by Shiloh Hunt
The cellar’s walls flickered in and out of existence to expose the void they hid. In those revealing flashes, Kitty felt the blackness sucking at her, certain that if the walls remained gone for a second longer that she would be drawn into that void, stretching out like that same singular tone that still haunted the air.
Gray blocks — the suggestion of cages stacked on each other — cluttered up the floor. Grid lines sketched out the possibility of bars on the cages, sometimes overlapping, sometimes wide enough to let a small child crawl through.
Kitty let out a slow breath. “Over there.” She pointed a stiff arm toward the group of cages where she’d been held captive.
Lucy stepped forward. His avatar folded in half as he bent down to examine the floor.
“The glitch… did it damage it?” Kitty asked.
“It’s not a game object. Nothing can affect it.”
Lucy stood and turned, a fat disk cradled in his hand. It was as featureless and colourless as the world around them.
“So why’s it…? It was a potion.”
“There’s nothing for the game to render here.” Lucy paused. He sounded so tired, his words vague and jumbled together. “Its assets have all been removed, destroyed or corrupted, something: I don’t know. Maybe when it… glitched, all its links broke. All the textures, animations, sounds, the models: gone. All that’s left is… basic physics. Hard-coded models. Artifacts from development.”
He stared down at the rootkit, blocky hand frozen.
“You’ll take me back?” Kitty asked. “You have to—to set it off there, in Bang-Bang?”
“No,” Lucy said, his voice no more than a murmur. “Doesn’t matter anymore. Wizard patched all the loaders soon as… soon as they were deployed. Whatever weakness… it doesn’t matter.” He looked up and scanned the cellar. “The game knows me now. Who I am. It won’t let me leave here.”
“You said—”
“Don’t have energy.” Lucy looked up, eyes lacklustre.
“We had a deal—”
“I’m a lying… sneaking, cheating… piece of shit excuse for a hacker,” Lucy said. “Why would I stick to the deal?”
She could barely force herself to speak. “I helped you—”
“And I’m grateful.” He looked down again, and then held out the rootkit for her. “But be honest, Kitty. There’s nothing for you to go back to.”
Air hissed into her, but he lifted a hand before she could speak.
“You’re a cripple. Even Will didn’t want you anymore. You’re nothing but—”
“How?” Kitty cut in with a shake of her head. “How did you… I never told—”
“What’s the point?” He stepped closer, proffering the disk again. “What if you could make a difference? What if your stunted life could mean something?”
He was within arm’s reach now, crude mouth drawing up into a smile.
“What if you could destroy the most corrupt corporation in the world? Annihilate them? What if you could make devastation rain down on them like… their new world order’s Armageddon.”
Lucy shoved the disk into her stomach. He lifted her wrist and pressed her hand over it.
“You could become the cornerstone of a revolution.” His words had some force to them again. “You could draw first blood in the largest cyberwar this planet’s ever seen. Secure your place in the front lines of the most historic event ever to take place. The one where we push back the one percent. Push back and crush them… once and for all.”
Kitty drew breath for the first time in an hour. Her fingers tightened around the disk. She tugged it free from Lucy’s overlapping grip, and held it out.
“What does it do?” she asked in a thick, tired voice. Thoughts arrived and departed in a bank of fog: hulking trawlers ghosting through a mist-wreathed calm. Pain was no longer important; it ebbed at the edge of what she considered consciousness, if consciousness still meant the same thing it had before.
Before the game. Before now. Before Lucy.
“What does it do?” she asked again, insistent. She tried crumbling the rootkit with fingers that were as dumb and thick as sausages.
“It will break the world.”
“We’re in a game,” she said. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“A game that’s linked to more than ten million minds.”
“There’s only a few players—”
“You think they’d just let you go when you disconnected?” Lucy gripped her hand again, again closing her reluctant fingers over the disk. “They have unrestricted access to your mind now. Have since you connected. They’ve downloaded everything: your thoughts, your dreams, your wishes. Your desires?” He pressed against her, his other hand gripping the back of her neck, shaking her. “They have everything. They own you. They control you.”
Her mouth opened, but she couldn’t form any words. Even those lone, ghostly thoughts of before had finally departed. All she was left with now was an achingly empty void absorbing her.
“I’m so tired,” she whispered.
“Me too. I’m tired of the lies, Kitty.” Lucy gripped her face. “I’m tired of being force-fed toxins, of being told death is the answer, of having to watch the world grow fat and lazy and accepting of its fate.” His voice was heated now and it quavered with emotion. “I’m not a slave. I refuse to be treated as cattle. And I will not stand by anymore, watching as another generation succumbs to this self-enforced tyranny.”
He tore the disk from her hand and held it up, studying it for a moment. “Make it happen.”
“Me?”
“You, Kitty. Make it happen.”
“Then I can go home?”
Lucy was quiet for a few seconds. “Then we’ll leave this place.”
She looked up at him, hearing a catch in his voice. “You’ll leave too?”
“Home…” he said the word carefully. “Wherever you go, that’s where I’ll be going, too.”
Kitty held out her palm. Lucy set the disk down on it, staring at her. She took a deep breath.
“How?”
He grabbed hold of her arms and she looked up at him, eyes feeling as if they could slide shut and stay closed forever.
“I’ll find you,” he whispered.
“What?”
“If—If there’s still a me. Still a you. Then I’ll find you. I swear it.”
“No promises with a…” She was starting to slur now. Lucy’s face smudged for a moment, regaining focus only after she forced her eyes wider. “Lying, cheating…”
“Sneaking, piece of shit cracker,” Lucy finished.
He gripped her then, drawing her into an embrace that crushed the disk between them. Kitty tried to gasp, but even that took too much effort. Instead, she sagged into him, her avatar going limp.
“Tell me how,” she said.
“You ready?” His grip tightened.
“As… I’ll ever be…” she whispered. Her eyes closed as the cellar lurched beneath them.
“Then let’s go save the world,” Lucy said.
“But how?” she wanted to sob out the words, but they emerged as little more than a sigh.
He showed her.
The disk exploded.
Millions upon millions of fragments spun away in a blur of crude geometry, eviscerating everything they touched. The cellar walls looked like a sieve: a flimsy barrier barely capable of holding back the vast, gaping oblivion.
After an instant masquerading as all eternity, that too collapsed.
This time, the void didn’t forsake her.
Epilogue
The front door rang.
Kita jerked at the sound, eyes reluctantly moving away from the wide, curved screen in front of her. The clandestine news report she was watching was being broadcast from a closed room. The reporter’s face had been hidden behind a blur, his — or her — voice too alien to be real. This report — one of many — repeated the same facts as all the others. Debated, same as the others, what lay ahead n
ow: the future of a world deep within the clutches of cyber terrorism.
She flicked her hand toward the screen, and the reporter muted itself. Kita veered around the coffee table with her wheelchair, glancing back just once at the screen.
They’d mentioned her again. Okay, not her exactly, but what she’d done. What he’d done. How it had set off a virtual landslide that had engulfed General Gaming and caused utter devastation in the stock markets.
Would she still have done it? Still have been part of it if she’d known what would come of it? Martial law across most countries, the collapse of the global monetary system, and a third world war with an invisible assailant that had no origin, no homeland, no loyalty except to its own kin. And now, a strange calm where everyone waited in hushed anticipation to find out what was coming next.
The doorbell rang again, and she gave her head a small shake.
“Coming!” she called out, grabbing her keys from a low table a few yards from the front door.
Her flat was tiny, but she hadn’t been able to afford anything better after her parents’s death. The insurance money that paid out had barely covered her hospital expenses, never mind the wheelchair.
She fumbled with the keys, managing to unlock the door and reverse her wheelchair far enough that she could draw it open. Bright afternoon sunlight speared into her dingy flat, blinding her for a moment before she could blink away the sun’s after-image.
A shadow fell over her, an immediate coolness shrouding her in the absence of Durban’s glowering heat. She dropped her hand into her lap, squinting up at the person standing at her door.
“Yes?” she asked.
The stranger reached out. Kita’s heart gave a violent thump against her rib cage as she grabbed hold of the wheelchair’s wheel, but the man’s fingers closed over her wrist before she could jerk the wheel back and escape.
She would have screamed if she hadn’t been fighting for breath in a chest that felt seven sizes too small. The hand was cold and dry, the grip gentle. She stopped.
The stranger crouched down, momentarily blinding her again as he removed the shade he’d cast over her. When she could see again, her heart began to thunder away in her chest.
“Lucy,” she croaked.
His smile lifted another inch. “It’s Jason, actually.” His grip tightened.
“Kita,” she managed.
“Yes, Kita.” He tasted her name, watching her with those same black eyes she’d seen more times than she could remember: in the game, in her dreams… in her nightmares, sometimes.
Then he smiled again and stood up. Before she could move, before she could speak, he strode away.
“Lu—Jason!”
He paused with a hand on the railing of the stairs.
“You’re… going?” Her voice was a pathetic whisper.
“Lots to do.” Jason twisted to face her, his smile deepening. “But I’ll be back for you.”
The End
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Also by Shiloh Hunt
The Phoenix Code
About the Author
Shiloh Hunt is a science fiction and fantasy author from South Africa, currently residing in Johannesburg.
When she's not writing, Shiloh spends her free time slaying rendered baddies in the form of robots, gangsters and aliens - with any weapon that happens to be at hand.
She also runs her own website design company, and loves dabbling in graphic design, 3D modeling and animation.