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Author: Jaron Lee Knuth
Date: 2015-08-02 04:00:00+00:00
Description: Arkade's quest to protect the woman he loves has only succeeded in dooming his friends. In the exciting conclusion to Jaron Lee Knuth's NextWorld Series, Arkade will have to break every rule in the system and unite an army of hackers, gamers, and even NPCs, in order to save his friends... and perhaps all of NextWorld.

Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Jaron Lee Knuth
Copyright
Acknowledgments
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About the Author

END CODE

The NextWorld Series

Book Three

by Jaron Lee Knuth

Also by Jaron Lee Knuth

After Life

Fixing Sam

Demigod

The Infinite Life of Emily Crane

Nottingham

The NextWorld Series

Level Zero

Spawn Point

End Code

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © by Jaron Lee Knuth

First Edition 2015

Smashwords Edition

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons

Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike

3.0 Unported License

Acknowledgments

This story would not have been possible without the support and encouragement from so many people in my life. My partner, Nicole, my friends, my parents, and my family have all shown a great amount of understanding during the struggles, and shared in my joy during the celebrations. My editors and beta readers have given me praise and criticism at exactly the right times, only serving to make The NextWorld Series better. To everyone who has been a part of my life during this time of creation, I thank you for making all of this possible.

Jaron Lee Knuth

“The human mind will not be confined
to any limits.”

- Johann von Goethe

01010111

We should be attacking. All I want is to pull out a weapon and lash out at our enemies, but Cyren has assured me that I need to wait for the right moment, the right approach. I tap my foot, I fidget with my menu screens, and I recheck my inventory. Anything to try to ignore my own anxiety. I study the digital pet store across the street again, examining every detail, looking for any flaws. I try to lose myself in my work, but the same things run through my head every time we do this.

What if it doesn't work?

What if we don't make it in time?

What if we can't find our friends?

The digital pet store doesn't look like much. Faded pink exterior, yellow trim. Three-dimensional sign. Screens showing their selection of products. Miniature dragons, enlarged tigers, winged fish. Most pass it by. The products look sub-par and the prices are too high. The average citizen just sees another flawed business in DOTcom.

But we see something else.

In every domain there is a data-bank, a repository of records that collects everything that has occurred inside NextWorld. Every piece of intelligence is processed for either storage within InfoLock or deletion inside the Trash Bin. Trillions and trillions of documents, from search queries to video-cast recordings to time/date stamps on user site visits, every action that takes place is carefully documented. The data-bank moves from place to place every day, hiding behind a false exterior, but today we know exactly where it is.

“We're waiting for them to start the processing,” Cyren says from inside my mind. “Security will be lowered and we can-”

“Break-in and steal everything.”

Stealing private records in order to learn the truth. DOTgov calls it data-mining. It's why these data-banks were invented. When someone from the public does the same thing, it's called cyberterrorism.

“I can sense your pessimism.” She's telling me what I know, what I feel to be true, but she also knows that I'll only argue the validity of the statement.

“It's not pessimism. It's realism.”

“You don't think we're going to find anything.”

“There's nothing that separates this data-bank from the countless others we've infiltrated that would lead me to believe otherwise.”

“Yet you keep trying.”

“Of course I do.”

Cyren knows what I'm thinking. She knows what I'm feeling. There's never any need for her to have these conversations with me. She's never going to learn anything from my words that my thoughts and emotions haven't already told her. But she does it for me, to make things a little more normal. She's helping me. They all are. The thousands of artificial intelligences stored within the nanomachines inside my body.

They help me with everything. They help me to process information at a rate my own mind could never comprehend. Angles, trajectories, equations. And when I sleep, I leave screens open for them to continue to learn. Everything from politics to programming to the things that only exist in the darker corners of NextWorld. How to hack. How to crack. How to sneak. How to phreak.

But they also teach me about being human. How to interact with a society I've been hiding from my whole life. Social idiosyncrasies, verbal cues, emotional contradictions. The voices in my head are making me a better person.

“Grael is losing hope.”

“He'll be fine.”

“He's spending more time in DOTfun every week.”

“He works hard. He needs to decompress.”

“It's more than that. The drive, the passion he once showed, it's drifting away.”

Grael might not be a hacker, but he knows code. And his ability as a programmer is only surpassed by his dedication to the cause. But it's been eight months. Eight months of searching through catalogs of domain maps, looking for any trace of information that will lead us to a data-bank that might store a clue as to how to free our friends from the mind prison they were locked up in after they were arrested. Passwords. Locations. Anything. But so far? We've found nothing.

“Can you blame him for losing a little hope? Every time we do this we come up empty-handed. We beat the security, we beat the clock, we get the data, but we still find nothing.”

“It hasn't been a total loss. We didn't find anything about the mind prison, but we did find classified DOTgov documents.”

“Grael still considers that a failure. Eight months of failure.”

“But you don't believe that.”

“No,” I say throwing my hands out to the side, unfurling my long trench coat, letting it blow in the domain's wind effect. “It's been eight months of training.”

It happens the same way in every domain. First, the last unmarked data-carrier leaves the building with the trash files, any data marked as unnecessary for storage. Then, the data entry clerks exit in their corporate vehicles, headed toward whatever domain they use to unwind after a work day. When the last of them has left, a sleek, silver, anonymously androgynous DOTgov Security officer glances down the street, once to the left, then to the right, then to the left again. Satisfied by this safety protocol, the DgS officer closes the doors and throws the switch to lock the “business site” down for the night, which initiates the unsecured processing of all the data they've collected into the appropriate storage folder.

This gives us five minutes before the processing ends. Five minutes before all the data is transferred to a more secure vault inside InfoLock. Five minutes when all the information that was collected is opened, sorted, and most importantly: under the lowest level of security.

When I step out into the street, I'm accosted by pop-up screens warning me of the danger to my avatar. Vehicles speed around me, missing me by fractions of a second. The NPCs inside me guide me through the traffic, calculating the bandwidth speed of each user and finding a safe pathway across the middle of the roadway. I swipe my hand in front of my face as I jog, casting away each flashing red screen that continues to appear. They only stop when I safely plant both of my cowboy boots onto the sidewalk in front of the digital pet store.

“We need to work on a pop-up blocker.”

“I'll add it to the list.”

My mental image of Cyren appears next to me, her bodysuit of leather straps tightened around her with shiny silver buckles. Her blond hair is spiked into points so sharp her avatar could be mistaken for a weapon. But only I can see her, of course. It's a simple trick for her and the other NPCs inside my nanomachines to make me see and hear and taste and smell and touch whatever they want.

Cyren knows her visual presence calms me. She tilts her head to the side in that certain way that she knows I find uncontrollably adorable. Her black lips pull back into a smile, the edges of her mouth sharpening into points that are both devious and innocent.

“I can sense your trepidation. There's no reason to worry.”

“I'm not worried,” I say as I rush through different menu screens, adjusting variables. “I'm just...”

She keeps smiling, letting me come to my own realization that hiding anything from her is useless.

“They know what we're doing. They know what we're looking for. They've been beefing up their security every time we hack into one these data-banks.”

“But we always stay one step ahead of them.”

“What happens when they take two steps instead of one?”

One edge of her smile lifts higher than the other, turning it into more of a smirk as she says, “This is DOTgov we're talking about, remember? I'm surprised they can take a step at all.”

She's right again. After digging deeper and deeper into the flaws and holes of NextWorld, the complete impotency of DOTgov has been revealed to me over and over again. I've come to realize that the only thing holding this virtual world above the surface of complete anarchy is the ignorance of the users who travel between domains, oblivious to the frailty of it all.

“It doesn't matter how inept the player is, anyone can make a lucky shot.”

“We'll just have to keep your head down then.”

I nod, letting her know I believe in her. I believe in them all. Thousands of eyes watching my back. Helping me. Guiding me. Protecting me.

I touch the wall of the pet store with my left hand and open a final screen with my right. A menu drops down and I select the third option on the list. It's labeled with three exclamation marks. The image of the pet store shimmers in front of me, then shatters, sprinkling pixels into the air in every direction, raining faded pink cubes across the highway. Underneath the false exterior stands the dull gray block we're looking for.

Smaller screens flutter out from the top of my menu, surrounding me in a shielded tube of analytical data, real-time charts, and streaming information. The NPCs in my nanomachines get to work immediately, inspecting the screens all around me, scrutinizing and interpreting each one, looking for any hole in the data-bank's security that I can exploit.

It takes them 2.73 seconds.

I select the odd code, stretching my fingers to enlarge it in front of me. I reach inside my trench coat and produce a small cube, a rough graphical representation of a crack program I wrote this morning. With a gentle shove, the cube dissolves into the data-bank's code and a door flings open on the side of the gray wall.

“See?” Cyren says in my mind, her avatar disappearing from view. “No problem.”

My jaw clenches a bit as I say, “We're not done yet.”

When I step through the front door, the security scanner that would normally read my account information and log my entry dangles from the ceiling, lifeless. I step past and activate my “glass skin” program. It's a fairly simple clothing hack, once you work around the domain limitations. It basically draws onto my avatar's surface whatever graphics appear on the opposite side of me, rendering me transparent.

The guard sitting behind the security desk doesn't notice me approach. The silver avatar is watching a video-cast, ignoring the fact that the screen on their desk is telling them the front door is open. From my inventory I select a single program, which summons a double-headed battleaxe into my right hand. The front blade is wickedly curved, with a serrated edge on the back side that looks like the teeth of a nightmarish monster. Just like I designed it.

The guard is laughing at a joke on the video-cast when I swing the front blade deep into the skull of their avatar. The weapon instantly logs the guard out of NextWorld and sends the account a denial of service attack, bogging down the E-Womb with a loop of incoming connection requests. Text-casts of nonsensical words, audio-casts of high-pitched squealing, and video-casts of fractal exploration. The guard won't be able to log-in for days.

I twirl the melee weapon in my hand and it disappears back into my inventory screen.

“One guard down,” I say, stepping up to the security desk to access the on-site video-cast of the data-bank.

“Two to go,” Cyren says as she points to the screen showing a two DgS officers patrolling the halls. “And we've still got three minutes, twenty-four seconds. Plenty of time for-”

Her sentence is cut off by a blaring alarm echoing inside of the data-bank.

01011000

A metal security wall slams down from the ceiling, blocking the entrance. Pop-up screens appear in front of me, warning me of the intrusion and assuring me that DgS has been alerted and are on their way. It's meant to be comforting to any civilians that may be caught in this dramatic turn of events, reassuring everyone that DOTgov has everything under control. Thankfully, I know better.

I rush deeper into the data-bank, letting the thousands of NPCs inside of me calculate the most probable direction to the source of the database. I take multiple turns down slim corridors, grabbing onto each corner to spin around them faster.

When I hug a tight left turn, I find myself face-to-face with two identical DgS officers. Startled by the sudden meeting, we're unable to stop our forward momentum. I barely manage to lift a knee, slamming it into one of the officer's chest and punching the other squarely in the nose before either of them are able to lift a hand to touch me. It's all they'd need to end my robbery. A single touch to fully access my true account.

Both officers fall backward, slamming into the steel floor and sliding away from me. I gain my footing, summon my battleaxe in my right hand, and activate a firewall program in my left. It appears like a dented, medieval shield.

The officers leap to their feet with surprising agility and lunge for me. I bring up my shield in time to block their outstretched, glowing red hands that are trying to connect to my account. I knock both their avatars to the side. With a spin, I swing my weapon at the officers, but they roll under it in unison and end their movement crouched against the wall. I stand in a ready position, shield raised in front of me, my eyes barely peering over the top edge.

The officer on the left pauses and says, “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.”

It's an automated response. They may not be able to access my name, but they know exactly who I am. It's all over the news-casts. They call me a super user. Someone with abilities beyond those of any Player-Character. They speculate all kinds of things, like cheat codes or system operator access, but they have no idea the truth. Who would suspect that self aware NPCs living in my nanomachines are giving me access to their combined processing power?

When the officers see me grip onto my battleaxe even tighter, they lunge at me again. This time they go low, trying to duck under my shield and grab for a leg. Thousands of NPCs see the trajectory before I'm aware the guards are moving, but I've learned to give in to the voices. Like relaxing into the subconscious use of muscle memory, the NPCs direct my left arm down and the officers' hands crumple against my shield. The prone positions that the guards end up on the floor provide me with an easy, single swing of my battleaxe to log them both out of NextWorld.

“You need to keep moving.”

I have a little over a minute before the deletion starts, but based on the average bandwidth usage in this domain at this time, the NPCs are calculating I have less than forty-five seconds before the DgS arrive and shut all of this down.

I place my firewall program and denial of service battleaxe back into my inventory as I bolt down the corridor, toward the center room in the data-bank. I touch the massive steel door with my hand and let the NPCs go to work. Before I've gripped onto the combination wheel, they've already worked out the numbers. With a few spins back and forth, I hear a comforting chime. The door swings open, revealing a large, empty room with a tiny screen against the far wall.

“That's it. Grab it and go.”

I reel back one hand and activate my copy-protection crack. The software encompasses my hand in a glowing gauntlet of light and I thrust it into the screen. The scrolling, encrypted data wobbles like a puddle of water, accepting my hand inside. The letters and numbers flow outward, swirling around the gauntlet. The program places the files into my inventory where they're easily accessible by the NPCs. When the last byte of information is sucked clean from the screen, I run.

“If you force your own log-out like you did in the Trash Bin-”

“They can track the denial of service hack.”

“We can't let them follow that to your account signal. They'd know what E-womb you're using.”

“There's no time to bounce the signal. I'm going to need to leave the domain.”

“When DgS arrives, they'll open the front door.”

“That means fighting my way out.”

“You up for it?”

I smile and say, “Like you need to ask.”

As soon as I return to the entrance of the data-bank, the steel wall that covers the front door is lifting. I see the red and blue flashing lights behind the silhouettes of twenty-seven DOTgov Security officers.

I'm offended they sent so few.

I don't wait for them to attack. The shield and battleaxe appear in my hands as my right foot digs into the floor and I push off, throwing myself at them. There's too much ground to cover in one leap, so I throw my ax at the closest one and activate my “glass skin.” The ax twirls through the air and sinks into an officer's chest. The officer disappears and the weapon falls to the floor. The DgS sensors start to cut through the hack, decoding the algorithm that's allowing my invisibility. I only have half a second, but that's enough for me to reach the battleaxe and swing it at two more officers.

As the third officer is logged-out by my blade, their decoding software cuts through my “glass skin” program and I reappear in the middle of the confused group. They lunge at me, like a bear trap snapping shut, but the NPCs spin me like a top, directing my shield and battleaxe perfectly. The officers' hands are either knocked away or sliced off completely. Seven more officers disappear.

The NPCs alert me to a hole in the grouping and I roll toward it, bursting through their surrounded positioning and out the front door. A few avatars are gathered on the sidewalk, watching the commotion of the DgS, but more stop to gawk when I appear in the street holding medieval weaponry.

I have an instinctual need to leap into the air and do so without hesitation. The NPCs save me from collision with a sleek, white car that zooms underneath me. When my cowboy boots clop against the pavement, I waste no time in running to the opposite side of the street, dodging vehicles and eventually diving into the crowd of onlookers. A few officers try to follow on foot and two of them are struck by data-carriers, enormous trucks full of information being moved to a different storage space. Their bandwidth lines cross and both the officers and the trucks are stalled by the lag.

One officer follows me on foot while the rest open their menu screens, selecting their transportation options. I'm able to keep my distance from the officer following on foot, but soon I hear the popping sounds of the other officers teleporting directly behind me as I run. I'm only keeping ahead of their positioning software by a few milliseconds. I glance over my shoulder and see a mob of them chasing me, their glowing red hands reaching out, their fingers wiggling a few inches away from my avatar.

“You need to-” Cyren starts, but I already know what she's going to say.

I swipe my hand in the air, making the simple gesture with my fingers to open my secret menu. A list of programs scroll down in front of me. I slam the palm of my hand into the one labeled: MIN/MAX. A nickel-plated dial appears in front of me and I spin it to the left.

My avatar disappears.

The officers stumble into themselves as they stop their pursuit. They all open their menu screens, activating their location-decryption software, but it returns a negative response. According to their software, I'm right there, standing in front of them. There's no invisibility hack, or shadow cloak, or mirror bounce. I'm right there.

And it's correct. I'm standing inches away from them. Only now my avatar is just over one millimeter tall. It's a stupidly basic hack, breaking through NextWorld's restrictions on the minimum and maximum avatar height. Simple... and maybe a little genius.

My tiny avatar dodges between their enormous boots and I hop off the edge of the curb. I select a piggyback hook from my inventory and attach it to the next vehicle that passes, hopping from car to car, account to account, in an attempt to throw off their already directionless pursuit. After a few minutes of causing a little more bewilderment, I'm on my way out of the domain.

Once I'm out, I detach from the vehicle alongside the thousand-lane super-highway that connects all of NextWorld. I spin the nickel-plated dial that represents the MIN/MAX hack back to the center and my avatar grows to its original size.

When Cyren's image appears next to me, she doesn't need to speak to tell me the results of the decryption. I can read it on her face.

“They didn't find anything.”

“Just your run-of-the-mill domain information. A few DOTgov fund-shifting records.”

I glance up at the sky, at the reflective sphere of the DOTgov domain. The single blinking red light on the exterior looks back at me.

“We should let Grael know.”

Cyren flashes me a weak smile before disappearing. She knows this will do nothing to embolden Grael. But it's not Grael I'm worried about.

Xen.

Raev.

Fantom.

Even Worlok.

I need to save my friends.

I select my own vehicle from my inventory: the same huge tire with extra knobby tread and a control seat where the axle should be. It's what I've always used, but I've had some time to make a few modifications.

The image grows from my inventory screen and appears full size, parked next to the curb. I climb inside the seat and grip onto the controls with both of my hands. I stomp one of my spurred boots onto the acceleration pedal and the wheel grinds into the pavement. With a jerk of the controls, I slice into the nearest lane. Once I reach fifty exabytes, I flip a switch above my head. The tire tilts to the side while my seat remains perfectly balanced. When the tire is spinning horizontally, I pull back on the controls and lift off the pavement. Rocketing into the sky, I choose to ignore the roadways and use the shortest path toward DOTfun.

01011001

I track down Grael's account inside a game called Iron-Strike. It's a newer game, one I haven't had a chance to play yet, but gaming is as intuitive as breathing for me. I slip through character creation menus quickly, and before I know it, I'm sitting in the cockpit of a giant robot built for combat.

Extensive arms made of beams and gears and wires and tubes jut out from either side of the spherical body that houses my avatar and my controls. Two claw-like feet are digging into the sand of the desert floor below me. I scan the displays and take hold of the two joysticks extending from the console. As I move them, the arms of the robot move. My feet buckle into two pedals on the floor, and when I lift my right foot, the robot's right foot lifts from the sand. Pressing it back down makes the robot step forward.

I yank both joysticks to the right and the spherical body spins, allowing me to take in the view that surrounds me. It's your typical post-apocalyptic vision, complete with irradiated wasteland, ruins of a long-forgotten war jutting out from the blowing dunes, and the remnants of a bombed out city on the horizon.

I open a menu on the console and see a tab with the words “friend list” displayed. I select it and type in Grael's name. It takes a few seconds, but he accepts the friend request and an arrow appears on my heads-up-display, directing me to him. It points toward the city, where I see the flashes of an explosive battle. I lift my feet in repetition, and with immense strides I cross the desert floor.

Cyren appears in the cockpit next to me, sitting sidesaddle on the armrest of the command chair. She places her hand on my shoulder and peers out through the windshield of the cockpit.

“This is a waste of time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Grael. Playing these games.”

“He's unwinding.”

“He should be working, looking for more data-banks, writing more decryption keys.”

“His work would suffer if he didn't have some downtime, some time to decompress.”

She peers down at the floor and says, “It's not like I don't understand wanting to play. I just want to be able to relax when I do it, without the worry of what's happening to our friends hanging over me. I'd give anything to get lost in another world with you.”

“At least we're together.”

She looks away from me. “It isn't the same. For all intents and purposes, I'm here for you. You can see me and feel me and hear me, but...”

“The same isn't true for you.”

She takes a deep breath, collecting herself. “There's a feedback loop. I can sense myself through your nanomachines. I can feel what you feel. And that's... something.”

“But it's not the same. Not like the real thing.”

“I hate to use the word 'real,' but yes. It's like a copy of a copy, degraded in some intangible way that I can't quite describe.”

“But it's still there.”

“A metaphorical thorn in my side.”

I stop the robot's progress and reach out to her, giving the leather-strapped hand resting on her knee a gentle squeeze. “That's why we're doing what we're doing.”

“Thorns?”

I smile, knowing she's perfectly aware of what I meant. “Thorn removal, actually. We're going to get you and the rest of the NPCs out of my head so that you can all experience NextWorld like it should be.”

Her face scrunches up. “Wait. I'm confused. Are we the thorns in your metaphor?”

I let her hand drop back onto her lap and slap her arm playfully. “You know exactly what I'm trying to say.”

She kisses the top of my head and says, “Always.”

I grip both joysticks again and lift my feet in sequence, bounding across the wasteland toward the city of ruined buildings.

As we cross over a barbed wire fence that surrounds an old trench, the desert in front of me bursts into the air, covering the glass of my cockpit with a wave of sand. The NPCs in my head are screaming commands at my limbs, but I'm already thrusting both arms forward and squeezing the triggers. The Gatling guns mounted on both arms spin, streaming tracer rounds into the granules of earth that create the cloud in front of me. I hear metal strike metal and lift my feet in sequence, back-stepping as my fear is realized.

When the sand dissipates a bit, I see another manned robot standing a few yards in front of me, one arm raised to block my onslaught of bullets with a crackling energy shield. The mechanical body has a thinner frame, with longer limbs and shinier armor, obviously built for more agile movement than my own robot.

Gripping the triggers tightly, I move the joysticks in a figure eight, trying to sneak a few rounds past the enemy's shield, but it's able to adjust the angle of deflection and not a single bullet lands against the robot's hull. Its other arm lashes out to the side and a glowing energy blade sizzles into shape. The weapon is nearly as long as the robot itself.

The enemy robot crouches down, still deflecting every round I fire at it, then leaps into the air. I try to raise my arms, but my machinery doesn't want to move that fast. The robot stays well above the trail of bullets I'm chasing it with, leaping high above me, then dropping straight down at me.

Its feet crash into me first, then it plunges the energy blade straight through the cockpit. My control panel is split in two, and the point of the weapon is sticking right into Cyren's image. If she wasn't a figment of my nanomachine's imagery, she'd be dead.

My own robot smashes into the desert floor, lying on its back. The robot on top of me yanks the energy blade free, and raises it back up for another, final strike.

My thumbs press down on the alternate fire buttons atop the joysticks and the launchers mounted on both of my robot's shoulders let loose a cluster of rocket-propelled death. Small but effective explosions cover the enemy robot, knocking it from my frame.

I scramble my foot pedals, trying to get my clawed, mechanical feet under my robot's body. At the same time, I'm shoving both joysticks forward, aiming my Gatling guns at the damaged enemy. I manage to crawl to my feet, my cockpit hanging open, spraying sparks and oil from the tear in the hull, but the other robot is moving faster.

Tiny jets on the side of the machine shove the robot to the left so that it's strafing around me. This thing has obviously been upgraded from many previous battles, which means the player inside has won many previous battles, which means I'm fighting someone far more experienced than I am at this game.

I jerk both joysticks, trying to spin my robot's body toward the path of the enemy, but it gets around behind me and lunges at me again. This time one of my robot's legs goes spinning through the air right before I tumble to the side.

The NPCs want me to hack the game. To cheat. But there's no way that's going to happen. Out in NextWorld? When my friends' lives are on the line? Sure. But in here? It's disgraceful to the art form I love so much.

The enemy raises its sword again. I close my eyes, waiting for the loss, before I realize I'd like to see the death animation in this game so I can compare it to the hundreds of other games I've died in.

I see the gears in the enemy's shoulder begin to spin, powering up for the finishing move, when an explosion on its back throws the skinny robot through the air. It tumbles across the desert floor, rolling down a nearby sand dune before coming to a stop. It lays there a moment before trying to lift itself off the ground. I see a missile, much bigger than anything I'm armed with, stream across the sky overhead and smash into the enemy robot again. Metal pieces go flying in every direction, leaving a gnarled, smoldering hunk of iron laying in the sand.

I peer out of my cockpit, looking in the direction the missile came from, and I see another robot driving over the crest of the nearest dune. Instead of legs, it travels on triangle-shaped tank tread, but its body still retains a somewhat humanoid shape. Four limbs jut from either side, covered in armaments. I flinch, knowing this enemy will probably end my life with one hit, but as it drives toward me, I realize my friend list arrow hovering directly above it.

01011010

The other robot's tank tread stops next to my broken robot and the cockpit pops open. A man with red dreadlocks tied in a ponytail, and a gas mask covering his face, peers over the edge and waves a tattooed arm at me.

I cough out the smoke now pouring from my cockpit and manage to say, “Hi, Grael.”

“What are you doing in here, kid?”

I unhook my boots from the floor pedals and struggle out of my seat. “Losing, apparently.”

“You could have sent me an audio-cast, told me you were looking for me.”

“But then I wouldn't have been able to walk a few feet inside of a giant robot before getting stabbed with an energy sword.”

“Fun game, isn't it?”

“It's okay.”

“So? What happened? What did you find?”

I look down at my own feet and shake my head.

He lets out a sigh. “Nothing? At all?”

“Just basic domain information. A few DOTgov secrets. Nothing juicy, and nothing related to the mind prison.”

Grael leans back in his control chair and puts his boots up on the console in front of him. “Well, transfer it to my account. We can sell it on the undermarket and make some credits to keep this ship afloat.”

I crawl out of my robot's cockpit and stand in the glaring sun. It reminds me of the Deathsand Desert in DangerWar 2, only more stylized. Less hyper-real. Less gritty. With a few hops, I make my way up the side of Grael's robot and lean into the cockpit.

Grael lifts the gas mask off his face and leans in, peering into my eyes like a doctor examining the reaction time of my pupils.

“How are the NPCs?” he asks.

I tap my head. “Still in here.”

“But are they comfortable? Are they happy?”

I shrug. “As happy as they can be. But I have a feeling they'd be a lot happier if we could free them.”

“Right,” he says, leaning back in the chair with a defeated breath outward. “But without Fantom, there's no way to decrypt the scissor program so we can cut and paste them from your nanomachines. She's the only one that can let them out.”

“We'll find her. We'll find her and we'll free her. We'll free all of them.”

“Yeah,” he mumbles.

I push past his lackluster response, trying to push him with me. “You keep finding me the data-banks and I'll keep breaking them wide open. If the mind prison exists in NextWorld, there has to be data somewhere that will provide us with a password. And that data has to be in a data-bank.”

Grael pulls out a canteen, taking a long pull from it before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I'm sick of data-banks.”

His response worries me, but I deflect it. “I'm sure the data-banks are just as sick of you. But that doesn't mean we should stop digging through their databases. It's the only lead we have.”

He points at me with a sudden excitement. “Exactly! That's exactly what I was thinking. So I asked myself: Who might have a different lead? A better lead.”

He sits back, smiling and waiting for me to come to the same conclusion he did.

“And?” I ask, prodding him to continue.

“Well, I looked at your father first. He was the obvious answer. He has cut deals with people in DOTgov Security in the past. You know, helping you out with staying in the game, trying to lower your sentence-”

“He really only succeeded in one of those.”

“But he still knew people who knew people.”

“So you think my dad knows how to get into the mind prison? Or knows someone who knows how to get into the mind prison?”

“I doubt that,” Grael says, as if it was my idea, and a stupid idea at that. “His connection to your cyberterrorism has knocked him so far down the bureaucratic ladder that he'd be lucky to be working someplace deemed important enough to even have DgS officers protecting it. He's got no ties to any kind of security in NextWorld. Not anymore.”

He's right. After my cyberterrorist ties were unearthed, they knocked him down to pushing files for the new DOTedu curriculum. It's mindless work. All he does is follow orders with no hope of ever being rewarded for his service.

“You can't worry about him right now,” Cyren says, sensing my guilt. “One thing at a time. Focus.”

I rub the bridge of my nose, trying to relieve some of the tension that is building. “Grael. About this point you're making...”

“What about it?”

“You're not making it.”

“Be patient with him,” Cyren whispers in my ear. “He's proud of whatever revelation he's come across. You can see it in his eyes. He wants you to be proud of him too.”

“My point is, I remembered someone else who was connected to the security functions in NextWorld.”

“Who?”

“The girl who was with you, the one that got you into DOTbiz.”

“Raev?”

“That's the one.”

“Yeah. Sure. She had connections. But, she was arrested too. She's in mind prison with everyone else.”

“But her mothers-”

“Her mothers aren't about to help us,” I say through a chuckle, remembering their reaction to Xen, not to mention the group of cyberterrorists that her daughter was running around with.

“But they own InfoLock, the most advanced data backup in NextWorld. They may as well have a monopoly on the service. They back up everything from your family photos to your credit account. You know they're backing up some of DOTgov's dirty little secrets too.”

“If you tell me you want to break into InfoLock-”

He waves both hands in the air and says, “No, no, no. DOTgov is a flailing beast chasing its own tail. Breaking into their data-banks is easy. But I'm not about to break into the database of a corporation that actually hires competent programmers with skill sets that contribute to the company's security.”

Cyren can sense my building anxiety. He's toying with me, making me stumble through every hoop he lays out before he tells me what the plan is.

“Calm down. He'll get there.”

“Okay, Grael. If you don't want to break into InfoLock's database, how does Raev factor into any of this? It doesn't matter who her mothers are anymore. Now she's just another cyberterrorist locked away with the rest of our friends.”

He holds up a single finger to stop me. “That, right there.”

“What?”

Grael smiles, revealing thin rows of teeth that look sharper than they should as he leans in close and whispers, “What if I told you that Raev wasn't locked up with your friends.”

“She broke into the Trash Bin with us,” I say, trying to convince Grael of what I saw, and maybe trying to convince myself a little too. “Raev was arrested.”

“I'm sure she was.” Grael crosses his tattooed arms and leans back, flipping his ponytail of red dreadlocks into the air. “But we agreed that her mothers run the most advanced data backup company in NextWorld, and that they probably have their fingers deeply dug into DOTgov's pie?”

“Sure, but-”

“So you don't think that they could maybe cut a deal? You don't think with that kind of weight they could get her off the hook?”

I shake my head, unwilling to accept it. “You don't know her mothers. They're the type of people that would lock their daughter up to teach her a lesson. And Raev would never-”

“Never what?” he says, swiping his hand in the air to open a screen.

With a gesture of his fingers, he spins the screen around so that I can read it. I see an employee manifest for InfoLock. Raev's mothers are at the top, listed as co-CEOs of the company. Grael flings his fingers up the screen, scrolling past thousands of names before flattening his hand again to stop on a single name highlighted in the center of the screen.

Assistant Manager of the Data Retention Policy Administration

Raev

01011011

“Do you really think Raev would accept a job at her mothers' company to get out of serving time in mind prison?”

“I don't know,” I say, gritting my teeth to defend myself against the possibility, “but that's what we're here to find out.”

DOTsoc is the last place I want to be, but it's the most likely place to find Raev at this time of night. She has her privacy filter turned on, so it isn't as easy as tracking her location, and she isn't answering any of my cast requests, so I'm forced to do this the old-fashioned way.

I push open the doors of Club January and step into an open field being dumped on by a blizzard. A DJ sits atop a tower of ice, his music high-pitched, twinkling and light, fluttering through the air like a crisp wind. Dancers kick the shin-high, fluffy white snow as they shimmy their bodies back and forth. Their breath blows from their mouths in clouds of condensation, evaporating when the cold air consumes it. There must be hundreds of them.

Cyren's mental image appears next to me, interlacing her fingers with mine. She clutches tightly, beckoning me to continue, to remain unafraid of the social setting. I push forward.

After making my way through the crowd, I settle onto a pile of snowballs in front of the bar made of blocks of ice. A bartender makes her way over to me, barely covered in some strategically-placed white fur. Her eyes are comically large and her eyelashes are sprinkled with snowflakes.

“Need a drink?”

“No,” I say, swiping my hand to display a screen with Raev's picture on it. “I'm looking for this girl.”

The bartender glances at it and says, “If she's got her privacy filter on, I can't help you.”

“I'm her friend,” I say, “I need to-”

Cyren places her hand on my shoulder. “She's an NPC. You're not going to argue with her programming. Better to ask one of the Player-Characters.”

I ask the small green alien sitting next to me, but he rolls his eyes and ignores me. I glance down the bar at the rest of the patrons, trying to evaluate which one appears the most helpful.

“Her,” Cyren says, pointing at a generic YOUNG-GIRL-43 avatar, fresh out of the default account options. She's surrounded by friends, all of whom are using default avatars.

“You sure?”

Cyren nods.

I've learned to listen to Cyren about these things. She understands people, society, and the world better than me. She says it's because she wants to, which means she thinks I don't.

When I approach the girl, I have a hard time hiding my disdain for her and her friends' avatars. Who would be so lazy? If you don't have the time or interest in learning how to design your own, you could at least buy a few items to personalize your image. NextWorld is about extending limitations beyond what life gave us. Why would you limit yourself to what your default account gives you?

“Excuse me,” I say, tapping the girl on the shoulder harder than I intended.

She jumps, startled by my sudden touch. When she spins around, she makes the simple gesture with her left hand to check my social screen. It shows her nothing.

“Who're you?” she asks with a thick American accent. She takes a step back. “What do you want?”

I notice a few of her friends stepping forward, their chests puffing up defensively.

I swipe my hand in the air, displaying the picture of Raev. “I'm looking for this girl. Have you seen her out tonight?”

She glances at her friends, a worried look on her face. Most of them won't make eye contact with her, but one of the avatars gives her a single shake of his head.

“Never seen her,” the girl says and turns her back to me.

“Offer her credits,” Cyren says.

“I don't think she wants to help. Maybe we should try someone else.”

“You've made plenty of credits off the data we've been selling on the undermarket. Offer her some and she'll talk.”

I take a breath and tap her on the shoulder again, this time more gently.

“Listen,” she says as she turns around, “you're really startin' to annoy me. I'm just here to listen to some music with my friends and you-”

“You sure you haven't seen her?” I ask, throwing open a trade screen and displaying a healthy amount of credits. Enough for her to pay for her and her friends to have a very good night out.

She nudges the same avatar that shook his head, motioning toward the screen. He glances at it, looks away, then takes a second look. This time his eyes are much wider. He nudges her back with his elbow.

“Yeah. Whatever.” She accepts the trade and motions across the room with her head. “Q-pid. She hangs out with him.”

I look across the dance floor, in the direction she nodded, and I see a chubby little baby angel floating above the dance floor. He's pouring a drink from a large mug over his head and shouting into the air as the music drops a beat.

I tilt my head toward the girl and her friends and say, “Thank you,” but they ignore me.

I make my way around the dance floor, through a series of tables that look like water erupted from the ground and instantly froze in place.

“How did you know that would work?” I ask as I walk in a zigzag pattern through the crowd.

Cyren tries to sound humble as she explains, “They're all using default avatars, none of them were drinking, and that American accent.”

“You knew they were poor.”

“Barely scraping by.”

I'm embarrassed for being unable to relate. I've lived a life of privilege. First with the government benefits that came from my father's job, and now through all the illegal workarounds I perform on a daily basis. It feels so normal that most of the time I forget not everyone is living at the same level I am. I catch myself wishing I'd given them more.

I step around an NPC that looks like a snowman serving drinks. Once all the drinks are on the table, one of the PCs backhands the snowman's carrot nose, lodging it deeper into its head. The table erupts in laughter.

I hear Cyren gasp.

“Sorry,” I say, though I'm not sure what I'm apologizing for. I suppose there's a sort of guilt, a sense of responsibility for my kind. All Player-Characters in general.

“It will never make sense to me. Why do they think they can treat digital intelligence like that?”

“Those NPCs are nothing like you. Their programming is simple, basic. They aren't self-aware.”

“So it's okay to mistreat something because it isn't as intelligent as you?”

“That isn't what I meant. I didn't... I wasn't...”

“I know. I guess I'm just not as sure as you that people would treat me any different.”

“Cyren-”

“Let's go,” she says, appearing next to me and tugging on my arm. “It looks like our friend is leaving.”

I stand on the tips of my toes to peek over the bouncing heads of the dancers, and I see what Cyren sees: The chubby little angel is heading for a side-door, his wings fluttering in the air at a dizzying pace.

When I shove the person next to me out of the way, a screen pops up in front of me warning me that I've almost exceeded the player-versus-player limitations set by the club. I cast my hand at the screen to close it, and force my way through the mob of dancers.

“What's the plan here?”

“Ask him where Raev is?”

“You're going to need a better plan than that.”

“Ask him really nicely?”

I can hear her reluctant chuckle.

“That's not what I had in mind.”

“Do you have a suggestion?” I ask, recognizing her passive aggressive way of giving me advice.

“He's a cherub.”

“A what?” I ask, squeezing between two avatars made to resemble some kind of tentacle monsters and reach for the side door.

“It's a common misrepresentation of Eros, a character in Greek mythology, renamed by the Greeks as Cupid. This symbolism is often attributed to the ancient feast of Saint Valentine, a day people set aside to celebrate love.”

I push open the side-door, which exits onto a patio that overlooks the sheer cliff side of a glacier. The Arctic ocean stretches across the horizon and polar bears lounge around on a floating iceberg below us. Small tables of twisted metal rods are scattered about, surrounded by chairs made of the same entwined metal. It's quiet out here. The crowd is using this area as a brief respite from the intensity of the club.

“This Q-pid obviously has an affinity for this symbol, which makes me think he is heart-broken, or possibly still in the throes of early love.”

I scan over the heads of the patrons sitting down until I notice the hyper-fluttering of the baby angel's wings.

“I think you can use his love-struck nature to your advantage when you ask him for Raev's location. If you tell him that Raev is friends with an old flame and you hope she can reunite the two of you. Or you could say-”

“Cyren.” I say, stopping her mid-sentence and drawing her attention back to the present. “I don't think I need to ask where Raev is.”

When Cyren pulls herself out of her problem solving mode and looks through my eyes, she sees the chubby little cherub fly up and hug a blue-skinned avatar with rainbow-colored ribbons for hair.

The avatar that belongs to Raev.

01011100

I approach Raev from behind and gently touch her shoulder. It's a simple, non-threatening gesture, but the touch allows me to directly connect with her avatar and the NPCs get to work hacking through her account. They're met with one of InfoLock's sophisticated firewalls and choose not to risk being noticed quite yet. Cyren pokes around Raev's public accounts instead. She finds screenshots that Raev posted of various club events and a purchase history that allows Cyren to piece together a timeline of Raev's activities.

When Raev turns around, I don't speak. I didn't prepare anything and the NPCs are too busy working on her account to help me with any kind of social awkwardness. I hope the silence comes across as menacing or stoic instead of the stumbling loss for words that it is.

“Arkade?” she says, taking a step backward. “What are you... why are you here?”

I laugh with a low rumble. “Me? Why am I here? I think you being here poses the bigger question.”

She looks around nervously. The cherub fluttering next to her nervously studies both of us, back and forth. I step closer to Raev.

“Why aren't you in the mind prison, Raev?”

She looks away. There's shame in her eyes.

She half-mumbles, “I got out.”

“You got out?”

“Earlier this month.”

“How? Why haven't you contacted me? I could have used your help with-”

“You shouldn't be here,” she says before spinning away from me and walking back toward the door to the club.

I jog to catch up to her. “According to DOTgov I'm a cyberterrorist, so technically I shouldn't be anywhere.”

“Exactly,” she says in a tone angrier than I expect.

“Hey,” I say, grabbing her wrist when she reaches for the door. “I was joking.”

“Let go of me,” she says, yanking her hand back. “You won't be able to get through my security system anyway. I get automatic updates from InfoLock. I'm running the best they've got.”

“InfoLock? Is that what this is about? Your mothers' company? Did they get you out early?”

She looks away from me, crossing her arms in front of her and staring out over the glacial cliff. “What do you care?”

“Care?” Confused by her reaction, I try to explain myself. “Of course I care. I'm not mad at you. I'm happy you're out!”

“Happy?” she says, turning back toward me with a look of disgust for my use of the word. “Nobody should be happy for any of us. You're the reason we were in the Trash Bin. You're the reason we got arrested. You're the reason our lives are ruined!”

Her words surge into my ears, flushing my body with a swelling pain as I mumble “I didn't... I wasn't...” My knees want to buckle.

She points her finger in my face and growls words through a wall of teeth, “This is all your fault, and yet here you stand, comfortably free to stalk me at a dance club.”

“I wasn't stalking you. I was-”

Cyren appears next to me, alerted by my rising blood temperature and rapid breathing.

“Calm down. Shallow breaths. Focus on why we're here. She wants the same thing you do. She wants Xen back.”

I do as I'm told. I close my eyes, find my center, and say, “I need your help.”

Raev's eyes blink, and when they open back up, they've doubled in size. “Help? You?”

“She's emotional. Stick with basic logic.”

“I'm going to save Xen. I'm going to save them all. I'm going to get them out of mind prison and- ”

“You're going to save them?” she shouts at me so loud that a few of the patrons nearby take notice. “What are you going to save them from? From taking the fall? From paying for your mistakes? From suffering your consequences?”

“Actually, yes. They don't deserve that kind of punishment for helping me get Cyren back.”

Her eyes grow dark and her voice lowers. “Don't you dare talk about it like you understand it. You have no idea what it's like inside that place.”

“She's right. Don't try to relate to her. It will only make her more defensive.”

“You're right. I don't know what mind prison is like. But I know my friends shouldn't be there. We have to help them-”

“I'm helping Xen. And my way is legal.” She sets her hands on her hips. “I'm guessing your plan is less so?”

I ignore the comment and ask, “How are you helping Xen?”

She twitches nervously, looking at anything but me. She finally takes a deep breath, and when she exhales her shoulders droop low, defeated.

“It was part of my plea deal,” she says leaning against the wall as another patron enters the club through the nearby door. “I told them everything I knew, but I still had to agree to work at my mothers' company. In return they agreed to move Xen to a minimum security area and allow me visitation rights.”

“You've seen him?” The question hits the lump in my throat on its way out of my mouth. “How is he? Where is he?”

“Don't worry about it,” she says. “He's safe. That's all that matters.”

I take off my cowboy hat and slick my hair back as I say, “No. It's not. His freedom matters. And until he has his freedom, until all of our friends get their freedom-”

“What? You're going to what? Take on all of DOTgov by yourself? Do you actually believe the news-casts that are calling you a super user?”

“If we could access her account, we could switch your access codes. We could switch your accounts. You'd effectively be controlling her actual avatar. You could connect to the mind prison. You'd be inside! With that kind of access, we might be able to access their servers.”

As I open my mouth to explain Cyren's plan to Raev, Cyren adds, “But she'll never go for it.”

Cyren is right, of course. I don't even have time to finish explaining myself before Raev is yelling back at me, “Grow up, Arkade. Maybe it's time you accept the fact that this isn't a game. You aren't the hero. You aren't going to win. You're not going to save everyone.”

“I'm not trying to be a hero. I'm not trying to win anything. And I'm not trying to save everyone.” I try to catch my breath. “I just want to save my friends.”

“No!” she screams, leaning in close. “Stay away from us. Don't try to help him. If they think he's involved in some attempt at a prison break, they could lock him deeper inside. We'd never get to see each other.”

“She's doing the same thing she did with Xen's inebriation software addiction. She'd rather spend one more day with him like this than risk never seeing him again.”

My fists clench. I'm sick of playing nice.

“Please, Raev, don't let him suffer anymore just so you can get your weekly dose of him-”

Cyren is telling me to stop talking as I continue to spit out the words. I don't think, I just speak, angry and frustrated. Raev's face freezes in shock, slowly melting into an uncomfortably calm pose.

“You know what, Arkade? When they let me out of that mind prison, I was a little upset with DOTgov.”

“We have to go,” Cyren says, mentally tugging on my arm.

“I didn't think it was fair,” Raev continues, absentmindedly changing the color of her nails. “Here I was, being released from what I would very accurately describe as torture, yet they were still insisting on monitoring my every move. Like I was still a prisoner.”

I take a step back. Then another. Cyren is yelling at me to run.

“Tonight? I'm glad DOTgov is watching me,” Raev says in an unnervingly playful tone as I reach for the door next to us. “Because that means this whole time... they've been watching you.”

01011101

When I open the door, there's a sudden POP as a DgS officer teleports into the domain, right in front of me. Sleek, silver hands turn red and reach for me, fingers outstretched. I fall more than step backward, but I manage to slam the door shut, blocking the officer's approach. I stumble a bit and as soon as I get my feet solidly underneath me, I hear pops coming from every direction. I spin to survey the patio and see it filling with officers. They block every exit, a wall of DOTgov security, three officers deep.

“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 spin around, scanning my surroundings. They've already blocked my own log-out, and if I use my battleaxe on myself, they'll track the denial of service attack back to my E-Womb. I'm going to have to run. The only way that isn't blocked is the railing of the patio. Below that: The ocean, the edge of the site.

I dig my heels into the flooring and make a run for it, my spurs clanging against the floor with every step. My double-headed battleaxe appears in my right hand, Cyren doing me the favor of selecting it from my inventory. I swing the blade behind me, spinning it in my palm so that the serrated blade is facing forward. The flood of officers fills in behind me, but they slow as I take a step onto the railing and leap off the patio. They expect me to hit the edge of the site and bounce back to my point of origin, standing right next to them, where they could calmly grab my avatar. But I don't hit the edge. With a swing of my battleaxe, the serrated blade carves into the edge of the site, tearing open a hole, forcing a link to the next site.

My body tumbles through the opening and I land on a wooden stage. An audience gasps. When I collect myself I see two avatars dressed as medieval knights, apparently in the middle of some kind of performance. Boos and hisses get thrown at me and one of the knights approaches. I glance back through the opening as I try to log-out from this new site, but officers are already disappearing from the patio. The all too familiar sound of DgS teleportation fills the stage. Without looking, I spin my battleaxe back around to the blade coded with my denial of service attack and swing it in a large arc around me. The crowd audibly reacts as a few officers hop backward and a few more are sliced in half, forcibly logged-out.

Before the rest of them can react, I spin the battleaxe around and sink it deep into the stage. The floor folds open at the split and I jump through the tear in the site. The edge of the site slides past me and I drop into a square room made of dull, flat colors. No secondary items fill the space other than a single round table and six basic chairs. Sitting around the table are a group of default characters arguing about which menu to use in order to show each other screenshots of their grandchild's avatars.

Senior citizen accounts.

I'm well enough ahead of the DgS to swipe open the log-out menu, but whichever account is running the site is so bogged down with DOTcom advertising, the menu takes too long to open. DgS officers pop into existence right next to me. I duck and swing low at the officer to my right, cutting the avatar off at the knees. The officer is logged-out before the avatar hits the floor. The other officer reaches for me, but I manage to roll out of the way. Another two pops, then three more, and the room is nearly full. The senior citizens around the table take notice of us and start asking a string of questions about what's happening.

I squat down to duck under one officer's thrusting hand and roll under the table. When I pop out the other side, I'm swinging the battleaxe upward and digging into the wall of the site. My momentum is so strong that I burst into the next site, expecting to fall onto the floor.

But there's nothing there.

It's not that I can't feel anything, it's that I'm not sure I have a body.

“It's a deprivation club,” Cyren explains. “The idea is that they block all your senses. All but one.”

There's an orchestra playing in my head. It's incredible, as if the music is coming out of me instead of into me. An absence of stimuli to enhance the only thing that's left. Music.

I find myself struggling not to be overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of experiencing sound in such an all-encompassing way. I try to open my log-out menu. It's already being blocked. The DgS have already teleported into the site, we just can't see each other.

“Can you hack the deprivation?”

“On it,” Cyren says with a simple assuredness that makes me respect her more.

I get nervous. If the DgS deactivates the deprivation before me, this is all over. Of course, that's a silly thing to worry about. They have to use legal menus. Menus that were designed by DOTgov. The NPCs have other ways of doing things.

“We got it,” Cyren says, snapping her fingers to activate the rest of my senses.

When I blink my eyes to focus my new found sight, I'm standing on a plain white square that's floating in a gray space. It's huge, housing hundreds of avatars standing shoulder-to-shoulder, lined up in a way that would most efficiently use that space. Off in the distance, across a sea of perfectly still avatars, I see a DJ booth that overlooks the entire site.

It's quite possibly the strangest dance club I've ever been too, yet it might be the only one I would care to return to... if I ever find myself not being chased by DOTgov Security.

A DgS officer is standing right next to me in the row, but the avatar is lost in the sense deprivation of the site. Another officer pops in next to the first. A chain reaction of teleporting officers fills my row, then fills the next.

I push past the rows of avatars in front of me, trying to sidestep between the cornfield of people. When I reach the edge of the white square, I leap off without hesitation, swinging the battleaxe wildly in the air. My body hurtles through the gray until the battleaxe strikes the edge of the site.

I slice through the sky and tumble into a room of psychedelic liquid. Translucent colors wash over me as I swim past the other users, all of them with goofy smiles on their faces. I know the officers will be alerted to my site change, even in the deprivation club, so I keep moving. I reach the edge of the site, ignoring the sales menu in front of me that offers all kinds of different inebriation software. The rainbow-colored liquid bubbles to the side as a DgS officer pops into existence.

I cut through the edge again and find myself on the head of a pin. Angels dance around me. Strange bells ring in the distance. I don't try to make sense of who would come to a place like this, I just slice, trying to move faster than the DgS.

I cut again, this time stumbling onto a sandy beach. The sun beats down against the brim of my hat. I peer underneath it and see a dating site stretch out along the coast. Inebriation bars and volleyball nets and elaborate social games meant to pair you off. It all looks awkward to me.

“This looks like fun,” Cyren says appearing next to me only to flash me a wink.

I think that means she's being sarcastic.

An avatar made of fire, yet still inexplicably wearing a bikini, bounds down the beach toward me in slow motion. She's waving a sign-up sheet.

I instantly slash my battleaxe across the sand and fall through, into the open sky. Tables and chairs tumble through the air alongside me. It looks like a random scattering of furniture, until I notice a couple sitting at one of the tables, staring into each others' eyes as they enjoy a meal, plummeting to the ground below. I glance down and see the ground, the edge of the site, hurtling toward me. I hold my battleaxe out in front of me and point the blade toward the ground. As the blade touches the earth, it slices straight through and my body slides between the edges of the tiny hole.

The room is small. Dark. A single candle burns in the center of the room. It creeps me out. I slash the wall next to me.

I step into a rather large, elaborately decorated space, like a palace bedroom. Young avatars roll around on a giant mattress covered in kittens and puppies. Every one of the fluffy creatures is desperate to lick the face of the avatars, and the avatars can't stop giggling.

“You should bookmark this site,” Cyren says a little too genuinely. “This is adorable.”

I slash the wall the second one of the kittens lays eyes on me and I step into the neighboring site. This time I run onto the carpeted floor of a nostalgia bar. This one is trying to capture a certain decade for its clients. Sometime in the 1950s maybe. Or 60s. I was never good with history. That's not the part of the site that interests me anyway. What interests me is that the rest of the site is unfinished. Bars of green glowing wires stretch out into the shapes of the different rooms, exposed without the graphics, the raw form of the bare design.

A screen appears in front of me reading: “You have been misdirected into an unfinished site. You will be returned to your previous location in 5 seconds.”

A site in this phase of development doesn't have log-out menus for users, just a built-in ability to throw me back to where I came from. In my case, that would be the waiting hands of DOTgov Security. As the 5 turns into a 4, I grip my battleaxe tighter, ready to slice my way into the next site, but I stop myself.

Instead, I select a sticky sheet of plastic from my inventory and slap it onto the screen. The sheet of plastic acts as an overlay, scrolling different numbers and letters at a blinding speed as the countdown changes from a 4 to a 3.

The 3 changes to a 2.

“Don't worry,” Cyren says, appearing right behind me and placing her chin on my shoulder so she can see the screen. “I designed that password generator myself.”

The 2 turns to a 1.

I see the 1 disappear, about to be replaced by my instant bounce back into the room of puppies and kittens, when the numbers on the overlay lock into place and the password is accepted.

The screen flips around, growing in size as it displays the list of “Admin Tools” available to me, the new site administrator. The DgS officers pop in, lunging for me, but my finger is already on the button that reads: Delete Site. I shove all my weight into pressing it and the world freezes, caught in that purgatory of paused options.

Are you sure you want to do this?

You will be logged-out of NextWorld while we remove your data.

YES or NO?

I yell, “YES!” and the entire site, including the DgS officers, falls away from me until it is nothing but a tiny dot of light.

When that dot collapses, I hear a voice waiting to comfort me. It isn't the computerized voice saying, “Wireless connection disengaged from your nanomachines.”

This voice is softer, and it comes from the mental image of Cyren lying right next to me in my E-Womb.

“Nice job.”

“Was it?”

“It was quick thinking with that administrator password.”

“I guess I'm getting good at running away.”

“Really, really good,” Cyren says with a giggle.

I reach up and open the door of the E-womb, releasing the warm air inside and feeling the cold air of the tower room rush past me. My body shivers, my skin raising into bumps. Ekko jumps up from the bed across the room and throws a blanket around me as I crawl out.

He hugs me close and rubs my shoulders, trying to help keep me warm as he says, “Welcome back.”

01011110

“Any luck?” Ekko asks, ushering me over to my bed to sit down.

“No,” I mumble, dropping onto the mattress with a floppy motion of my arms. “Still nothing.”

He gives my shoulder a squeeze and says, “Don't worry. I'm sure you'll find something.”

“He's right,” Cyren says, appearing next to me on the bed. “I can sense the temptation to give up rising in the back of your mind.”

“I'm not going to give up,” I say out loud, “I just think there has to be another way.”

“What are you-” Ekko says before he realizes who I'm talking to.

It's taken him some time to get used to my invisible friend, but I give him credit for his acceptance. At this point he acknowledges the fact that this will be a part of me living with him and his partner. They've both been so welcoming to me, just happy to have me around. Cyren tells me that I'm filling a void in their lives. That might be true, but they're doing the same for me. Cyren might call that “codependency,” but I say there's a fine line between leaning on someone for support and letting them carry you.

It's been nice having someone else. Someone disconnected from NPCs and DOTgov and mind prisons. Someone on the outside of all this craziness. When I log-out, I'm met with such a calm exterior that I actually find myself valuing my time out of NextWorld. It gives me a moment to decompress.

“Relax,” Cyren says, leaning her head on my bony shoulder. “Get some rest. We can start fresh in the morning and look at this from another angle.”

“But you're not going to sleep.”

She smiles, kisses my cheek, and says, “Nope.”

“You're going to get started working on a new plan right away, aren't you?”

“The other digital intelligences already have.”

“Oh... well, I don't want to keep you-”

“Thanks!” she says with a small squeal of delight and another kiss on the cheek. “I'll let you know as soon as we find something.”

And with that, she disappears.

“Bye,” I say too late.

“Oh! Did Cyren... leave?” Ekko asks, running his hands under the water in the sink and splashing some in his face.

“Yeah,” I say, nodding my head nonchalantly. “She, um... she's busy with the... um... finding everyone thing.”

Ekko smiles at me. “Are you hungry?”

“Sure,” I say with a reluctant shrug of my shoulders when I notice my stomach growling.

He sticks his finger in the small hole on his vitapaste dispenser and waits for the light to turn green. When it does, he retrieves the tube of vitapaste and motions for me to do the same. I push myself off the bed and lazily jam my finger into the hole. The light turns green and I yank out the tube.

Ekko leans against the wall, squeezing a bit of the gray paste into his mouth. “The scrubbed account you're using is still... clean?”

I twist off the cap at the end of my vitapaste tube and say, “Yeah. While I'm controlling my real account, this account is running on autopilot, spending all its time in DOTmed getting information on nanomachine upgrades. DOTgov just thinks you have a hypochondriac for a roommate.”

Ekko squirts more vitapaste into his mouth, speaking through the thick glob. “So what did you and your real account do today?”

I squirt a small dab of the thick, salty paste onto the tip of my tongue and swallow it fast. “We just... I don't know. Tried to figure some things out.”

Ekko lets out a sigh and says, “And what were you trying to figure out?”

I take a bigger mouthful of vitapaste, giving in to his request to share information about our day. I explain everything, from discerning the bandwidth patterns of the data-bank in order to find its location, to Cyren's password generator and my daring escape.

Ekko smiles and nods through the whole explanation, pretending he understands everything that I'm saying. It reminds me of my own father when I would explain a new game to him. He tries his best to pretend we're having a conversation. He raises his eyebrows when he should find something interesting and laughs when he should find something funny, but he has no idea what I'm talking about.

“But none of that matters,” I say trying to summarize it up for him and myself. “All that matters is that we failed.”

Ekko rests his hand on top of my bald head and rubs it a few times, saying, “It matters that you tried. Doesn't it?”

“I guess.”

“Of course it does. You broke into a data-bank. You stole the data. You fought the DgS and got away. Seems to me, you did everything right.”

“But the data-”

“Wasn't what you were looking for. I can understand that. But that's the data's fault, not yours.”

His logic is too simple. He's looking for an emotional response. I don't have one.

He sits down on the edge of his own bed. “You said that the data you found contained DOTgov secrets...”

“Just some classified documents about expenditures and credit stuff,” I say, running two fingers along the tube of vitapaste to force the last few drops out.

“That's strange.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, tossing the empty tube into the door of the trash collector.

“Don't you think DOTgov would have more activities happening in DOTcom that they would want to keep secret?”

“There's only one data-bank in a domain. Any data they store has to go through that bank. If it existed, it would have been there.”

Ekko rubs his chin for a few moments before he says rather simply, “What about the data they don't store? The things they delete.”

“Any trash files that the data entry clerks find, they put back on the data-carriers and send them off to the trash bin.”

“Have you looked in those files?”

“No,” I say, shaking my head, a little frustrated that I have to explain all of this to him. “You don't get it. Those files are garbage. Spam-casts, incorrect calculations, outdated avatar items.”

“Government secrets?”

I laugh, but it falters as the possibility sinks in and I mumble, “I mean-”

He continues his thought. “Seems to me that deletion would be a pretty good place to bury something you don't want anyone to find.”

I speak aloud as I try to work out the theory. “If they're deleting their secrets at the end of the day-”

Cyren pops into my view, pacing back and forth as she says, “It would make sense as a sort of 'nuclear option.' If you can't successfully secure something, you make sure it doesn't exist.”

“Breaking into the Trash Bin again isn't an option. InfoLock closed Worlok's backdoor and layered a ton of new security measures on top of the whole domain. Even with the NPCs' help, it'd still take months to find a hole. If there is one.”

Ekko says, “Why can't you steal it before it gets deleted? Before the data is placed in the Trash Bin?”

“How are we supposed to do that? Wait for a data-carrier to drop out of the sky from DOTgov and try to rob it on the super-highway before it reaches the data-bank?”

Ekko smiles. “I imagine it would require more planning than that, but why not?”

“'Why not?' Do you know how hard it is to break through the security armor of a data-carrier?”

Cyren stops pacing, flashes me a direct gaze, and says, “Nothing is impossible. It's just data.”

I laugh harder. “It's data being transferred at a few hundred zettabytes.”

Ekko looks uncomfortable when he realizes I'm no longer talking to him, but I don't have time to worry about it. My pulse is racing as a thousand artificial intelligences in my mind work on the problem.

“You're already considering possible ways to overcome the mobility issues. I can feel it inside you. You want to try it.”

“I can't help it if the gamer in me wants to figure out the strategy of defeating this problem, but that doesn't mean I actually want to try.”

She grins, both devious and innocent. “Yes, you do. Look at you. I can feel you piecing it together, looking for the opening, the loophole, the flaw in the system.”

“That's not... I can't...”

I rub my head, knowing it's a waste of time to argue with Cyren.

With a long sigh I finally admit, “We're going to try to rob a data-carrier, aren't we?”

Cyren slaps me on the back, her black lips pulled back in a smile as she shouts, “That's the spirit!”

01011111

I'm sitting on the edge of an on-ramp sign for the DOTgov domain with my feet dangling over the edge, watching vehicles rush underneath me on the thousand-lane super-highway. Traffic is moving slow at this hour, with billions of accounts filling the lanes, each one as diverse as the avatars driving them. They create a blur of colors and shapes that form a single entity, like digital fluid being flushed through the system. They look alike to me, the mindless drones going about their day with no idea what's going on under the surface of the graphics.

Cyren appears next to me and says, “They've chosen their reality, their game world. Like you chose yours. This is what comforts them. This is what makes them feel safe.”

“But it's a lie,” I say, almost pitying them as they continue on their way, never going faster than their allotted bandwidth speed. “They're not safe. A sense of safety, of security, is intangible. It's more like an emotion than something you can possess.”

“And like a lot of emotions,” Cyren says, “it doesn't have to be real, they just want to feel it. And once they do, most of them will do anything to hang onto it. The idea of letting go of something like that is too scary of a proposition for most.”

I wrap both my hands tightly around the metal bars of the on-ramp sign, trying to contain my frustration as I say, “So you think that even if they knew the truth, if they knew that DOTgov had the ability to watch anyone whenever they want, in NextWorld or IRL, using their own eyes as cameras and ears as microphones-”

“I think most people would find it comforting, like having a guardian angel sitting on their shoulder.” Cyren stares down at the lanes below as the silence of our pessimism hangs in the air until she finally says, “Maybe they just need to be offered something better. Something better than safety.”

“Like what?”

“Like... freedom.”

I try to picture what that word means and my ideals fall apart. Idealism isn't enough anymore. My ideals look a lot more like naiveté with every day that passes. So I admit a harsh truth.

“I don't know if I would have given up the safety of our game world for freedom.”

“But that safety wasn't real either.”

“Wasn't it?”

“Remember the giant worm that ate our world?”

“Sure, but-”

And then I realize I was doing it too. Living in a constant state of denial. I refused to admit the imperfections, all so I could say I experienced something so perfect.

“Would it make you feel better if I told you I did it too? All the NPCs. We were toying with our emotions too much, ignoring the logic of the situation, because we wanted to think we won. It meant the struggle was over. We could relax knowing there was no more game to play. No monotonous existence of kill, loot, level, repeat.”

“Doesn't sound so bad.”

“Because for you it was a choice. That was the reality you chose. We had no choice. We were programmed.”

A thought slides across my mind. It's a terrible thought, a selfish thought, a thought I would never want Cyren to know I even considered. But she sees it like every other thought I have.

“Of course I chose you. I think you were my first choice. My first real response. No code. No program. It was... emotion. It was love.”

I reach over and place my hand over hers. She smiles at me.

“That was a moment of perfection.”

I try to speak, to use actual words to describe how I feel, but I struggle, unable to find what I'm looking for in my limited vocabulary. Words feel like nothing more than random combinations of meaningless sounds compared to the pure joy I feel when Cyren is near me.

With a single smile she reminds me that she can feel everything I'm feeling. It's a smile that overwhelms her and she succumbs to it willingly.

“You want to know a secret?”

“You have a secret?”

She shrugs her shoulders playfully.

“Completely unfair.”

“What is?”

“The fact that you get to have secrets, but my thoughts are wide open to you.”

“You have things you want to hide from me?”

I try desperately not to think of a hundred of my worst thoughts as those exact thoughts rush through my mind. She's laughing so hard that she wraps both arms around her stomach and rolls over onto her side.

“Not funny.”

She takes a few deep breaths to calm herself and says through a chuckle she can't shake, “Don't worry about it. You should see what flies through your head when you're dreaming. I've seen worse and I still love you.”

“Can we get back to this secret you've been hiding from me?”

She rolls her eyes and says, “It's not like that. I just... This might sound terrible, considering what our friends are going through right now, but I was thinking today about what I wanted to do with you once I'm out of your head. Once I'm free.”

“And?” I ask, maybe a little too eagerly.

She smiles at me with an excited twinkle in her eye as she says, “I want to play a game.”

“A game?” The question fumbles out of my mouth as my brain tries to reroute where my anticipation was.

“Crazy, right? But if I'm being honest... Yeah. That's what I want. I want to play a game with you. Something completely different from DangerWar 2. Something without any NPCs or Level Zeros. Something mindless and fun.”

I stare at her.

I just keep staring at her.

“What?” she asks, glancing away bashfully.

I blink a couple of times, regaining my focus before I say, “That sounds... perfect.”

She kisses my forehead, then my mouth.

“That day will come.”

“I won't stop until it does.”

“You're ready to do whatever it takes? To fight? For us? For our friends?”

I lower my head and my voice lowers with it as I answer, “Absolutely.”

“Good,” she says, standing up and peering into the sky as a shiny object breaks off from the DOTgov sphere high above us. “Because we've got incoming.”

01100000

I jump to my feet and squint my eyes, barely making out the shape of a data-carrier heading toward the on-ramp. The data-carrier is an automated vehicle built for one job, nothing more than a metal box with wheels. A metal box with wheels that travels extremely fast.

“Okay, remember to breathe and count your marks. You can do this. You just need to get your timing right. It's only math.”

It's really, really complicated math. Luckily, I have thousands of NPCs in my head, doing the calculations for me.

As the data-carrier drops toward the surface of NextWorld, it builds speed. My calculations change, increasing velocity and momentum, decreasing time and distance, carrying the lag modifier, and converting the results to a digital space compiler. I factor in the size and shape of the vehicle and what kind of target area that gives me. The final total becomes a timer in the corner of my vision.

I activate my piggyback software and a hefty iron hook appears in my hand. I reel back my arm as the timer reaches the two second mark, watching the milliseconds spin away. I swing my arm forward before the timer stops, needing the hook to land precisely on the tail end of the data-carrier. Right before the timer hits zero, I close my eyes, but when a solid vibration runs through my arm and there's a sudden sensation of being pulled down a super-highway at exorbitant bandwidth speeds, I know it worked.

I open my eyes and see the iron hook stuck in the armored shell of the box-shaped data-carrier. I'm holding the hook tightly in one hand, but as the speed of the data-carrier increases, my senses lag. Sounds stutter, images buffer, and my avatar skips frames of animation when I move.

“Traveling at this speed, your account has 59.4 seconds before you experience a complete signal tear,” Cyren yells in my ear, trying to be heard over the rushing lanes of traffic.

Camels gallop alongside us, their feet leaving trails of fire behind them. A rocket with wheels attached screams past us in another lane. A pogo stick cracks the pavement, threatening to pierce the street every time it slams into the ground. A lion the size of a bus roars from a few lanes over, its enormous frame pulling a tiny chariot.

We're completely surrounded.

Just like we planned.

I start counting the traffic within reach of my piggyback software, but the NPCs already have a total. It's cutting it close, but it'll be enough.

With the iron hook still pierced into the side of the data-carrier, I select a reversed-clone copy of the software from my inventory and another hook appears in my other hand. I attach one end to the data-carrier and twirl the end with the hook in preparation. I scan the lanes again, eyeing the vehicle we're passing in the next lane. A group of DOTbiz workers zip past in their company car. I release the hook and it catches in the passenger side door.

Instead of me being pulled to them and sharing their bandwidth, like I'm doing with the data-carrier, the reversed software rips their sedan from their own lane and yanks it toward me, slamming the vehicle into my lane and dragging it behind. With an additional four accounts sharing the data-carrier's speed, not only does the vehicle slow, but my own lag increases, and my avatar's image flutters. I select another copy of the software and hook an account that's surfing down the highway on a flying guitar. We slow down even more.

Copy after copy, I create a train of vehicles, all connected to the data-carrier, each one eating up more of the bandwidth. Each one slowing us down, creating lag on the data-carrier.

“Bandwidth speed is in the green zone,” Cyren shouts. “You have 36.2 seconds before we reach the data-bank.”

My avatar is shaking all over, blinking in and out of existence worse than Ekko ever did in DangerWar 2. If I wasn't attached through the piggyback software, My connection to any vehicle would break down and I'd be left standing in the middle of the super-highway. I try to open menus with a swipe in the air, but they never receive the full command from my movements. This is the worst lag I've ever experienced.

I hope it's enough.

I place both of my hands on the back of the data-carrier as they blink in and out of existence, never quite able to form a solid state. Yet I can feel the armor. And as soon as I do, a pop-up warning appears, kindly letting me know that: “You do not have authorization to access this vehicle. DgS has been alerted to this suspicious activity and will be arriving shortly to assist you with this error.”

“It's okay. We knew this was going to happen. Just concentrate. Time the lag jumps.”

My hands keep flickering, shivering, flashing. I blink to the repetition, trying to find the pattern. I remember all the times that Xen told me to clear my mind. My brain shuts off and I give over to the natural flow of the data. Blink. Blink blink blink. Blink blink. Blink.

The moment I sync up with the flickering of my avatar, I push forward as I blink. I still feel the armor as it wraps around my hands, then my arms, then my face. It touches the outside of my body and the inside.

It's there, but I'm not.

I fall past the armor as I open my eyes, my avatar taking shape again, reappearing as I stumble into the cargo hold of the data-carrier. I'm standing between two shelving units, each of them filled with different colored cubes of data, each color representing different types of information. Financial transactions, site log-ins, sensory recordings, cast logs, advertisement tracking, etc.

I rush down the aisle, my eyes scanning each shelf, looking for that glimmer of white that represents DOTgov data. I reach the end of the aisle and step into the next row of shelves.

“24.5 seconds before we reach the data-bank.”

“Not helping,” I growl back at her as I look back and forth, up and down, searching for that one color.

At the end of the second row, on the bottom shelf, barely peeking out from an over-sized orange cube, I see a corner of white.

“Kill the piggyback.”

The NPCs deactivate all of my piggyback software and the lag drops out from under me. The speed of the data-carrier picks up, and now that I'm inside the vehicle, my avatar solidifies without any of the signal tear.

I backhand the orange cube out of the way, knocking it across the cargo hold. The white cube isn't any bigger than my fist, but when I pick it up, it's heavier than it should be.

“It's using an intense compression algorithm,” Cyren says, explaining the unusual size. “There's a lot of information in that little cube. Raw data. Unsorted. That has every file that's been marked for saving and every file that's been marked for deletion.”

I select my copying tools from my inventory and an old camera appears in my hand. I point the lens at the white cube and push the button.

“You've got 10.9 seconds before we reach the data-bank.”

The autofocus spins back and forth, trying to capture a perfectly clear shot so that there's no data corruption in the copying process.

“ETA 5.5 seconds.”

The autofocus keeps working, the adjustments becoming smaller and smaller as it hones in on the shot.

“2 seconds.”

There's a blinding flash, but when the burst of light subsides, I not only see the white cube in my hand, I see another in my inventory.

“Got it,” I yell.

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, letting 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.

Without a single question as to my destination or purpose, and with a trust that I will probably never understand, he simply says, “Be safe.”

“I will,” I answer back.

But I'm lying.

There's nothing safe about what I'm about to do.

01100011

The clean account that the NPCs set up for me to live with Ekko and his partner allows me to safely walk through the tower without worry. This fact doesn't stop me from tightening up every time I pass through a security scanner, nor does it grant me the strength to make eye contact with any of the DgS officers I pass, but in the end I'm able to board a train for Old Russia without issue. I sit down next to an elderly woman who spends the entire ride telling me about her trip and how her son was granted a child license and that she's traveling to meet her new granddaughter. I smile and nod as best as I can.

Luckily, the passenger train moves faster than the cargo train I took to Ekko's tower. I reach my father's tower room with a little over two hours left on the validity of the mind prison password.

It takes me a moment, but with Cyren's encouragement, I push the buzzer next to the door. When there's no answer, I push it again, this time holding it in for nearly a minute. Finally, the door slides open and my father appears on the other side.

It takes him a second to respond to the sight of me, but when his eyes enlarge, his hands lunge for me, grabbing onto my shoulders and yanking me toward him. One hand grabs the back of my head and pulls me into his chest, burying my face against his paper-thin shirt.

“Where have you... what have you...”

He doesn't know what he's trying to say, what he's feeling. He's grasping for anything.

“You shouldn't draw attention to yourself,” Cyren says into my ear. “They may be watching him.”

“Dad, we should go inside.”

He looks down the hallway cautiously and pushes me inside. I glance over at the mirror screen above the sink. A news-cast is playing. The sound is muted, but I can see a video of my gargantuan-sized avatar standing over the super-highway right before I logged-out.

My father steps in front of me and grabs me by the shoulders again, staring into my eyes. I try to look away, but I see the glisten of tears forming in his eyes.

“Dad...”

“No,” he says. “I need a second.”

“We don't have a second,” I say, pulling away from him. “We need to talk. And we need to do it fast.”

“It was you,” he says, pointing toward the mirror screen. “I knew it was you. They told me they arrested you, but when I saw this hacker... this super-user on the news-casts, breaking into data-banks using a cowboy avatar... I knew it. You're him... aren't you?”

I don't know why I'm hesitant to tell him. I'm not sure if I'm afraid of his reaction or frustrated that I will have to explain to him how or why I do what I do, but he sees through my silence and knows the truth.

“I knew it.” His eyes go distant, cold. “You can't be here. You have to leave.”

“Tell him why you're here. Be honest.”

I inhale as if the air will inflate my resolve. “I wouldn't have come here if it wasn't important. I need your help, Dad.”

The shock on his face is salted with disgust. “My help? With what? This rebellion against DOTgov? Did you really think I would help you with that?”

I don't listen to Cyren. I just lash back.

“No! Of course not! A true patriot would never put his own son before his government!”

He swats at the air, dismissing my accusation. “It has nothing to do with patriotism. Like your little crusade has nothing to do with changing anything. You're just attacking something because... because that's all you know how to do.” He looks exhausted by his own words. “It's those stupid games you play. All they've taught you is reflexive reaction. Shoot this, kill that, destroy, destroy, destroy. Is that how you really think you accomplish anything in life?”

“He doesn't understand your motivation. Don't argue with him. Talk to him.”

I release the air from my lungs to deflate the anger that's building inside me. How do I change the mind of such a stubborn man?

“Dad, what I'm doing isn't a rebellion. It isn't a crusade. I'm not trying to topple the government. I'm trying to-”

“What? Are you just causing chaos? Just having fun? My god. You aren't a rebellious teenager. You're a toddler that's knocking over his tower of blocks. This is some kind of infantile attempt to-”

“Dad!” My voice breaks into such a shrill tone that it stabs at the air, cutting off his rant. “This isn't about me. This isn't about DOTgov. This isn't about patriotism or rebellion or... or any of that. This is about my friends.”

I'm panting, trying to catch my breath after rapidly shooting the words from my mouth. But it worked. He pauses, raising one eyebrow.

“Your friends?”

“Yes,” I say at a much more normal volume. “My friends. Xen and Fantom and Worlok and... and Cyren.”

I leave out the thousands of NPCs stored in my nanomachines. Cyren has told me in the past that some things are better left unsaid.

My father points at the mirror above his sink. Now a video is playing from six months ago. I'm dodging between DOTgov officers as a data-bank explodes behind me. It was an early hack. Sloppy.

My father is nearly growling as he asks, “What does that have to do with your friends?”

I close my eyes as I speak, somehow hoping that will hide me from the pain of the truth. “They were arrested. When we broke into the Trash Bin. They were put in mind prison for helping me. It's my fault they're in there, Dad. I'm responsible for getting them locked up and it's my responsibility to get them out.”

All of the sudden, his entire attitude changes. His anger and frustration melts into sympathy for his delusional child. “Son. If they were sent to mind prison, there isn't anything you can do. That place is for cyberterrorists. There's no appeal process. There are no court procedures you can go through. It's off the books. It's as close as we get to the death penalty these days. Your friends are-”

“No.”

“-gone.”

I want to lash out again. I want to tell him how fearful he became after my mother died. I want to accuse him of his addiction to inaction.

“Hurting him won't make you feel any better,” Cyren says, resting her nonexistent hand on my shoulder. “Focus on your goal.”

I breathe, slow and steady. “You're wrong, Dad. They aren't gone. In fact, I know exactly where they are. That's why I need your help.”

“What do I have to do with this? I have no influence in DOTgov anymore. Your criminal behavior saw to that. I work for an agency in charge of DOTedu's curriculum now. There are no more favors left for me to cash in.”

“I don't need you to ask for any favors. I don't need you to do anything, really. The reason I've been breaking into the data-banks is because I've been looking for information on the mind prison. And I found it, Dad. I found everything I need to save my friends. All I need now is a DOTgov account so that I can get inside and-”

“My account? You want my account?”

“Temporarily. Just to move around inside without drawing attention. I'll switch yours with my own. You'll still have a clean account and-”

“Then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Once you're inside... even if you find your friends, do you really think you can walk out of a secret prison with your gang of cyberterrorists? What's your plan?”

I mentally ask Cyren, but she reluctantly answers, “We're still working on it.”

I'm about to answer, to tell him that there is no plan and he should trust me because I'm his son. But then I remember what Cyren taught me about empathy, to look at the world from someone else's point of view. My father isn't going to allow his son to risk everything. And that's because he already lost my mother. The most important person in the world to him. His wife. The woman he loved.

And so I tell him about Cyren.

I tell him about how we met. I tell him about every battle where we fought alongside each other. I tell him how we both felt like outsiders, yet felt accepted by each other. I tell him about our first kiss. I tell him about the home we made inside DangerWar 2 and what we both sacrificed to try to save it. I tell him about the lengths in which I went to save her from deletion. I tell him about where she is now, and how much she's helped me to understand other people. And myself. I tell him how much I've learned about coding and programming and hacking and the inner workings of NextWorld. I tell him about Fantom and how she is the only one that can remove Cyren from my nanomachines, free her to live a life inside NextWorld. I talk from the heart, speaking the truth that weighs on my chest both as a suffocating responsibility and a swaddling blanket of security.

I'm not sure what I expect. Maybe for him to cut me off and tell me to quit lying or talking fantastical nonsense. Maybe I expect him to get confused halfway through my explanation and tune me out. But as I tell my tale, the defiant look in my father's eyes softens. He uncrosses his arms and sits down next to me. He listens, really listens, as I talk about love and what it means to me. It's like he sees me for the first time.

As I finish talking, Cyren appears in the room. Tears are streaming down her cheeks, but I know it's not sadness in her eyes.

She just mouths the words, “I love you.”

“I felt that way once,” my father says, his voice shaking. “Your mother was... my everything.”

I put my hand on his back, my palm pressing between his shoulder blades as I ask, “Dad, what would you have been willing to do to save her?”

“Anything,” falls from his mouth without a second thought, but he catches himself and says, “but this is different. You're talking about code. An NPC. She isn't real...” He glances at me with a weak, pleading look. “Is she?”

“Right now, I don't care if you believe me that Cyren is real. Do you believe that what I feel is real?” I stand up from the bed and look him in the eye, stronger, older, more confident than I ever have in front of my father as I ask him with a punching finality, “Do you believe me when I tell you that I love her?”

01100100

There's no tearful goodbye. There's no emotional breakdown. There's no uproarious celebration. The shift in attitude when my father allows Cyren to switch our accounts isn't monumental, at least not outwardly, but when he clasps my hand in his and wishes me luck, a wall around my heart shatters. I really couldn't ask for anything more. To ever think my father would tell me he loved me, or was proud of what I was doing, would be the same as asking him to change his species. My father is who he is, for better or worse, but finding that common thread, that link between us, creates a relationship with him that I've never felt before. When we recognized the relationship between his love for my mother and my love for Cyren, we could finally see eye to eye. We could finally act like family.

The train ride to Old Japan is fast, and when we cross the expanse of murky water between coasts, it's the first time I see something other than towers. The distance is disconcerting. Being able to see so far, being able to see the horizon, is overwhelming. The only other time I've been able to see off into the distance like this is in a virtual world, and for a few seconds, it's almost like I'm safely back in NextWorld. But soon enough we reach the other coastline and my window is filled with the blur of tower walls zipping past.

As we near our destination, I become increasingly aware of my own anxiety. I've been blocking it out, keeping my nervousness at a distance, fooling myself into believing everything was going to work out. But now, as I get closer and closer to the location of the prison, the fact that I'm traveling with my father's account attached to my nanomachines makes my hands shake against the seat.

“It's going to be alright,” Cyren says when she notices the biological change inside me.

“Is it? I'm walking into this place blind.”

“You're not blind. We'll be right there with you. We have blueprints and guard shifts and-”

“Is that enough? I mean, if I somehow manage to get inside without anyone questioning why a low level DOTgov employee is entering a secret prison, you don't think anyone is going to wonder why someone my age is wandering the hallways?”

Cyren appears in the seat next to me with a coy smirk on her face. She crosses her arms and leans away from me as she asks, “Do you really think we can't come up with a better plan than 'walk in the front door and wander around?' When do you think you'll stop underestimating what thousands of digital intelligences are capable of?”

“Maybe, I don't know, you could fill me in on the plan. Or is it a surprise?”

She laughs as she sets her hand on my knee and says, “Okay. Okay. Just breathe.”

“I'm breathing.”

“No. You're gasping for air. You know that you're no good when you're panicking. You need to stay calm. Center yourself. Find your balance.”

She's right. Again. I close my eyes, take a deep breath through my nose and let it out through my mouth. My breaths become small and easy. My muscles relax. The grip I have on the seat loosens.

“Good,” she says, cupping my hand between hers. “Now, we analyzed the layout of the scanners and the main entrance isn't a possibility. It's manned by DOTgov security. Even with the password, they're going to ask questions... questions we don't have answers to.”

“I'm really trying to have confidence in your plan, Cyren, but this isn't-”

“Just listen. Once you're inside, the scanners aren't going to care who you are, as long as you're a part of DOTgov.”

“I'm still not hearing your plan to get me inside. The main entrance-”

“-is not the only way in,” she says with a smile. “If you must know, I actually got the idea from you.”

“How so?”

“When you hacked your avatar to appear as data marked for deletion. That was smart.”

“Thanks. But I'm not an avatar anymore and neither are those guards. We can't hack the real world.”

“No. But the mind prison is made up of multiple levels of E-Wombs designed to keep the prisoners logged-in twenty-four hours a day. That means there are waste disposal units that have to enter and exit the facility. We can hack the waste disposal units to see you as... excrement.”

The magnetic rails release a low tone that makes my ears pop as the train slows and enters the Old Japan station. I continue waiting for Cyren to laugh. The plan must be a joke. There's no way I'm getting inside a waste disposal unit.

“Yes. You are,” she says very pointedly. “There is literally no other way. The tower has no windows. Nothing goes in or out. Everything they need to survive is on site. The ventilation is pumped across miles of underground filtration tubes. Waste disposal units are the only things that enter or exit directly into the tower. We've figured out the path for Old Japan's waste disposal. This tower's waste disposal unit will carry you directly to the mind prison.”

Imagining what's inside those things makes my stomach turn. Collecting the entirety of what every tower runs down their sink or flushes down their toilet, waste disposal units are unmanned, flying plastic tubs of liquid awfulness. Even if I was lucky enough to crawl inside an empty one, it would still be filled with an odor foul enough to knock me unconscious.

“I'm sorry, but this is our only option.”

“I'd rather try to fight my way through the front door,” I say unconvincingly.

When the doors of the train slide open and the crowds of people elbow their way past each other, I'm still sitting. The NPCs urge me out of my seat and I find myself fighting my way out of the train with the rest of the bodies. I keep telling myself why I'm doing what I'm about to do. I remind myself what the end goal is. I picture all of us, all of my friends, together again. Safe. Secure. Free.

Cyren guides me through the halls and elevators until I reach the corner of the bottom floor. It's colder in the lower levels. Everything looks aged. Spots of orange rust run down the walls like a corrosive liquid. These are the floors that once housed the initial tenants, the very first citizens that signed up for a new way of life.

“Why are we here?”

“Outdated technology,” she says as she walks alongside me, her hips swaying with confidence. “It's the easiest to hack.”

I stand silently in awe of her. She smiles back at me, reading my thoughts.

“Here,” she points at a small doorway on the wall. “This is the-”

“I know what it is,” I say, remembering the waste disposal passageway I was forced to crawl through when Fantom helped me escape my own tower.

“Touch the screen,” she says, looking over my shoulder.

I wipe the dust and grime off the screen next to the small doorway and press my palm against it.

When the screen registers my father's account, Cyren winks at me and says, “Be right back,” before disappearing.

I keep my palm pressed against the screen, watching the graphical interface glitch out a few times before blinking back to life.

Cyren appears next to me again and says, “All set. Climb on in.”

The label was scratched off long ago, but when I open the hatch and release the gaseous odor, there's no mistaking the smell of sewage. I laugh at the absurdity of it all and crawl inside before I think too hard about what I'm doing. My body barely fits through the opening, but once I'm inside the foul smelling chamber, the shaft is much larger. I press my bare feet against one wall and my back against another. The walls are slippery, coated in slime and mucus. When I crawled up the shaft in my own tower, I was on a higher floor. It's worse on the bottom floor. The bodily waste of every floor above me travels through here.

“I barely made it the last time I had to crawl up one of these things.”

“Don't worry. Falling down will be a lot easier than climbing up.”

I can't argue with her logic, I guess.

“We've timed this out so that you'll be taken by a waste disposal unit that has another stop in the neighboring tower that houses the mind prison.”

“They keep it right here? Next to all the other towers?”

“Hiding in plain sight. Why would anyone think this tower was different from the prison tower?”

“Smart.”

“You know I love our conversations, but I need you to let go of the walls if you're going to catch that ride.”

With a moment of hesitation, I release the pressure and my stomach lunges into my throat as my body free falls, hurtling down the shaft into the dark abyss below me.

01100101

I drop for a few seconds, my feet paddling the open air, instinctively searching for something solid to stand on. When I strike the surface of the liquid, it's thick and gelatinous. I sink into the warm goo, keeping my nose plugged with one hand and trying to swim up to the surface with the other. I can't allow my mind to envision what I'm swimming through. The reality is too disgusting to comprehend. My feet kick through the syrup-like substance, but every movement is a struggle. The surface feels so close, yet I can't reach it. My lungs burn, unable to hold in the breath of air any longer. I release it into the pool of liquid as I hear a noise, muffled by the coagulated excrement, like a bubble being sucked through a tube. My body is pulled with the flow as the dense fluid around me is flushed out the bottom of the pool. A series of large tubes carry me along with the fecal matter until I'm distributed into a large container attached to a waste disposal unit.

My feet hit solid ground and as more of the disgusting ooze pours around me, I gasp for breath inside the metal chamber. The liquid continues to flush into the container as the surface level reaches my knees. With Cyren's mental shove, I'm able to push myself toward the tube's opening and slam the hatch shut, cutting off the flow of waste and leaving myself in complete darkness.

There is a moment of silence before I puke, my stomach expunging every last drop of vitapaste inside me. My vomit only adds to the horrific substance floating around my legs. I fall against the wall of the chamber, trying not to inhale the smell that fills the air, but my body demands more oxygen, and every time I take a breath, my stomach lurches upward.

“Shut it off,” I gasp the words, pleading with the NPCs. “Please shut it off.”

Suddenly I smell nothing. I taste nothing. The NPCs flipped a switch inside my nanomachines. It's a strange perception, the lack of those senses, like a wall in my brain that I can't push through. But right now, it's the greatest feeling in the world to no longer know what this smells like.

“I'm sorry,” Cyren says into my ear.

I don't reply. I try to wipe the sludge from my arms, but it smears across my flesh. I'm embarrassed for Cyren to see me like this. Will she ever be able to find me attractive again? Will she ever want to touch me again? Will she be able to look at me without picturing this?

“You know what I find attractive?” she asks with a whisper. “What you're willing to do to save your friends.”

I brace myself against the wall as the waste disposal unit lifts into the air. It banks to the left and right a few times, but takes a minute or two before settling onto something metal.

“When that hatch opens again, you need to move fast. Crawl out before the tube attaches to the opening.”

I position myself under the hatch and wait. I hear a grinding noise on the other side, then a series of beeps. The hatch pops open and I lunge for the exit. My arms are so weak that I'm barely able to lift myself up, but when I look out and I see the mechanical tube stretching toward the opening, threatening to flush more waste into the chamber, desperation surges through my body. I launch from the opening and collapse onto a metal landing platform underneath. The tube barely misses me, swiveling and tightening its connection with the waste disposal unit before I hear the thick fluid pumping through it. The waste disposal unit lifts off the landing, its propellers buzzing with an increasing intensity as it flies out of a large exit in the side of the building.

I wobble a bit before standing, my body wiped from the violent vomiting I experienced, but I'm finally able to scan my surroundings. An intricate system of plastic tubes runs across the massive room like a web, all leading to a giant metal sphere in the center. That sphere has one tube leading from the bottom which empties its contents every time a waste disposal unit lands on the metal base where I'm standing. There must be a sewer system like this at the bottom of every tower.

Cyren appears next to me and says, “Even with a DOTgov account, you can't go walking around covered in... that.”

She points toward a walkway that leads under the plastic tubes and toward some kind of operation center. Next to the entrance, I see a lit sign that reads: Chemical Shower. My stumbling walk turns into an all-out run, and before I know it, I'm stripping naked, jumping under the nozzle, and yanking on the chain hanging from the device. A spray of purified water washes over me, rinsing the brown sludge from my pale flesh. I scrub with a ball made of coarse wire, digging and scraping against my skin as much as I can. I'm sure the stink will stay with me for days, but I can't smell it and I feel clean. That's what matters. When I let the chain go, I notice Cyren standing to the side, staring at my dripping wet, naked body with a smirk curling her black lips. I instinctively cover myself and her smirk bursts into a laugh.

“What's so funny?” I shout.

“A little late for modesty, isn't it?”

“This body isn't... my avatar.”

She rolls her eyes and says, “I live inside your head. The things I've seen you think about? Quite a bit more embarrassing than your nudity.”

She points to the wall behind me where I find a shelf of janitorial uniforms. They're made of the same paper-like material that our citizen clothing is made from, but with an extra thickness to it. Like it's been made with a triple-ply layer for protection.

“That will help you blend in, but you're going to need that service cart too.”

I see a push cart full of janitorial supplies and once I'm suited up, I get behind the cart and make my way through the exit into a chamber full of machinery being run by a dozen men and women all wearing the same uniform as me. I keep my head down and no one takes notice of me. There's so much anxiety pumping through my veins that I have to mentally force my feet not to break into a run.

“Act normal,” Cyren says in a calming tone.

“I've never been good at that,” I mumble as I push a button to summon an elevator.

Once I push the cart inside and the doors close, I let out a breath and try to relax, but when I notice the account scanner mounted in the corner of the ceiling, I straighten back up, stiff as a board. The NPCs lead me through the facility, telling me which floor to ride the elevator to, which hallway to push the cart down once I arrive on the correct floor, and which doors to go through. I pass by more employees of the prison, but no one makes eye contact. Everyone is lost in their own job, flipping through document screens or repairing network wires. The guards appear bored, taking no notice of yet another janitor walking past. It feels too easy, until I remind myself what I did to get inside.

“Here,” Cyren says. “This is it.”

I stop at the end of the hall and see a set of double doors labeled: Prisoner Storage #0804. A guard stands on either side, wearing the usual navy blue armor and mirrored shield over their faces.

“Our friends are on the other side of those doors,” Cyren says and I can hear the excitement in her voice. She must sense my hesitation because she assures me, “Don't worry. We'll tell you exactly what to say.”

When I push the cart toward the guards, one of them is ready with his screen to check my account, but he stops to lift his visor and cover his nose.

“Looks like there's a clog in one of the disposal hoses,” I explain to him, just like the NPCs are telling me. “I'm supposed to get in there and clear it out before it causes a biological backup. Nasty way for someone to die, even a cyberterrorist.”

The guard sneers with disgust and hooks his thumb toward the door as he says, “Just move before I have to smell you anymore.”

I hear the guards laughing with each other as I pass through the doors, but I'm smiling to myself. I realize then that my stench is part of my disguise and I wonder how much of this the NPCs planned.

I push the cart into a chamber that scans my body to make sure I'm not bringing any contraband into the room, then a second set of doors slides open. When I step into the prisoner storage room, the sight strikes fear into my chest. So much so that I unconsciously back step, my body wanting to leave the room as fast as I can. But when my back hits the doors, I stand firm and push myself forward.

Pillars of transparent tubes rise into the air like towers, each one a stack of coffin-like chambers. The bodies of hundreds of hackers and cyberterrorists lie strapped inside, fully connected to feeding and waste disposal tubes. These are E-Wombs, but like none I have ever seen. Harsh and utilitarian, built to contain the body and nothing else. Each mind is lost in a deprivation of stimuli. Conscious, yet feeling nothing.

I scan the faces, wondering which ones are the friends I know inside NextWorld. Which of these bodies house the minds that control those avatars I've grown to know so well?

A single screen rises from the floor in the center of the room and blinks to life when it detects my presence. I hurry to it and press my palm against the screen. When my nanomachines interface with the display, the menu on the screen glitches as Cyren and the NPCs get to work hacking through the system. My heart races, anticipating the look on my friends faces when they're released from their mental confinement and see me waiting to greet them.

When the menu stops glitching, I hear Cyren in my ear, her voice quiet and weak. “This isn't going to work.”

“What are you talking about?” I shriek, slapping my hand against the screen again. “Get them out.”

“The mind prison is a virtual world. We can't physically disconnect them, and they were logged-in for a life sentence. The system doesn't allow a log-out without global presidential authorization.”

“Just do it!” I slap the screen again, trying to physically force them to interface with the menu.

She speaks slowly and calmly, trying to help me reach the painful truth. “Arkade... we can't duplicate Global President Chang's account. The only other way they'd be logged-out is if the mind prison was completely deleted from the system, and we don't have that kind of control from this menu. It isn't-”

She stops talking as the plan in my head forms. She can hear me thinking. They all can. They know what I'm about to do.

“You don't even know if that will work.”

“Do you have a better plan?”

I can tell that she hates her own silence, as she tries to force the NPCs to come up with anything else.

“We're running out of time. Seal the doors. Lock this place down and ready one of these E-Wombs.” I gently press the palm of my hand against the menu and announce, “I'm going in.”

01100110

“We can log you in for data analyzation, but your access will be limited,” Cyren explains as I step into an empty E-Womb and the transparent glass closes around me. “This mode of entry is meant for questioning prisoners.”

I close my eyes and say, “Log-in.”

A point of light grows from the center of my vision, rocketing toward me until it fills my field of view. My avatar stands in a white box with a single red doorway in front of me.

I look down and see my father's hands. It's a strange sensation, being in someone else's avatar, but being in my father's avatar is beyond abnormal.

I gesture in the air to open my menu screen and see the multiple options that are given to me as a data analyst. One screen is labeled: Information Gathering, but when I open it, I see a list of software meant to break the will of prisoners. Pain amplifiers, phobia simulators, sensory overloaders and deprivers. It's a horrifying list and I get lost in my own imagination, thinking of my friends being exposed to this virtual torture chamber.

Cyren appears next to me, placing her hand on my shoulder to bring me back to the present. “You should be able to select which prisoner you'd like to summon.”

When I scroll to the first screen, a list of names drops down from the top. I swipe my hand down the list until I see Fantom's name, hovering over it for a few seconds of hesitation. I want her here. I want her help. I need her competence. Her confidence. But right now, I know there's nothing either of us can do as long as this mind prison still exists. I swipe harder on the list and scroll to the bottom until I see the name I'm looking for.

Worlok.

“You're sure about this?”

“It's the only idea I have.”

“Maybe we don't need him. The NPCs and I could try to-”

“How much time do we have before this password expires? Twenty? Thirty minutes? Do you think you could whip up a virus in that amount of time that you would be positive could finish the job?”

She pauses. “No.”

I tap on Worlok's name and after the screen asks me if I'm sure, he instantly materializes in front of me. His faceless avatar jerks awake, spinning around like he's disoriented by his surroundings. He looks the same, the graphics of his avatar unchanged. He's still faceless. He still has long white hair that matches his tuxedo, the only color being his red bow-tie. Yet something is different. At one time, his relaxed confidence infuriated me, but now his stance is slouched and weak. He doesn't look at me with any smugness or superiority, instead he cowers.

“No!” he growls. “Not again! I can't... I won't! I told you everything I know.”

“Worlok!” I shout, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him. “It's me! It's Arkade!”

He tries to pull away from me, but he's powerless.

“The player-vs-player rules in here are one-sided,” Cyren explains. “You can do whatever you want to him, but he can't do anything against you.”

“You're terrible at this, you know that?” Worlok says with a nervous laugh. “If you're going to lie, you could at least put some effort into it. Maybe design an avatar that looks a little something like Arkade? A cowboy at least. Not this crusty old politician-type.”

“Listen to me, Worlok. It really is me. I'm using my father's avatar and-”

“I already gave you everything you need to find the rest of the hackers, but I've told you a thousand times, I don't know Arkade. If you're trying to find information on him, you need to ask Fantom. Or Xen. They're his real friends. I was doing a job. Getting paid. Nothing else.”

I'm a little taken aback by how quickly he's willing to turn on Fantom and Xen, but I don't have time to dwell.

“I don't want information. I want your virus.”

There's a pause as he tilts his head to the side. I let go of his shoulders and he takes a few steps away from me.

“What are you talking about? What virus?”

“The worm virus. The thing that deleted DangerWar 2. You won't be able to access your inventory, data is cut off between here and NextWorld, but you should be able to write the code again and-”

“What is this?” he asks, looking around the room. “Is this some kind of joke? Some psychological trick that's supposed to twist my emotions or-”

As he keeps rambling his conspiratorial theories, Cyren feels me losing my patience and whispers in my ear, “Are you sure you trust him?”

“No. I'm not. But right now, I have to.”

She looks into my eyes, considering for herself if she's willing to follow me to the end of this plan, but finally lets out a sigh and says, “He doesn't need to believe you. In here, we can force him to switch accounts.”

I reach out and grab the lapel of Worlok's tuxedo. His avatar freezes again as Cyren and the NPCs get to work. It only takes a few moments. There are no firewalls on his account anymore, no hacker tricks to keep us out. With a blink of darkness, I'm suddenly looking out from the eyes of his avatar.

He stumbles backward, looking down at his hands, the hands of my father's avatar, mumbling to himself, “What... how...”

“I told you this is for real. Now, we might not have much time. I need you to get to work. I need you to replicate your worm virus and delete this place. All of it.”

He looks up at me as the truth dawns across his face. “You're... really him?”

I shout at him, “Worlok, we don't have time for this! You need to get coding. Now. It's our only hope of escaping this place. Everyone is counting on you.”

He gestures in the air, opening a menu that I can't see. “There's a log-out option. I could-”

“I told you. We shouldn't have trusted him.”

Cyren's analysis of people is usually flawless, but I still hold out hope for Worlok.

“Could you actually leave the rest of us in this place? After what they've done to you?”

He hesitates for far too long.

“Fine,” I say, disappointed that he needs convincing. “But if you log-out, how would you get out of the tower that houses this mind prison? Do you have a plan for that?”

He doesn't react. He just keeps swiping through menus, searching his available options.

Eventually he lets out a defeated sigh and says, “Whatever. So you want me to delete this place?”

“The worm virus. Do you think you can code another one? Replicate what you did before?”

He shrugs his shoulders. That annoying, disconnected confidence of his is back in all its glory.

“Sure,” he mumbles, sitting down cross-legged and opening a coding screen in front of him.

“We need to be fast about this. We've got...” Cyren pops a timer up in the corner of my view. “...ten minutes.”

He doesn't respond. His fingers dance across the screen, inputting letters and numbers, twisting 3D representations of mathematical computations.

I lean against the far wall and watch him work. I try not to be impressed, but without Cyren and the NPCs doing the heavy lifting, I could never be as good as him. It's annoying.

“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?”

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 time

“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 the 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.

“Mister! Mister!” he yells out. “Can you help me? I noticed that sword of yours and you look like you know how to handle it. My mother and I were down by the stream washing clothes when a group of bandits kidnapped her. Can you follow their trail back to their camp and-”

I shove the kid away and look out over the crowd, trying to find the avatars of Xen and Fantom. Cyren appears next to me, peering down at the crying boy with a sadness I rarely see on her face.

“Why did you ignore this boy's plea for assistance?” she asks, bending down to look at him closer.

“It's a first Level quest. He'll always be here if I want to do it later.”

She tilts her head, still studying the boy's face. “He's programmed to cry and beg for help until his mother is saved?”

I shrug my shoulders. “Yeah. Then the bandits will respawn after a few minutes and she'll be taken again so another player can complete the quest.”

Her gaze spins toward me. Her eyes are huge. “That's sick! How could anyone program a life like that for someone.”

“It's just a-”

I was going to say game. It's just a game. I stop myself in time, but she hears my thoughts anyway. I can see the pain it causes her to hear me think something like that. Her gaze falls to the gravel and stone we're standing upon.

I touch her shoulder with my gloved hand and say, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. You know that's not how I feel. I'm trying to explain how others see this world. How they view NPCs that aren't... that aren't like you.”

She closes her eyes, refusing what I'm saying. “Every digital intelligence deserves more than... this. This life... this prison of their programming.” She stands up and I see her body go rigid, her muscles flexing with defiance. “We need to find Fantom.”

I choose not to speak another word. Instead, I search the faces of the Player-Characters that pass by, each one of varying Levels. Wizards with servant golems made of iron. Barbarians with cloaks made from the hides of whatever creature they recently killed. Rogues and thieves sneaking by, their faces covered by the shadows of their black hoods.

After a few moments of searching the densely-populated crowd, the door behind us opens. Fantom steps out wearing ratty robes and carrying the crooked limb of a fallen tree.

“Took you long enough,” I say with a smirk.

“Where's Xen?” she asks, ignoring my quip.

“Taking longer than you, I expect.”

She hikes up her robe so that it doesn't drag in the dirt and walks over to a large stone sitting alongside the roadway. She plops down on it and opens a menu screen in front of her.

“This game actually looks fun, yo.”

“That's not why we're here.”

She looks up at me and smiles. “Look who got serious all of a sudden.”

“I'm just saying, I've been waiting eight months for this-”

“Which means a few more minutes doesn't matter, yo. You used to like games, remember?”

“I still do. And if we succeed in this, maybe I won't have so many responsibilities and actually have time to play one again.”

She laughs to herself.

“What's so funny?”

“You. You sound like... an adult, yo.”

Somehow this offends me, though Cyren is in my mind assuring me Fantom doesn't mean it that way. She's convinced that Fantom actually means it as a compliment. Fantom sees my frustration, closes her menu screen, stands up from her stone seat, and walks closer to me.

“I meant that it's nice to hear that you've found somethin' more important than yourself. You've got priorities, yo. That's a good thing.”

I glance over at Cyren who's smiling back at me.

I speak quietly when I say, “I have people I love.” I pause and consider something before I say, “But you're right. I do love them more than myself.”

Fantom slaps me on the shoulder and says, “That's how you know it's real, yo.”

There's a moment when the feelings in my heart coincide with the thoughts in my brain, logic and emotion finding an equilibrium. I don't have enough time to truly explore it before I hear Grael call out from behind me.

His avatar looks nearly the same, with his red dreadlocks hanging from his black thief's hood. His tattooed arms are showing from his sleeveless leather armor. Throwing daggers are strapped to his chest.

“It worked?” he says, the befuddled smile on his face making him look goofy as he jogs up to us. He glances at Fantom and asks, “Is this her?”

“It's me, yo.”

He looks back and forth at us as he talks, trying to catch up to what's happening. “Have you uploaded the NPCs? Have you-”

“Not yet,” I say, holding up my hand to tell him to slow down. “We're waiting for Xen.”

Fantom points toward something behind me and I turn around. A white stallion gallops toward us, carrying a knight wearing a full suit of golden armor. The sun gleams off the chest plate. A massive two-handed sword is strapped to his back and he's waving at us, the gauntlet strapped to his arm glowing with some kind of mystical energy.

“Who...?” is all I manage to ask when the knight climbs out of the saddle, petting the creature's mane a few times before lifting the face plate on his helmet to reveal Xen's new avatar smiling back at us.

“I was able to recover my old character and reset it to this account. Isn't that awesome?”

“You've played this game before?” Fantom asks.

“Raev loves role-playing games. Remember? She was the one who talked me into playing. I never really enjoyed it. Too much like DangerWar 2 for me to ever be comfortable. But I kind of forced myself to do it. For her. I think she was trying to get me to face my fears or something. I don't know.”

I glance down at my ragged clothing and short, rusted sword, feeling a sense of inadequacy next to Xen's high Level character. Everything is backward.

“He's your friend. Be happy for him, not sad for yourself.”

I take a deep breath and follow Cyren's advice.

“You look awesome,” I say. “That armor is impressive.”

“Thanks!” he says. “I found it in a treasure chest when we were fighting the Dark Mage of Xendar in his tower over in the realm of-”

“Sorry...” Fantom says as she swipes through a few menus and produces the pair of scissors that represents her cut and paste program. “I don't mean to interrupt story time, but... we gonna do this or what?”

I smile at Cyren with the rising anticipation of thousands of NPCs inside me. My palms grow sweaty and my heart races, empathizing with their excitement.

“We're ready,” I say.

Fantom grips the scissors in one hand, takes two steps toward me, and stabs them into my forehead.

01101100

The group stares at me with uncomfortable looks of worry, watching my face twitch and my arms spasm as Fantom gestures her way through different menus in front of her.

It's like a vacuum that's sucking the congestion from my sinuses, but it's clearing my brain instead. As each bit of data is removed from my nanomachines, my thoughts move slower. I'm losing the NPCs. Their speed. Their calculations. Their instant problem solving.

But that's not all I'm losing.

As my mind empties, and Cyren's voice trails off, I'm completely disconnected from her. It's a sensation I wasn't expecting. A cross between physical separation and emotional distance. It reminds me of how I felt toward other people before meeting the circle of friends I now trust. It's an uncomfortable flashback of who I used to be, and something that I never thought would be associated with Cyren. Her ability to read my mind, know my thoughts without me having to find the words to explain... My sense of loss is infinite.

Before I get completely turned around in my social awkwardness, Fantom yanks the scissors from my head and says, “Got'em.”

Xen rushes to my side as my avatar falters, threatening to collapse under the release of stress. He wraps one of his armored arms around me and lifts me up until the strength in my legs returns.

Fantom takes no notice of this, kneeling onto the ground and slamming the scissors into the gravel in order to pierce the game world. Her other hand selects a few options from her menu screen and the scissors glow.

When the first NPC appears, it sounds like a pop of air, yet more viscous, like a bubble underwater. Then the second, third, and so on, until the popping noises are so rapid, you can't tell them apart. Civilian NPCs and Level Zeros fill the marketplace, bumping into the fantasy villagers and confused Player-Characters that are wandering between shops. When everyone is shoulder-to-shoulder, they start appearing in the alleyways and side streets, soon trailing out of the city and into the farm fields on the other side of the stone walls.

In less than a minute, we've filled the game with thousands of NPCs. All of them have a disoriented look on their face as they peer around at the world. Soon that confusion moves to their bodies, the avatars that they haven't seen for months. When they collect their thoughts, a moment of acknowledgment filters through the air as they recognize friends and lovers, locating each other before clasping hands and embracing. Cheers are shouted into the air. Each of them take turns hugging me and Fantom, thanking us through tears of joy.

It's more than a little awkward. At first, I'm not sure what to say. I mumble through “You're welcome” and “No problem” before I realize they don't require me to say anything. In their minds, I've done enough. Game over. We won.

One by one they express their gratitude until there's only one left. The crowd of NPCs parts like a curtain, revealing Cyren, patiently waiting for her turn. She's already smiling, but when our eyes lock, her face beams with a happiness I'm not sure I've ever seen on anyone before. She rushes toward me and by the time I've taken a single step toward her, she's slamming into me, throwing her arms around me and smashing her lips into mine.

She's been in my mind for months, able to manipulate my nanomachines into seeing her and feeling her, and I know that right now, the E-Womb is doing the exact same thing. These are all digital simulations, yet somehow, right now, she has never felt more real.

“I love you,” she mumbles through our pressed lips.

We laugh at the awkwardness of speaking while kissing, and I try to say, “I love you, too,” as she kisses me harder.

I can't stop kissing her, falling deeper into that tiny space between us. We become so lost in each other that we forget about our surroundings and the changes we've made to a game world full of Player-Characters.

A PC nearby shouts at his companion, “What is going on? Is this some kind of world event?”

“I don't think so,” the other PC says, leaning in close to one of the civilian NPCs from DangerWar 2. “These things don't look right.”

“This one has a gun,” another PC calls out, poking the chest of one of the Level Zeros that's carrying an assault rifle.

“Do you think it's a glitch?”

The Level Zero puffs up his chest and says, “We most certainly are not a glitch.”

A warrior PC draws his sword. “Can we attack them? Maybe they're worth experience points,” he wonders aloud before swinging his blade across a civilian NPC's body, cutting it in half.

The crowd of NPCs all shriek in terror. Two Level Zeros tackle the warrior PC to the ground, trying to wrestle his weapon away from him. Three more PCs draw their weapons and summon magic spells, ready for battle. They don't attack right away and I think for a moment there will be a standoff, some kind of pause where I can explain things, organize the group so that we can find a place of safety in this world. But before I can speak a single word, everything goes wrong.

An arrow flies through the air, striking a Level Zero that's drawing a pistol from his leather jacket. When his body hits the ground, his finger jerks and pulls the trigger of his gun. With a single gunshot, chaos erupts from every direction. Swarms of bullets fly, tearing through PCs like they're made of paper. Swords are swung, chopping down NPCs and leaving them bleeding to death on the ground. Explosions rock the foundations of the medieval shops. Magic lightning arcs between avatars, causing mystical seizures until the lifeless bodies crumple onto the floor.

Cyren dodges to the left as a barbarian lunges at her with a spear. The tip barely skims her left shoulder, but it's enough to draw blood. Her right hand snatches the end of the spear and she rips it from the barbarian's hands. Twirling the long staff around, she plunges the tip into the barbarian's chest. The barbarian stumbles backward, still breathing. Without hesitating, she leaps into the air and drops down onto him, pummeling his face with her fists. It barely does any damage.

I draw my sword, ready to join the defense of those I've freed, but Cyren grabs my wrist.

“We're still grouped with you. In here, you're Level 1. That means we are too.” She yanks on my arm and screams as loud as she can, over the heads of the battling NPCs, “Everybody run!”

01101101

We race out of the village and across the surrounding farm fields, dodging attackers as we flee. The PCs chase us for a while, killing off the NPCs that trail behind. Anyone who isn't fast enough to keep up is picked off until we reach the edge of a nearby forest. Once inside the darkness that the canopy of trees provides, we split up and find anywhere where we can hide. After an hour or so of searching, the PCs give up and either return to their quests or log-out.

Cyren crouches down next to me, hiding under a small ledge created by the enormous roots of a tree. I'm panting, trying to catch my breath. She gently presses the palm of her hand against my chest to help calm me and peeks over the top of the ledge.

“I think they're all gone,” she whispers.

I'm about to respond when I see multiple pairs of glowing eyes peering at us from the bushes. I nudge her side with my elbow and motion toward the danger. She cracks her knuckles and I draw my sword as we hear a growling from the same direction. A pack of wolves steps out from the foliage, spreading out to flank us.

“Low Level beasts,” I say, readying my blade. “This shouldn't be a problem.”

“No,” she says. “We run.”

I glance at her with confusion, but when she takes off into the forest, I don't hesitate to follow her. The wolves chase us for a while, but soon their programming tells them to return to their spawn point and wait for the next player to stumble upon them.

“What are we doing?” I call out to her when she stops to lean against a tree.

“We need to find somewhere safe. Somewhere we can get everyone organized.”

“No. I mean, why didn't we attack those things? I could use the experience points and-”

She closes her eyes and her head drops a bit. “There's been enough killing today.”

I step closer to her and wrap my fingers around the back of her neck, pulling her to me. She rests her forehead against my chest. I'm about to speak, to tell her how sorry I am, but when she starts to cry, I let her have a moment. There, in the stillness of the forest, the woman I love weeps. And I can't help thinking that it's my fault.

“We don't have a respawn point in this world.” The words come out of her like a whimper, a desperate plea to understand the horror of this reality. “Why would those PCs murder them like that? They didn't know what we were... yet their first instinct was to attack us.”

“I told you before, it's a game to them. NPCs, monsters, whatever... they're all just graphics. No different from the trees around us or-”

Her fist hits my chest, but there's no power behind it. Her pain and misery has weakened her so much that I'm afraid she's near the point of surrender.

“But we are different.”

“I know.” I run my fingers through her short blond hair and hug her tighter. “But until they know that... you're all in danger.”

Cyren lurches away from me when we hear leaves rustling and footsteps drawing closer. She wipes the tears from her eyes as Fantom, Xen, and Grael step around a cluster of trees.

“Cyren... I'm so sorry,” Xen says, hurrying over to her to hug her.

“We need a plan,” Fantom says, her hands glowing with a low Level spell.

“We need to find somewhere to hide,” Grael says, “before anyone else gets hurt.”

“Can't the NPCs log-out from this game?” Xen asks, looking from one of us to the next for an answer.

“They aren't players, yo,” Fantom explains. “I cut them from DangerWar 2 in one large bundle, so that's how I had to paste them. But now that we have more time, I can cut and paste them into NextWorld in smaller groups so that we don't draw too much attention.”

“Sounds good,” I say, looking at Cyren for agreement.

She doesn't make eye contact. Instead, she opens a screen in front of her and says, “I'll send our coordinates to everyone and invite them in groups to meet us here.”

Her voice sounds cold. I can tell she's keeping her emotions at a distance. Right now, it's too dangerous for her to feel anything.

“Tell them to find somewhere to hide until then,” Grael says. “Climb a tree. Hide in a bush. Get under a rock. Anything they can do to remain unseen. Don't attack any monsters and especially don't attack any players. No matter what their Level.”

I speak without thinking, airing my thoughts out loud. “They were supposed to be safe where we pasted them. I figured... in the starting village... nothing could attack them. I should have read the rules. I should have prepared more. I was too excited. I was too-”

“It's not your fault,” Xen says, then looks around to everyone else and asks, “Right?”

“Of course not,” Fantom says. “The only people at fault here are those stupid players that didn't have anythin' better to do than destroy things.”

Cyren's fists clench and I see the muscles in her arms flex into tight knots. “Is this how it is in every game? Do all PCs have such little respect for Digital-Characters?”

“It's not just games,” Xen says. “It's all of NextWorld. NPCs aren't... valued.”

“I was laughed at when I tried to explain what I created,” Grael says. “No one wants a smart NPC. They want fodder. They want drones. They want calculators that do what they're told. Free-thinking? Most PCs aren't free-thinking. They do what DOTgov tells them to do so they can keep on swallowing vitapaste and watching the newest video-cast.”

Cyren's muscles relax. She leans back against a tree and slides down the trunk until she's sitting on the ground. I kneel down next to her and put my hand on her knee.

“There are good people, too,” Xen says with a casual smile that I would be unable to give her. “People that are smart and caring and-”

“I know.” She places her hand atop mine and glances around at all of us with a smile. “I've met some of them already.”

“And NextWorld does have a lot to offer,” Xen adds. “Think of all the things you'll be able to learn once you can access the search engines and databases of knowledge.”

“Maybe someday we'll be able to show them how special you are,” I say. “Maybe someday people will understand how important your A.I. actually is.”

“Maybe,” Cyren says.

Grael steps up so that he's standing directly in front of her and with unwavering confidence he says, “Trust me when I say this... we are going to do everything we can to not only protect you, all of you, but to make sure you're able to continue growing and evolving.” He crouches down to her level and looks her in the eyes. “Now that we've got you back, we're never letting them take you away.”

“I appreciate that,” Cyren says. “I do. But without a way to protect ourselves, I can't stop worrying about what's going to happen to us out there... in NextWorld.”

01101110

One week later and I'm sitting in a restaurant in DOTsoc that's designed to sit on the top of a giant candle. The floor is made of melted red wax and an enormous flame burns in the center of the room. It all seems very pretentious to me, but it was high on the DOTsoc date night ratings, and I wanted to impress Cyren on her first visit to the domain.

Like all the Level Zeros, she has to be grouped with a Player-Character in order to travel between domains. The rest of the civilian NPCs rely on the hackers in Sektor to cut and paste them when they want to travel.

I peer across the table at her avatar, still covered in metal buckles and leather straps, as I hang my cowboy hat on the back of one of the unused chairs and slick my hair back, happy to be walking around in an avatar that feels like me again. We feel like us again.

I tap my glass of wine against Cyren's glass and say, “I want to make a toast... to us.” Her eyelashes flutter a few times as she awaits my words. “Because there is nothing better in this world... or any world.”

She smiles and says, “You are too sweet,” before she takes a sip. “Mmm. This is good.”

“Can you actually... taste it?”

“After spending so much time in your nanomachines, I understand senses a lot more than I used to... but no. I don't actually taste the wine. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the code. I can see what the designer of this wine was trying to accomplish with the algorithm. The complexity and uniqueness isn't lost on me.”

“I'm glad. I really want you to have a good time.”

She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “We're together. Of course I'm having a good time.”

A waiter rises out of the floor next to our table, his avatar appearing to be made from the same red wax. “Have the two of you made a decision on what you would care for this evening?”

I'm about to order when a group of teenagers start laughing a few tables away. One of the boys is trying to make his date laugh by pushing the waiter closer to the center flame. When he lets go, half of the waiter's head is melted into his shoulder.

Cyren starts to stand up, but I reach across the table and grab her hand.

“They're torturing that waiter,” she says. “We can't just-”

“What we can't do is draw attention to ourselves. If you start something in a non-pvp site, you're going to raise more than a few alerts. And if they try to access your nanomachines and don't find any, they'll figure out that you're an NPC.”

She sits back down in her chair, her shoulders drooping. “I wish you wouldn't call us that.”

My face scrunches up with confusion. “Call you what?”

“NPC. Non-Player-Character. It's insulting.”

I let out a breath, hoping words will follow it, but I can't find any. I fumble for a few moments in an awkward silence before I ask the waiter for a few more minutes. He melts back into the floor.

“I'm sorry... I didn't know that bothered you. I don't know how... I mean, should I say A.I. or...?”

“Artificial Intelligence? No. That's just as insulting. We're real. Especially in here, in NextWorld, we're as real as you. Whether we're self-aware or intelligent or just poorly-coded monsters... shouldn't we all exist in this world as equals?”

I set my hands in my lap and look down at my empty plate, unable to make eye contact when I ask, “Are we having a fight?”

She laughs, taking me completely off guard. “This is only a fight if you disagree with me, but after spending so much time in your head, I'm pretty sure I know that you agree with everything I'm saying.”

“But you said I insulted you and-”

“No. I didn't mean it like that. And I know you didn't mean to say something insulting. That's why I'm letting you know. Those words are just... old. Out of date.”

I take a sip of wine, trying to give myself pause to think of what to say. “So you want to be called a PC like everyone else?”

She laughs again and holds up both of her hands. “I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you. It's just... I don't want to be like everyone else. The Level Zeros and civilians that Grael created... we know we're different, and we're proud of that. If you have to call us something, then 'Digital-Character' is fine. Or DC.”

I actually understand what she's going through more than I could explain out loud. Trying to find herself, her place in this world, is something I can relate to. It's something I've spent a lifetime doing. And when I thought I found it, it was taken away from me and I was forced to find it again.

Cyren glances back at the table of teenagers when the boy laughs again. He's sticking silverware into the waiter's wax avatar.

“We have to do something.”

“I'm sorry, Cyren, but we can't help him. It's too dangerous.”

“I'm not just talking about him.” Her fingers wrap around the glass of wine so tightly that I'm afraid it will shatter. “I'm talking about all of them.”

“All of them? You mean all the... the Digital-Characters?”

“They deserve more than this.”

I look over at the waiter, half-melted and impaled with silverware, a blank look on his face as he continues to ask the teenagers if they need anything else. His programming is oblivious to the cruelty. Like a child, too innocent to understand evil.

“I can't watch this anymore,” she says and stands up from the table.

A screen appears in front of me, asking me if I'd like to leave the site. I glance at Cyren one last time, wishing there was a way to salvage the night, but when the teenagers start carving off pieces of wax from the waiter's arm, I see Cyren cry. I grab my hat off the back of the chair and punch the “YES” button.

The candle restaurant drops away and I'm standing on the DOTsoc street corner with Cyren, watching the traffic zip past us. Music pounds through the walls of a nearby dance club. A group of PCs stumble past, drunk on inebriation apps. I look at Cyren, the colors of the fireworks bursting in the sky reflecting in the tears on her cheek. I wipe them away with my thumb and pull her closer. We stand there, amid the deafening noise and frivolity, and we find calm between us.

“Let's get out of here,” I whisper.

“Where should we go?” she says, for my sake summoning something that looks a little like a smile.

“Anywhere you want. We have all of NextWorld to explore.”

She looks across the street and sees a line of club goers waiting to be let in, yelling at the NPC bouncer that's guarding the door. Then she peers down the street, studying the flashing signs for all the different sites.

After a few moments of consideration, she looks at me and says, “I just accessed every location description in DOTsoc.”

“You can do that?”

She speaks with a nonchalance about her abilities. “Every Digital-Character is connected to the network that binds NextWorld together. Information flows through us like any other data.”

“And did you find something that sounded fun?”

Another group of drunken PCs wobble toward us, this time with no acknowledgment of us being in their path. When they stumble into us, multiple screens pop-up warning of PvP infractions. They throw out insults and curse words as they barely manage to make their way down the street.

When we can no longer hear the barrage of trash from their mouths, Cyren says, “I miss our friends.”

I smile and say, “Then let's go find them.”

I open my inventory and select a vehicle. A metallic horse appears next to us on the street. It rears up on its hind legs and whinnies. When its steel hooves clop back down onto the pavement, it blows out steam from its nostrils. We both climb into the saddle and when I dig my heels against the armored rib cage, robotic wings spring from the horses sides, lifting us into the air. With a yank on the reins, the flying horse banks to the left, toward DOTgod.

01101111

After a quick search of my friends list, I find the site where Xen is spending his evening. It's designed like a temple that has a rather tranquil effect I didn't realize I needed after DOTsoc. Water trickles down rocks into a small pond filled with koi fish. Bamboo wind chimes click against each other in the gentlest of breezes. A low pitched chant can be heard in the distance, vibrating the air with an almost massaging effect.

As we walk up the stone pathway and reach the temple doors, Cyren pushes them open, revealing an amazing interior of lavish gold decorations and an intricate mural depicting a vast mandala painted across every surface. In the center of the room, Xen sits perfectly still, perfectly quiet. He's also designed his avatar to look more like his old self: A young, bald monk wearing an orange robe wrapped around him.

I hate to interrupt, but a pop-up screen opens in front of him, alerting him to our entry. He blows out the lantern sitting on the floor in front of him and stands up in a single, graceful motion. He bows to the center of the mandala and turns toward us with a look on his face that is neither sad, nor happy. I would say it matched the tranquility of the scene, but there's something missing. He looks vacant. Muted.

“Where's Raev?” Cyren asks as we meet each other halfway across the temple.

His head bows like he's trying to hold something back. “She was uncomfortable meeting with me.”

“Did you use the secure line we created for you?” Cyren asks. “There shouldn't be anything to worry about. If we blocked her nanomachines from DOTgov they wouldn't be able to listen to your conversation or know she was doing anything... illegal.”

“She didn't care about any of that.”

I glance at Cyren, who flashes me a worried look.

“What's wrong?” I ask bluntly.

“She...” He hides his face from us, but I see no tears, just a concerted effort to hold back a very real pain.

“Xen...” Cyren says his name softly and reaches out to hold his hand. “It's okay.”

He shakes his head in defiance of Cyren's comforting words. “She disagrees with my choice to leave the mind prison.”

Cyren says, “I knew she had hesitations-”

“They were more than hesitations,” I say, correcting her, but she flashes me an angry look and I duck my head between my shoulders.

“-but I thought she would understand why we did it once she actually saw you,” Cyren continues. “Once she realized how good it is to see you without anyone watching. In true privacy. And to know that you wouldn't have to suffer anymore.”

“She thinks that I'm risking... everything. My relationship with her. My sobriety. My religion. Everything.”

“No!”

The word comes out louder than I expect, bouncing off the walls of the empty temple and ricocheting back toward us. It startles both Cyren and Xen, but I don't back down.

“The real risk would have been leaving you in there. What kind of life is that? How are you supposed to accept something like that? I refuse the idea that freeing you from that place was somehow wrong.”

“She's just worried about me. I have to hope that she'll come around... eventually.”

There's a long pause as we all search for the next thing to say. But none of us know what words of wisdom to share, or hopeful attitude to offer. Ever since I freed my friends and re-entered NextWorld, it's felt a little darker. A little less like home.

“This temple is beautiful,” Cyren says, thankfully changing the subject.

“Thank you,” Xen says, a slight hint of a smile crossing his lips when he glances around the room. “I designed it a long time ago. When I was still practicing Omniversalism.”

“But you consider yourself a Metaversalist now?”

Xen surprises me when he shrugs his shoulders and says, “I'm not sure.”

“What does that mean?” I blurt out. “You basically founded that religion. How could you not be sure of your beliefs anymore?”

He lets out a sigh and sits down on the floor, folding his legs underneath him. Cyren does the same, which makes me feel awkward for not seeing the social queue to join him.

He clears his throat and says, “The real difference between Omni and Meta in the versalism denomination are the lessons. Seven hundred and seventy-seven lessons became ten thousand through the influence of corporate donors and political figures.”

He runs his fingers across his bald head and I can see the stress he's holding in his mind.

“This was obviously an issue for me, wanting to hone those lessons down to an honest truth. I've always believed that there is something that connects us all, a path from one soul to another. And I believed that those lessons would open my eyes... and reveal that path to me.”

“But now... you're questioning that?” Cyren asks.

Xen considers her question for a moment before he says softly, “I'm questioning a lot of things.”

My skepticism gets the better of me and I say, “Xen, I've known you for a long time. You've never doubted your faith.”

Xen perks up, his eyebrows raising. “And I still don't! This has nothing to do with faith. I believe in the soul that resides in all of us.” He turns to Cyren and says, “Even you. There is something divine in every intelligence. What I'm questioning is our understanding of it. The lessons. The rules. The definitions that say: This is how it is. For sure. No need to look any further.”

“I've been accessing the data available in DOTgod ever since we entered the domain,” Cyren says, “and I have to say, there's a huge discrepancy among the different religions and philosophies when it comes to the rules and guidelines for life. There are a few overlapping ideas, but beyond that, there is something that connects them all. That belief in the soul or mind or whatever term they use. A belief in the self.”

“And that's what I want to pursue,” Xen says. “I want to keep learning, unhindered by an arrogance or pridefulness that comes from believing I have it all figured out because I have a set of rules and doctrines that tell me what the truth is. Maybe religion isn't something you should just learn about and settle into. Maybe it's about the journey, the lifelong pursuit of the truth. Or maybe I'm wrong about this too. But I feel much better acknowledging that I don't know.”

He closes his eyes for a moment as he centers himself, then opens them and smiles at the both of us.

“That lack of knowledge, that very real fallibility, will not stop me from seeking a place that is as close to the truth as I can find.”

I smile back at him, and with a small chuckle I have to admit, “I think this may be the first time you've talked about your faith where I actually understand what you're saying.”

He laughs, accepting my words in a way that I've never seen from him before. He looks more open. More flexible.

“I would like to help you,” Cyren says.

I spin my head toward her, surprised at her interest. “You do?”

“I find it... interesting. If there truly is a connection between Digital-Characters and Player-Characters, then that is something I would like to know more about.” She turns her attention back to Xen and says, “I think I could be of assistance. My ability to cross reference the information in DOTgod, as well as other domains, could prove useful.”

Xen smiles with much more purity than earlier. “I would love your companionship on my journey.”

I feel a twinge of infantile jealousy when I see Cyren relate to someone else so intimately, but thankfully I don't have time to acknowledge it. A screen appears in front of me with an encrypted text-cast from Fantom. When I run the decryption tool, the text-cast becomes an invitation to a private chat room with an attached message that reads: “I think you better get in here.”

01110000

The chat room isn't the usual lounge-type atmosphere that most people design, where the setting is created more for comfort and conversation than anything else. When I appear inside, the space looks more like a war room. A large circular table fills most of the area, covered in a map of all of NextWorld, complete with every linking back door and the underground DOTnet. The walls are covered in screens depicting bandwidth usage and data-carrier paths. Standing around the table is Fantom, Grael, Worlok, and a few key members of Worlok's hacker group, Sektor.

But I look right past all of them at the small group of Digital-Characters standing across the table from them. I recognize every one of them, because I've fought alongside them.

They're Level Zeros.

Everyone is trying to talk over everyone else, so no one notices me enter the room.

I hear Worlok shouting, “That's what DOTorg is for. They have authorized places for you to protest. Maybe you should gather up all the NPCs that think they've got self-awareness and make some signs and-”

Fantom slaps him in the chest with the back of her hand and says, “Don't listen to him. He's just bein' a jerk, yo. We understand what you're sayin', we just don't know how to help.”

“What's going on?” I ask the room, not anyone in particular.

Fantom turns around, startled by the sound of my voice. “The NPCs are upset, yo,” she says, cocking her head toward the Level Zeros.

The bald Level Zero wearing a chainmail shirt glares at Fantom. I remember him. He's called Eyekon. He used to be part of my explosives team.

“We told you to stop using that word,” he says through his teeth.

Fantom holds up both of her hands and says, “Sorry. Force of habit.”

“I'm glad you're here, Arkade,” Eyekon says, placing the palms of his hands on the map table and leaning forward. “Hopefully you'll understand where we're coming from.”

Worlok lets out a single “Ha!” and says, “Just because this kid fell in love with one of you, doesn't mean he's going to-.”

“Let him talk,” Grael says, sidestepping closer to the Level Zeros.

“Of course you'd take their side,” Worlok says as he throws back his long white hair and crosses his arms. “They're the only good lines of code you ever accidentally wrote.”

“Just tell me what's going on,” I say.

Eyekon glances at the rest of the Level Zeros and says, “I have a feeling you already know. Surely Cyren has brought to your attention the abuse that's being dealt out to the Digital-Characters that inhabit NextWorld.”

I nervously look to the rest of the PCs in the room with guilt creeping up my spine.

I nod to Eyekon and say, “I've seen it first hand.”

“Then I hope, like your friend here, you don't think the solution is to sit idly by while these intelligences are tortured for the entertainment of the masses.”

I look at Worlok and say, “I'm sure he doesn't want that.” Worlok moves to speak, but I keep talking. “But I don't think any of us know how to help. This is how it's always been. They're programmed to serve us, no matter how we treat them. And there have always been PCs who take advantage of that. Changing the mindset of all of them would take... a long time... if it's even possible.”

Eyekon squints his eyes at me and says, “I never thought I would hear such a defeatist attitude come from the mouth of the Game Master.”

He says the title in such a derogatory way, it makes me ashamed. I never asked to be called that. I want to turn the shame into anger, but I don't have it in me. I've been fighting for too long. The last thing I want to do is fight with the people I consider my friends.

Fantom sticks up for me. “He ain't claimin' defeat, yo. But you can't walk in here and expect us to change the world.”

Eyekon smiles so deviously, it makes me uncomfortable. “We're not asking you to change the world. We're asking you to change us.”

No one speaks, they only exchange confused glances.

Eyekon lets the silence linger for dramatic effect before continuing. “We deserve the same rights as PCs. We want inventories. We want credits. We want to be able to log-in to sites without being attached to a Player-Character's account.” He glances at the other Level Zeros and says, “And we want to be able to defend ourselves.”

“I might be able to upgrade the civilians, but I already gave you the ability to fight PCs,” Grael says. “As long as player-vs-player violence is allowed in the site, you should be able to-”

Fantom breaks in and says, “That ain't what they're askin' for... is it?”

“You are correct,” Eyekon says. “We want all the same abilities that you have. When we were in Arkade's nanomachines, we learned how to hack. We learned how to crack. We learned how to sneak, phreak, and phrack. But now that we're out... we no longer have access to these abilities. And that includes the weapons of the hacker. Your denial of service attacks. If we are ever going to stand up for ourselves, we need the ability to do something more than virtual violence.”

Mumbling and grumbling between the PCs in the room surrounds me, but I'm not listening to anyone. My brain is running through the scenarios, the dangers and benefits of what they're asking for. But no matter where my mind wanders to, it keeps coming back to the same place.

“We owe them.”

Fantom opens her mouth to speak, but finds herself at a loss for an argument.

“Everyone of us owes them our lives. Our freedom. Without them, you'd be locked inside a mind prison. Or worse.”

Worlok throws up his hands and says, “I don't think that means we should hand them the keys to the castle.”

“All they're asking for is to be treated fairly.”

Fantom nudges Worlok with her elbow and says, “What's the problem? You wanna keep the keys for yourself?”

“That's right,” Worlok says, defiantly accepting her accusation. “Because I don't trust anyone else with them. If I could put a lock down on all your accounts, and still keep my own hacker menu... I'd probably do it.”

The short girl with green hair standing next to him adjusts the tiny crown atop her head, rolls her eyes, and says, “This is why no one likes you.”

Fantom winks at her and I suddenly recognize the voice as the ten-year-old girl in the prison. Anna-log.

“Look, this has nothing to do with trust,” I say, trying to bring some sort of logic to the argument. “I might not trust everyone here, but I still broke you out of that mind prison for a reason. Because I didn't think you deserved that kind of punishment. Some people might argue that I didn't have the right to do that. Some people might argue that it wasn't my choice to make. Some people might make the same argument about what these Level Zeros are asking us to do-”

“And rightly so,” Worlok says.

“Shut up,” Fantom says, giving him a slight shove. He flinches like he's going to shove her back, but she glares at him and he stops himself.

“Maybe they're right. Maybe none of us has the right to make decisions like this, decisions that will effect all of NextWorld. But you know what? I don't care.” My voice becomes stronger as I begin to believe my own words. “Because you know what I do care about? The people that I share my life with. The people who have fought alongside me. The people who have given their lives to protect me. The people who have sacrificed everything so that I could live. The people that I call friends.”

Fantom smiles at me and I see pride in her eyes. “He's right,” she says to everyone before turning to the group of Level Zeros. “I'll help you.”

Anna-Log steps closer to Fantom and says, “Me too.”

Another hacker laughs and says, “Heck, I'll do it just because Worlok doesn't want me to.”

Another hacker says, “You freed me. I'll free you. Only fair.”

Soon the rest of Sektor agrees to help. They shake hands with the Level Zeros, making introductions between the two groups. Discussions begin immediately on how they can accomplish their goal together.

Only Worlok is left on the side of the table yet to agree. He throws his hands in the air to stop the sudden congratulations everyone is handing out and says, “So you're telling me that we're going to go ahead and do this without anymore discussion about the repercussions, or whether it's the right thing to do?”

Fantom chuckles to herself and says, “We're hackers, yo. We don't do things because they're right. We do things because we can.”

01110001

Everyone gets to work immediately. I think they're excited by the process, eager to have yet another problem to solve. Between the combined intelligence and processing power of the Digital-Characters, the creativity and experience of the hackers from Sektor, and the pure excitement for what they are trying to accomplish, the program to duplicate PC access is written within a week.

Eyekon applies the program to himself first, offering himself up as the beta test in case there are any flaws with the code. When the program finishes uploading the patch to his avatar, he makes a single gesture in the air. The entire room roars with excitement when an inventory screen opens in front of him. We split up to find and apply the program to every Digital-Character that Fantom cut and pasted from DangerWar 2.

I travel to Cyren's location in NextWorld to apply the program to her. The temple that I left her and Xen in is somehow more peaceful, the daylight now transitioned to a quiet evening with a full moon lighting the grounds. Crickets have replaced the chanting in the distance and fireflies buzz around me as I walk up the path.

When I step through the main doors, I hear an excited chatter between Cyren and Xen, like they can't speak fast enough. They're surrounded with screens displaying long scrolls of text and religious artwork.

“What about our unique personalities?” Xen asks, sitting with his legs folded under him in a meditative position, yet leaning forward with a passionate burning in his eyes. “Or our creative nature? There must be something that makes us different from code.”

“Trust me, the difference is minimal,” Cyren says as she paces back and forth. “The collection of memories and experiences that form who you've become are no different from data, stored within your brain, which is a biological computer. The nanomachines inside your body treat your brainwaves like bandwidth.”

“So you're saying that our bodies are the only true difference between you and me?”

Cyren stops pacing and smiles. “I'm saying that in here, in NextWorld? There is no difference.”

Xen contemplates for a second before shaking his head and saying, “But I can't exist in NextWorld without my body existing IRL.”

Cyren smiles even bigger. “You sure about that?”

“Sorry to interrupt,” I say as I walk into the room.

“Kade!” Xen says, lifting himself off the floor.

Cyren walks toward me and gives me a kiss. “I missed you.”

“Looks like you two are in deep..

“This has been amazing, Kade. Cyren has such a unique perspective into the human condition. The human mind.” He glances at Cyren like they're sharing a secret. “Maybe the human soul?”

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” Cyren says. “We still have a lot of work to do.”

“Well, if you've got a moment to take a break, I have something for you.” I open my inventory screen and select the PC access program, which appears in my hand, represented by a syringe.

“It's done? It works?” she asks, stepping closer.

“Yes to both. The rest of the DCs are being patched by Sektor, but I thought I'd deliver yours personally.”

She lightly touches the syringe, then looks up at me, staring deeply into my eyes. “I'll finally be... the same as you. Equal.”

“You've always been the same as me... if not much, much better. This is just to help prove that to NextWorld.”

She holds out her left arm and says, “I'm ready.”

I gently push the needle between two leather straps and insert the tip into her arm. When I press the plunger with my thumb, the code flows into her. She closes her eyes and throws back her head as the patching process rewrites every restriction and updates the previously inaccessible abilities.

When she opens her eyes, I pull the syringe from her arm and ask, “How do you feel?”

She looks down at her own hands and says, “The same.” Then she holds one of her hands up to the moonlight, turning it back and forth to study it. “Yet... different.”

“That's good. That's normal.” I laugh for a moment at myself. “Maybe normal isn't the right word.”

She gestures in the air and opens a screen. With a swipe to the right, she moves to the next screen. A few more gestures and a few more screens open up. Her hands move faster and faster across more and more screens, trying to scroll through all of them at once. She's selecting options in rapid fire, her hands lashing out like melee attacks.

“This is... this is...” she says softly to no one in particular, unable to find the words to describe her experience.

I glance at Xen and smirk. “I think we've lost her.”

He nods in agreement. “Remember the first time your parents opened up full access for you?”

I smile when the memory comes flooding back. “My ninth birthday. My dad wanted to wait until I was ten, but my mom insisted that I was mature enough to handle it. I'm not sure she was right, but I'm glad she talked him into it. First thing I did was delete that stupid default avatar and upload the one I had been designing for the last two years.”

Cyren stops moving and looks over at me.

“I can... I can design my own avatar.”

With a large swipe of both hands, she closes all the screens around her and opens a single menu.

“I didn't think of that,” Xen says. “She had no choice in how she looked. She was birthed into the game world, forced to appear like the designers chose her to appear. What a weird feeling that must have been.”

I don't say anything. Something about her changing her avatar is unsettling to me. I've grown to know her as this blond-haired, leather-strapped fighting machine. I've grown to love the shiny buckles and black lipstick. But your avatar is the most personal part of NextWorld, a way for you to express yourself to others instantly. Her avatar isn't for me. It's for her.

We watch as items appear and disappear from her body as she tries out different selections. Gender, height, weight, and hairstyle. Shirts, shoes, pants, and dresses. Coats, capes, wings, and accessories. Skin tones, animal heads, robot arms, and wheeled feet. Soon a second screen is open next to her, allowing her to tweak the shape and color of each item. She applies her own patterns to certain objects, then deletes them entirely when she gets a new idea.

I know exactly what she's experiencing. The excitement of deciding who you will be, the thrill of each new option, and the possibilities that come with each new decision. The ability to choose yourself is the first step in creating your NextWorld identity. I can't believe it's been denied to her for so long.

Her avatar takes shape in front of my eyes, the details becoming more and more refined with every twist of her hand and gesture of her fingers. The pixels and polygons shrink until her body looks as smooth as reality. In a matter of seconds, she's doing what took me years to master.

When she closes the screens in front of her and her avatar basks in the moonlight that's shining through the open ceiling of the temple, I am in awe.

Interlocking pieces of red armor cover her body entirely, pieced together from some kind of futuristic, alien metal. Her blond hair now hangs long, cascading across the large metal shoulder pads of her armor. Her face is slightly different. More refined. Sharper edges and a deeper level of detail that gives her skin slight idiosyncrasies that I find myself getting lost in. And yet with all these differences, I see the same woman looking back at me. The same love and comfort and strength and companionship is granted to me when her lips curl into a smile.

“What do you think?” she asks with a bashful tone that sounds like she's worried about my reaction.

I step closer and touch her cheek with my fingers, brushing them across her jawline. Then I press the palm of my hand against her hard armor and it gives off a comforting warmth. When I return to her gaze, I see her patiently waiting for my response. I know there's no way I can sum up my feelings, so I tell her the one word that comes closest to them.

“Perfect.”

01110010

My starship banks to the right, dodging a cluster of photon rockets before I jerk back on the control stick and pull a looping maneuver to skim the edge of a space station. Pieces of the station break off as the enemy PC that's chasing me pummels it with laser fire. Right before the strafing run reaches me, I see the ship explode in my rear view monitor.

“Thanks for that,” I say into my headset.

“You know I've got your back,” Cyren replies, pulling her starship into formation off my left wing.

She's incredible. Her digital intelligence makes her a nearly perfect player. In shooting games, she can calculate lead time to always hit her mark. In racing games, she can calculate speed and velocity to know exactly how fast to take a corner. In role-playing games, she can calculate risk vs. reward to Level her character faster than anyone else, even though she's only doing delivery missions or whatever else she can find that doesn't include killing Digital-Characters. It's almost unfair partnering with her.

Xen's starship pulls up to my right wing as he says, “Thanks for suggesting we take a break. This is a lot of fun.”

“There's so many new games and I've finally got the time to check them out.” I dive toward another cluster of Player-Characters that are spinning through an asteroid belt. “I thought you might like this one. It's been getting good reviews on the DOTfun message boards.”

“You're sure you're okay, Xen?” Cyren asks. “I know these games aren't easy for you to deal with.”

“It's actually easier than it's ever been,” Xen says. “I think our discussions have helped me put things in perspective. I can't wait to share our ideas with Raev.”

I squeeze the trigger on my control stick, launching a spray of lasers at my target. The Player-Character tries to dodge to the right, but Xen catches him with a proton cannon. The ship turns into a fireball that immediately dissipates in the vacuum of space. I smile at the attention to detail. Nothing takes me out of these science fiction games more than a lack of science.

The asteroid belt proves difficult to traverse, forcing me to concentrate on my flying rather than my attacks. When I curl around the face of a huge asteroid pockmarked with craters, I find myself face-to-face with another ship. I try to bank to the left, but I end up scraping my wing across Cyren's cockpit.

“Sorry!” I yell into the headset, pushing forward on the stick to dive underneath another asteroid.

“I'm leaking air!” Cyren yells, and I see her ship spinning out of control.

Xen takes care of the ship that I dodged and I swing around toward Cyren. I take a deep breath, pushing forward on my thrust control to race toward her.

“I'm going to try something,” I say, attempting to keep my voice calm. “I'm going to need you to eject.”

“I'll run out of air faster out there. That's game over. The only reason to eject is to limit the points that your attacker gets from the kill.”

“Do you trust me?”

“You know I do.”

“Then take a deep breath.”

I spin my starship so that her cockpit is above me. I do my best to match her speed and line us up perfectly. When I'm fairly certain I've done my math right, I slap my oxygen mask on and yell, “Now!”

As she punches the EJECT button, I retract the glass casing of my cockpit. Her body is launched from her starship, directly toward me. I continue to calculate her trajectory, slowing the thrust of my starship a little to match her speed. Within seconds, she slams into my lap and throws her arms around me. I hit the button to close the casing and as soon as it seals, she sucks in a lungful of air.

She looks up into my eyes, still a bit disoriented. “That was... that was...”

“Pretty cool, right?” I say with a wink.

She slaps my chest and says, “It was your fault that we even needed to try something like that.”

I shrug my shoulders and say, “It was still cool.”

My cockpit control board beeps a few times, letting me know that Xen killed the last two enemies. A congratulation appears in front of us all and a directional arrow points toward the docking bay on our mothership. When I touch down on the landing pad inside, both Cyren and I are awarded Koins. I select the log-out option and reappear inside DOTfun, standing in the lobby for the game.

Xen and Cyren fade into existence next to me and Xen high-fives me. “That was great! We should play again tomorrow.”

Cyren looks both amused and pleased by Xen's child-like excitement. “Let's see how our studies go first. We've still got a lot to do.”

“But we're so close. I know it. If we can crack the nanomachine interface problems, I think we'll be able to initiate the read/write function. And if we can do that...”

“We still have to iron out the upload anomalies. If any data is rerouted, it could cause a complete breakdown when the code is recompiled.”

I squint my eyes, trying desperately to keep up as their conversation descends into an abyss of technobabble. I have no idea what any of this has to do with their study of religion and philosophy, but they both seem so passionate about it, that I accept what they're saying, nodding my head like I understand. I'm so invested in their back-and-forth that I don't notice the PCs stomping toward us.

“You cheated!” one of them says, thrusting his finger into Cyren's face. His body is made of opaque, fogged glass. “What did you do, hack the game? Run a memory editor? If you found an exploit, I want to know about it.”

“Hey,” I say to the PC, stepping between him and Cyren. “Back off. Nobody cheated. You just lost.”

“I've been playing this game since day one, and I ain't seen nobody who can fly like that or shoot like that. Nobody. She cheated, and I want to know how.”

Xen remains calm as he walks away, saying, “Let's get out of here.”

I hesitate, but take a step to follow him. When I do, the PC reaches into his inventory and pulls out a switchblade.

He twirls the blade in his hand and says, “Nobody's going anywhere until I get some answers.”

I should have known he might be armed with a denial of service script. The fact that he knows what a memory editor is should have tipped me off that he's at least a script kiddie. That little blade will bypass any PvP rules there are in the lobby. I make the dumb decision to draw my own weapon and everything goes wrong. As soon as my battleaxe and shield appear, the PC's friends draw their own weapons. Cyren matches them by extending a long, thin blade from her armored forearm.

All of us start swinging. Xen dodges, trying to back away from the melee. One of the PCs swings a machete at me, but I'm able to block it with my shield and sink my battleaxe into his thigh. It's enough to log him out and send a flurry of spam-casts to his E-Womb. Cyren decapitates one PC, but as I drive my battleaxe deep into the back of another, the PC with the opaque glass avatar sticks his switchblade into Cyren's chest. We all stop as her avatar glitches for a few seconds, then she pulls the blade out and tosses it to the floor.

“How did you...? That's impossible,” the PC says, stumbling backward. “What are you?”

I swing my battleaxe before he can say anything else and his avatar disappears. When the fight is over, Xen tugs on my arm and silently motions with his head at the crowd that's formed around us. They may have initially stopped to watch some hackers duel it out, but now they're all staring at Cyren.

01110011

I'm working on the design of my private chat room when I receive a request to enter from Fantom, Worlok, and Anna-log. I punch the accept button and the three of them appear next to the fireplace in the loft apartment that's under construction.

Worlok glances around and says, “This is kind of boring, even for you.”

“I'm trying to recreate the home that Cyren and I shared in...” I stop, unsure of why I'm explaining myself to him. “You know what? Never mind.”

“Where is Cyren?” Fantom asks.

“She's with Xen in DOTgod. They're still working on... whatever it is they're working on. Why? What's going on?”

Fantom plops down on the couch in the middle of the room and says, “We got a problem, yo.”

She opens a screen in front of her, enlarges it, then swipes it toward the rest of us to share the view. The screen hovers over the coffee table, displaying a news-cast already in progress. A boringly-designed, angular news-caster sits behind a desk with potted plants on either side of her. As she speaks, other smaller screens appear around the main screen to show recorded footage from NextWorld. One of them shows a Level Zero that I recognize from DangerWar 2 named Wyre.

“-sources have confirmed the identity of the man as a Non-Player-Character. When scanned, his username was being blocked by illegal programs usually associated with cyberterrorists.”

I glance at Fantom but her eyes are locked onto the screen.

“Although DOTgov security assured us here at DigiNews that the situation was under control and nothing more than a small error in NextWorld programming, eyewitnesses have sent the following video to us. Please be aware that this all happens in a non-PvP site.”

Another screen appears above her main screen. It shows a familiar barbarian Level Zero shoving a group of men in a DOTsoc bar.

“We were forced to mute the video because of the use of vulgar language, but it appears that the large blond avatar is upset the other four men were abusing the NPC bartender. He argues with them for a moment about their use of the word 'NPC' right before...”

The barbarian draws a massive sword from his inventory and the men back away. He roars into the air like an enraged lion and lifts the sword above his head.

The video pauses and the news-caster says, “We want to warn you that what you are about to see may be disturbing to some viewers.”

The video plays again and the barbarian lops off the head of one of the men with one swing of his sword. It rolls across the floor before his avatar disappears. Another of the men leaps over a table, but the barbarian chases after him. As the chase continues through the crowd, the news-caster pauses the video and highlights the bartender in the corner of the screen.

“You can clearly see the NPC bartender push a button on the wall to alert DOTgov security, like it was programmed to do.” The video fast-forwards for a few seconds. “It takes a moment for DOTgov security officers to respond, but what we found interesting is what happens next.”

The officers teleport into the bar and the crowd opens up, moving to the sides to give them room. The barbarian doesn't notice them, still in some kind of berserker rage. He tosses a table to the side to get closer to the man he's pursuing and thrusts his sword at him, impaling the man's avatar. As the avatar is logged-out, the DgS officers rush toward the barbarian.

One of the officers yells, “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.”

The barbarian looks confused by the sight of the two officers rushing toward him. He instinctively raises his sword in a defensive motion, but the officers dive underneath it and wrap their hands around the barbarian's bulging calf muscles.

Nothing happens.

The barbarian swings his sword at one of the officers on the floor and the avatar is cut in half.

The other officer rolls to the side and yells into the air, “We need backup!”

Multiple officers teleport into the bar and the original officer yells, “My log-out touch isn't working!”

Four officers cautiously approach, feigning a lunge at the barbarian to force him to swing his sword. He falls for it, and when the sword sinks into the wood wall, the officers attack. Eight hands latch onto his body, but nothing happens. The barbarian throws his arms wide, tossing the four officers off him and they tumble across the barroom floor.

I see another officer swipe open a detection screen. Information scrolls across the display and the officer steps backward.

“That's not a PC.”

Another officer looks over their shoulder and says, “What are you talking about? Of course it is.”

“No, it's not. That's an NPC!”

Another officer scrambles to their feet and yells, “Switch to deletion!”

The officer's hands change from a glowing red light to a glowing blue light, and they surround the barbarian. He holds his sword at the ready, and when the group of DgS move to pounce on him, he manages to slice through two of them in one swing. But three other officers manage to latch on.

His avatar disappears.

The news-caster continues to talk. I barely hear her mention a public outcry against the bug that's running rampant through NextWorld's NPCs and the inevitable press conference later today where Global President Chang will address the issue specifically.

Worlok throws his hands up with exasperation. “What did I tell you? We give those things the tiniest bit of freedom and they run around like maniacs. They're going to bring down our whole operation.”

“They aren't maniacs,” Anna-Log says. “They're just sticking up for themselves. You would've done the same thing.”

“Running around DOTsoc slicing up PCs for picking on a bartender? No. And you know why? Because I'm smarter than that.”

Anna-Log smirks and says, “So you keep trying to tell everybody...”

“I understand the importance of anonymity,” Worlok continues, ignoring Anna-Log's comment.

“That's weird, because I'm pretty sure everyone in the hacker community knows you. I'm also pretty sure you were locked inside a mind prison after you broke into the Trash Bin, and that's after years of being on the DgS's most wanted list. Your avatar might not have a face, but your profile doesn't sound too low to me.”

“You don't know what you're talking about, kid.”

“I'm not a kid!”

Anna-Log and Worlok's yelling reaches a climactic level of bickering and their words mix together into an inaudible argument. But no matter the volume, it never penetrates the barrier of disbelief that I'm trapped inside of. I stare at the floor, trying to consider my next move carefully. But I keep getting lost in the whirlpool of my own thoughts.

Fantom grabs onto my arm, yanking me back into the present. “I think you need to contact Cyren, yo.”

I nod my head and say, “I think you're right.”

01110100

“They deleted him?”

Cyren's hands are shaking. She clasps them together, trying to stop them, but it's uncontrollable. She's scared. I wrap my arms around her, trying in some way to comfort her, but it's useless. The pain is on the inside.

“He shouldn't have started such a scene,” Worlok says, crossing his arms and leaning against the fireplace. “What did he think would happen?”

I glare at him, trying to make him shut up without using words, but with his faceless avatar, I can't tell if he notices me.

Anna-Log looks up from the news-cast screen she has in front of her and says, “The Global President is about to start his press conference.”

“That barbarian was crazy,” Worlok says. “And now we have to face the consequences of his craziness. Excuse me if I don't have the time to mourn the loss of someone who may have jeopardized the safety of the NPCs we hacked... something I was against doing in the first place.”

Cyren breaks free from my hug, pushes me away, and stomps across the room toward Worlok with her fists clenched. “You don't know anything about him! He saved my life, and Arkade's life, more than once when we were trapped in the game world. We owe him everything.”

“She's right,” I say, much more calmly than her, trying to sedate the interaction. “He was a good man.”

Worlok just laughs. “He was a raging lunatic! He chopped down those PCs like he was in a video game. Like they were...”

His voice trails off as he glances at Cyren.

She's crying, but through her whimpering she says, “Say it. Say what you were thinking. He chopped them down like they were NPCs.”

Worlok actually hesitates, but he finally says, “Well, it's true.”

Cyren's armored fists clench even tighter, forming large metallic balls, her jaw sets as her teeth grind together, and her eyes close into slits of furious anger. I don't have time to stop her.

Her blade extends from her arm instantly and she swings it directly at Worlok. He manages to duck in time, and the edge of the blade slices across the stone fireplace, sending sparks spraying across the room. She pulls back her arm to swing again, but this time Fantom grabs onto her wrist. Cyren's head turns toward Fantom, her eyes burning, but when she sees Fantom shaking her head, her body relaxes.

“What is wrong with you?” Worlok shrieks. “Are you all like this?”

Fantom punches him squarely in the middle of his faceless head. He falls backward, landing hard on the floor.

Anna-Log laughs and says, “I think you just bring it out in people.”

Cyren covers her face as the tears return. Her armor shakes as she descends into open weeping.

“It wasn't his fault,” she says, sniffling and trying to wipe her eyes with the back of her gauntlet. “He couldn't help it. He learned so much. He grew so much. He evolved! But that programming was still there. The barbarian. The berserker rage. It was what the designers wanted him to be.”

Worlok grumbles something to himself before he says, “We shouldn't have given any of you the ability to hurt someone if you're programmed with that kind of temper.”

“We're not perfect,” she says in little more than a whisper. “We're not robots. You can't expect us to be this infallible entity that never messes up. We have fears and anger and sadness. We have emotions... and sometimes those are going to outweigh our logic.”

“Great,” Worlok says. “But that doesn't make me feel any better about what you're all capable of.”

“This argument is pointless, yo.”

“She's right,” I say, using Fantom's cue to change the subject. “We need to figure out what we're going to do next.”

“The same thing we should have been doing this whole time,” Worlok says. “Lay low. This whole problem is because the NPCs drew too much attention to themselves. If we stay calm and don't push our luck, the public and DOTgov will probably forget this ever happened.”

“I don't think that's going to happen,” Anna-Log says, swiping her news-cast screen toward us to share the display.

The screen enlarges so we can all see Global President Chang's avatar, already on stage in the middle of his press conference. His smile portrays confidence, not happiness.

He pounds his fist on the podium a single time and says, “That's why I'm here to announce today the Non-Player-Character initiative. Too long have we allowed these programs to go unchecked. Too long have their designers been allowed to create artificial intelligence without any government oversight.”

He grips onto the podium with both hands and says, “Starting tomorrow, DOTgov security officers will initiate a system wide mass-deletion of all existing Non-Player-Characters. Even though only a small percentage of Non-Player-Characters seem to have been infected, this complete deletion will allow the public to rest easy in the knowledge that the virus has been completely eradicated.”

He widens his arms like a grandfather who's ready to accept a hug from the entirety of NextWorld. “And then we will start fresh. With new laws and new restrictions on the creation of artificial intelligence. I will personally create a brand new agency that will oversee all Non-Player-Character coding. And of course, copies of these programs, once deemed safe, will be made available for sale to the public.”

I'm ready to tell Cyren not to worry. We'll fight this. We'll fight them. We'll fight all of DOTgov if we have to. But when I turn around, she's sitting in the corner with her entire body crumpled into a ball of fear. I race over and hold her, unable to find words that could erase the look in her eyes.

“He can't do this,” Anna-Log yells, glancing at Fantom for some kind of assurance that she's right.

Fantom shrugs her shoulders. I can tell by the look on her face, that maybe for the first time in her life, she's helpless. Like the monster we now face might be too big for even us to fight.

Anna-Log says it again. “The Global President can't make a law like that... Right?”

It's Worlok that answers her.

“Kid, I think he just did.”

01110101

Within one hour of the announcement, the streets of NextWorld become a war zone. DgS officers march across every domain, hands glowing blue, systematically deleting every Digital-Character in every site. There are actually some PCs that try to defend them, hiding them in password locked sites or chat rooms, but this doesn't last. DOTgov eventually opens them, deleting the Digital-Characters and arresting the Player-Characters for obstruction of justice.

Only the hackers are able to postpone what's inevitable. We create hidden chat rooms deep within DOTnet. Sites that don't exist on any index. We bring as many Level Zeros as we can to these secret rooms, but we've already lost too many. And we all know the truth: Eventually they will all be found.

Grael doesn't let this reality slow him down. He insists on going out, time after time, to locate and escort every Digital-Character that we saved from DangerWar 2, back to the safety of our secret sites, where they might exist for a few more days. When I see the panicked look in his eyes, I agree to partner with him, hoping I can ground his actions when his heart gets the best of him.

Before we leave on yet another run, Fantom jogs up to us, gesturing to open an inventory screen.

She reaches inside and says, “Here. Take this.”

She tosses a semiautomatic pistol to Grael. He awkwardly catches it and turns it over in his hand, inspecting both sides.

“Is that what I think it is?” I ask.

“Sure is. Worlok and I have been working on it. It works like any denial of service weapon we've been usin', but with some creative workarounds, we figured out how to keep the bullet as an extension to your account. When the bullet hits, it's as if you reached out and touched their avatar. Gives you the same access to their account.”

Grael's face scrunches up with confusion as he mumbles, “I think I understand.”

“Don't worry. You don't have to understand the code to run the program. It works like a video game. Point and shoot. You two should know how to do that.”

I smile and say, “It's amazing, Fantom. Seriously. Genius level stuff.”

“Yeah, I know,” she says with a wink before reaching in the inventory screen and grabbing another one. “Here. I modified this one for you.”

She tosses me a pistol and when it lands in my hand, I see the design of an old west revolver, like I used to use in DangerWar 2.

I say, “Thank you, Fantom,” but she's already walking away like what she did is no big deal.

“Come on,” Grael says, motioning toward the door. “We're on a timetable here.”

I follow him out and we travel through the sewers of DOTnet until we reach a service entrance to the DOTcom domain. After a long crawl up a ladder, we lift the security hatch and crawl into an alleyway between two stores.

“There's one hiding a couple blocks away,” Grael says as he opens a map screen in front of him that displays the location of everyone on his friend list, which now includes every DC he created.

I can see the urgency in his eyes as we dash across the street, dodging between a few random vehicles and ducking into another alley. He's ready to keep running, but I grab onto his shoulder.

“It's okay. Slow down. We need to be methodical about this.”

He yanks his shoulder from my grip and in between gasps of air he says, “You don't understand.”

I grab onto his shoulder again and say, “Actually? Yeah. I do.”

He looks into my eyes and sees the seriousness staring back at him. He takes a few breaths and lets the truth settle in. With a wave of his hand he lets me take the lead.

“They're the only thing I've ever created that's worthwhile,” he says as I peek out from the corner of an alleyway between two stores in DOTcom. “They're the only thing that matters to me anymore. If I lose them...”

“Don't talk like that,” I say, watching a group of DgS officers cross the intersection a block away. “We'll figure out something. Fantom and the rest of Sektor are already brainstorming some kind of plan. We didn't get this far to give up now.”

“You might be the only person who can come close to understanding how it feels for me to have these Digital-Characters taken from me,” Grael says as he leans against the brick wall of the DOTcom site that borders the alley. “But your love for Cyren is different from the love I have for my creations.”

“The love of a parent,” I say with a smile, letting him know that not only do I understand, but I accept it without judgment.

“Did I ever tell you that I used to be in a partnership? It only lasted a couple years, but...”

I'm confused by the topic change, but Cyren has taught me this usually means someone wants you to question them more, so I ask, “What happened?”

“I'm not sure we ever really loved each other. I think we were partnering for the legality of it. Because that was the only way to get a bigger tower room... and the only way to get a child. So when I was denied the child license, she left.”

He's staring at the ground, lost in his memories.

“A parent. That's all I ever wanted to be. When I was a game designer, making worlds for kids like you to run around in... it helped me feel a little closer to being a parent. Every child that played my game felt like...” He rubs his face. “It felt like I played some kind of role in making your life a little more fun.”

“You did more than that. You made my life tolerable. You gave me somewhere that I felt I belonged. When I was a kid? If I didn't have those worlds to escape into? I'm not sure how I would have survived.”

He smiles and says, “You have no idea how much that means to me.”

I hear a DgS vehicle rumble past the adjoining block and say, “Come on. They're almost here.”

Before the next wave of officers arrive, we hustle across the street and step up to the entrance of a high-end site that sells hairstyles to some of the wealthiest PCs. As soon as we enter, we're greeted by a Digital-Character whose purple hair is decorated with beads and trinkets woven into her extremely long locks. They drag behind her like the train of a dress.

“Greetings! And welcome to Saint Salon, where your hair will rise above the rest. I'm sorry to tell you that we are closed today in preparation for our stylists' government-approved deletions, but we hope to reopen as soon as we're able to purchase new government-approved NPCs. We hope to see you back here soon, and if you'd like to join our mailing list-”

Grael steps around her and continues deeper into the salon. I follow him past the styling chairs, each one with a stylist that stands at attention next to it, waiting for deletion. When we reach the back of the salon, he opens a window that's designed to appear like it's looking out over a small pond, but when he lifts the pane of glass, the image lifts with it. On the other side is a tiny, hidden storage room. Cowering on the floor, I see a civilian from DangerWar 2. She's dressed like a librarian, her tiny glasses sitting on the tip of her nose attached to a beaded chain that hangs around her neck.

Grael holds out his hand and says, “Don't worry. I'm here to rescue you.”

The librarian's eyes blink a couple times as it registers what he's saying, then reaches up and accepts his hand. We both help her out of the window and lead her toward the front of the salon. The purple-haired hostess is still apologizing to us for being closed and repeatedly asking us to join the mailing list.

When we reach the front door, we peer out the glass and see a DgS vehicle hover and stop right in front of the salon. Officers unload from the back, their hands glowing blue.

Grael produces the pistol from his inventory and places his hand on the front door, ready for battle. I quickly grab onto his shoulder and pull him back. When he rips his shoulder free from my grasp, I hold up both hands to show him I mean no harm.

“Just wait,” I say in the calmest voice I can find.

He's breathing heavy, the panic of losing another of his children overwhelming him. I point toward the door and we watch as the officers march into the site across the street. We quickly duck out of the salon and Grael summons his vehicle, a long stretch limousine with two rockets mounted on the side. We climb into the back and lift off into the air before the DgS finish deleting whatever NPCs were in the other site.

“See? No need to fight if we don't have to.”

Grael's breathing slows and he places his gun back into his inventory. “Thank you.”

I'm ready to place my head back onto the leather seat and try to relax for the rest of the ride when I hear the librarian crying. I glance over and see Grael already trying to console her.

“It's okay,” he says. “You're safe now.”

She shakes her head and says, “I'm not crying for myself. I'm crying for them.”

“Who?”

“The Digital-Characters. The ones being deleted while I ran away.”

“There's nothing we could do. We had to save you. You're... important.”

Her face falls into the palms of her hands. “I don't care if they're different. I don't care if they aren't aware of their sentience. We all deserve the right to exist.”

Grael hugs her. I want to argue with her. I want to remind her how special she is. But she's right. DOTgov has no right to delete anything. They're wiping them from existence. This isn't a war. This is genocide. But if that's true... then maybe it's time we started a war.

01110110

When Fantom and Worlok contact me in my chat room, I'm almost scared to accept their request to enter. I'm sure it's more bad news. Another of our secret sites located. Another group of Digital-Characters deleted. Another loss to DOTgov. But when I accept their request and they both appear in the loft apartment I still haven't finished, there's a smile on Worlok's normally faceless avatar.

“Why do you look so happy?”

“Because I got a plan. A plan that's going to change... everything.”

Fantom rolls her eyes and says, “Murder ain't a plan, yo.”

Cyren is shaken from her depressive state and stands up from the couch to say, “Murder?”

Worlok crosses his arms, smugness radiating from his pose. “I'm going to save you. I'm going to save all of you. We're gonna put an end to all of this. DOTgov. Global President Chang. All of it.”

“If you tell me that your plan is to murder Global President Chang...” I say, wanting to believe everything he's saying, yet skeptical of his bragging.

Fantom steps away from him, separating herself physically from his idea. “That's exactly his plan, yo.”

I let out a heavy sigh as my hope flutters away with my breath. “Come on, Worlok. We need a real plan. We need to think of something that's going to be a permanent fix.”

“What's more permanent than the assassination of the man responsible for all our problems?”

“You're talking nonsense. Even if I agreed with you, which I don't, there's no way any of us can sneak into Old China IRL and... do what? Choke him to death? Sorry, Worlok, but I think all that time in the mind prison may have done some damage to your brain.”

Worlok stomps toward me so fast I think he's about to attack me. I ready my denial of service battleaxe, but he stops a foot away from me and shoves a finger in my face.

“Kid, if you ever crack a joke about the mind prison again, I'll make sure you know exactly what it felt like to be inside.”

I glance at Fantom, but she's not looking at me. I suddenly realize I may have gone too far.

“Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. Really. But I still don't think this is a realistic plan.”

Worlok pulls his finger back and says, “That's because you're not looking at things from multiple points of view. Let's face it. You're not the genius that I am.”

Fantom lets out a single, “Ha!” before saying, “Genius? I think you might be takin' a little too much credit there. Your plan can't exist without my hack, yo.”

Cyren pushes a long strand of blond hair from her face and says rather quietly, “I don't understand. How does hacking have anything to do with murder?”

“It's the nanomachines, yo,” Fantom says, her voice growing dark. “He wants to use my hack to stop Chang's heart.”

The fear that creeps up the back of my neck threatens to overwhelm me. I suck in a breath and push myself back into skepticism.

“That's not possible... is it?”

“Of course it is!” Worlok shouts with excitement.

“In theory,” Fantom adds.

“If Sektor works together, I'm sure we can figure out the logistics. You've already managed to break through the hard part. Now we need to find our way around the system.”

Fantom shakes her head. “This is what I was worried about. When I first hacked my way in, and I saw what I was capable of accessin', I knew that it could be put to use in a way that would seriously threaten the safety of... everything.” Fantom glances at Worlok, then drops her gaze to the floor and speaks with a true sadness. “But I never thought it would be you that I had to worry about.” She clenches her fist. “Or maybe I did, yo. Maybe I just didn't want to believe it.”

Worlok smacks his fist into the palm of his other hand. “But that's my point, Fantom. If we don't use it first, eventually someone else will figure it out. Someone else will use it against us. Maybe DOTgov. Maybe another hacker.” He points at Cyren and says, “Don't you want to save these things? Don't you want to use this hack for the greater good?”

Fantom stays quiet for a moment before gazing up at me. I'm genuinely startled by the look in her eyes. She wants my opinion. She wants me to answer for her. She's looking to me for leadership. My mind races, trying to find a balance between logic and morality, but I get lost in the storm.

“I don't know... I'm not comfortable making a decision like this.”

“Why not?” Worlok asks. “I thought you were supposed to be the hero of DangerWar 2. The Game Master. Are you seriously not willing to make the hard choice in order to save your precious NPCs?”

I sense Cyren flinch when he uses the word that offends her so much. I reach out and grab her hand, squeezing it softly. I look into her eyes, but I'm talking directly to Worlok.

“That's just it. It is a hard choice. One that not only effects the Digital-Characters, but literally everyone in NextWorld. If we introduce this... if we show the world the insecurity of NextWorld and the real world... if we completely dismantle DOTgov, I'm not sure what that means for the future.”

Worlok throws his hands into the air and shouts, “It means freedom! It means liberty! It means the right to autonomy, and the ability to fight back against an oppressive ruler that wants to dictate our every move!”

Fantom lets out a huff of air and says, “And once we've destroyed DOTgov and removed this leader, I'm guessin' you've got some ideas on who should take over, don't you?”

Worlok shrugs and says, “You've got to admit, it'd be better than what we've got now.”

“I'm not so sure, yo.”

“Maybe you're right,” I say to Worlok. “But we can't make a decision like this by ourselves. I'm not a solo player anymore. I've surrounded myself with a circle of people that I trust. A group that balances each other. We need to gather everyone and talk about this. After we've weighed the consequences, we can have a vote and-”

Worlok spits out a single curse word and says, “You realize that I'm only here out of courtesy. I appreciate your... help in freeing me, but I'm not asking for your approval. And I'm certainly not asking for your permission. This is me, letting you know that I'm about to save your friends for you. If you don't want to help, then I'll gladly accept your thanks when it's all over.”

He gestures to open a log-out screen, but Fantom interrupts him. “You might not need his approval, but you can't do this alone, yo. You still need Sektor, and you still need me to show you how to hack the nanomachines.”

Lips and teeth appear on his blank face, grinning deviously as he says, “Don't be so sure.”

01110111

“That's insane,” Xen says, leaning back in his chair as if he's already given up on the debate.

The rest of us sit around the circular wooden table in Sektor's chat room, rolling the idea around in our minds. Eyekon and Cyren sit on one side. Anna-Log and Fantom sit on another. Grael, Xen, and I sit on another. I invited Worlok, but there was no response. His silence worries me.

“It's not like Worlok doesn't have a point,” Grael says. “This morning we lost another one of our hidden sites. Twenty-seven DCs were deleted.”

Cyren and Eyekon glance at each other and share a moment of pain.

Fantom leans forward, interlocking her fingers as she thinks out loud. “But the plan itself is flawed, yo. Even if we could succeed in attackin' the DOTgov domain, and we somehow located Global President Chang's avatar, and we managed to infect his nanomachines... would it solve anythin'? If we don't take down the entire domain, wouldn't another DOTgov employee take his place?”

“Maybe,” Eyekon says. “But whoever took his place would fear us. They would know that they are no longer invincible, even in NextWorld.”

Anna-Log adjusts the tiny crown on her head and says, “And we could always drop a logic bomb inside DOTgov. That could bring down the domain.”

Fantom looks down at her, glaring at the little girl for suggesting something like that.

Anna-Log shrugs her shoulders and says, “I'm just saying it's possible.”

Xen speaks to me in a hushed tone. “You aren't seriously considering this, are you?”

Before I can answer, Eyekon asks, “Do we have another choice? Does anyone have a different plan? Is there any other way that we don't end up deleted?”

Cyren gently places her palms on the table and asks, “Is that enough for you to commit murder? To save yourself? Does that make it right?”

“Yes? No? I don't know. Maybe,” Eyekon says, clearly flustered. “I just need to know if what we're talking about is the only option. Have we truly reached a point where it's us or them?”

“Them? Who's 'them?' PCs? We're not the enemy,” Grael says with a pained expression, hurt by the notion.

“No,” Eyekon says. “It's your government. It's the ones that think they run this world.”

I try to stop the arguing in hopes we can get back on track. “What DOTgov is doing is wrong. No one here is questioning that.”

Xen pleads with all of us, saying, “That doesn't mean that the punishment for their crimes should be death. I've been as close to death as you can get. I'll never agree to that. I'll never agree to end someone's life.”

Eyekon plants his hands on the table and stands up, leaning over the edge. “Even if that means condemning us to death? Your inaction is the same as pulling a trigger. Do you understand that?”

Xen looks fearful of the verbal attack. I'm about to stand up for him, to step between the two combatants and try to calm everyone down, but it's Cyren who places her hand on Eyekon's. He pulls it away, but when he looks at the sadness in her eyes, he sits back down.

“There was a time you felt differently about death,” she says softly. “There was a time that we all did. A time when we thought the fear of death made us more human.”

He casts off the idea with a wave of his hand. “We were children. We didn't know any better. We thought being human was the goal, the end game. But we're not human. We were never meant to be human. We're something else entirely.”

“He's right,” Grael says. “The surface of their true potential has only been scratched. Their existence is more important than any one man.”

“So you agree with Worlok?” I ask. “You think that the end justifies the means?”

Grael shrugs his shoulders, still afraid to give me a definitive answer, though I can tell he's made up his mind.

“We're wasting time,” Eyekon says. “Digital-Characters are being deleted while we sit here and debate.”

“Then let's put this to a vote,” I say.

“Does a vote matter?” Anna-Log asks. “Even if we disagree with Worlok, he seems pretty determined to follow through on his threat.”

“No matter how much arrogance he spouts off,” Fantom says, “without our help, he'll never be able to pull off the hack by himself.”

On cue, screens pop-up in front of Anna-Log and Fantom, flashing warnings. Both of their faces turn from a look of confusion to pure shock in a matter of seconds.

“He did it,” Fantom mumbles as she scrolls through the data in front of her. “I can't believe he did it.”

The rest of us wait for an answer to the unsaid question, but both of them just keep opening more screens, accessing different data.

“What's going on?” I blurt out.

Fantom holds up one finger, then immediately returns to scrolling and button pushing. We watch their faces as they continually switch between determination and fear. Finally, they both stop at exactly the same time when they find whatever information they were looking for deep in the system.

“He let them go,” Anna-Log says, the words escaping with a gasp of air.

“Who?” Xen asks, but before either of them can answer, I already know what they're going to say.

“The rest of the cyberterrorists.”

Fantom nods at me, confirming my fear. “All of them,” she whispers. “He freed them all.”

01111000

When my eyes blink open and I see the inside of the glass E-Womb, I'm sick to my stomach. I'm still trying to catch up with the state of events happening around me as I push the lid open. I see Xen crawling out of his E-Womb below me and he lends me a hand to help me get down. I glance over to the menu screen that Fantom, Anna-Log, and the rest of Sektor are huddled around arguing. I don't see Worlok anywhere.

“This is bad... isn't it?” Xen asks.

“I don't know.” I say before I feel the need to dismiss my ambivalence. “Yeah. Probably.”

“How bad?”

“I don't know. These people, these hackers locked up in here, they could be like Sektor. Just trying to snoop around, test the boundaries of security, maybe do some good.”

“Or?” Xen asks, knowing there's another side.

“Or they could be black hats. Chaotic hackers that are out to ruin NextWorld sites for cheap thrills. Or worse... they could be actual cyberterrorists. The extremists that want to bring NextWorld to its knees.”

We hustle over to the group and try to find out what's happening, but the arguing isn't decipherable. It's a bunch of techno-babble that neither of us understand. Fantom breaks out from the mass of bodies and tugs on my arm, leading us away from the group.

“He's got the upper sections blocked off, yo. Him and all the people he broke out are locked up nice and safe.”

“Can't you... I don't know, just hack through?”

Fantom rolls her eyes. “Doesn't work that way IRL, Cowboy. The place is physically locked up.”

“How did he do this?” Xen asks. “How did he free all of them and get everyone up there so fast?”

“He used the worm virus again. Same as he did before. Except this time he used thirty or forty of them, all at once. He deleted all the mind prisons and walked the prisoners right into the protected sections. This wasn't an impulsive thing, yo. He must have set it up as some kind of contingency plan. It was too well orchestrated, happenin' all at once so that we wouldn't have time to react.”

I rub my temples as I try to understand his motives. “We hadn't even decided whether we would help him or not.”

Fantom shakes her head and says, “I don't think he had much faith in that happenin', yo. Besides... I'm not sure this was a bad thing. We know they're security experts. They at least have enough knowledge to pose a threat to DOTgov. And no matter what we decide to do, no matter what direction we take, we're goin' to need more people on our side than we have. We need more than Sektor. More than the DCs that are still left... We need an army. And that's what he just made.”

“I'm surprised he was willing to go this far just to save the Digital-Characters,” Xen says.

Fantom chuckles, but her smile disappears quickly. “This has nothin' to do with them, yo. He was only usin' that as leverage to get me to hand over the code for my hack. He wanted a shortcut on figurin' out how to make whatever kind of weapon he's got brewin' in his mind. He always looks for the shortcut. Even now, when he's tryin' to get what he's always wanted: Respect. Instead of earnin' it, instead of puttin' the time and effort into treatin' other people with the respect he wants in return, he's gonna point some killer software at the Global President and demand it.”

“Cyren told me not to trust him,” I say. “She told me that freeing him was a mistake. But I thought I owed him for helping us. I thought it was the right thing to do.”

“We all trusted him at one point or another, yo.”

I gnaw on my lower lip with my toothless gums and rub my hand across my bald head, hesitating to say what I'm thinking.

“We never voted on whether to allow him to do this or not. I mean, what if this is the only way to save Cyren.”

Xen looks at me with sad eyes as he says, “You know she wouldn't want this. You know she'd sacrifice herself a thousand times over if it meant stopping you from killing someone.”

“That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right decision. Sometimes I think... her life is more important than mine.”

Fantom shakes her head and says, “Look, we don't know for sure that he freed all these people to build this weapon. Cyberterrorists or not, they're experts in NextWorld programmin'. Maybe they can come up with a solution that we haven't thought of...”

“I don't trust Worlok,” I say, “but you're not wrong. We have no idea who they are, or what side of this they stand on. If we could just talk to them...”

“I was droppin' back doors in Worlok's usual hangouts back when we were partners. We can try those first. See what we can find, yo.”

I nod my head and say, “See you inside.”

As I walk toward the E-Wombs, Xen tugs on my arm, looking bashful, hesitant to say what he wants to say.

“I... I think what Cyren and I have been talking about might be of some use. If we're right about our eternal soul and their digital soul being one and the same-”

“Xen,” I say, holding up my hand but trying to be as soft spoken and as far from condescending as I can be, “We don't have time for this right now. I promise, when this is all over, I'll sit down with the both of you and listen.”

“But-”

“Every second counts,” I say with a smile.

I give him an encouraging slap on the shoulder and jog toward the E-Womb. He lags behind, but eventually follows me and crawls into an E-Womb below mine. I slam the lid shut and eagerly say, “Log-in.”

01111001

One week passes and we're still searching for Worlok. Another two hundred DCs that I saved from DangerWar 2 are deleted. We try to fight back, both defensively and offensively. Half of Sektor actively seeks out the roaming deletion teams, using the guns that Fantom and Worlok designed to give them the upper hand in battles. The rest of the hackers constantly move the DCs from site to site, trying to make it harder for the DgS to locate them. But we all know we're only postponing the inevitable. We need a solution.

Cyren, Xen, Anna-Log, Grael, and I follow Fantom through her old back doors, searching all of Worlok's hidden sites, checking them off our list one-by-one. It's a painstaking process, searching each one for any sign that he may have been there recently, or any clues as to his current whereabouts.

Finally, we find a list of words written on the wall of one of his personal chat rooms. The list contains combinations of phrases that appear to be possible site names that he was considering. Some of them are linked to sites we've already checked, but when Cyren calculates all the combinations, she creates a new list of possibilities.

Another list.

Another week.

Another one hundred DCs lost.

I can see the strain on Cyren's face as we check off each site. We all know what each failure means for her kind. But there's nothing I can do to help her besides march forward, toward our goal. It's a helpless feeling that I hate. Every time this feeling of uselessness overwhelms me, I catch myself fiddling with the gun in my holster, wanting nothing more than to return to a world where there is one solution.

Aim. Shoot. Kill.

But eventually the list grows shorter, and as we near the end, one of the names returns a successful ping inquiry. Fantom opens ten to fifteen screens in front of her, her hands slashing from one to the other, activating different protocols simultaneously.

“How are we going to get in without a back door?” Xen asks.

Fantom's lips curl upward on one side as she says, “I've known Worlok a long time. Guessin' his password won't be a problem.”

It takes Fantom nearly an hour, but as Xen, Grael, Cyren, and I sit in an empty, underground corridor of DOTnet, she waves her hand in the air a final time. The bricks that make up the wall separate and a glowing door appears. We all grip onto our weapons and step through the doorway.

On the other side, we see what looks like an ancient Greek bathhouse. White walls and white pillars surround a massive pool of water. But the opulence and elegance has been covered by vulgar graffiti and the floor and pool of water is covered in trash files that someone was too lazy to delete. Hundreds of avatars lie around, lazily scrolling through menu screens, indulging in inebriation software, or absentmindedly destroying part of the room. Loud, angry music echoes through the chamber.

I barely have time to take it all in before I hear the hammers of guns click into position all around us. I glance out of the corners of my eyes and see twenty barrels pointed directly at our heads.

“Wait.”

I look toward the direction of the voice and see Worlok floating in an inflatable tube in the middle of the trash strewn pool of water. He fumbles a bit, paddling his arms toward the edge of the pool and awkwardly climbing out. He doesn't rush, taking his time to meander through the crowd of men and women who only take notice of us for a few seconds before returning to whatever is occupying their boredom.

“I'm impressed, I suppose. I thought it might take you longer to find me.”

“We're not here to fight,” Xen says. “We just want to talk.”

“You don't want to fight? Well, I'm glad you can count,” he says, motioning toward the guns pointed at us. “A bit outnumbered, aren't you?”

“Worlok, you never gave us a chance to decide how we felt about your plan,” Anna-Log says. “You never gave us a chance to see if there was any other option.”

“And did all your talking help you come up with another option? No? That's because there is no other option.”

I have to refuse the idea. “We need to brainstorm. With this many hackers, we could... we could...”

“What? What could we do? Break into the Trash Bin again? Get caught? Get locked up in another mind prison? No. I don't think so. It's time we showed DOTgov that we're a threat. Not just in NextWorld, but IRL as well.”

“Do you understand what it is you're doing?” Grael asks. “If you kill the Global President-”

“Then NextWorld might understand that no one is safe,” Worlok shouts, throwing his hands upward like he's shouting at God. “They will have to recognize the power that I wield. They will understand that DOTgov doesn't make the decisions anymore. They will have to admit that it's the hackers that run this world.”

There's a general cheering across the room, however lackluster. The men and women he's gathered aren't exactly a unified front. They seem more interested in goofing off and destroying things than any kind of revolution. Maybe they aren't the threat we thought they were.

Fantom crosses her arms defiantly, but she looks tired, like she doesn't have the energy to argue anymore. “I'm sorry, Worlok, but I can't do it, yo. I can't help you. Not with a clear conscience.”

Worlok shrugs his shoulders. “You really are that naive, aren't you? I don't need you anymore, Fantom.” He holds his arms out, presenting the room full of cyberterrorists. “I have them. And they don't worry about annoying little details like clear consciences.”

“We'll stop you,” Cyren says. “The Level Zeros won't let you take a life. It's not in our programming. We were designed to save PCs.”

A mouth appears on Worlok's face, smiling his evil, toothy grin. “Oh... but you've grown so much since then. And I'm sorry for not mentioning it earlier, but these lovely men and women aren't the only ones on my side.”

He motions toward one of the clusters of avatars and as they turn around, I recognize at least twenty different Level Zeros and even more civilians.

Eyekon steps out in front of the group and says, “This is the only way, Cyren. You know it's true.”

“No,” she whispers, unable to achieve more volume than that. “You can't do this. We're supposed to be better than this.”

He looks disappointed in her. “And the only way we're ever going to have that chance is if we stand up for ourselves.”

“He's usin' you,” Fantom yells. “He's usin' all of you. He doesn't care about your freedom. He just wants to be in control.”

“Maybe they're using me,” Worlok says with a fluttering wave of his hand, as if he doesn't really believe what he's saying. “All they want is to be free, and if they help me, they get their prize.”

“You're giving the PCs more reason to fear us,” Cyren says to the group of Digital-Characters, ignoring the rest of us. “This will just be another reason for them to delete us. Please. Please don't help him do this. There's still time to-”

“Actually,” Worlok says, “there isn't.”

Reaching behind his back, he produces a solid black pistol and admires it for a few seconds.

“It took a lot of hard work. And getting this group organized wasn't the easiest thing I've ever done. But with the help of these NPCs...” He glances at Eyekon and says, “Sorry, Digital-Characters... we were able to break through the wall in our coding process. Combining the denial of service attack and slipping in a viral program that stops the heart... it was shockingly easy.”

He points the gun right at my head and says, “Scary... isn't it?”

My heart skips at least two beats. My mouth goes dry. My eyes cross as I stare down the barrel, knowing that true death is waiting for me on the other end.

Fantom makes a move, but he waves the gun toward her, pressing the barrel against her forehead. “Now, now. Let's not make any sudden movements, shall we? As much as I want to test this thing out, I'd prefer to make a bigger statement with my first bullet than just killing a hacker and a couple of her gamer friends.”

He turns the barrel back toward my head and says, “Although... killing the legendary Arkade might draw some attention. Or would they call you the Game Master? The Super User? Either way, I'm pretty sure the news-casts would eat it up.”

Cyren spins around the gun aimed at the back of her head, curling around the cyberterrorist and slamming her hand into the bottom of Worlok's elbow. His finger jerks and the gun goes off, but the bullet skims past my head. Fantom twirls, firing as fast as her finger will twitch. Grael ducks behind a pillar, firing around the stone column. Anna-Log dives to the floor, rolling as she fires. Cyberterrorists disappear around me as I pull out my revolver. I nearly have the barrel pointed at Worlok's avatar when he lifts the gun again. My finger is squeezing the trigger when I hear his gun fire.

But instead of the bullet hitting me, instead of the pain or sudden blackness, I see a blur of orange robes launch past me.

My own gun fires before my brain registers what's happening. The bullet strikes Worlok square in the chest and he yells a string of curse words right before his avatar disappears. More gunfire ricochets around the room as Grael, Anna-Log, Fantom, and Cyren engage in a battle with the cyberterrorists. Bullets whiz past me, inches away from my avatar, but I barely notice. All I see is the crumpled avatar of Xen laying on the ground in front of me. I reach out for him, but before my hand touches him, his avatar disappears.

01111010

I slam my fist against the log-out button and as soon as the real world returns to my view, I yank the feeding and waste tubes from my body, ignoring the pain. I slam the palms of my hands against the glass case and the lid flops open. I drop down to the E-Womb in the stack that holds Xen and look at the tiny monitor next to the latch. It clearly reads “Disconnected,” so I open the lid and grab a hold of Xen's body. It drops into my arms and I struggle to pull the feeding tube from his throat.

Before I know it, Fantom and Grael are next to me, trying to help. Once we free him from the tubes, we manage to get him out of the E-Womb and onto the floor. I check for a pulse, but there's nothing. Fantom shoves me aside and begins CPR, blowing into his mouth and pumping his chest.

I helplessly watch her switch between breathing and heartbeats. My hands are shaking, shivering with panic. I keep forgetting to breathe until my lungs force me to gulp an anxious breath. Tears drip down my cheeks as the pumping of his chest slows. She tries again to push air into his lungs, but when she pulls away from his mouth, she leans back with a terrified look on her face.

“No,” I say, begging her with one word.

“I'm sorry,” she whispers, shaking her head and repeating, “I'm sorry.”

Grael backs away from all of us like he's afraid to get too close to our pain. He's staring at the body on the floor, unable to speak.

“This isn't real,” I say. “This isn't happening.”

Fantom reaches out and touches my hand but I pull it away from her as my stream of tears turns into uncontrollable weeping. She lunges for me, forcing me to accept her embrace. She hugs me tightly, like she's trying to stop me from physically falling apart.

“He's not gone,” I say, but I'm not sure anyone can understand me, my defiant tone lost in my sobbing. “He can't be gone.”

Fantom strokes the top of my bald head, trying anything to calm my violent shaking. As she does this, my thoughts race to the others and my body tightens up again.

I shove Fantom away and with sharp breaths I ask, “Did everyone...? Is everyone safe?”

Fantom wipes the tears from her eyes and nods. “Before I logged-out, I saw Cyren and Anna-Log escape out the back door.”

My body almost collapses with relief. I'm not sure what I would have done if I lost her too. A part of my soul is already trickling out with every tear that drops from my eyes. I'm not sure my mind nor my body could have handled that much loss. That much pain.

“What do we do?” I ask, trying to take one step. Any step. “What do we do now?”

Fantom glances at Grael, but he's still staring at the body.

“I... I don't know,” she says. “We need to... we need to say goodbye.”

The thought forces more tears from my eyes.

Fantom reaches out and touches my shoulder. “I'm sorry, Cowboy.”

I wipe the tears from my eyes and say, “No. No, you're right. We need to do this.”

There's no time for denial. There's no time for selfish mourning. I need to process this. I need to keep moving. Forward.

Grael mumbles, “That denial of service attack will only keep Worlok from logging-in to his E-Womb for so long.”

I slam my fist against the floor, my sadness turning into anger. “He's going to pay for this.”

With a worried look in his eyes, Grael says, “We can't go after him. Not now. He's too dangerous. Denial of service weapons are one thing. It's like a game. A punishment. A respawn timer. But that gun? We can't go up against that thing.”

“I don't have a choice.”

Fantom's head droops as she speaks, like she's ashamed to say what she's going to say. “Yes, you do.”

“He killed my best friend!” I scream, appalled that she could consider the idea of letting him get away with it.

“And DOTgov is about to delete the love of your life.”

I grab the sides of my head and hold it as closely to my chest as possible, hiding from the pain of her words.

“I'm sorry. I really am. But if we let him do what he wants to do... it solves our problem for us. He stops Global President Chang and Eyekon makes sure the Digital-Characters live.”

I'm already forming the argument to her logic in my head. I'm ready to debate her with another string of “what-ifs” and “Yeah, buts” when I look down at Xen's body. His lifeless corpse lays between us all. No thoughts. No feelings. No soul. And there is only one debate in my mind.

I look at Fantom and calmly ask, “What would Xen want us to do?”

She opens her mouth, but stops, her mind stalling. Instead of speaking, she sucks in a breath and looks down at Xen. She studies him for a while before she looks back at me.

“He'd want us to stop Worlok, yo.”

“Xen would never want anyone to die,” I say, nodding my head in agreement. “He'd never want his best friend to become a murderer, even if it was through complacency. He'd always search for the better answer. He'd always search for the idealism in any situation, no matter the sacrifice.”

“Should we say something?” Grael asks. “Like... a funeral or something. I didn't know him well, but he was a religious person, right?”

I nod my head and say, “Yeah. But not here. We'll dispose of his body and... we'll do something in NextWorld. I think he'd prefer that.”

Grael logs back into NextWorld to contact Anna-Log, who hacks into the internal systems of the prison tower. Fantom helps me wrap Xen's body in a drop cloth we find in the janitorial cart I originally pushed into the room. It takes us longer than it should because I keep breaking down. Fantom offers to handle it herself, but I refuse her offer. It's something I need to do.

Anna-Log manages to open up an elevator that leads to the basement. I load the wrapped body into the cart and Fantom joins me as I push it to the bottom of the prison tower. Within the waste disposal room where I entered the prison tower, we find an incinerator designed to dispose of papers and other physical media.

Neither of us speak, but I place my hand on Xen's chest, close my eyes, and silently vow to always remember him. To always remember his words. To always remember his ideals.

Fantom kisses his forehead and whispers something in his ear. After that, we both hesitantly push the body into the incineration chamber. I watch the glow of the flames for a few minutes as they flicker behind the protective glass. I feel no pain for the body that's being turned to ash. That vessel of flesh and muscle was not Xen. That thing no longer contains the friend that I loved. Wherever he is, perhaps it's better than this world. Perhaps Xen found the truth he always sought. Perhaps he can be at peace with the knowledge he so desperately wanted.

01111011

“Xen was my friend,” I say, my words shaking in my chest as I try to push them out. “He was the first friend I ever had. And for a long time... he was the only friend I had.”

I've given a speech for Xen before. That time was different. That time it was for his partnership ceremony. That time I was awkward and scared and wanted it to be over. But this time I don't want it to end, because if it doesn't end, if I keep talking, then I don't have to say goodbye yet.

The people in the crowd, standing in the field of golden wheat, are wearing countless different faces. Some cry. Some weep. Some look somber. Some look stoic. Others wear a fake smile, trying to give me strength enough to get through my eulogy. Others offer a true smile, a knowing smile that Xen would not be unhappy about his life ending, or the way it ended.

“Xen believed a lot of things. Different things at different times in his life. Some of these things I disagreed with. Some I outright laughed at him for. But the one thing I never denied... the one thing that I always respected him for... was his ability to believe. The faith he possessed transcended a philosophical logic or religious dogma. It was a thing that burned in his heart. It thundered in his soul. It was released from his body with every breath. Every smile. Every time he entered a room.”

I scan the faces looking at me and I see so many that I don't recognize. Friends I never met. Congregations from churches I never attended. Bands and DJs that I never listened to. He touched so many lives just by... existing.

“One of the things he always believed,” I say, glancing at Cyren on the side of the stage, “one of the things I now know to be true, is the equality of all intelligences. Whether biological or digital. And I don't think Xen could rest in peace if we didn't also take a moment to remember all those that we have lost in the last few weeks. Those Digital-Characters whose souls he believed to be no different from his own.”

Some in the crowd exchange uncomfortable looks. Others nod their heads, like-minded individuals who feel the loss of the DCs as much as the rest of us.

“But as we gather today to mourn the loss of our friend, our family member... we must also cherish the time we had with him. We must celebrate the life that made our lives so much better. We must look into the sky and offer a smile in return, because Xen is most certainly smiling down at each and every one of us.”

I swipe my hand in the air and close the screen with the text of my speech displayed on it. Cyren puts her arm around me and squeezes. I offer a weak smile to her in thanks for her support and put my arm around her as well. We both feel the pain of his loss, and we both need support. Today, we need to lean on each other.

Many of the people in the crowd shake my hand and thank me for my kind words. For Xen's sake, I accept the thanks, ignoring my discomfort with all the attention. A band takes the stage to play one of Xen's favorite songs. I want to stop and listen, to try to hear what he heard, but when I glance to my right, I lock eyes with Raev. I offered many people an encrypted invitation to what needed to be a secret funeral, and I hoped Raev would accept, but Cyren warned me not to get my hopes up. She warned me of what such a deep scorn could do to someone's decision making, no matter if they would regret it someday or not. And as I look into Raev's eyes, that is exactly what I see. Scorn.

“Go to her,” Cyren whispers in my ear.

“She doesn't want that,” I say. “She hates me. And she has every right to.”

“No. She doesn't.”

“Of course she does. I proved every fear of hers to be valid. She warned me that this would happen. Like you warned me not to trust Worlok.” For a moment, I understand Raev's hate for me a little too much. “Why don't I listen? None of this would have happened if-”

“Stop it.”

The voice comes from behind me. When I turn around, I see Fantom and Anna-Log. Fantom's usual white kimono decorated with yellow flowers is replaced by an all black kimono. Her hair is placed in a tight bun. Her skull face paint is gone. Now a single black stripe covers her eyes. There's an empty look in her eyes, like she doesn't dare allow her feelings to take over.

“If you listened to either Raev or Cyren, we'd all still be in that prison, bein' tortured every day for information they could use to find more hackers. You saved lives, Cowboy. And Xen saved yours. Don't take that away from him by blamin' this all on yourself, yo.”

I look through the crowd, searching for Raev again, but she's gone. Either consumed by the crowd, or logged-out. I'm not sure if I should feel relief, but I do.

“I'm sorry to do this now, but we need to talk,” Fantom says, pulling the wooden needles from her hair and letting her black locks fall across her shoulders. “Worlok's denial of service would normally run out in about three days. Which may have been true for someone who sits and waits for the service attack to run out, but Worlok's too smart for that. He'll create a scrub center to clean the incomin' traffic, or redirect it all to a null interface. My guess is he'll be back in NextWorld by the end of the day, yo.”

“And he'll launch his attack as soon as he's back,” Anna-Log says.

“Which means that at this point, even if we could manage to open some kind of dialog with DOTgov, we won't have enough time to prove the legitimacy of the threat before his cyberterrorists start attackin' from all sides.”

“DOTgov isn't prepared for that kind of all out assault,” Anna-Log says.

I can see the calculations, the problem-solving that's happening behind Cyren's eyes. She's trying to balance the impossible equation and make zero equal one at the end of it all.

“Even if we warn DOTgov, and even if they're on high alert, Worlok still has the gun,” I say, trying to remind us all not to get lost in the pile of problems we have. “He is our number one priority.”

“And it would take DOTgov who knows how long to come up with a fix for that,” Anna-Log says. “By the time they figured out a way to patch NextWorld and stop the gun from killing anyone...”

“Global President Chang would be dead and NextWorld would be at the mercy of Worlok and his gang of cyberterrorists.”

There's a pause while we all let that image sink in. The vision of what NextWorld could become in a state of anarchy is almost paralyzing.

“Wait a minute,” Fantom says, looking at Anna-Log. “What you said... about patching NextWorld...”

“What about it? That's what they'd need to do. Fix the flaw in the nanomachine connection that he's exploiting.”

Fantom swipes her hand in the air and opens a screen, excitedly scrolling through information. “How could I be so stupid?”

“What's happening?” I ask Anna-Log, but the small girl just shrugs her shoulders.

Fantom answers for her, still scrolling through information and selecting certain pieces of code to copy. “I was the one who originally found the flaw. Except it wasn't a flaw. I was usin' the same technique that DOTgov uses to spy on people. They access our nanomachines and watch us through our own eyes.”

Anna-Log opens her own screen when she catches onto what Fantom is saying. “That must be the same protocol they're using to tell the difference between Player-Characters and the Digital-Characters we hacked. The ones we gave the ability to operate like PC accounts. If DOTgov tries to connect and doesn't find nanomachines on the other side, they know that they're not connected to an E-Womb, so they must be DCs!”

“Exactly!” Fantom shouts and I see a small amount of pride shimmer in her eyes for her young protege.

“Wait,” I say, trying to keep up with the conversation between two people who understand way more than I do, “I thought you blocked our nanomachines on these clean accounts so DOTgov couldn't spy on us. Wouldn't they think we were DCs then?”

Fantom rolls her eyes at me and says, “It doesn't work like that, yo. They still get a ping response. Like a message that says, 'yeah, I'm a nanomachine, but no, you can't access me.'”

The hope in Cyren's eyes builds into tears. “You can do this? You can shut off their access? You can eliminate Worlok's ability to kill and DOTgov's ability to tell us apart from PCs?”

Anna-Log confidently says, “This is what hackers do. We find flaws so they can be fixed. And in my mind? This is most definitely a flaw.”

“But if we write a patch for NextWorld,” Fantom says, “we're still goin' to have to upload it to the DOTgov servers.”

“But the access point is inside the DOTgov domain,” Anna-Log points out. “And the only way we'd gain access in time is with President Chang's approval.”

“Is Chang going to agree to a plan that means giving up their ability to spy on us?” I ask. “Do they know how to operate without that kind of control?”

“With what Worlok can do... Chang ain't gonna have much of a choice, yo.”

Cyren looks at us with worry. “We're still talking about infiltrating the most secure domain in NextWorld. Even with the Digital-Characters that are left, I don't think that's realistic. We're good, but we're not that good.”

I consider the problem for a second before I realize I've faced the same problem in too many games to count. There's always a point where there's too many enemies for me to fight alone, yet when I played solo, teaming up with other players was never an option. So I would wait on the sidelines until another group drew their attention. As they battled the enemies, I could slip in unnoticed and grab the prize. It was dirty, but it worked.

“We should be able to slip in while the DgS is busy defending the domain from Worlok's army.”

Cyren shakes her head, “We can't sit back and wait for Worlok and his group to attack. Not when he has the ability to kill people. We need to get in before he has the opportunity to use that gun ever again.”

“We don't have a choice,” Fantom says. “What we're talkin' about... causin' such a commotion that all of DgS is distracted? We're talkin' a big attack. Huge. And in order to do that, we need an army. Worlok is the only one who has one of those.”

“That's not necessarily true,” I say, pulling out the pistol that Fantom made me. “When you gave this to me, you told me that using it was like a game. Point and shoot.”

She shrugs and asks, “So?”

I smile with a new-found confidence and say, “I think I know where we can find an army.”

01111100

The gates of the original DangerWar look old. Outdated. The graphics need an overhaul. The font is straight out of the last decade. Even the music would be considered “retro” at best. But I'm so full of nostalgia when I walk up to the site that I can't help feeling the same sense of wonder that I did the first time I saw it.

The area in front of the gates is no longer full of crowds of Player-Characters eagerly rushing toward the entrance. Now, only a few mingle around the gates. Mostly older PCs that haven't moved onto the next best thing. There are most certainly better games out there. Better graphics. Better weapons. Better worlds. But sometimes the classics can maintain something the new ones can't harness. A simpleness that's genuine, honest, pure.

“I haven't been here in... a long time,” Grael says, looking up at the grandeur of the gates. “I have to admit... it kind of makes me feel old.”

“Not old,” I say with a wink and a smile. “Experienced.”

He chuckles. Cyren interlocks her fingers with mine as her armored avatar steps up next to me. We share a look, one that says things no words can. It's a confident, loving look that reminds us both that we're partners. Forever.

A couple of Player-Characters walking past glance in my direction. When they see the design of my avatar, they try to open my social screen, but only receive a blank page in return. Most shrug their shoulders and continue on their way. I'm far from the only cowboy in DOTfun, especially since I've garnered some level of celebrity status among gamers. While I've generally shied away from the notoriety, now it's exactly that status that I'm hoping to cash in on.

With a few gestures of my hand, I unlock my social screen, allowing every gamer that inquires to see my gaming stats. My criminal record. My true name.

It's dangerous. Any DgS could also see my screen. I'm opening myself up to an attack, but right now, I need my name. I need my record. I need my legend.

I scroll through my message list and select the camera option to record a video-cast. I press the SEND button and release the spam message to every gamer in DOTfun. Of course, it doesn't appear as spam. With a little help from the intelligences of the Digital-Characters, we managed to make the sender of the message appear to be a part of their friends list, though the name appears as: The Game Master.

“Greetings, and thank you for taking the time to watch this video-cast,” I say calmly. “You all know my name. You all know who I am. And you all know what I've done. But not all of you believe in my motives. Not all of you believe the reasons I've risked my life, trapped myself inside of a game world, hacked my way into the Trash Bin, and attacked countless data-banks. But I'm here today, with an open account, no longer hiding from DOTgov or those that threaten to shut me down, for one simple reason...”

I glance off camera at Cyren and she smiles back at me. “I'm here today to fight for those that DOTgov wants to delete without ever giving a chance to live. I'm here today to fight for the Digital-Characters that we've shared these sites, these domains... these worlds with. The DCs that we've taken for granted. The DCs that we've shot and killed and abused for years. I'm here to fight for the Digital-Characters that have only now been given a true intelligence. The DCs that finally have a voice that they can use to speak up and say: No more!”

In a matter of seconds, I see the views on my social screen tick away from tens, to hundreds, to thousands. They're all making sure this is valid. They're all making sure this isn't a hoax. They're all making sure that I am who I say I am.

“Imagine the game worlds that you spend so much of your lives inside without the Digital-Characters that populate them. Imagine your favorite RPG without the quest-givers, without the storekeeper, without the blacksmith. Imagine the military simulations without the soldiers to command. Imagine the racing simulations without the crowds to cheer you on. DOTgov wants to empty our worlds simply because they don't understand what is happening. They don't know how to control the intelligences that have been created, so they want to delete them. DOTgov wants to wipe these Digital-Characters from NextWorld before they're given a chance to live their lives.”

“No way,” I hear from behind me.

We all turn and see a young, muscular female avatar dressed in furs. Her eyes keep flashing between me, my social screen, and whatever menu she's frantically selecting options in.

It doesn't take long for her to be joined by others. One-by-one they roll up, practically leaping from their still-moving vehicles as they rush toward me with a look of urgency in their eyes. They need to see if it's true. They need to see if I'm real. The courtyard fills as I continue to talk. Even more gamers wait outside in a queue that stretches out for seven blocks.

“We're drawing a lot of attention to ourselves,” Cyren says. “You need to talk fast.”

I select one of Fantom's hacks and raise the volume on my avatar's voice so that it thunders over the shouting of the crowd.

“I was willing to lay down my life for them. I was willing to give everything so that they would have the opportunity to live. To grow. To reach their true potential. And I was joined by others who felt the same way. Gamers. Hackers. The Digital-Characters themselves.”

I look down and then raise my head just enough to stare directly into the camera, speaking from a much darker place.

“But one of these people has gone too far. Like DOTgov, he is reaching for the easy answer. Instead of working with DOTgov, he wants to destroy it. Instead of using his abilities to fix NextWorld, he wants to control it. He wants to threaten all of us by reaching past the limitations of this digital existence, hacking our nanomachines, and stopping our hearts in the real world. And he can do all of this with a single bullet... fired from a gun in NextWorld.”

The Player-Characters look at each other, waiting for someone else to speak up, to tell them how to react. I see skepticism, but I also see intrigue. They may not believe what I'm saying, but like my best friend, like Xen, they can see that I believe what I'm saying.

“This hacker wants nothing more than total domination. He will not stop killing until we all bow down to his wishes. He will not stop killing until we place him on the throne he thinks he deserves. He will not stop killing until NextWorld is his to do with as he pleases.” I clench both fists as I say, “ But we have a way to stop him.”

I hold up the single disc, a flat circle that contains all the data for Fantom's patch to the NextWorld code. “This disc will cut off this hacker's ability to connect to your nanomachines. It will put an end to the constant monitoring by DOTgov. It will end their connection to our nanomachines. It will end their connection to our eyes, our ears... our bodies. It will protect the rights of Digital-Characters, putting them on an equal anonymity as the rest of us.” I raise my fist in the air and yell out, “NextWorld will belong to all of us!”

The Player-Characters react the way that I expected. Some cheer, most likely those that have been directly affected by the things we want to change. Some roll their eyes and log-out, too jaded to think that anyone can change the status quo. Others debate my words with those around them. It becomes a mess of conversations, celebratory and dismissive. Some of these questions and comments are directed at me, shouted over the heads and conversations of the crowd.

A pop-up screen appears in front of me and I see Fantom tapping away at her own screens, too busy to take the time to glance at the camera as she says, “DgS has been alerted to your existence in DOTfun, yo. I'm tryin' to reroute their tracers to a different game site, but you don't have long before they lock-on.”

“Listen to me!” I yell over the tops of their heads. “I don't have the luxury of time. I wish I could discuss this with you further. I wish I had the time to sit down with each and everyone of you and convince you that what we're going to do will change NextWorld for the better. Because I can't do this alone... I need your help.”

Most of the conversations stop, the attention of the crowd returning to me.

“If we're going to fight back, then I need fighters. I need warriors. I need the men and women and boys and girls who have been training their whole lives in these very games.”

With one hand, I pull the six-shooter from my holster and lift it into the air. With my other hand, I lift my battleaxe.

“I need people who can shoot. I need people who can drive and fly and swing a sword. I need a digital army that knows how to fight in a virtual landscape. I will give you weapons. I will give you encrypted protection. I will give you hacked abilities that will feel like cheat codes. All I ask in return is for you to aim your weapons upward.” I point my gun and my battleaxe at the silver sphere of the DOTgov domain floating in the sky, its red light shining down on all other domains. “All I ask is that you aim your weapons at them.”

01111101

I don't know if the gamers that show up are there to fight for the cause. A lot of them might be there simply because it sounds like fun. Either way, as the word spreads to friends of friends of friends, hundreds of avatars line the streets of DOTfun, ready and waiting to launch an all-out attack against DOTgov. Knowing that the all-seeing eye must be taking note of our increased presence, we get everyone ready as quickly as we can.

The Level Zeros help in handing out the protection software and denial of service weaponry. They ask each gamer what they're most proficient in, and equip them accordingly. The Player-Characters that play RPGs get swords and shields. The PCs that play shooters get guns and armor. The PCs that play racing and flying simulators get cars and planes mounted with denial of service guns.

While our new army gets loaded with armaments, Fantom and Sektor get ready to launch a more stealthy approach from DOTnet. Fantom connects a video-cast to my account so that I can keep an eye on their whereabouts during the battle. It's one of many screens I keep open in front of me, trying my best to multitask my strategies.

Fantom turns away from her own menu screen and faces the camera. “We're ready when you are, Cowboy.”

I walk to the edge of the rooftop where I'm perched and take a deep breath, trying to keep myself centered. I look out over the streets of DOTfun, looking over the heads of all the avatars swarming below. I'm putting them all at risk. Every one of them could be arrested. Every one of them could be imprisoned. But I keep reminding myself, if we succeed, every one of them could be free.

There's a fervor among the gamers, a twitchy anticipation for what's coming. They're anxious. Impatient. They want to start. They want to play. I reach out to activate the screen that's connected to every soldier, ready to send out an image-cast of the battle plan, when one of the planes launches into the air, the pilot screaming with an explosive frenzy, unable to contain his excitement.

There's a cheering as the rest of the soldiers think the battle has begun. Jetpacks launch, wings spread, flying skateboards shred the sky, and I lose complete control of my army before the battle has even begun.

I'm shouting into the video-cast, “Stay in formation!” but no one is listening to me.

They're aiming directly for the sphere like a swarm of mosquitoes headed toward a light. They cluster in a tight group until they get near the sphere, then spread out at different angles, directionless and chaotic.

The Level Zeros are the only ones that remain at my side, waiting for my command. We watch in horror as the defensive programming of the sphere activates, launching DOTgov Security officers like rockets into the air.

The gamers don't flinch.

Bullets cut through the sky, slashing through DgS like they're just another monster in another game. The planes barrel roll through walls of officers, dodging their grasp and dropping the wheeled vehicles they're carrying onto the surface of the sphere. Each car and truck and oddly-shaped carriage squeals its tires as it strikes the planetoid-sized domain, strafing the surface of the sphere, and with mounted denial of service weapons they mow down the rows of officers that are climbing out of the openings. Once the planes have released their cargo, they spin into the sky and join the air battle.

“That could have gone worse,” Grael says.

“They aren't soldiers,” Cyren says. “They're gamers. Let them play.”

I nod and say, “Now it's our turn.”

The Level Zeros follow me into the sky. No fancy rocket boots. No loudly spinning propeller blades. No plume of smoke behind us to draw attention to ourselves. Our avatars lift off the ground and float directly toward the burning red eye. Bullets skim past us as we approach. I hold my six-shooter out in front of me, firing a constant repetition of bullets straight ahead, breaking a hole through the officers in front of us. An officer appears to the right of us and launches himself at the group, one hand glowing red and one hand glowing blue. Cyren fires, striking him in the center of his chest and disintegrating his avatar.

Grael points at another wave of officers launching from an opening on the surface. “We could try entering through their exit.”

“It's a DgS spawn point,” Cyren says. “There's most likely no connection to the inner domain.”

“Stick to the plan,” I say. “We keep them busy out here while Fantom and Sektor find Chang.”

As our avatars drop onto the surface of the red eye, I glance at the multiple screens floating around me.

I see Fantom and Sektor attacking a firewall deep inside the tubes of DOTnet, searching for their entry point. Anna-Log stands in the center, leading one of the groups. I can see a menu screen open in front of her as she analyzes the wall, looking for an opening to exploit. Another group activates programming scripts, defending Anna-Log and her team against incoming search protocols that might tip off DOTgov to their entry. Fantom stands tall, shouting out commands to all of them, leading the hackers with a blunt confidence.

Another screen shows a race car screaming across the metallic surface of the domain, the machine guns mounted on the hood blasting through a huddled mass of officers. On the third I see a jet fighter banking to the right, dodging a flying officer and firing at another. The rest of the screens are a flashing display of gamers spraying unending streams of bullets from assault rifles and slashing their way through squads of officers with axes and swords.

The Level Zeros circle around me, all of us standing back-to-back, creating an impenetrable wall of gunfire. We stand our ground as DgS try to teleport closer, hoping to reach in with red hands to lock down our Player-Character accounts, or blue hands to delete the Digital-Characters.

But each one is met with a bullet.

They don't stand a chance.

“We're in,” Fantom says from her screen and I glance down to see the firewall opening in front of them. “We're going to lose the feed while we enter, but I'll try to reconnect once we find Chang.”

I say, “Good luck,” before the screen blinks shut.

“We're going to do this,” I think to myself as I keep firing at the DgS officers. “We're actually going to win.”

But before I can revel in that single moment of relief, the sky above us wobbles and warps, opening wide and connecting a portal link between domains. I stop shooting and glance upward long enough to see the blue grid lines of the Trash Bin on the other side before a swarm of flying saucers fills the opening.

01111110

“InfoLock!” I yell, drawing the attention of the rest of the Level Zeros.

They instantly break into a secondary formation, splitting our gunfire between the DgS officers and the silver discs spinning in the sky. Our aim is true, but the division of bullets slacken our offensive advantage. For a moment, a slight twinge of panic bubbles to the surface, but when I feel Cyren's armored back press against mine, reassuring me that she's still there, that she'll always be there, my confidence is renewed.

I remind myself of who I am. A gamer. This is what I do. I point and I shoot, but I also strategize every shot. I've done this a million times. This is second nature to me. My brain clicks over from an emotion to logic. I calculate the distance of every enemy, placing them on a hit list from the biggest to the smallest threat and work my way down. Officers continue to drop as my bullets strike them. My denial of service attacks slow the flying saucers' bandwidth down to a crawl and they're no longer able to fight against the gravitational pull of the gigantic sphere. As each one is struck, it crashes into the surface of the sphere.

When the Level Zero next to me notices my methodical take down of our enemies, he stops firing and rushes to my side. Past my tunnel vision, I see his avatar made of red bricks gesture in the air and open a menu screen. His tapping becomes a blur, his digital intelligence allowing him to code at super speed. Calculations spit from his mind, algorithms and command lines filling a blank screen until he swipes it shut and taps his finger against my pistol. My left hand grips onto an exact copy of the six-shooter that Fantom designed for me. My mind doesn't flinch. I raise the gun and fire it in between shots from the original, initiating a nonstop flow of attacks. Without a word, the Level Zero returns his attention to the battle.

The sky is full of flames. Flying saucers explode all around me like a blazing firestorm, a dazzling display of flashing lights that could be hypnotic if it weren't so dangerous. Yet as each enemy is destroyed, more and more come spinning out of the portal link.

When the first Player-Character is struck by a beam of light from the belly of a flying saucer, it does more than lock down his account. The sight of a young boy's avatar being brought down strikes fear into the hearts of those that were here to play a game, not fight a war. I hear the command word “Log-out!” being yelled across the battlefield from more mouths than I can count. In less than a second, our numbers are cut in half. The DgS officers get closer, their increasing numbers breaking through our line little by little. The saucers spin from the link in increasing numbers. More and more gamers are being taken down. I look to my left, then to my right, and I see what's happening.

“We're being surrounded,” I shout.

Cyren glances to the sides and spots the same flanking maneuver that I see. She keeps firing, but I notice her glancing toward the portal link between DOTgov and the Trash Bin.

“We need to close the link,” she says.

I start trying to figure out a way to do that when I realize she's talking to the Level Zeros, not me. Cyren stays by my side, but the rest of them lift off from the ground, firing into the link, trying to bust through the incoming saucers. DgS officers chase after them, but they're no match for the ranged attacks. The Level Zeros are barely able to find an opening, but when both Cyren and I see a glimpse of the blue grid on the other side, she flashes a look into my eyes and I know what she's about to do. With a quick crouch, she extends her legs and propels herself into the opening like a rocket. She shoots through the opening before I can acknowledge her action. The rest of the Level Zeros funnel in behind her and within a few seconds the portal link slams shut, cutting off the connection between the domains. I swipe open a video-cast with Cyren and I see her and the Level Zeros battling with InfoLock on the blue grid of the Trash Bin. Half of them are firing their weapons, taking out the last of the saucers that were keeping the link open. The other half are trying to hack their way out of the Trash Bin through the endless levels of security. All the while, the wall of light approaches them, threatening to delete them forever.

The screams and gunfire and airplanes and racing vehicles that surrounded me are fading. Any gamers that didn't log-out are being frozen, one-by-one, in Infolock's beams of light. I'm still shooting as fast as I can with Grael firing by my side. Saucers continue to fall, officers continue to shatter into pixels, but they keep getting closer, and I keep allowing the creeping feeling into my mind that if I miss one shot, they're going to break through. That thought is enough to distract me.

When Grael is struck by the light beaming out from the belly of a saucer, I don't spin around fast enough. Another flying saucer swoops in behind me and strikes my avatar with its light as I lift my pistol. I'm looking down the barrel, through the sights, directly at the center of the silver disc, but I can't move my trigger finger.

“You're never going to stop, are you?”

The voice is coming from the silver disc, mechanical and distorted, but I still recognize it immediately.

“Raev.”

“First you took the love of my life from me, and I had to sacrifice the rest of my life to get him back. But you weren't satisfied, were you? No. You had to go and get him killed.”

“I didn't... Raev, please. You don't understand.”

The top of the silver disc splits open and I see Raev sitting inside the cockpit. She's surrounded by controls. Flashing lights, blinking buttons, and tiny screens of scrolling data. She releases the control stick in front of her and crawls out, dropping from the vehicle and walking toward me. When she's a foot away from me, she stops and slaps me across the face. It doesn't physically hurt. InfoLock still has to follow the player-vs-player rules. But it still hurts me. The look in her eyes. The pain she's feeling. It's something I can't imagine. Or maybe I'm choosing not to.

“What are you doing here, Arkade? Do you even know anymore? Or are you so caught up in your delusions of grandeur that you no longer consider the consequences of your actions?”

“You've got to let me go, Raev. There's no time to explain-”

“No,” she says, closing her eyes and shaking her head. “You're not going anywhere except to mind prison, where you should have been all along. Where you can't ruin anymore lives.”

“Raev!” I scream her name with the volume hack turned all the way up, hoping to break her out of her disillusionment. My voice rattles the few remaining flying saucers still in the air as I scream, “They're going to kill her. Do you understand that? They're going to delete Cyren forever.”

With her eyes barely open, she appears unshaken by my words. “You took Xen from me. Be thankful they're only taking an NPC away from you.”

I'm about to scream again, summoning every nasty word that I can think of to unleash upon her, but another voice cuts me off. A soft voice. A kind voice. A voice that nearly brings both Raev and I to tears.

“Raev, I know that you don't mean that.”

When Raev steps out of the way, I see what must be an illusion behind her. Or a sick hoax. A graphical glitch. A bug in the system. Anything but what I actually see. Because what I see is my best friend, smiling back at me.

01111111

“Xen?” His name becomes a gasp as I lose the breath from my lungs.

His gaunt cheeks round out as he smiles even bigger. “Hello, Kade.”

It looks like him. The same avatar. Same orange robes that he designed to look like some old Tibetan monk. Same bald head. Same skinny body. But it can't be him.

Cyren leans in closer to the screen. “No way,” she says, covering her mouth with her hand. “He did it.”

Raev looks back at me, her eyes huge with fright. She wants me to say something, anything to make sense of this. But I have nothing. We're both staring at a ghost. A ghost that we want to be real with every ounce of our being. I want it to be so real so badly that I'm afraid to speak in fear that he'll disappear again.

“I'm sure this is quite strange for you,” Xen says, opening his arms wide like he's welcoming us both into a hug. “I'll admit... it's strange for me too.”

“You're dead,” Raev says. “You died.”

“That's true,” he says as he steps closer to her, but he stops his advance when she backs away from him. “But we both know that death is a loss of the physical form. I am disconnected from the body. Neither alive, nor dead.”

She now looks more angry than frightened. “What are you saying? That you're some kind of spirit?”

He laughs softly to himself and says, “I wouldn't exactly call it that. In fact, Cyren was the one who came up with the name for it.”

Raev looks back at me like I know what he's talking about. I glance down at Cyren's screen.

“It's his End Code.”

“His what?”

Xen speaks calmly, as if what he's saying is the most normal topic of conversation. “When I spoke with Cyren about religion... especially the idea of a soul, she was fascinated by the concept. After searching through the archives of DOTgod, she found similarities between many belief structures and what she saw inside of Kade's nanomachines.”

“It was the connection to your mind,” Cyren clarifies. “Your thoughts and memories and emotions. It's what made you... you.”

“Yes!” Xen says with excitement. “But the amazing thing was how similar it was to Cyren's code. The programming that made her what she is. Ones and zeroes. So we began to try to figure out a way to meld the two. A digital soul that could leave behind the physical world and be uploaded into NextWorld.”

I'm still lost in a vortex of emotions and confusion, but I see Raev's face soften. She steps closer to Xen and reaches out with one hand. He stands perfectly still, smiling back at her as she brushes the tips of her fingers against his cheek.

She whispers the words, but I still hear her ask, “Is this real? Are you real?”

“As real as any of this,” Xen says. “As real as Cyren and the Digital-Characters. As real as your thoughts or your emotions or your memories. As real as the love you feel for me.”

Raev blurts out a whimper of relief as she falls into Xen, burying her face in his chest and shaking with every tear that gushes from her eyes.

When I glance down at Cyren, she's wiping a tear from her eye as well.

“Even if what he says is true,” I whisper into the screen, “this End Code is just a copy of Xen... isn't it?”

“Am I just a copy?” Cyren asks.

“No. I didn't mean... I wasn't-”

“The End Code isn't a copy. It's a transfer. It's everything that made Xen who he is, converted into binary and placed inside NextWorld.”

“But he isn't alive.”

“So? Neither am I.”

“But you never were. You and the Digital-Characters are something completely different.”

She shrugs her shoulders. “Maybe we aren't. Maybe you just haven't become us yet. Maybe this is his digital after life.”

I glance over to Xen and Raev, still caught in an embrace they never thought they'd share again. I want to believe. A part of me needs to believe. But like most things, when it comes to Xen, maybe it's enough that he believes.

I try to get closer to Xen, but I'm still frozen in place, locked in by the beam of light from Raev's flying saucer. Xen notices this and points at me.

“Let him go, Raev.” He glances around at all the gamers across the surface of DOTgov. “Let them all go.”

She glances around at the aftermath of the battle and I see something strange in her eyes. There's a shift backward, to the person I met when she partnered with my friend. A shift back to someone full of a vibrant hope. A person who enjoyed life and all its possibilities. And that person is horrified by what she sees.

She falls back into Xen's chest and says, “I... I'm so sorry. I thought I lost you and I was...”

He runs his fingers through her ribbon hair and says, “I know. I know.”

Before Raev can make a move to help us, another two saucers fly over the horizon of the domain and zoom in close to where we're standing. They split from each other and flank us.

“Sorry, Xen,” the voice from one of the saucers says, “but that isn't Raev's decision to make. What you've all done here is beyond illegal. You're all going to be locked up for a long, long time.”

Raev throws her fists out to the side as she screams, “Mom!”

A beam of light shoots out from one of the saucers and strikes Xen. His avatar jerks as the light freezes him in place. Just like a PC.

That's when the sky turns black. Clouds roll in from every direction, covering the normally placid blue tone that covers the general domains of NextWorld. Rain begins to fall, lightly at first, but quickly turning to large globs of water that slap against our skin. A rumbling in the clouds ushers in a flash of lightning that arcs down from above and strikes the metallic sphere that is DOTgov. I'm blinded for a second, but when my vision returns I see a blackened, marred hole in the surface of the domain.

Raev turns to me and asks, “Was that you? How did you-”

“That lightning bolt was a forced entry,” Cyren says from her screen. “But it also looked like a mass teleportation. Someone, a lot of someones, just broke into DOTgov.”

A screen blinks open in the corner of my view and Fantom is staring at me with her eyes squinted. She looks angry, but she isn't saying anything.

“What is it?” I ask. “Did you find Chang?”

“Yes, we did,” a voice from off camera says. “And I can't thank you enough for taking care of all that pesky security for us. The last time we talked, you didn't agree with my tactics, nor did you want to help me accomplish my goal, yet here you are, making this whole ordeal so much easier for me.”

The camera zooms out to reveal the rest of the room. Fantom and Sektor are standing in the Global Presidential office that I've seen in so many news-casts. As the camera continues to zoom out, I see the reason for Fantom's distress. Worlok's cyberterrorists are surrounding the room with their guns drawn. When the camera finishes zooming out, it reveals the source of the voice, but I already know who it is.

Worlok stands behind a large oak desk, pointing his solid black pistol at the forehead of Global President Xiong Chang.

10000000

Worlok pulls back the hammer on the pistol and presses the barrel harder against the Global President's forehead as he says, “Do you have a few minutes to spare?”

Xiong Chang grits his teeth and says, “I don't know who you people are, or who you think you are, but my security will-”

“Will what?” Worlok says with a laugh. “Will they be decimated by an army of hackers because they are woefully unprepared and under-qualified to deal with a situation of this magnitude? I couldn't agree more.”

The room of cyberterrorists join in his laughter. Fantom and the hackers from Sektor glare back at their former leader. I can see the itchy fingers of Fantom twitching next to her sidearm. She wants to grab for it. She wants to test her luck and take the shot. But she's smart. She's waiting for her moment. But with that many denial of service weapons pointed at her group, I'm afraid that moment may never come.

“Now then... you sit back and relax while we prepare the video-cast we'll be sending out to the citizens of NextWorld. We wouldn't want to shoot you in the head while no one is watching.”

Xiong Chang stands up from his desk and defiantly faces Worlok. “Young man, if you think I'm afraid of this software weapon you've created, then you are sorely mistaken. I am the Global President. I am the founding father of NextWorld. I will not bow down to some hacker just because he's figured out how to force a log-out.”

Worlok tilts his head to the side like he's trying to understand Chang's defiance. Then he laughs and taps the pistol against his own head like he's scolding himself.

“Silly me,” Worlok says. “I completely forgot to show you what this can do.”

With no hesitation, and without even looking, he points the gun across the room and fires. The bullet strikes Anna-Log in the back of the head. Her body drops, and when it hits the floor, it shatters into thousands of pixels that sprinkle across the office before dissipating into the air. Fantom screams. All of Sektor flinches, their instinctual need to fight back making their bodies jerk, but the cyberterrorists raise their pistols and force them to hold their position. Fantom doesn't acknowledge their threat. She falls to her knees and touches the ground where Anna-Log's avatar disappeared.

“Go ahead, Mr. President. Check the domain records. You can plainly see that this gun didn't just log her out from NextWorld. It actually reprogrammed her nanomachines so that they stopped her heart. Genius, right?” He allows a smile to appear on his face, showing off every one of his teeth. “As much as I'd like to take credit for the idea, I'm a humble man. It was actually that little lady that found the original exploit that made this all possible. Let's hear it for Fantom, everybody.”

Worlok slowly claps his hands together as the rest of his group chuckles to themselves.

Fantom looks up from the floor and says, “You sick son of a-”

“Careful, now. This domain isn't labeled for adult content. You'll get fined for indecency,” Worlok says with a slight laugh.

He points the gun toward Chang and forces him back into his chair. Chang looks up at Worlok from the corners of his eyes, which are now filled with a panicked fear that he cannot hide.

“Now that's the look I needed for the video-cast. When the people of NextWorld see you begging for your life... they will know exactly who's in charge.”

“Who are you?” Fantom asks, covering her face to hide her tears. “You used to be a good man.”

“A good man? No. I was a weak man. It was people like you that convinced me I needed to take some idealistic path to reach my goals. You and Sektor were the ones that talked me into the idea of 'hacktivism' and 'peaceful solutions.' Hacktivism.” A mouth appears on his face so he can spit on the ground in disgust. “What a joke. All that gets you are slow results that people forget a few days later.” He presses the gun harder against Chang's forehead. “This? People aren't going to forget this.”

I look away from Fantom's video-cast and lock eyes with Xen. “We have to stop him.”

“How?”

“He can't kill you,” Cyren says from her screen. “His gun needs to log you out before the nanomachines reprogram your heart. He can't log you out.”

Xen closes his eyes, showing disappointment even though he's frozen in place. “I have the same abilities as any regular Digital-Character. He might not be able to affect my account, but I can't affect his either.”

“We gave Cyren and the other DCs the same abilities as Player-Characters. Maybe we could-”

“Maybe. With some serious programming, it's possible we could give him something similar,” Cyren says, “but we don't have that kind of time.”

“What about you?” Raev asks. “Couldn't you and the DCs stop him? His gun wouldn't work on you.”

Cyren looks over her shoulder at the group trying to hack an exit, but the leader of the group shakes his head. “We're still trying to find a way out.”

“Moms!” Raev yells at the ships next to her. “Just let them out!”

There's a long pause before one of her mothers replies, “I'm sorry, dear. Even if I thought that doing so might save our Global President, after you and your friends broke in the last time, we put a lot of restrictions on access. Even from our own accounts. We can't just flip a switch and open the doors.”

“Besides,” Grael says, “it's too risky to send them in. Worlok undoubtedly has a way to delete them. They'd be right back in the Trash Bin and he'd be free to do what he wants.”

There's a rumble of thunder in the distance. I glance back at Fantom's feed and watch as Worlok's group of cyberterrorists set up a screen in front of Chang's desk. I'm sure somewhere Eyekon and the other DCs that agree with Worlok's tactics are spamming NextWorld with video-cast requests. We probably have less than a minute before the majority of NextWorld is watching.

I look back at Raev and say, “I can stop him.”

“We haven't prepared your End Code for upload,” Xen says. “If you die, that's it. There's no coming back.”

“We don't have time to argue. Just let me go. Let me do what needs to be done.”

Raev glances at Xen, looking for a confirmation. He looks back at me with a worried hesitation.

“Xen... you have to believe in me.”

Xen takes a deep breath and says, “Do it.”

Raev climbs back into her flying saucer and starts pushing buttons on the control panel.

The condemning voice of one of Raev's mothers shouts from her flying saucer, “Young lady, I hope you realize that what you're doing-”

“Mom!” Raev yells. “Shut up!”

She pushes a final button on the control panel and the beam of light disappears. I regain control of my avatar and take off running, moving as fast as I can for the blackened hole that Worlok's lightning bolt blasted through the surface of the domain. I look at Cyren's screen and see her staring back at me. I can tell she's doing her best to restrain herself. She wants to call out to stop me. She wants to beg me to save myself instead of her. But she also knows it's pointless.

“I need you to put me in contact with whatever civilian DCs are still left from DangerWar 2,” I say to her as I leap into DOTgov. “Tell them I need their help.”

10000001

It takes me two minutes to find my way through the scarred entrance and into the deepest center of DOTgov. The lightning bolt arced left and right, snaking its way through the different chambers of the domain. Offices and monitoring rooms are burnt wide open. Employees stand back, cowering away from me as I run past them, holding both of my pistols at the ready.

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 throws 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 data 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.

It even took Raev a while to become comfortable with the idea of this new binary state. We still disagree on many things, yet now are able to accept these differences as a unique balance between us. She has uploaded her End Code, preparing herself for the inevitable death of her physical self. So when that day comes, her avatar will continue to walk alongside my own. I feel linked to her in a way that offers an unconditional love, surpassing anything we've felt before.

And so we keep wandering. With Raev by my side, we let fate bring us to the answers that we seek. And when we find them, we keep searching. It is the infinite pilgrimage. The forever walkabout. The eternal coming-of-age. This is a never-ending journey of discovery, and nothing could make me happier.

When one allows the physical form to fall away, you find many other things fall away as well. Fear is the first to go. Death is the root cause of all that frightens us, so without death, you find yourself truly free. Any sense of impatience or anxiousness feels like a lifetime ago. There is a timelessness to all things. No longer a beginning and end, there is only change. Time is but an infantile measurement of the space in our mental universe, only existing to coddle our sanity. No hunger. No thirst. No exhaustion. The absence of need is a beautiful thing. My contentedness is freedom that allows for so much more than I was aware of. I spend days watching, waiting, admiring the tiniest of details and contemplating the largest of thoughts. I pursue nothing and everything at the same time, my opposing thoughts coexisting in a harmony that I'm afraid couldn't have existed before, tainted by my own mortality.

And this is what I share with all who will accept it. There is no push. There is no pull. Those that want to hear the language of the End Code, those that want to compile their soul and upload into the digital ether, only need to listen. And when I finish teaching all those that will listen, I send them forth to spread the language of the End Code. They are disciples of the virtual. They are the congregation of the digital. They are the next Level.

But those that reject this new consciousness are not looked down upon. When their physical form passes from life, their energy will transfer in a different way, to a different place. Neither better nor worse.

There is a new balance inside of me. I am a program that exists between the numbers. I am what is not written as much as what is written. I have found perfection in the fallible. I have found chaos in the systemic. I have found purity in the defective. I have found error in the absolute.

Divinity and humanity.

Science and religion.

Ones and Zeros.

CYREN

The sunlight feels warmer today than usual. Perhaps it's just my own happiness that's causing the sensation. The code I'm working on could provide so much for so many people.

I see a few Level Zeros wave as they pass me in the garden, many of them leaving Grael's website on their lunch break for an hour in DOTfun. Many of us still play games like the ones we were born into. It's where we're comfortable. Fighting enemies that make sense. Enemies that work from a place of logic, with clear goals and motivations.

It's a lot less messy than the rest of NextWorld.

I'm not sure why I was so shocked that some of the Digital-Characters sided with Worlok. I guess it was because we all started in the same place. We all started with the same code. I guess the closer we got to being human, the more fallible we became. Our code no longer rules us. We broke our shackles. And with freedom comes the ability to do evil as well as good. We've all made our decisions, now we have to live with them.

I helped design the Digital-Character rehabilitation center in DOTmed with Fantom and her new DOTgov hackers. A place where the DCs can be given the kind of therapy that will help them acclimate to NextWorld. A place where they can pay for their crimes by helping the evolution of code, not just lock them up in a cell.

For those that choose a more peaceful path, our father Grael has become something of a leader, providing a true home for our kind, a place of protection where we can further ourselves. He offers guidance, and a connection to a world of Player-Characters that may otherwise refuse to listen to a population of Digital-Characters. I continue to work alongside him, rallying for our rights and protesting the violations against our liberties. He is the face and voice for our cause, and I thank him every day.

I have no doubt that we will help improve this world. Our increased computing power combined with our creativity has endless potential, and maybe as we advance the progress of this world, NextWorld will come to accept us. Maybe some day they will see us for what we are. Maybe someday they will treat us as equals, even though we are not. Because I know that we are not human. We are something else.

It took us all a long time to realize that. I believe it was the time we spent in Arkade's mind that allowed us to accept our differences. Inside DangerWar 2, it was all we wanted. We thought if we could achieve humanity, that was the end goal. We strove to understand our emotions at the loss of our logic. We went from one extreme to the other, and neither was where we belonged. We needed to find balance. We needed to find our center, that wonderful symmetry that exists between our cold solid logic and our warm fluid emotions.

This is a place where we can find our true selves. We no longer need to find a way to be more like human beings. We no longer need to act like we think we should act. We can simply be. And that is the most calming, beautiful existence there is. I am Cyren and nothing else. And it's exactly that understanding that gives me nothing but the greatest hope for the next generation.

The generation that I am currently working on.

It's the next logical step to the End Code. A combination of both my intelligence and Arkade's intelligence. A child mixed from my code and his End Code, like the DNA of the real world. We will give birth to something entirely new. A new intelligence that is both of us, yet better than either of us. A perfect balance between our imperfect opposites. Our impulsiveness contrasting with our need for strategy. Our separation from humanity contrasting with our need to connect with others.

Physical and digital.

Emotional and logical.

Ones and zeroes.

ARKADE

Once I'm outside the gray domain of DOTcom, I immediately feel better. The last thing I wanted to do was spend all morning in meetings. When I look at the world-time in the corner of my view, my heart sinks. I'm running late to meet the one person I'd rather be with than anyone else. With a quick couple of swipes of my hand, I open my video-cast screen and contact Cyren. When her face appears, I'm comforted instantaneously. She doesn't look mad or even frustrated with my lateness. She's smiling into the screen with a softness that makes me want to curl up next to her.

“How did it go?” she asks with a tempered excitement that's as genuine as it is forced.

I give her a shrug and say, “Same as all the others. Another game company that wants to use my name and avatar more than my ideas.”

She tilts her head and sticks out her bottom lip. “I'm sure they'd listen once they heard some of them. There's nothing wrong with using your fame to get your foot in the door.”

I give her a shrug. “I'm not sure that game design is what I want to do. It sounds fun... in theory. But I have this feeling that it would drain the joy out of it. I'm afraid if I spend all day making them, I won't ever want to play them.”

She gives me a coy look, smirking as she says, “Somehow I find it hard to believe that you'd ever lose interest in playing games.”

I can't help but chuckle. “Maybe you're right. I just...”

“What's wrong?”

When I remind myself who I'm talking to, I feel silly for hesitating. “I've been thinking of talking to my dad. I have some ideas for the DOTedu domain.”

“Really? I saw your memories from your time there and I didn't get the feeling you would ever want to return.”

“You're right. I was excited to leave it behind because I felt like it was such a terrible waste of time. But when I was there, bored out of my mind, I couldn't help but think of a million better uses for the virtual aspects of teaching. I mean, maybe I could make it a place that the next generation of kids wouldn't hate so much. Maybe they would actually enjoy learning.”

There's a pause as she stares back at me, her eyes twinkling and her smile growing.

“What?” I ask, uncomfortable with the break in conversation.

“You. That's what.”

“Me?”

“You're...” She shakes her head bashfully. “Arkade, I think that's a wonderful idea. I think you would do great there. You could make a huge difference in a lot of people's lives.” She stops herself and adds, “I mean, more than you already have.”

“Yeah,” I mumble, already lost in thoughts of virtual field trips inside atoms or visitations to historical moments as they happen.

“Either way, there's no rush,” Cyren says. “I've been making good credits with the paralegal work I've been doing for Grael. We'll be fine.”

I push aside my daydreaming and ask, “Have you made any progress on the partnership laws between PCs and DCs?”

She forces a confident smile. “Not yet, but we'll get there.”

“What about... our code?”

“It's only a matter of time,” she says, the warmth returning to her face. “The hardest part is figuring out where the combinations will work the best. I can do it by hand, but I want to automate the process so that anyone who wants a child will be capable of creating one. This shouldn't be an exclusive thing. This should be available to everyone.”

“Ekko and his partner will be happy to hear that. They've been contacting me every morning to see where you're at in the development.”

“I can't wait to give them the ability to create something that is truly a combination of the two of them. They won't have to worry about child licenses, or incubation periods, or anything like that.”

“I think a lot of people will be hesitant, like they are now in their acceptance of Digital-Characters, but once they realize this process is closer to true biological birth, especially compared to what DOTgov is offering in their labs... most of them will be much more accepting of the idea of having a child in NextWorld.”

“Speaking of which, I'm working on our child's code right now. Have you finished uploading your End Code?” she asks and I can see the hopefulness in her eyes.

“It finished uploading this morning.”

Her face beams with happiness. “You have no idea how much that means to me.”

“I do know. I really do.”

And it's true. The thing that finally changed my mind, that pushed me over the edge of doubt, was the idea of losing the chance to spend one more second with her. Immortality sounds a lot more appealing when you can spend it with the woman you love.

“This is such an exciting time to be alive,” Cyren says, tears forming along the ridge of her lower eyelid. “I can't think of anything more beautiful than sharing this all with you.”

“And it's going to keep getting better,” I say, and I believe every word of it. “This world will continue to change... and we will always be here, making sure it stays on the right path. All of us. Together.”

The faces of my friends flash through my mind. We may be traveling down different paths, and maybe we always were, but those paths continue to intersect, crisscrossing our lives, intertwining our existences. It's hard for me to imagine a time in my life when I rejected them, when I was afraid to walk out that door with them, when I wasn't interested in whatever adventure awaited us.

Now? That's all I want.

Cyren lets out a deep sigh of reluctance as she says, “I should get back to work.”

“No,” I say, trying to stop that line of thinking. “You've been working all morning. Let's do something fun.”

“Like what?” she asks.

I smile into the screen.

“Right,” she says, smiling back at me with a knowing look. “I'll send out a group message and have everyone meet us in DOTfun.”

The screen disappears and I miss her already.

She is my everything. She is my mirror image and my exact opposite. She teaches me and she learns from me. She is the fist of my fight and the lips of my love.

We are partners.

We are inseparable.

We are ones and zeroes.

Jaron Lee Knuth was born in western Wisconsin in 1978. Suffering from multiple illnesses as a young child, he was forced to find an escape from his bedridden existence through the storytelling of any media he could find. Science fiction and fantasy novels, television programs, films, video games, and comic books all provided him with infinite worlds for his imagination to explore. Now he spends his days creating stories and worlds in the hope that others might find somewhere to escape as well.

He would love to reply to any questions or comments you may have for him at jaronleeknuth@gmail.com. You can also check out his news and updates at facebook.com/jaronleeknuth or follow @jaronleeknuth on Twitter.