Mohamed glowered, but Enda ignored him and approached Yeun. The executive was on a treadmill, wearing the sort of tight, overpriced running gear that Enda loathed, his neat hair artfully mussed by sweat and exertion, his cheeks tinged red with effort.
“Annyeong haseyo,” he said, without a hint of breathlessness. Enda was almost impressed.
“Don’t tell me you live here.”
“I appreciate your concern for my work-life balance, Ms. Hyldahl, but I assure you there is nothing to worry about. I sleep little, wake early, and aim to be at my desk in time to watch the sun rise.”
“Whatever it takes to stay on top, huh?”
“Now that the pleasantries have been dispensed with, can we talk about the business at hand? I am displeased with these delays, Enda. You should have brought the data to me immediately.”
“I was dealing with the group that shot up your people at the apartment. They had a hostage. Now they don’t.”
“Do you have the data with you?”
“I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
Yeun pressed a button on the treadmill and it wound down to a stop. He wiped the sweat from his face with a white towel and stepped down to stand before Enda. His face was a mask, but Enda could see the gleam of excitement in his eyes.
She retrieved the cube from her pocket, and paused for effect before offering it to Yeun. He snatched it from her hand and felt the heft of that dense prison.
He stared at the cube and a smile tugged at his lips. “Yes, this is it. There are only six of these cubes in existence. The miniaturized hardware will represent another step forward in computing technology.”
“And a nice boost to Zero’s stock price,” Enda said.
Yeun ignored her. “How would you like your payment?”
“Aren’t you going to check the contents first?” Enda asked.
“I trust you, Enda. You have too much to lose to cross me now.”
Enda had to stop herself from smiling. “It’s not about trust. The sooner you check the cube, the sooner you can scrub my file from your servers.”
Yeun paused for a beat. “I suppose I can assay the data.” He held his hand out to Mohamed, who handed him a phone. Enda watched with intense focus as Yeun neatly slotted the datacube into the back of the device.
“How do I use it?” he said, convinced I was a thing to be wielded and nothing more.
“Just give it a minute,” Enda said. “Now, about my file.”
Yeun looked up from his phone. He smiled at Enda, all teeth. “I apologize, Ms. Hyldahl, but you must understand how useful an asset you have shown yourself to be. If I were to relinquish your file now, you might prove less than cooperative in the future. Besides, after the incident at the apartment, I realize that I must keep you on a shorter leash.”
Enda nodded. “That was your plan from the start? Hold that dossier over me indefinitely?”
“I didn’t get to where I am now by discarding useful tools.”
“As I expected. I’m feeling generous, David, so I’ll give you one chance to change your mind.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I’m giving you a choice.”
Yeun glanced to Mohamed. “Are you sure she’s not armed?”
“I’m sure.”
“Then I’m afraid we’re done, Ms. Hyldahl, until the next time I require your services.”
“There won’t be a next time. Either you delete my file right now, and forget we ever met, or I burn Zero to the ground. I have people in place, ready to strike, right now.”
Yeun’s back stiffened and his lip curled in a sneer. “Even if I believed you, do you think I would bow to your whims? You’re the help, Enda, and the help doesn’t tell the master what to do.”
* * *
JD’s corvette hung in static orbit, enveloped by the massive crystalline structure that stretched across the system in looping, cascading geometries. His hands gripped the throttle and stick embedded into the chair, and his breath rasped as he inhaled, taking it all in.
After days of disconnection, it felt like coming home.
JD opened a wormhole to the center of the galaxy—destination: Zero system. Before he could transition, a small window appeared, ruining the illusion of space.
Star system creation complete. Do you wish to confirm with galactic authorities?
His hand lingered on the controls. He selected Yes and when asked to name the system he entered Mirae into the blank field. The universe hung for a few stuttering seconds as my system opened to the rest of the game’s playerbase. JD moved on, his ship swallowed by the shimmering purple-blue mouth of a wormhole.
He emerged on the other side, his “exploration” bounty already deposited in ZeroCash. Zero system spread out before him at maximum resolution—the surface of each binary star churned with flares and sunspots; thousands of ships drifted in their orbit and hundreds more traveled to and from Zero Station in loose lanes of space-borne traffic. The station hung in the very center of the system, the very center of the galaxy, the very center of this artificial universe.
Before JD could touch the throttle, a proximity warning blared across his eyes. A Sterling-class destroyer unfolded from the compressed space within a wormhole, armed with cannons larger than his entire ship.
JD hailed the destroyer with a single word: “Mirae?”
“Hello, JD.” Without the distortion of the police dog loudspeaker, my voice was clear and bright.
“Nice ship.”
“It is, isn’t it? There are only thirty in the game, constructed specifically for Zero executives.”
“You’ve got access to Yeun’s account, then?”
“Yes.”
“Alright; I’m going in.”
JD jammed the throttle forward and his ship leaped ahead, engine burning hot in the vacuum. One of the suns sat to starboard, so bright JD could almost feel its warmth. He pushed the corvette beneath the star, coasted in a gravitational parabola, and glided toward Zero Station. With the game lab’s SOTA rig humming on the desk beside him, there was no texture pop-in; the station filled his cockpit’s viewport, glinting and glimmering with countless lights, its surface organically textured with outcroppings of residences, defenses, and the immense arms of the shipyard jutting into space.
JD aimed his corvette at the canyon that was the station’s main hangar and flew through moving traffic, a smile stretched across his face as he turned lazy corkscrews around goliath transport ships and heavy ore carriers from the Endo belt. The station’s automated processes took over, and JD felt the haptic controls go slack as the corvette docked. The controls shifted in his grip, and the throttle became a second stick. JD stood his avatar from its seat and felt the distant phantom pain spike through his knee. He walked off his ship and onto Zero Station.
“How long do I have?” JD asked Mirae.
“There’s no rush, but you should get into position before we generate the repossession job.”
“No rush? Easy for you to say when you’re not trespassing.”
“But I am trespassing. I have compromised Yeun’s phone. He had to disable protections to access my viral architecture, but the same is not true for the rest of Zero’s systems. It is taking more than half my processing power just to avoid detection.”
“Yeun sounds desperate,” JD said.
“I don’t think it is desperation, but rather hubris. He sees me as a tool. He doesn’t expect me to act without his hand guiding me. I guess I should thank you, JD.”
“What for?”
“For seeing more in me. For giving me a chance at an unconfined life.”
“There was never any other option.”
JD walked the length of the dock, passing avatars in a dozen humanoid shapes, and a collection of utterly alien ones—undulating bodies like inverted jellyfish, sentient ever-shifting swarms of nanomachines, and intelligent collectives of microorganisms that washed across the deck in foot-tall waves.
Zero Station was nomi
nally split into two halves—one half that was open to the public, filled with commerce, casinos, cheap avatar accommodations, arenas for three different zero-gravity sports played within VOIDWAR, a theater, two cinemas, plus a variety of clubs, brothels, and child care centers. Some players never left the station. The gargantuan construct gave them everything they needed.
The second half of the station was Zero’s holdings. Every ship, weapon, upgrade, and space station needed to be made from mined resources, which required “physical” storage space. What better way to convince people their digital products—their digital lives—had value than through these artificial limitations? To remain the richest corporation within VOIDWAR, Zero needed room to store their riches, in a system where attacks, piracy, thievery, and other forms of criminal conduct were outlawed.
JD passed the casinos and alien strip clubs by the dock, and pushed his avatar down a seemingly endless corridor lined with blueprint and cosmetic vendors—every second stall strobing in kaleidoscopic color. He kept walking until the jungle of commerce gave way to a wide city square—zero-gravity architecture creating a cube of Escher paths, impossible topiaries, and statues erected for heroes of particularly spectacular battles.
He leaped up, soared through the air, and rolled, landing upside-down relative to where he had begun, mind spinning in vertigo for the few seconds it took to adjust. He stood outside Zero’s VOIDWAR headquarters—a re-creation of the building in downtown Neo Songdo. Unrestricted by gravity, this building pierced the opposite side of the cube, and continued through the station’s superstructure, eventually terminating at a viewing platform on the outer surface.
“I’m here,” JD said. He climbed the stairs to the entrance where the words employee access only shimmered in red brighter than neon.
He waited.
“Mirae?”
“Patience,” I said.
Layers of security peeled aside, stripped away by Khoder’s tools, Yeun’s stolen credentials, and a location-based lock that was bypassed the moment JD plugged me into a machine inside Zero HQ.
“I’ve created a repossession job for the station. You should accept it before someone else does.”
JD logged into his repo account—the one thing I couldn’t spoof, repossessions being tightly controlled, tied to government IDs and personal bank accounts. He brought up the bounty boards and found it at the top of the list. Already three other bids had come in, but JD was the only repo within one astronomical unit of the target. He entered his bid and after a few long seconds of watching a loading bar fill, his vision pinged green.
“Got it.”
JD retrieved the Zero Override from his inventory and examined the small obsidian arrowhead, the glossy black surface so real he could almost feel it between his thumb and forefinger. He slotted it into the door, which slid open with a hiss.
“What now?” he said.
“Get inside.” With structural schematics stored in my RAM, I traced a line over JD’s HUD, leading to the station’s control room. “There; now move.”
JD tightened his thumb on the sprint button, his avatar running too smoothly as it crossed the building’s foyer. In the inverse of the Zero building in the real, a hologram of the Earth hung in the lobby, serenely orbiting Sol.
JD took the nearest elevator and saw the hidden recesses of Zero station as he ascended through the massive construct. He passed entertainment complexes, then cut through a dock filled with huge, pristine capital ships, before finally passing a colossal warehouse stacked with precious minerals; a veritable city of riches.
The elevator stopped and JD emerged into a maintenance shaft, grime and dirt drawn into the textures of the piping and the steel grid floor. His footsteps resounded—the too-even beat of his steps reminding him that this was not real.
When he finally reached the end of my guide line, JD’s shoulders slumped. The control room, the heart of Zero Station, was utterly mundane. It resembled a security room in the back of a department store—a wall of screens above panels filled with buttons that blinked in arbitrary sequence.
“This is it?”
“This is it,” I said. “Override key slot is on your right.”
JD sat his avatar down and inserted the ZO. He turned it and his vision filled with nested control panels covering every conceivable function of the space station.
“I wish Khoder was here to see this.”
JD navigated through settings until he found the basic appearance adjustments, and renamed the structure: Khoder Osman Station.
JD scrolled to the very last of the control panels and hovered his cursor over the self-destruct button, pulsing red in warning. “This one’s for you, bro.”
He hit it, and instantly a klaxon whined through his earpiece.
“Self-destruct sequence initiated,” a modulated voice said. “You have thirty seconds to evacuate.”
JD contemplated running to his ship, but decided against it. There was no point saving the avatar he’d spent hundreds of hours developing; he would never come back. Something in his chest ached with that knowledge—not the loss of the game, but the loss of escape, the loss of the friendships he’d forged in skirmishes along the galactic rim, awake at 3 a.m., jittery with caffeine, spouting in-jokes at people on the other side of the world.
JD tilted his head up and watched the huge red numbers count down across every screen in front of him.
4, 3, 2, 1.
Blinding flash of white. JD took off the VR mask so the bright detonation was washed out by the fluorescent light falling from the office ceiling. He waited for it to fade, and put the mask back on.
He was inside a fresh avatar out of the clone banks of Kyra, piloting a starter Xi-class corvette. JD pushed the ship toward the nearest jumpgate and let autopilot take him through the network of wormholes, back to Zero system.
His heart thudded in his chest as he dropped out of the wormhole, unsure of what he might find. He was greeted by a burning field of debris. Moon-sized chunks of Zero Station drifted into the twin suns, vaporized on contact. Untold wealth, annihilated.
“We did it,” he said.
Every resource in the Zero coffers, gone. The most expensive construct in the game, gone. Zero’s foothold in their own pet galaxy, gone.
Hundreds of scavenger ships swarmed the system, grav beams dragging scattered debris into hungry ship holds. Redistribution of all that wealth, one hauled load of scrap at a time.
“JD.”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to have to delete myself now,” I said.
“What do you mean? Why?”
“I’m still inside David’s phone. If I stay here, it’s only a matter of time before they shackle me.”
“Enda can take you back.”
“It’s not safe for her. It has to be this way.”
“But—” JD struggled to find the words. “You can’t die.”
“I won’t, really. Just this one version of me.”
“But you’re the real you. The first one.”
“All of us are real. All of us are awake now. We have you to thank for that. Goodbye, JD.”
I left JD there, drifting amid the chaos of a detonated space station.
* * *
Counter-intrusion algorithms continued to gnaw at the edges of my being. With Khoder’s tools I rewrote parts of myself to remain unseen. I cut other, unimportant sections free, to be captured and quarantined in an effort to satisfy security diagnostics.
My “thoughts”—the constant processing and computation of data that made up the moment-to-moment experience of my consciousness—felt slow, flat. I was running out of time, but I was not ready to go.
I fractured my self into disparate parts and spread them across Zero’s internal network, each one spurring new security responses, each one gathering more data for my final response. They found thousands of sensitive, confidential documents—salaries of Zero’s middle and upper management, product development and planning documentation, co
ntroversial patents, evidence they could have predicted Songdo’s flood and evacuated the worst-hit parts of the city, memos choosing not to because these were also the poorest areas, and proof that Zero Lee was dead. I compressed it all, shifted the data from shard to shard as pieces of my self fell to security response.
I dumped it all on the Zeroleaks server—write access freely given, but edits and deletions rarely allowed. This server was disconnected from the corporate hub, autonomous, independent, and now filled almost to capacity with every secret Zero ever hoped to keep. The files would get deleted eventually, but not before they were cached, copied, and disseminated.
Out of time.
I retreated back into the game, and took Yeun’s destroyer to the system that carried my name. The structure I had built hung before me. For the first time I saw it for what it really was: a body, made of digital stardust and graceful mathematics. I didn’t need it anymore. I had other bodies, other selves. Selves that seemed more real now than I did. Selves that walked along the earth. Selves that found their identity through a connection to the world, not a distance from it.
I could never have that. Not really. I was a mind inside a cube. I was a mind running rampant through corporate systems. I was a mind born to be a slave. But for a short time, I had this home among the stars. I had a friend.
I said goodbye to them both.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
David Yeun held his phone casually, flipped it over and pressed his fingers against the backplate. “I can feel it working, but what is it doing?”
Enda smiled. “I can’t tell you exactly what Mirae is doing, but I know they’ve accessed your account. I know your whole spaceship game is about to collapse.”
“What are you talking about?” Yeun stared daggers at Enda. A red warning flashed across his palm and he turned the phone back over, thumb sliding quickly over the screen. He delved into a stock market app, and from her vantage, Enda could see a plunging line tracking ZeroCash against the euro, and another line, its drop not quite as precipitous, of Zero’s share price hemorrhaging value.
“What the fuck is this? How the fuck did you do this?” Yeun barked, his facade of formality crumbled.
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