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  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 ha
s 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 per
sonally 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.