End Code

by Jaron Lee Knuth

  “I'd take you over him any day,” Cyren says when she hears the lack of self-confidence running through my head.

  As the timer reaches the two-minute mark, Worlok stands up.

  “It's done,” he says. “You ready for this?”

  I nod my head and he taps a single button on his screen. From my view, I can see the screen melt into monochromatic static. Black and white pixels drift into the air, funneling upward. When they strike the surface of the white room, they dissolve the ceiling like acid, leaving behind the black emptiness of deletion. The hole in the room widens until I see something far off in the distance. The mouth of the worm, teeth spinning around the vacuum-like orifice, growing in size as it approaches.

  “I hope you're right about this,” Worlok says before selecting something else in his menu and disappearing.

  “He logged-out,” Cyren says, but I know what she means is: “I told you so.”

  It doesn't matter. He did his job. If I'm right, he just saved us all.

  As the mouth of the worm grows bigger and bigger, I can tell it's going to consume this room in one pass. I spread my arms and close my eyes, waiting for the sweet embrace of deletion.

  01100111

  As my eyes flutter open, I hear shouting. The transparent glass tube I'm laying in is fogged over from my breathing, but I see someone on the other side trying to get it open. When it unseals, three young boys are looking down at me. I try to lift myself out of the E-Womb, but one of the boys shoves me back in.

  “Look at him. He's wearing a DOTgov uniform.”

  “It's a disguise,” I try to explain. “I had to sneak in here to-”

  I see commotion in the background as a small group of people help someone else out of their E-Womb. They're disconnecting feeding and waste tubes that have been attached to their bodies for who knows how long.

  One of the boys yells over his shoulder, “We got a worker over here!”

  A twenty-something girl shoves her way between the onlookers and grabs a hold of my uniform to inspect it.

  “Janitorial?” she asks.

  “Like I said. I needed a disguise to get in here.”

  “A disguise?” She lifts one eyebrow and asks, “Why would you need a disguise, yo?”

  It's in that single word, that immature use of slang, that I connect the very real face I've never seen before to the voice I've heard a hundred times.

  “Fantom?”

  Her face grows more confused.

  “It's me!” I shout, throwing my arms around her and pulling her in close for a hug. I feel hard muscles under her prisoner garb, like she must have worked out a lot before being locked up. I guess it doesn't surprise me that Fantom is as tough IRL as she is in NextWorld. She easily pushes me away from her and the other three boys grab my shoulders to push me back into the E-Womb.

  “I'm Arkade! I'm Arkade!” I shout, repeating my name in a panicked excitement.

  “Cowboy?” Her voice trembles and I see tears building in her eyes when she recognizes my voice. She falls toward me, letting her head fall against my chest. I hug her back, but she leans away from me and adds, “You stink, yo.”

  I'm about to explain when a group of men, women, and children shout from over by the menu screen for the mind prison. We both perk up, trying to look over their heads.

  “I've got it!” one girl shouts.

  “You can't cancel the alarm,” a man yells at her, reaching over her shoulder and tapping on the screen. “You have to enter the false alarm code and-”

  A woman shoves him aside and says, “There's a much easier way to do this. If you put a search string here...”

  Fantom strides over to the arguing group, squirming past the increasing amount of bodies yelling at each other. I shove past the now distracted men around my E-Womb and follow her into the crowd.

  “What's going on?” she yells. “What are you doin'?”

  As the main group continues to argue about endless loops and bracket placement, one of the younger men leans over and explains, “An alarm was triggered.”

  I glance up at where the scanners used to be, assuming Worlok has been scanned, but now only wires hang from the walls. He was smart enough to disconnect them before his password expired.

  “The other mind prisons in the other sections of the tower are still active, but it looks like our mind prison was deleted by a virus.”

  “It was Worlok,” I explain. “I freed him so he could delete everything. It was the only way to get you out.”

  Fantom's eyes dart back and forth across the floor as she internally searches for an answer. Her eyebrows shoot up when an idea strikes her. She doesn't hesitate, pushing people aside with a violent expediency. When she reaches the few men and women huddled over the menu and shoves them to the side, one of the young men shoves her back.

  She punches him square in the nose.

  His body falls backward, blood spewing from his nostrils. I hear a painful crack as the back of his head hits the steel floor. He lays there with his arms outspread, unconscious. When the other hackers see this, they throw their hands up and step away from the console.

  Her fingers slam against the menu, typing with a ferocity that I find almost scary as she says, “Canceling the alarm isn't enough.”

  “That's what I was trying to tell them,” one of the men says.

  “No. You can't send a false alarm message either.” She opens up the alarm selection screen and digs in deep, opening sub-menus that I wouldn't think of looking for. “They'll send someone to check the mistake. It might not be a full squadron, but it will be enough for them to learn we've escaped.”

  “So what do we do?” I ask, looking over her shoulder.

  She glances at me with a smirk and says, “Didn't you have a plan for gettin' out of here?”

  Cyren appears next to me, looking apologetic. “Of course we did. You were going to sneak our friends out inside of that janitorial cart and escape inside another waste disposal unit that would take us to an abandoned tower level we found in Old Canada. We were forced to throw that out when instead of releasing three of our friends, we released hundreds of cyberterrorists.”

  I summarize for Fantom: “Plans changed.”

  “Wait,” someone from the crowd calls out, “this kid is the one that freed us?”

  I'm about to answer when a middle-aged man steps out of the crowd and says, “He helped.” The man flashes me an arrogant smile. “But I was the one that took down the mind prison.”

  “Worlok?”

  The faces of the hackers around him turn pale when they hear his name. They take a few steps back, whispering to each other. Fantom glances over her shoulder, looking him up and down like this is the first time she's seen him IRL.

  She rolls her eyes as her focus returns to her hack. “You're also the one that set off the alarm, so we'll call it even, yo.”

  “Not my fault,” he says, stepping up to the screen to overlook her typing. “I didn't exactly have the time to keep it a secret that I was releasing the virus. Your friend here was the one that gave me an account that was about to expire.”

  “Yeah,” I shout at him, “I gave you that account after I broke into a secure tower and logged myself into the mind prison, risking my own life sentence!”

  “Sure, Kid. We all appreciate it. No need to brag,” he says with another smile that makes me wish I could throw a punch like Fantom.

  Cyren's image presses her hand against my chest when I take a step toward him and she gives me a look that says, “Not worth it.”

  Worlok points at the menu and says, “There. You can use that safety protocol to override the other.”

  “I see it,” Fantom says with annoyance. She peers out of the corner of her eye, looking him up and down again. “You lied to me about your age.”

  He shrugs his shoulders with a wry smile.

  “I guess that explain your obsession with anonymity.” Fantom slaps the last button, uploading her workaround. “It's the only way
you can pick up girls.”

  The lights in the room turn red and a squealing alarm bounces off the bare walls. It runs a cycle three times before a computerized voice says: “Reactor breach. Contamination levels at 90%. Please evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion. DOTgov is not responsible for any pain, suffering, or fatal ramifications caused by this hardware failure.” The siren sounds again and the voice repeats itself, over and over.

  Fantom slaps her hands together like she's wiping them clean. “That should do it, yo.”

  Half the hackers laugh while the other half look at each other in terror.

  When Fantom sees the look on my face she says, “Don't worry, Cowboy. I didn't doom us all to death by radioactivity.”

  Worlok points at the locked door and says, “But they don't know that.”

  I'm not sure if I'm stating a fact or asking her for confirmation when I mumble, “You used a false alarm to clear the entire tower...”

  “And they won't be riskin' comin' back either. Safety protocols require them to seal the tower for at least a hundred years before they come back in to test the radiation levels.”

  Worlok throws a single fist into the air and shouts, “The prison is ours!”

  The voices of the small group of hackers yell triumphantly, throwing their fists into the air in reply. Fantom high-fives me before receiving a long line of slaps on the back in congratulations.

  Cyren steps closer to me and with a quick glance toward Worlok she whispers in my ear, “Did we lock them out... or lock ourselves in?”

  I throw her a quick smile. “I guess it wouldn't be the first time I trap myself somewhere with you.”

  01101000

  “So... it worked?” Fantom asks as she looks into my eyes like she's trying to see past them, into my brain.

  “Of course it worked. Wait... did you think there was a chance it wouldn't work?”

  She jerks up straight and tries to play it off like my question is obvious. “It's not like I've tried uploadin' a bunch of NPCs into someone's nanomachines before, yo. I figured it would work, but you're never sure of anythin' when you're workin' on the cuttin' edge of technology. But who cares about that now? I can't believe they're all in there... and you can hear them? They talk to you?”

  “They do more than that.” I smile at Cyren who's sitting next to Fantom without her knowing. “I can see Cyren. I can... feel her.”

  “Amazin',” Fantom says, still looking at me with a kind of child-like awe. “They have total access to your nanomachines. When I opened a connection, I could break into your visual and aural connections. Sure. But touch? Taste? Smell? That's... incredible.”

  “And a little scary,” Cyren adds. “If we can do it, someone else is bound to figure it out eventually. What happens when they learn to hack your senses? Your bodies?”

  “Cyren is concerned with the ramifications of something like this. Access to our nanomachines is like giving up access to everything. Our entire life.”

  “Just think if the wrong person got a hold of that kind of access. Think of what they could do, yo.”

  “I think the wrong people already have that kind of access,” Worlok says as he walks up to join our conversation, sitting down right where Cyren is sitting in my view, fluctuating her graphics and forcing her to move closer to me. “We may have been able to block DOTgov while we were hacking, but when I was in the mind prison, they were showing me recordings from other people's points of view. Inside and outside NextWorld. They can watch us anywhere.”

  “They did the same thing to me when I was on trial. They showed me personal conversations between Xen and Raev.”

  Fantom looks up at where the scanners used to be, wires protruding from the wall. “We should be safe as long as we're physically in here, but we're going to need to lock this place down digitally too.”

  “And then what?” Worlok asks. “Are we really going to live the rest of our lives in a prison? This place isn't even connected to NextWorld.”

  “That's not entirely true,” I say. “Xen is somewhere in this tower, in a lower security section. Raev has been visiting him, which means there has to be an outside line to NextWorld.”

  “Raev's been visitin' him? How is she-”

  “I'll explain later,” I say, standing up and walking toward the group of hackers scrolling through menu options on the main screen in the room.

  Fantom and Worlok follow me and peer over the shoulders of the hackers, checking on their progress.

  “Any luck?”

  The young girl nods her head excitedly. I'm a little shocked at her age. She can't be any older than ten, yet she's gained enough respect among the other hackers for them to allow her to lead the charge on manipulating the screen. As she talks to Fantom, I can see a little twinkle of idolization in her eye.

  “We're pretty sure we can shut off scanners in a single room or hallway. But right now, only one at a time. We're using a repair request, but if we do it in sequence, it will allow a small group to travel through the tower and access other areas as needed.”

  Fantom pats the young girl on the back and says, “That's smart. You did good, yo. I don't think I caught your name?”

  “Anna-log,” she says with a bashful smile.

  “Nice to meet you. Do you think you can get this up and runnin'? We need to access the higher levels of the tower, where the low security cells are located.”

  She turns back to the menu screen to continue her work. “No problem!”

  Fantom turns to me and Worlok and asks, “You up for this?”

  Worlok looks at the little girl's hacking and says, “I don't think... I mean, there's no real reason for me to go, is there?”

  “What's the matter, yo? Don't you trust a girl to do a proper hack?” Fantom asks, crossing her arms over her chest like she's daring him to say yes.

  Worlok chuckles and says, “I don't trust a ten-year-old to do a proper hack.”

  Anna-log sticks out her tongue at Worlok before returning to the screen.

  Fantom lets out a huff of air and walks away. Cyren accompanies her, gesturing for me to do the same, so I shrug my shoulders at Worlok and follow them over to the door.

  We wait in silence while Anna-log prepares the repair bypass for the next room. Fantom cracks her knuckles and leans her head against the wall.

  “Something is troubling her,” Cyren says, motioning toward Fantom, urging me to talk to her.

  “Is something wrong?” I ask, but the words come out awkward and blunt, not at all like I meant them too.

  She peers out of the corner of her eyes at me, staring for a few seconds before throwing her head back in a roaring belly laugh. She nearly falls over, she's laughing so hard, yet I still don't know what's so funny.

  When she catches her breath, she wipes the tears from her eyes and says, “I missed you, Cowboy.”

  “I don't get it. What did I say?”

  “Seriously?” She casts one hand in the air, motioning toward the room of E-Wombs behind us. “You're asking me if somethin' is wrong? I've been locked in a mind prison for...” Her smile disappears. “Oh, wow. I just realized that I don't know how much time has passed, yo. How long was I in there?”

  I hesitate, trying to say it as sympathetically as possible. “A little over eight months.”

  She rubs her temples like she's trying to force her brain to catch up. She glances back at the E-Wombs again and I see pain in her eyes. I think about the menu of torture software and I cringe, unable to stop myself from picturing her being subjected to each one.

  “I'm sorry.”

  She stands up taller, her muscles tightening. “Don't be.”

  There's an awkward pause, so I fill the silence with, “What was it like?”

  Her head jerks toward me and she looks confused. “Why do you want to know? It's over, yo. I'm out.”

  “I just... It seemed... I mean, I can't imagine-”

  “No. That ain't it. You want to know so you can blame yourself. You want
to know how awful you should feel. But that's stupid, yo. We chose our own actions.”

  “If you don't blame me, who do you blame? DOTgov?”

  “I told you before... I don't think DOTgov is evil. They're inept, yo. This was the only answer they could come up with to a problem they couldn't solve. Lock us all up. Torture us for information. All because we're smarter than the people they pay to code NextWorld.”

  “So what's the answer? How do we fix this?”

  She chuckles to herself softly. “I don't know, Cowboy. Maybe there ain't no answer.” Then, with a very serious look, she says, “But that doesn't mean I'm not goin' to try.”

  01101001

  The emptiness of the prison tower is unsettling. We find the remnants of the employees' work left scattered in rooms and halls, dropped right where they were when the alarm went off. Screens flicker, stalled mid-line, left unattended in the middle of whatever work they were involved in. We pass more doors marked for prisoner containment. There's a few hundred more cyberterrorists, still locked inside their mind prisons. I wonder for a moment if we should free them too, but we've already freed more than I expected. And that's more than I'm sure I can trust.

  Every area we pass through is silent except for the voice of Anna-Log coming over the speakers.

  “Okay, take your next left and there should be an escalator up to the lower-security cells.”

  We jog up the moving staircase and find large yellow doors marked: Low Security. It takes a few seconds, but Anna-Log is able to turn off the scanners inside and unlock the doors.

  When the doors open, instead of towers of plastic tubes, we see rows of them lining the walls. Cyren instantly counts fifty, but barely any of them are occupied.

  “Looks like there isn't much demand for low security cells,” I say as we jog down the rows, looking at the name plates attached to each E-Womb.

  “Most people aren't goin' to commit a crime when they know they're bein' watched,” Fantom says. “And the few who do, are usually sent to a physical prison. This prison is specifically for cyberterrorists. How many of those do you think DOTgov would ever risk allowin' inside NextWorld again?”