End Code

by Jaron Lee Knuth

  I clench my fist in frustration. Xen isn't a cyberterrorist. He wouldn't know how to hack NextWorld if someone handed him a pre-made script tool. He was there to show his support. For me. For Raev. For Cyren. Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. Just like before. Just like DangerWar 2.

  “He's over here!” Fantom yells out from across the room.

  I race over to join her as she taps on the screen attached to the E-Womb. With a few deft keystrokes, I see the screen light up with the words: Logging Out. There's a slight hiss as the air inside the tube is released and the plastic lid retracts into the E-Womb. The waste disposal tube and feeding tube retract as well. When the feeding tube completely removes itself from Xen's throat, he gags a few times and his eyes flutter open.

  It's a strange thing seeing someone for the first time that you've known for practically your entire life. There's no recognition in his eyes when he glances back and forth between us, but I can see his brain churning, trying to make sense of why he's seeing reality instead of the absence of sensations from his mind prison.

  Both Fantom and I set our hands on his shoulders, but he jerks away from us. I see fear in his eyes.

  “Xen, it's okay. We're not going to hurt you.”

  He looks at me for a second, still frightful, but I see a hint of something as his mind tries to recognize my voice.

  “That's Arkade,” Fantom says. “And I'm Fantom.”

  “We're here to save you,” I say. “You're... you're free now.”

  “Kade?” He says my name like a whisper. I'm waiting for him to smile, or to hug me, or to cheer, or something, but instead he cowers away from me. “No! No, no, no. Put me back. Put me back inside!”

  He flails around, his arms and legs lashing out at us, trying to break free from our hands.

  We let go and he screams past us, “Please! Help! Someone put me back in!”

  “Xen!” I yell his name and push his body back down. “Calm down. No one else is here. You're safe.”

  He closes his eyes and shakes his head back and forth rapidly. “No, I'm not. I'm not safe. Not out here. I'm only safe in there.”

  “No one's goin' to hurt you,” Fantom says. “They can't torture you anymore.”

  He covers his face with his hands and whimpers through his fingers, “I'm not afraid of them.”

  “Who are you afraid of?” I ask him, but I glance at Cyren, hoping she can make sense of his mania.

  Before she can give any sort of reply, Xen breaks down, weeping into his hands. “I'm afraid of myself.”

  “Xen...” Fantom only says his name, I think because she doesn't know what else to say.

  “Eight months of sobriety. Eight months without any inebriation software. It was just me and the thoughts in my head. Nothing more.” Xen looks at me through his tear-soaked eyes and says, “I was safe in there, Kade.”

  I want to argue with him. I want to tell him he's crazy for thinking that way. But then I feel something. Something I'm not used to.

  Empathy.

  I felt safe once, inside DangerWar 2. When the entire world was devoured by Worlok's worm virus, I wanted to stay there. Where it was safe. Where I could be with Cyren.

  It was Cyren that pushed me out. She knew I was choosing the safe choice, not the right choice. She knew I was staying in the game because it was easier there, but she also knew that if I stayed, there was no hope for me. I would never grow, never change, never evolve. She needed to make the hard decision for me.

  And now I need to make that decision for Xen.

  “Xen, you're coming with us.”

  “No!” he screams, continuing to fight against me as I pull on his arms.

  “You can't make him to do this,” Cyren says from behind me. “This isn't a problem you can solve with force.”

  She's right again. That's when I realize I need to remind him of his motivation. The same motivation that saved me from giving up. The same motivation that helped my father realize what truly mattered to him.

  I clamp down the palms of my hands on the sides of his face, look him straight in the eyes, and say, “Do you want to see Raev?”

  His bottom lip is quivering. His eyes turn from fear into desperation. The rigidness of his body softens as his need to struggle against me lessens. He closes his eyes as acceptance floods his system.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you need to let us help you. We're going back into NextWorld, and you're going to come with us. You'll be able to contact Raev and-”

  “No!” he says, the fear threatening to return. “They'll hear me! They'll see me! They'll put her back in this place and-”

  “Not gonna happen,” Fantom says. “We'll protect you. Give you a brand spankin' new account that's completely invisible to DOTgov. They won't hurt you ever again. I promise.”

  His head drops and he mumbles, “I just want everything to be okay.” He glances up at Fantom, then me. “I want everything to be okay for all of us.”

  Fantom squeezes his shoulder and says, “Don't worry. We can fix this. We can fix everything. Our accounts. The NPCs. DOTgov.” She throws her hands in the air and says, “Heck. If we put our minds to it, I bet we can fix NextWorld itself.”

  Xen looks at me and I do my best impression of a confident smile, like I believe everything she said. But when I glance at Cyren, she knows the truth. She knows that unlike Fantom, I don't care about saving NextWorld. I just want to save my friends.

  01101010

  When we return to the room of E-Womb towers, I can tell most of the members of Worlok's hacker group, Sektor, are less than excited to help us with our plan. When I pay attention to the whispers between hackers, I hear rumors of blame being placed on Worlok for their incarceration. Some of them know he gave up names and locations while he was locked up, yet no one has proof, and the fact of the matter is, he did free them. Eventually. With my help. But they still refuse to take orders from their old leader.

  When Cyren says, “Some people need to find their own way through life,” all I can think about is the boy I used to be. Lost. Alone. Unable to connect to anyone. Even my best friend.

  Fantom tries to convince them to work with us, to work with her, and eventually she does. Her natural talent as a leader shines through effortlessly. It's hard not to follow someone with so much confidence.

  We eventually find our way into the mainframe of the prison tower and get to work rewiring the E-Womb's network. The entire group works around the clock, swapping in and out when an hour or two of sleep is required. Within two days we've opened the tower's block on NextWorld. The mind prisons that lock down the stimuli of the cyberterrorists in the rest of the tower still prohibit them from connecting to NextWorld, but our E-Wombs have open connections. With the help of every secret code the hackers have ever designed, as well as the creativity and ingenuity of the NPCs, every E-Womb in our room is capable of logging-in with clean, secure accounts. Each one is hidden under layers of personally created firewalls, signal bouncers, ghost duplicates, and encryption more advanced than anything DOTgov could ever dream of.

  In the midst of all the activity, I can't help feeling outgunned. I've learned a few things about hacking, but everyone around me is so talented, so progressive with their out-of-the-box thinking, that I spend most of my time in a corner with Xen. He barely talks, nodding or shaking his head once in a while. I'm forced to fill the empty space with endless chatter, telling him everything that happened to me since I saw him last.

  When I reach the point in the story where we found out about Raev, I stumble over my words, trying to find a way to soften the blow.

  “You need to tell him,” Cyren says as she appears next to me, foregoing whatever she was working on in order to help me.

  I hesitate.

  “He needs to know the truth.”

  I try to find the words, “Yeah... I mean, I don't know... when I heard about Raev I just... it was weird, you know?”

  Xen perks up for the first t
ime

  “Wait... you knew she was released? You knew she was visiting me? Did you talk with her?”

  His questions are point-blank. There's no way for me to soften the blow. “I did.”

  His eyes grow large. “I can't wait to see her. It's the first thing I'm going to do once I'm back in NextWorld. Our visits were always... short. And monitored. We could only talk about previously agreed upon subject matter. It all felt so... fake.” He looks up at me and smiles for the first time. “She must have been happy to see you. DOTgov wasn't allowing her to contact you, so I'm sure she was happy you tracked her down on your own.”

  I hesitate again, but Cyren gives me a look.

  “I'm not sure I would call her mood... happy.”

  He tilts his head like a confused puppy. “What do you mean?”

  I take a deep breath and say, “She blames me for... where you are. For what happened to you. The arrest. The imprisonment. Everything. She tried to have me arrested.”

  Xen chuckles uncomfortably. I think he's hoping this is some kind of joke, but when I don't laugh with him, the humor falls away.

  “You must have misunderstood her.”

  “Trust me, I didn't misunderstand anything.”

  He shakes his head, denying my words. “Then maybe DOTgov has been lying to her. We were never allowed to discuss you, or Fantom, or anything that happened. Once I talk to her, I'll straighten everything out.”

  I won't lie to him, but I also refuse to take away his hope. No matter how hopeless I think it is.

  “Maybe you're right, Xen. Maybe you can talk some sense into her.” I pause and rest my hand on his knee. “I just want you to be careful.”

  He laughs off my worried state. In his idealistic world, Raev could never pose any threat.

  He doesn't speak as I finish the rest of my story, making a few ugly faces when I tell him about the waste disposal unit. After many hours, I relax into the silence and sit with him. It's actually quite nice, just being there. With the constant stimulus of NextWorld, sometimes I forget how serene the real world can be.

  When I drift into a solid state of sleep, it feels good to rest my mind. I'm not responsible for anything immediate. I may not trust the people around me, but I trust their skills.

  Unfortunately, my sleep doesn't last long.

  Fantom shakes me awake. “We're ready, yo.”

  I rub my eyes and look around the room. Men, women, and children are crawling into their E-Wombs and connecting their feeding and waste disposal tubes, preparing for our inaugural log-in.

  “You're sure everything is safe?” Xen asks.

  I glance at him and can tell he hasn't slept at all.

  “I'm sure,” Fantom says. “Every E-Womb is usin' a private network and a different set of security protocols. Everyone is loggin'-in to a different site so that our bandwidth spiderwebs into NextWorld. The only thing left is for us to decide where to release the NPCs.”

  “I don't have a preference,” I say, standing up and stretching my arms, trying to get a kink out of my back from sleeping on the floor. “As long as they're free...”

  Fantom rolls her eyes and I have to stop myself from smiling. Seeing her real face imitate the same look that her avatar has given me so many times before fills me with a strange sense of comfort.

  “I ain't askin' for a preference, yo. We're goin' to be uploadin' thousands of NPCs. A sudden change in numbers like that wouldn't go unnoticed.”

  I rub my head, trying to force my brain to think creatively. “We need somewhere that's already full of NPCs. Somewhere the change won't matter as much.”

  “What site has the most NPCs?” Xen asks. “The biggest clubs in DOTsoc don't need anywhere near that many NPCs to handle the needs of their clientele.”

  When the answer hits me, it's obvious.

  “DOTfun.”

  “A game?” Xen asks.

  “Sure,” I say with a smile. “There's a ton of role-playing games. They fill those fantasy worlds with NPCs to run the shops and give quests and generally make the world more alive. Just like they tried to do in DangerWar 2.”

  Fantom walks away as she's talking, already heading toward her E-Womb. “Then we have a plan. We'll log-in to DOTfun and locate the largest RPG they've got. Once we're inside the game, I'll cut and paste the NPCs from your nanomachines and they can hide inside the world until we figure out our next step.”

  I jog to catch up to her. “We should contact Grael, let him know what's going on.”

  “And Raev,” Xen mumbles from behind me.

  I stop and turn around so that I'm facing him. “Of course. Right after we release Cyren and the NPCs, we'll figure out the best way for you two to reunite.”

  He smiles, looking at his feet, lost in his thoughts of the reunion.

  I help him into one of the plastic tubes and seal him shut. Then I climb into the tube right above Fantom.

  “See you inside, Cowboy.”

  I pause and call out below me, “With these new accounts, I won't be able to see your name. How am I going to know who you are?”

  I hear her laugh, and right before her E-Womb slides shut she yells back, “Just look for the girl rolling her eyes at you, yo.”

  I swallow my feeding tube and clench my toothless gums around it as the waste disposal tube inserts itself. Cyren appears on the outside of the E-Womb, smiling back at me.

  “We're almost there,” I think to her. “You're almost free.”

  In my mind, I hear her say, “I've been free since the moment I met you.”

  She presses the flat of her palm against the plastic that surrounds me. With the tube in my mouth, I mumble the words, “Log-in,” and watch the image of her disappear into the blackness of the NextWorld loading graphics.

  01101011

  It doesn't take me long to locate the biggest RPG in DOTfun. Named Pendragon's Crown, it bills itself as having the most expansive world of any role-playing game, inhabited by the largest assortment of monsters for players to hunt and kill.

  I send an audio-cast to Grael, letting him know our plan worked, and tell him to meet us inside the game.

  As I stand outside the entrance to the game, designed to look like the drawbridge of an old European-style castle, I notice a couple other players standing awkwardly off to the side, eyeing every player that walks past. It has to be Fantom and Xen. Without the time for any detailed design, we're all forced to use default avatars, but our choices are still familiar. My BASIC-MALE-32 avatar is still wearing a flat, badly-modeled cowboy hat. Xen is still bald, with a long orange robe, but this basic model doesn't move like cloth, holding its shape more like a hard surface. And Fantom's avatar still has her hair pulled into two long ponytails.

  I tip my hat at them and they approach me.

  “Let's get inside and get this over with, yo,” Fantom says. “I don't want to be in this lame avatar any longer than I have to.”

  We jog across the drawbridge and as soon as we enter the castle, DOTfun drops away from view. I find myself alone, standing in a tiny room with candles flickering all around, dripping wax onto stacks of books and the skulls of various creatures. A decrepit old man sits behind a desk, scrawling something onto a sheaf of paper with a feather pen. His white beard falls onto the desk winding its way around books and jars and magical trinkets of all kinds before finding its way onto the floor and trailing off into a mouse hole in the corner of the room. He blinks his eyes a few times and peers over the top of his glasses at me.

  “Ah! I see you've finally arrived. The Realms of Whisperwind have been awaiting your presence for...” He chuckles to himself. “It feels like an eternity, doesn't it? Perhaps you are the one who will fulfill the prophecy, eh? Are you the chosen one? The stranger who will locate Pendragon's Crown and return peace to the thirteen kingdoms?”

  I clear my throat and say, “Yeah. Sure.”

  I've never been a fan of these types of games. I prefer something with firearms rather than swords and magic. I guess t
he blending of the two in DangerWar 2 was interesting. The mash-up made it more original than either of the two genres on their own.

  “Excellent!” he says, dipping his pen in a silver inkwell. “I need to make a few notations for the historians before you begin your journey.”

  He asks me a series of questions, everything from what race of creature I am, to what weapon I choose to wield. It's an interesting twist on character creation, speaking with an NPC instead of selecting things from a menu, but it serves the same purpose. I rush through the selections, not putting much thought into my choices. I don't plan on playing this game for long.

  Before I know it, the old man is motioning toward the exit and wishing me luck on my adventure. I open the only door onto a medieval city street, bustling with NPCs going about their day. Farmers bring their fruits and vegetables to the market square on carts pulled by oxen. Children run through the crowds laughing... and occasionally stealing loosely tied pouches of gold from the belts of distracted villagers. I hear the clank-clank-clank of a blacksmith hammering steel against his anvil. Shopkeepers yell from their doorways, beckoning other Player-Characters to peruse their various items for sale. The smell of fresh baked bread fills my nostrils. A bard plucks the strings of his lute, singing songs while he lays against the roots of a giant tree set in the middle of the square. It's all quite impressive. The graphics are nice, more stylized than realistic, but in this fantasy world they work.

  When I step out of the old man's home, my avatar changes to represent the choices I made inside. Patchwork leather pants cover my legs, and a stained, white peasant shirt covers my chest. A rusted sword dangles from my belt. It's all starter equipment that I would have to replace soon if I hoped to survive outside the safety of the town.

  A young boy runs toward me and I instinctively grab for my sword, but he waves his hands in the air and I see tears streaming down his cheeks.