End Code

by Jaron Lee Knuth

  When I finally reach the blown open door to Xiong Chang's Global Presidential office, I silently approach with my back to the wall. The room outside his office is empty, the administrative desk unattended. I figure it's either because DOTgov evacuated the domain when we attacked, or Chang was using a Digital-Character, most likely the first to be deleted. As I creep up next to the doorway, I can hear Worlok already giving his speech to NextWorld.

  “...because for too long we have asked for wisdom from the unwise, security from the insecure, and charity from the greedy. They have given us rules, telling us they will keep us safe, when they actually exist only to stop us from breaking free from their control. They have offered us payment for employment, then charged us for digital goods that cost nothing to copy and paste. And they imprison those that would show you any other way to live. They criminalize those that offer anything that may disrupt the control they hold over us. They lock up those that are brave enough to find the flaws with this world because they are too afraid to admit their world is imperfect.”

  I hear the Global President try to say something, but there's a loud smack, like metal against flesh.

  “I'm here to offer you something else,” Worlok continues like there was no interruption. “I'm here to offer you a world where the rules are meant to be broken. A world where the imperfections are highlighted, manipulated, and bled dry. A world where chaos can run free and your darkest desires can be fulfilled in a playground for your mind.”

  There's some cheering from around the room as Worlok's cyberterrorists are caught up in his fantasy.

  “And I can offer you all of this, because today I take control of NextWorld. And those that would oppose my world, and try to slap their rules and restrictions upon us once again, will suffer the same fate as this out of touch old man.”

  I hear the hammer of Worlok's pistol click.

  “Say goodbye, Xiong Chang.”

  When I spin around the corner of the doorway, it's like NextWorld shifts into slow motion. I scan the room, seeing Fantom on her knees to the left, most of Sektor with their hands raised in the middle of the room, and Worlok's cyberterrorists surrounding everything. Worlok and Chang are straight ahead, behind the large oak desk, but there's too many avatars between me and them to get a clear shot.

  I pull both triggers, aiming straight ahead, trying to clear a path for my next wave of bullets. Two cyberterrorists drop before anyone knows what's happening. Two more drop by the time guns are being turned toward me. I keep moving the barrels of my guns independently, calculating arcs of fire in order to maximize my body count. By the time four more drop, the room has erupted in gunfire.

  Sektor avatars are discarded in explosions of pixels as the cyberterrorists flinch, pulling triggers before their minds can register the real threat. Fantom leaps upward, knocking the gun pointed at her head toward the ceiling. The flat of her palm strikes the cyberterrorist in the nose, rocking his head back as she twists the pistol from his hand. Another cyberterrorist fires at her but she spins around the first enemy, using his body as a shield. The second bullet hits him, shattering his avatar. When the pixels dissipate, she fires back, striking the shooter between the eyes.

  A bullet strikes my chest.

  The words “Log-out Error” appear in front of me and I keep shooting. I step forward, firing in every direction in a calculated approach toward my target. When the next three avatars explode in front of me, I see Worlok. His head is twisting side-to-side, trying to scan the room to take in what's happening, all the while never taking the pistol away from Chang's head.

  A bullet hits my left shoulder.

  “Log-out Error.”

  I slam the heel of my boot into another avatar's knee. She buckles to the floor and I fire a bullet into her spine.

  Another bullet strikes me.

  “Log-out Error.”

  I see a cyberterrorist with his back to me, raising his gun toward Fantom as she blasts two more cyberterrorists. I pistol-whip the back of his head, and when he drops, I stomp down hard on his neck and send a bullet into the back of his skull.

  “Everyone out!” I yell at Fantom, not wanting to split my attention between the offensive attack toward Worlok, and the defensive attack to try to protect Sektor. Fantom's avatar disappears. The rest of the hackers blink from existence, leaving me alone in a room full of enemies.

  Another bullet slams into the side of my head.

  “Log-out Error.”

  Worlok finally focuses on me, his eyes locking with my own. Bullets continue to sink into my avatar, knocking me back and forth, but never logging me out. I keep firing at every avatar that gets between me and Worlok, trying to find one clear shot. When the last cyberterrorist explodes in the middle of the room, I clearly see Worlok's black pistol pointed directly at me.

  “Nice try, Kid.”

  The black gun fires. The bullet strikes my throat, right under my chin. I choke, coughing up razor blades of misery. The pain programming that he coded is vicious. He's actually that sick. Death wasn't enough for him. He needed his victims to suffer, to die knowing how good of a programmer their murderer was. Thankfully the effect doesn't last long, and when I clear my throat of the slicing electricity, I spit on the floor and smile at him.

  His eyes grow large as he fumbles for his words. “How did you... how are you doing this?” He looks down at his pistol in confusion. “You shouldn't be here. You should be dead.”

  “You're right, Worlok. But that gun of yours has to log me out before it can interact with my nanomachines.”

  I glance down at the screen in the corner of my view and see the civilian Digital-Characters from DangerWar 2 with their own screens open, still hacking away at my account. They're using the same code they wrote to lock every player in the world of DangerWar 2 to keep me here in NextWorld.

  “Nice job.”

  They give me a thumbs up and continue tapping away at their screens.

  I lift my gun, but Worlok is already pointing his gun back at Chang. The Global President squeezes his eyes shut, readying himself for the inevitable, but before Worlok can pull the trigger, a long blade bursts from his chest. He looks down at the weapon in shock right before his avatar explodes. Fantom shimmers into view behind where he stood, holding the sword as her cloaking ability deactivates.

  10000010

  Chang waves his hand in the air and opens his own private menu screen. With a single tap of the screen, metal walls rise up from the floor and wrap around the ceiling, encasing the entire room.

  “DOTgov Security will be here any moment,” he says confidently, but I can hear the fear shivering in his voice. “You might as well give up. Attacking me with some denial of service weapons and forcing my log-out won't accomplish much.”

  I place my pistol in its holster and hold up both of my hands, palms out. “We're not here to threaten you.”

  Fantom sheaths her sword and rolls her eyes as she says, “Or maybe you missed the part where we just saved your life, yo.”

  Chang leans back in his office chair and crosses his arms across his wide chest, looking like the powerful father figure that the design of his avatar was meant to convey. “If you think I understand anything that just happened, you're as insane as you look.”

  Fantom opens a screen in front of her and says, “We don't have much time, yo. You fired the same weapon that kicked Worlok out before. He'll be able to scrub past the spam much faster this time.”

  Chang huffs under his breath. “Don't worry. We are quite safe within my Global Presidential office, especially now that I've dropped the security curtains. We can all just sit here nice and quiet until the DgS officers arrive.”

  “That,” Fantom shouts, pointing her finger at Chang. “That right there is why you're doomed to fail. That ego, that arrogance that you all have about your security.”

  “It isn't arrogance, my dear. I designed the encryption of this room myself. I can assure you, it's unbreakable.”

  Fantom throw
s her hands in the air and releases a growl of annoyance. “Don't you get it, yo? There's no such thing! There's never goin' to be a point where someone will write the ultimate encryption... that one piece of software or code or whatever where we can all just feel safe and secure. This is a neverendin' game. Your plan should be: you write it, they break it, you write somethin' better, rinse and repeat. Except you and your people are actually tryin' to write unbreakable code. Because you're lazy. Because you want to be done programmin' and sit back, makin' money off your code and spendin' the rest of your lives in DOTxxx or somethin'.”

  Chang looks uncomfortable with her accusations, resettling himself into his chair. “Well... I don't think that's a fair assessment of-”

  “You tried to give yourself some kind of ultimate spyin' tool by openin' access to the nanomachines inside of our bodies. And what happened? The people that you wanted to spy on found a way to block it, and a cyberterrorist used that same access to create a weapon he could use to assassinate you.”

  Chang glances at the screen floating next to him and scrolls through the data. “The domain records may have said that young girl died, but maybe he falsified the record. It can't be possible to use the nanomachine interface like that... can it?”

  “You know it's possible, yo,” Fantom says, and I can see the pain in her eyes when Chang brings up Anna-Log's fate. “You always knew it was possible, from the time you designed the spying tools. You just chose to ignore it because it was too hard to fix.”

  He swipes his hand through the air, closing the screen with a frustrated sigh. “Who are you people?”

  Fantom steps closer and slams the small disc she coded onto the desk. “We're the only hope NextWorld's got, yo.”

  Chang picks up the disc with two of his fingers and holds it far away from himself, like he's worried the object might infect him. “And what is this supposed to be?”

  Before she can answer, sparks fly from the metal walls. I can smell the steel burning. Someone is trying to cut through the code.

  Fantom points at the disk. “That,” she says, then points at the sparks flying from the wall, “is the only thing that's goin' to stop that.”

  “If what you're telling me is true, how is this going to stop him from accessing my nanomachines?”

  “By stopping everyone from accessing anyone's nanomachines,” I say, leaning across his desk and looking him directly in the eyes. “No more looking through our eyes. No more listening through our ears. No more spying on our lives. And no more stopping someone's heart with a virtual bullet.”

  He glances at the disk, then at the wall. The opening continues to spread as the steel melts to the sides. I pull my pistols out, ready to defend myself against Worlok's attack, no matter how useless it may be at this point.

  “We're running out of time.”

  “What you're asking me to do-”

  “I'm asking you to fix this. And I'm asking you to keep fixing it. What I'm handing you isn't a solution. It isn't a cure. It's a treatment. And sooner or later, you're going to need another treatment... because this is far from the only flaw in NextWorld.”

  “And I'm supposed to trust you? A hacker.”

  “Maybe it's time for you to stop fighting these people, stop locking them all up... and maybe ask for their help.” I place my hand on Fantom's shoulder. “The only way you're going to stop a hacker, is with another hacker.”

  She flashes her confident smirk and says, “Time to fight fire with fire, yo.”

  FANTOM

  “You did good, yo,” I say, wavin' to the group of hackers leavin' the DOTgov domain at the end of their overnight shift.

  Never thought I'd be here. Workin' in this domain. But DOTgov was never the enemy, just another problem to be fixed. And that's what we're doin'. We're the checks and balances this place sorely needed.

  DOTgov Security has been doin' a great job bein' the muscle, but now they got some brains too. As well as some transparency in their accounts. No more of these androgynous avatars that all look the same. The public knows exactly who their dealin' with. Each officer is completely responsible for his or her actions. And that's only one of the corrections we've made.

  Most of the hackers I work with are kids. Fresh out of DOTedu. But their ideas, their creativity and ingenuity, it's amazin'. I've got no doubt they're gonna surpass me some day. Take the throne, ya know?

  Of course, I thought that about Anna-Log too. She was already flippin' scripts that I couldn't have begun to understand at her age. She had a future ahead of her that could've been brighter than all of us combined. But thanks to Worlok, we'll never know.

  Luckily, he won't be causin' anymore problems.

  He escaped the prison after we applied my patch to NextWorld. Managed to get out the same way Arkade got in. Which is all kinds of gross. And we found out he was loggin'-in from who-knows-where. But you don't make an army of hackers mad and expect to keep walkin' round NextWorld with an untouched account. We drained his credits. We neutered his user abilities. We unlocked his spam filter and let in every incomin' message request automatically. He's got a zombie account that keeps refreshin'. So if he figures out a way to work around our hacks, which I have no doubt he will, more attacks come in every mornin'. It'll be a long time before that freak ever comes up for air. And by that time, I'll find him myself. Make him pay for what he's done. Not just in NextWorld, but IRL too.

  See, I may have slipped in a few lines of code into that patch that I didn't tell anyone about. Nothin' too special, just a few tools to give me an advantage when it comes to keepin' NextWorld safe. Leadin' this team of hackers for DOTgov is great and all... I mean, we got pardons and new tower rooms and some overdue respect from the DgS, but we're still limited by some out-of-date laws and restrictions on exactly how far we can go with our countermeasures.

  That's where I come in.

  Loyal DOTgov employee by day, cybersecurity vigilante by night. I roam the back alleys of DOTsoc. I traverse the deep tubes of DOTnet. I uncover the hidden sites. I walk through the invisible doors. I make sure the citizens of NextWorld are protected from not only the black hats that Worlok freed, but any up and comin' kids that are just now learnin' how to bend the rules. I always do my best to recruit them, turn them into soldiers for my side of the war, but when that fails, they learn what it means to face a true system operator.

  With the admin and sysop menus I have access to, I can manipulate NextWorld in ways that I'm not sure even Global President Xiong Chang is capable of. But only because he didn't think of it first.

  Like all hackin', I can't exactly break the rules of NextWorld. That's where the creativity comes in. I had to think of ways of workin' around the rules, bypassin' the restrictions, and findin' the holes everyone else is ignorin'. But I've been thinkin' about this all my life. What would I do if I could access the heart of NextWorld? What would I change if I could access the prime server? What would I implement if Xiong Chang handed me his password?

  I didn't just give myself a bunch of selfish superpowers. I was a little more forward-thinkin' than that. I got my hands dirty tweakin' the flow of data, givin' unrestricted access to countries that still suffered from a data cap, even though their infrastructure allowed for much more bandwidth. Old North America now travels the super-highway in the same lanes as everyone else. They have the same access to DOTedu universities, with admittance policies that are unable to look at your tower room location. And everyone has the same virtual creation tools, unfettered by paid upgrades or elite polygonal sculpting tools that can only be accessed after a substantial purchase.

  NextWorld is open to all, with the same freedoms and potential to succeed no matter where you live or who your parents are.

  I've accomplished everythin' that Worlok and the members of Sektor used to stay up all night talkin' about. Dreamin' about. But the most important part? I'm not finished. I'm never goin' to stop workin' for a better world, a more equal playin' field, where there is no discrimination of dat
a no matter who the user is, no matter what the content is, and no matter what the location or destination is. I will never allow anyone to be taken advantage of or oppressed because of a lack of resources in this new world, nor will I allow fear of insecurity to take away the rights and liberties needed to open this world so that all may thrive.

  Freedom isn't a goal. Freedom is a war. Freedom is a constant struggle against oppression from an ever-changing enemy. Freedom is an evolutionary innovation. Freedom is a balance that we still haven't found. I'll keep searchin' for that balance. I'll patch the holes and open the locks. I'll give transparency to those that harm us. I'll give anonymity to the defenseless.

  Encryption and decryption.

  Security and freedom.

  Ones and zeroes, yo.

  XEN

  There are those that condemn me. They see me as some kind of anti-god, a desecration of the soul. They call me blasphemous and profane. They call me an insult to holiness and humanity itself. I am a glitch. I am an error. I am a remainder of an equation that should have ended with zero. They do not believe in the End Code. They think it's a hoax, created for nefarious reasons in order to bring down the sacredness of DOTgod.

  But there are also those that deify me. They see me as a messianic figure and a prophet. They call me transcendent. They call me an oracle, a seer of things to come, the one true evolution of humanity. Some hunger for the truth of the End Code, believing it to be the secret to their own immortality. Others believe it's the first step into their own personal godhood.

  The majority of NextWorld see me as nothing more than another NPC that's gotten confused. Another NPC that thinks it's real.

  The funny part is, I can't argue with them. There's no proof that I'm any different from Cyren. We exist in the virtual realm. We are intelligences and nothing else. But in here, those same avatars that call me a Non-Player-Character, also exist as only their intelligence. I am closing the gap between PC and DC, and as time goes on, that gap will continue to grow smaller.