End Code

by Jaron Lee Knuth

I race for the back of the cargo hold to open the access port and free myself, but I barely take two steps before our bandwidth slows.

  “It's too late. We're here. Time for Plan B.”

  I nod my head as confirmation, but she senses the fear that I'm hiding behind my demeanor.

  “You break in and out of data-banks all the time. Think about it this way: You're already inside. You're halfway done.”

  “You're right,” I say with a deep breath. “Take out a few DgS officers, unlock the front doors-”

  “And we'll have this cube decrypted by the time you're stepping outside.”

  I activate my battleaxe and shield, waiting with a tense jaw for the access port to open. The seconds tick away and every muscle in my body retracts, hardening like a thousand steel springs. A red light above the door turns green. The access port spins, the opening widening from the center until the entire back of the data-carrier has retracted. The interior of the data-bank is revealed, complete with a wailing security alarm and an entire squadron of DgS officers with their glowing red hands reaching toward me.

  01100001

  The NPCs are screaming at my body, telling it which way to move, what trajectory to dive, when to jump, and when to duck. A quadrillion equations are being solved per second, calculating risk factors and probability tables.

  I keep my shield up and barrel through a group of officers, trying to skirt around the room and escape into the hallway, but their offensive line stays strong. Hands shoot at me like spear tips, each one focused on making solid contact with my avatar, creating one open connection to my account. I'm forced backward, rolling around the front edge of the data-carrier. I manage to catch one of the officers with my battleaxe as they turn the corner. The silver avatar evaporates, but there are two more ready to take its place.

  “We can't log out from here. And we can't leave the data-bank now that it's locked down.”

  “I'm hearing a lot of CAN'TS and not a lot of CANS. What's the plan here?” I yell as a DgS officer swings their hand at me, trying to strike my shoulder.

  I raise my shield in time and their hand crumples under the impact, but they immediately strike out with their other hand. I side step it, spin backward, and strike low with my battleaxe as I come out of the twirl. Their leg is sliced below the knee and the avatar disappears a split second later.

  “DgS can't teleport through the security on a data-bank. So this is all there is.”

  I look out over the squadron of officers circling to surround me and I say, “It's enough.”

  “You need to force them to open that door. And the only way they're going to do that, is to send in more officers.”

  I dodge two more hands with a couple of back flips, roll over the control box for the unloading of data from the carrier, and twirl my battleaxe in my hand.

  “So your plan is to-”

  “Log them out,” she says. “Log them all out.”

  I smile as they rush toward me, a wall of glowing red hands reaching for my avatar, threatening my safety, the safety of the NPCs, and the safety of my friends.

  “I got this.”

  My battleaxe chops through the first officer's head and I continue the swing, slicing through two more before raising my shield in defense. I'm less worried about movement now, focused only on kill shots. I step to dodge, but I'm using my battleaxe more than my shield, pushing my offense to the front. When my brutality escalates, DgS officers disappear around me like wisps of smoke.

  As I cut through two more officers, I remember all the times that Ekko felt the need to remind me that what I'm doing isn't a game. He still reminds me that I'm not in DangerWar 2 anymore. He thinks he's being fatherly and trying to keep me grounded. What he doesn't realize is that I've never treated NextWorld like a game. I wasn't treating DangerWar 2 like a game either. It's arguable that I've never treated any game like a game. Gaming has always been something I take seriously. I feel comfortable here, with a weapon in my hand, using skills I've been honing all my life.

  A hand comes so close to my face that the air rushes past the tip of my nose. I step back, swinging my battleaxe behind me and striking an officer that was trying to sneak up on me from behind. The officer in front of me lunges at me when my weapon is behind me, but I smash my shield into the avatar's face and swing my battleaxe upward, catching the officer under the chin. Their head splits open and the avatar disappears. I roll to the left, raising my shield again, but Cyren stops me.

  “It's over.”

  I pivot on one foot, scanning the room for movement, but there's a calm in the air that's a stark contrast to my rapid heartbeat and tense muscles. I stand alone. The empty room yanks me out of the violence I was reveling in and I suck in a breath of air before running to the front of the data-bank.

  When I reach the entrance, the guard sitting at the front desk stands up from his chair as my battleaxe swings across his neck.

  “Now what?” I ask, staring up at the front door, still firmly sealed.

  “We thought reinforcements would be pouring in by now. That door is supposed to be open.”

  I knock twice on the metal wall covering the entrance and yell through my frustration, “Nope! Still closed!”

  A pop-up screen appears in front of me, asking me to accept an incoming emergency-cast. I back away, but it follows me.

  “What is this? What should I do?”

  Cyren appears next to me with a worried look on her face. “Answer it?”

  “I sure would appreciate some confidence right now,” I say as I push the “accept” button.

  Cyren stands up a little straighter and mouths the word, “Sorry.”

  The screen blinks to life, displaying a video-cast of a DgS officer standing in front of the data-bank alongside five more squadrons.

  “User name: unknown. Please disable your illegal encryption, all access countermeasures, and any personally programmed software so that we may flag your account and log you out immediately to be processed IRL.”

  I swipe my hand across the screen to shut it and another request pops up. I slap the decline button and say to Cyren, “Did you see how many officers are out there? I'm thinking it's a good thing that door isn't open.”

  “We miscalculated.”

  “Miscalculated? How could thousands of artificial intelligences, all working as a hive mind, make a miscalculation?”

  “We're digital. Not infallible.”

  “Can we come up with a new plan, please? And this time, remember to carry the one.”

  “Working on it.”

  “And please come up with a plan that doesn't include me giving up... or trying to fight everything that's waiting for me on the other side of that door.”

  “Give us a second,” Cyren mumbles before disappearing.

  I'm too nervous to stand still, so I try to be of some use. I jog over to the desk where the DgS officer was sitting and plop down in his chair, selecting a few of the screens in front of me. I search the security video-casts of the database rooms, looking for anything that could give me a way out, but they all look the same. Empty rooms with a single screen to access the data stored there. There are no other entrances or exits. None except-

  “I have an idea,” I say as I burst from the chair and run toward the data-carrier in the back of the data-bank.

  Cyren appears next to me, running down the hallway with me and yelling, “I know what you're thinking!”

  “Yeah, I haven't forgotten you can read my mind, Cyren.”

  “Your plan is too risky!”

  “It can't be riskier than staying here and waiting for DgS to figure out a way to track my account.”

  “If you hack the data-carrier and fool it into thinking you're data and marked for deletion-”

  “The data-carrier will carry me right out of here.”

  “Straight to the Trash Bin.”

  I run up to the control box for the unloading of data from the carrier as I say, “No, thank you. Been there. Done that. Wasn't
a fan.”

  “You would need to escape the data-carrier before it arrived at the Trash Bin.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But how would you-”

  She stops questioning me as soon as she reads my thoughts, but I still answer aloud, “Plan B was to fight my way out of the data-bank. I never used Plan A.”

  I slap my hand on the screen that controls the sorting procedure and the NPCs get to work hacking through the safety protocols. It only takes them a few seconds, but with five squadrons of DgS losing their patience outside, every second is moving in slow motion.

  “Get ready,” Cyren says as the last of the multi-colored cubes of data are sorted for saving and the deleted data is transferred back into the data-carrier to be delivered to the Trash Bin. “This is going to feel... weird.”

  The screen blinks a few times and my chest cracks open. My avatar fractures, each crack turning into smaller cracks, like a spiderweb stretching out across my entire body. The fragmentation continues to multiply until my body is broken down into individual pixels, my body separating into individual molecules. Each pixel funnels toward the screen, pouring through the filter as a stream of data. The filter registers me as unsaved content and marks me for deletion. My avatar, pixel-by-pixel, is transferred onto the shelves inside the data-carrier, where I lay divided.

  Without an avatar, I'm unable to motion for screens or select anything. Luckily, I have a few thousand NPCs floating around inside me that can do that for me.

  As soon as the data-carrier leaves the facility and exits onto the thousand-lane super-highway, they remove every label on my avatar that marked it for deletion. The pixels pull toward each other like magnets, piecing together my cowboy avatar. My eyes blink open and I'm standing inside the data-carrier, surrounded by nearly empty shelves.

  “We've got under a minute before we reach the Trash Bin,” Cyren says into my ear. “And DgS is tracking the data-carrier.”

  I swipe in the air and open my hacking menu, once again selecting the MIN/MAX option. The large nickel-plated dial appears in front of me, but instead of turning it to the left, I spin it toward the right.

  My avatar grows in size. My head presses against the ceiling of the data-carrier. My arms knock over the shelving units. I fold my knees, trying to fit inside the increasingly tiny area. My cheeks squish together, pressing against the ceiling as I continue to grow.

  “Turn off my pain simulators!” I yell, unable to make any kind of motion myself.

  The NPCs do so instantly, and I keep growing. I hear the digital distortion as the data-carrier tries to make sense of its own spatial calculations. The dimensions of my avatar don't compute with the dimensions of the cargo hold. Three seconds later and the data-carrier splits in half, fracturing under the barrage of errors. Pixels spill across the super-highway, random pieces of data crashing into the pavement causing traffic jams in six different lanes.

  My avatar slams into the street and keeps growing. When I push against the pavement underneath me and stand up, my head is nearing cloud level. My foot takes up three lanes below. Traffic is stopping to stare in awe at the super user they've heard about. DgS officers step out of the vehicle that was following the data-carrier, stunned for a moment by my sheer size.

  It's all the time I need to slap the log-out button.

  01100010

  When I step out of the E-Womb, Ekko is waiting for me, the anticipation glowing in his eyes as he jumps up from his bed.

  “Well?” he asks. “Did you get it?”

  “We got... something,” I say, reaching for the vitapaste dispenser. “It'll take time to go through it all.”

  I clench the tube of vitapaste, squirting a handful into my mouth, nearly gagging on the taste as Ekko asks, “How long will it take?”

  “It's raw, unsorted data. It could take a long time to find exactly what we're looking for, if it's there at all...”

  “You underestimate the combined processing power you have stored in your nanomachines,” Cyren says, shimmering into view next to me.

  Her smile is practically glowing. She throws her arms around me and squeezes. Hard.

  “What is it?” I say, stumbling backward from the forceful gesture.

  “We got it,” she whimpers into my ear. “We got it all.”

  “All?”

  She steps back, wiping the joyful tears from her eyes as she says, “Passwords. Locations. Access Points. It was all there. It looks like they use it as some kind of countermeasure to hacking. They delete and change the records multiple times a day so that if someone were to find it, anything useful will have been changed.”

  I frown with confusion at her excitement over this news and ask, “But doesn't that mean-”

  “All the information we gathered will be invalid within three hours.”

  “And you're happy about this because...?”

  “Because all the information we gathered is still valid for the next three hours!”

  I drop onto the edge of the bed and let my head fall into the palms of my hands. Ekko places his hand on my back and moves it in small circles. He doesn't even know what's happening, what's troubling me, yet he tries his best to comfort me.

  I let out a deep breath and say, “Okay. There's no time to waste worrying about it. We need to try our best. That's all we can do at this point.”

  “That's the spirit,” Ekko says encouragingly.

  I give him credit. He's acting like an involved father, blindly supporting me even though he's only taking part in half the conversation.

  I stand up with renewed vigor and ask Cyren, “First of all, where are they hiding this thing? What domain is it in?”

  Her smile falters. “That's a problem.”

  “What kind of problem? Like 'it's a heavily guarded domain' kind of problem, or-”

  “More like a 'it doesn't exist inside NextWorld' kind of problem.”

  “It doesn't exist?”

  “It's on a secure local network. There's no connection to NextWorld.”

  She senses me trying to wrap my brain around how that's possible and continues.

  “The prison exists in a physical place. The prisoners are transferred to a secure tower in Old Japan where they are logged-in to the mind prison servers, which have no outside access to NextWorld.”

  “So Xen is-”

  “It's why we couldn't find any records for any of them in the tower databases. They've been moved IRL.”

  In Real Life. The thought is horrifying. I picture DgS knocking down doors, yanking Fantom and Xen and Worlok from their E-Wombs and dragging their frail bodies off to some kind of torture tower. I feel helpless.

  “You're not helpless.”

  “How do I hack something that I can't access? How do I get somewhere that isn't connected to the digital world?”

  Ekko keeps rubbing my back, allowing Cyren and I to work through the problem. But Cyren and the NPCs have already worked through the problem. She's leading me to the conclusion at my own pace. It frustrates me how much smarter she is than me, but only for a second. In fact, it's one of the many, many things I love about her.

  “You exist in two worlds. You can reach them IRL. Free their bodies and you'll free their minds.”

  I look up at her, her lips looking blacker. Her wide shoulders looking more powerful. Her leather-strapped outfit looking harder. Her clenched fists looking deadlier. And then I remember that together, we can accomplish anything.

  I stand up, leaving the comforting hand of Ekko to fall back onto the bed as I say, “They won't just let anyone who happens to have a password inside.”

  “When they scan you, they better see a DOTgov account connected to your nanomachines or it's going to raise suspicions. I can switch your account, like I was going to switch your account with Raev's. IRL or NextWorld, it's all the same account. Same hack.”

  “A DOTgov account? Where would I...” The truth dawns on me. “You don't mean-”

  She smiles that knowing smile, letti
ng me accept my conclusion.

  “My father is never going to help me. We need a different plan. Something that-”

  Cyren laughs abruptly. It's a little disconcerting.

  “What's so funny?”

  “You! You've fought vampires, giants, dragons, a giant worm virus, and DOTgov itself. Yet somehow you're still frightened of your father.”

  “I'm not afraid of my father. But I know that he's never going to help me, especially if it might threaten his job.”

  She tilts her head, playfully coy, and says, “Really? Because someone looking at it from a different point-of-view could argue that everything he's done, including his job, was to help you. He's always done what he thought would make your life better than his own.”

  If I was smarter, I would listen to her. She's always right. About everything. She reads people better than me. She understands people in a way that I never will. I take things at face value, never looking underneath their literal meaning, never reading between the lines, never understanding the subtleties of social cues that are supposed to expose a person's unspoken truths. Sometimes I wish she could make all my decisions for me. So why am I arguing with her?

  “He'll never understand what we're doing, what we're trying to accomplish.”

  “He doesn't need to. He just needs to understand how important it is to you, how much it means to you.”

  “And how am I supposed to make him understand that?”

  “You need to open up. Be honest. Be his son.” She smiles with an encouraging gentleness. “And you need to let him be your father.”

  I let her words sink in before I stand up straight, trying to look confident in my resolve, but deep down, I know she's right.

  I'm afraid of my father.

  “Even if I can talk him into helping us, we still need some kind of plan.”

  “I'll go over the data on the mind prison while you're traveling, see what I can learn to help you, but there's no time to plan. You need to act.”

  “But-”

  “Stand up. Say goodbye. Start moving.”

  I take my own advice and listen to her. I stand up and hug Ekko. The hug lingers for a bit as I allow my fear to hold me in place. It's Ekko who lets go of me first.