by Danny Tobey
# netstat Active Internet connections Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State tcp 0 0 144-103-28-21.po.65531 68.28.12.24.8443 SYN_SENT tcp 0 27 144-103-28-21.po.65532 68.28.12.24.8443 LAST_ACK tcp 0 0 *.6010 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.2011 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.6020 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.2021 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 localhost.3128 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.51500 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.65200 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 localhost.4400 localhost.65533 ESTABLISHED tcp 0 0 localhost.65533 localhost.4400 ESTABLISHED tcp 0 0 *.4400 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.irc *.* LISTEN udp 0 0 *.* *.* udp 0 0 *.* *.* udp 0 0 *.* *.* udp 0 0 *.* *.* udp 0 0 *.bootp *.*
There it was—port 6667 (no joke) was bound to all interfaces. Why on earth had Jeep’s biggest exploit landed on the Mark of the Beast?
Alex’s car went faster and the dust was kicking up all around him. He must have been going eighty or ninety and gaining, the wall looming closer. He would smash into it so absolutely that Charlie was sure he’d feel the blast from up here, Alex’s demise instantaneous and violent.
G.O.D. sent the modified v850 firmware to the car in the form of a white light streaming from Charlie’s raised hand. He was in.
Alex’s face came into view. His expression was horrible—dead eyed, grim mouthed, head tilted forward, ready. Gripping the wheel, his knuckles were white.
The wall was before him, massively taller and wider. It would’ve filled his entire vision now. The impact would be explosive. A massive, visceral SNAP.
Then darkness.
Charlie pressed with his hand in the air and sent the code:
EID: 18DA10F1, Len: 08, Data: 04 31 15 00 01 00 00 00.
It appeared as a red beam, a laser shot that hit the car in augmented reality. The code told the car, Kill engine. The hack was ingenious, courtesy of the Game. There was no direct access to the central bus, but through the radio, there was a single, indirect connection: a small chip that could wake up a larger electronic unit next door that had been taught to trust its neighbor. It was an exploitation of trust. A flaw in the grand design that turned good into evil but, here, back to good.
The engine shut down but the car was hurtling forward with such momentum that it made no difference. The death would be here momentarily.
Charlie swiped for a new command and sent another burst of red light. All brakes.
The wheels locked and screeched and the car continued toward the wall, kicking up dust and digging into the ground.
One last hope:
Charlie moved his hand again and sent a final instruction:
IDH: 02, IDL: 0C, Len: 04, Data: 90 32 28 1F.
This told the power steering to turn counterclockwise with maximum torque.
Nothing happened and the car hurtled headlong toward the wall.
Then the message engaged in a burst of red light and the car spun left, braking and turning hard, Alex’s face a mix of confusion and rage.
The car fishtailed in circles through the dust and spun to a stop with a silence that was startling after all the grinding and thrashing.
Alex stumbled out of the car and fell to his knees in the dirt. He was crying and then sobbing and looked like he might throw up. He went hands down on the ground and let his forehead press against the dirt.
Charlie ran down the slope, sliding and wide-stepping his way down the rocky grass and mud, and ended up in the dirt with Alex, shaking his shoulders and asking him to please look up.
66 LEVIATHAN
Alex looked up and wiped his face. “What did you do?”
He seemed dazed, like he didn’t even know who Charlie was. The adrenaline had hacked his brain and pulled him into a zone.
Charlie couldn’t think where to start.
“Did you stop me?”
Charlie nodded.
“Why?” Alex’s voice wasn’t grateful. It was agonized and enraged.
“They’re not worth it. None of them.”
“You don’t know that.” Alex glared at him wildly. “Everyone hates me.”
“No, no.”
“And now … now…” Alex thought of the picture, of himself stripped naked, laid bare in front of the entire school. “You don’t know anything.”
“I hate them too. Kurt. Tim. All of them.”
“And I hate you,” Alex spat.
“Alex, I—”
“You had no right to stop me.”
“No right? I—”
“You ruined everything.”
Charlie just stared, stunned.
“I was going to do it.” Alex looked at the wall longingly. “I was ready. Now…”
“Alex, you’ll see—”
“I didn’t ask for your help. Ever.”
Alex got up, his legs shaky, and shoved Charlie so hard he fell backward into the dust. Alex stood over him. “I hate you.” Alex opened his car door.
Charlie picked himself up. “Please. Please, let’s just talk.”
Alex tried the engine, and it turned over. “Everything that happens now is your fault.” Alex’s voice was so anguished, so weary and defeated, that if left Charlie chilled.
Alex put the car in reverse and drove off.
Charlie would never get up the hill and back into the car in time to follow Alex. His Goldz were at zero and the Game showed him nothing. He called 911 and gave them Alex’s name and car. “He’s going to hurt himself,” Charlie told them. He called Alex’s home number and left a message for his parents, but Charlie had no idea how to reach them at work. Then he climbed his way back up the hill—it was a lot faster on the way down. Peter was there.
“You could’ve helped me talk him down,” Charlie said.
“I’m out of Goldz.”
“No, with him. He listens to you.”
“Not anymore.”
Charlie felt himself crumbling inside.
I hate you, Alex had said.
Alex was going to kill himself, and Charlie couldn’t stop it. He’d stopped it once, and it used everything he had. Now Alex was gone—Charlie couldn’t find him, much less save him. The guilt tore through Charlie. You don’t want me in the group anymore.… I’d be better off gone.…
“This wasn’t my fault,” Charlie said.
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Tim and Kurt did this.”
“Of course they did.”
How many other people had Kurt tortured over the years? Dozens, at least. Whom else would Tim crush—calmly, methodically—to keep his lousy place in the world?
“They have to pay,” Charlie said.
Peter studied him. A moment earlier, Peter had felt lost, hating that Charlie had been the hero below, and in the Game no less. Now, seeing Charlie lost and reeling, Peter felt centered again.
“They killed him,” Charlie said.
Peter’s eyebrows raised. “What are you going to do about it?”
“You still have something on Tim?”
Peter nodded.
“It’s good?”
“Yeah. It’s good.”
“And Kurt? You haven’t put that video out yet?”
“Nope.”
Charlie looked down at the savage skid marks in the dirt, far below them, where Tim and Kurt had sent Alex hurtling toward death.
This was the moment, Charlie realized. He’d always had that last thread, that connection to his old self, the voice in the back of his head. He knew he shouldn’t do this. He knew, deep down, that it was his anger talking—or, no, not his anger, that was just another layer of excuse, rationalization—it was his guilt talking, and if he listened to that fading voice in the back of his head, he’d know that lashing out at Tim and Kurt was just a way to avoid seeing himself. But this was the moment when he went dark, when he knowingly snipped that last line to the old voice and let that Charlie go. You could mark it in a book.
“Let’s ruin them. Let’s destroy them and leave nothing behind.”
Peter took a long slow breath, in then out.
Then he smiled. “Okay.”
67 IMMOVABLE WALL / UN
STOPPABLE FORCE
Alex drove straight back to school—the last place Charlie or anyone else expected, straight down to the Tech Lab, where the 3-D printer was working away.
He knew Charlie had tried to call 911 to stop him from hurting himself again, but the Game had intercepted the call, so no one would be bothering Alex. It had kept Vanhi and everyone else at bay, too, so Alex could get back to the lab and finish what the Game had been guiding him through, step by step. Charlie was so sure Alex was going to hurt himself again, but that was the least of it. Alex had tried to do the right thing at the spillway, but coming out on the other side of that failed suicide attempt, having seen the wall come at him, having been ready for death and then cheated at the last second, he had found a clarity settling over him. The Game was right: killing himself was the easy way out. He would not disappear into anonymity, another loser gone and forgotten. He would leave a legacy. People would remember him, like the Friends of the Crypt, and shudder.
He took the new parts off the printer and hid them with the rest, waiting to be assembled. The DMT was kicking in. His suicide attempt had been rash, propelled by a jet fuel of shame and anguish, his dick pick spreading through the school, but it had given him an excuse, a way to bow out without letting the Game know he was scared to go through with the larger plan. But now he was glad Charlie had stopped him. He should be thankful. This way was better. It would leave a mark.
He was in God’s hands now.
* * *
Vanhi sat on the edge on the brick wall of the east lawn, her laptop open. The computers in the Tech Lab had locked her out. They kept replaying the kid cradling his shattered cat until she couldn’t stand it. She tried the library, but those terminals blanked out one by one. Finally she grabbed her bag from her locker and logged on through her laptop outside, using a VPN and a mobile hot spot. But once inside the Harvard app, she couldn’t touch it. Everything was submitted, time-stamped. Her beautiful essay and perfect GPA taunted her like models on a catwalk, inaccessible, locked.
She picked up her phone dialed the admissions office.
The phone cut off midring and told her:
You shall not pass!
10 Blaxx!!
She tried again, hitting Redial.
You shall not pass!
1000 Blaxx!!
Her breath caught. She knew four hundred Blaxx was a hate brick through the window. What was a thousand? She thought of Kenny and his attack—a car nearly killed him over eighty-one hundred. She couldn’t stop though. She knew she was being impulsive, frantic, but she had to make things right. She had to start with the application and unwind everything backward toward purity. Forgiveness.
She called again.
It rang twice before going dead.
She braced herself.
You shall not pass!
100000 Blaxx!!
One hundred thousand? A queasy fear spread through her. It had jumped to one hundred thousand? In her haste she’d ignored the power of the multiples. What was she at now? Adding quickly: 101,010?
It was mocking her. She recalled her fight with Charlie.
You want the world to be black or white, ones and zeros.
That fucking twisted AI!
It didn’t just want to step on her—it had to pull the wings off first.
But at some point she realized it didn’t matter. Twenty-six hundred Blaxx had gotten Charlie a minor beating with a bat. Eighty-one hundred nearly got Kenny run down by a car. So what did it matter if it was one hundred thousand or ten million? Dead was dead.
So she dialed again because the only way out was through.
The phone rang and rang, and a sickening thought occurred to her. Were Blaxx transferable? Maybe she wasn’t capped by the limit of her own misery. Maybe the bad mojo could spread to her parents, her friends, to Vik, who never sinned a day in his life?
She was about to hang up when a woman answered, “Harvard College Admissions Office.”
Vanhi’s phone read:
Don’t do it.
Rat = Infinite Blaxx
Free Will!!!?
Free will. Vanhi thought that about.
I am Vanhi, goddess of fire. I can illuminate or I can incinerate.
Closing her eyes, Vanhi said, “I need to report something. Computer hacking in the admissions system.”
After a brief pause the lady said, “Okay,” more calmly than Vanhi would have guessed, as if she’d received this call before. “One moment please.”
The call transferred, a series of clicks then banal music. Vanhi felt a steely resolve. She was proud of herself.
When the man answered, she took him through the whole story, and once it started, it poured out. She told him about the Game, the class rankings, messing with the essays and scores. The man listened patiently, with an occasional “Okay” or “Uh-huh.” He asked Vanhi to repeat a couple things, and she could hear him taking notes in the background. He asked her to spell her name, repeat her address, and give her application ID number.
Finally, when Vanhi was done, the man said, “What I’m going to need you to do next is suck my dick.”
Vanhi froze. She felt all the wind go out of her. She didn’t even answer.
“You got that? Suck my dick. Suck it long and hard. Snitches are bitches and bitches are snitches. Know what happens to rats, fuckwad? Do you know? They get fucked and stuffed! Stuffed and fucked! Wanna get fucked and stuffed, rat?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Too bad. It’s out there, man. You already did it. See? You already fucked yourself. Got it, rat?”
The line clicked dead.
Vanhi stared up and down the long wall in either direction. She was alone, but she didn’t feel like she would be for long.
68 ROKO’S BASILISK
Kenny had been researching all afternoon—philosophy, cognitive science—putting the pieces together. Now he met with Charlie and Vanhi upstairs, in a corner of the library that was the closest thing they could find to a dead spot, no computers nearby, no students with phones, a gap in security cameras. Not even a loudspeaker, which Charlie knew from doing announcements in his student council days could be switched into listening mode. They left their phones in their backpacks on a table downstairs, hoping the Game would assume they were studying quietly. They looked terrible, every one of them.
“We have to get out,” Kenny said. “You, me, Vanhi.”
Charlie looked between them. “Now you want to get out?”
“Yes,” Vanhi said. “Why aren’t you happy? This is what you wanted.”
“It was. It is. But … the Game just saved Alex.”
“Yeah, right after it drove him to it.”
“That was Tim and Kurt.”
“No, it was the Game playing Tim and Kurt. Trace it all the way back.”
“I’m not sure quitting—”
“Give me a break,” Kenny jumped in. “Two days ago you said—”
“I know what I said,” Charlie snapped.
“But now you have a restaurant and an inside track to Harvard,” Vanhi said bitterly.
“That’s not it.”
“The hell it isn’t,” Vanhi said. “Trust me, I’ve been right where you are. I get it.”
“Look, you tried to pull us back,” Kenny said. “Now it’s our turn.”
“It’s not that simple,” Charlie said. “Getting out is worse than staying in.”
He told them about Scott Parker, his warning: the only way out was taking a life.
“What if there was another way?” Vanhi asked.
“There isn’t. He said—”
“That’s because he’s a computer guy. You need a philosopher,” Vanhi said. “It was Kenny’s idea.”
“What idea?”
“First you have to promise you’re with us. If it finds out, we’re done.”
Charlie knew they were right to want to quit. But they were right about something else, too. The restaurant did matter. His dad was happier than
he’d been in ages.… And now that Harvard was actually possible again, why shouldn’t Charlie want that?
“All this time, you’ve been telling me to want things again. And now I do.”
“Think about the restaurant, Charlie,” Vanhi said. “Some guy didn’t just decide to give it away to your dad all of a sudden. Someone suffered for that good luck. Did he deserve it?”
“Maybe he did. We deserved what we got.”
“I tried to find Eddie,” Kenny told him. “Trust me, Charlie, you can’t live with this. I thought I could. It’s not who I am. It’s not you, either.”
“We’ve all done things we regret. It’s time to stop,” Vanhi said.
“What have you done?” Charlie asked.
She couldn’t bear to say it. She would fix it first, make it right. Then she’d tell him. Maybe then he’d forgive her. They heard a student walk by, talking on his phone, on the other side of a row of books. They fell silent until he was gone.
“Charlie,” Kenny said, “we can’t do this without you. I have the idea, but Vanhi can’t code it fast enough alone.”
“Please,” Vanhi said. “I’m already toast. Infinite Blaxx. It’s the only way for me.”
Charlie stared at her. “Really?”
She nodded. He’d never before seen Vanhi look scared. She told him.
Fuck, he thought. Everything was so good, for once.
“Fine,” he said. “On one condition. It’s all of us together. No more secrets.”
“Yes!”
“Okay!”
“That means Peter, too. And Alex, if we can find him.”
Vanhi shook her head. “No way. We can’t trust Peter.”
“That’s my price. We started losing the second we let the Game divide us.”
“Charlie,” Kenny said, “I know how you feel about Peter. But you have a blind spot here.”
“No. No more jealousy. No more division. One for all, all for one.”
Vanhi folded her arms. They faced each other; they were in a stalemate.