obviously been upgraded from many previous battles, which means the player inside has won many previous battles, which means I'm fighting someone far more experienced than I am at this game.

  I jerk both joysticks, trying to spin my robot's body toward the path of the enemy, but it gets around behind me and lunges at me again. This time one of my robot's legs goes spinning through the air right before I tumble to the side.

  The NPCs want me to hack the game. To cheat. But there's no way that's going to happen. Out in NextWorld? When my friends' lives are on the line? Sure. But in here? It's disgraceful to the art form I love so much.

  The enemy raises its sword again. I close my eyes, waiting for the loss, before I realize I'd like to see the death animation in this game so I can compare it to the hundreds of other games I've died in.

  I see the gears in the enemy's shoulder begin to spin, powering up for the finishing move, when an explosion on its back throws the skinny robot through the air. It tumbles across the desert floor, rolling down a nearby sand dune before coming to a stop. It lays there a moment before trying to lift itself off the ground. I see a missile, much bigger than anything I'm armed with, stream across the sky overhead and smash into the enemy robot again. Metal pieces go flying in every direction, leaving a gnarled, smoldering hunk of iron laying in the sand.

  I peer out of my cockpit, looking in the direction the missile came from, and I see another robot driving over the crest of the nearest dune. Instead of legs, it travels on triangle-shaped tank tread, but its body still retains a somewhat humanoid shape. Four limbs jut from either side, covered in armaments. I flinch, knowing this enemy will probably end my life with one hit, but as it drives toward me, I realize my friend list arrow hovering directly above it.

  01011010

  The other robot's tank tread stops next to my broken robot and the cockpit pops open. A man with red dreadlocks tied in a ponytail, and a gas mask covering his face, peers over the edge and waves a tattooed arm at me.

  I cough out the smoke now pouring from my cockpit and manage to say, “Hi, Grael.”

  “What are you doing in here, kid?”

  I unhook my boots from the floor pedals and struggle out of my seat. “Losing, apparently.”

  “You could have sent me an audio-cast, told me you were looking for me.”

  “But then I wouldn't have been able to walk a few feet inside of a giant robot before getting stabbed with an energy sword.”

  “Fun game, isn't it?”

  “It's okay.”

  “So? What happened? What did you find?”

  I look down at my own feet and shake my head.

  He lets out a sigh. “Nothing? At all?”

  “Just basic domain information. A few DOTgov secrets. Nothing juicy, and nothing related to the mind prison.”

  Grael leans back in his control chair and puts his boots up on the console in front of him. “Well, transfer it to my account. We can sell it on the undermarket and make some credits to keep this ship afloat.”

  I crawl out of my robot's cockpit and stand in the glaring sun. It reminds me of the Deathsand Desert in DangerWar 2, only more stylized. Less hyper-real. Less gritty. With a few hops, I make my way up the side of Grael's robot and lean into the cockpit.

  Grael lifts the gas mask off his face and leans in, peering into my eyes like a doctor examining the reaction time of my pupils.

  “How are the NPCs?” he asks.

  I tap my head. “Still in here.”

  “But are they comfortable? Are they happy?”

  I shrug. “As happy as they can be. But I have a feeling they'd be a lot happier if we could free them.”

  “Right,” he says, leaning back in the chair
with a defeated breath outward. “But without Fantom, there's no way to decrypt the scissor program so we can cut and paste them from your nanomachines. She's the only one that can let them out.”

  “We'll find her. We'll find her and we'll free her. We'll free all of them.”

  “Yeah,” he mumbles.

  I push past his lackluster response, trying to push him with me. “You keep finding me the data-banks and I'll keep breaking them wide open. If the mind prison exists in NextWorld, there has to be data somewhere that will provide us with a password. And that data has to be in a data-bank.”

  Grael pulls out a canteen, taking a long pull from it before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I'm sick of data-banks.”

  His response worries me, but I deflect it. “I'm sure the data-banks are just as sick of you. But that doesn't mean we should stop digging through their databases. It's the only lead we have.”

  He points at me with a sudden excitement. “Exactly! That's exactly what I was thinking. So I asked myself: Who might have a different lead? A better lead.”

  He sits back, smiling and waiting for me to come to the same conclusion he did.

  “And?” I ask, prodding him to continue.

  “Well, I looked at your father first. He was the obvious answer. He has cut deals with people in DOTgov Security in the past. You know, helping you out with staying in the game, trying to lower your sentence-”

  “He really only succeeded in one of those.”

  “But he still knew people who knew people.”

  “So you think my dad knows how to get into the mind prison? Or knows someone who knows how to get into the mind prison?”

  “I doubt that,” Grael says, as if it was my idea, and a stupid idea at that. “His connection to your cyberterrorism has knocked him so far down the bureaucratic ladder that he'd be lucky to be working someplace deemed important enough to even have DgS officers protecting it. He's got no ties to any kind of security in NextWorld. Not anymore.”