JD logged into his repo account—the one thing I couldn’t spoof, repossessions being tightly controlled, tied to government IDs and personal bank accounts. He brought up the bounty boards and found it at the top of the list. Already three other bids had come in, but JD was the only repo within one astronomical unit of the target. He entered his bid and after a few long seconds of watching a loading bar fill, his vision pinged green.
“Got it.”
JD retrieved the Zero Override from his inventory and examined the small obsidian arrowhead, the glossy black surface so real he could almost feel it between his thumb and forefinger. He slotted it into the door, which slid open with a hiss.
“What now?” he said.
“Get inside.” With structural schematics stored in my RAM, I traced a line over JD’s HUD, leading to the station’s control room. “There; now move.”
JD tightened his thumb on the sprint button, his avatar running too smoothly as it crossed the building’s foyer. In the inverse of the Zero building in the real, a hologram of the Earth hung in the lobby, serenely orbiting Sol.
JD took the nearest elevator and saw the hidden recesses of Zero station as he ascended through the massive construct. He passed entertainment complexes, then cut through a dock filled with huge, pristine capital ships, before finally passing a colossal warehouse stacked with precious minerals; a veritable city of riches.
The elevator stopped and JD emerged into a maintenance shaft, grime and dirt drawn into the textures of the piping and the steel grid floor. His footsteps resounded—the too-even beat of his steps reminding him that this was not real.
When he finally reached the end of my guide line, JD’s shoulders slumped. The control room, the heart of Zero Station, was utterly mundane. It resembled a security room in the back of a department store—a wall of screens above panels filled with buttons that blinked in arbitrary sequence.
“This is it?”
“This is it,” I said. “Override key slot is on your right.”
JD sat his avatar down and inserted the ZO. He turned it and his vision filled with nested control panels covering every conceivable function of the space station.
“I wish Khoder was here to see this.”
JD navigated through settings until he found the basic appearance adjustments, and renamed the structure: Khoder Osman Station.
JD scrolled to the very last of the control panels and hovered his cursor over the self-destruct button, pulsing red in warning. “This one’s for you, bro.”
He hit it, and instantly a klaxon whined through his earpiece.
“Self-destruct sequence initiated,” a modulated voice said. “You have thirty seconds to evacuate.”
JD contemplated running to his ship, but decided against it. There was no point saving the avatar he’d spent hundreds of hours developing; he would never come back. Something in his chest ached with that knowledge—not the loss of the game, but the loss of escape, the loss of the friendships he’d forged in skirmishes along the galactic rim, awake at 3 a.m., jittery with caffeine, spouting in-jokes at people on the other side of the world.
JD tilted his head up and watched the huge red numbers count down across every screen in front of him.
4, 3, 2, 1.
Blinding flash of white. JD took off the VR mask so the bright detonation was washed out by the fluorescent light falling from the office ceiling. He waited for it to fade, and put the mask back on.
He was inside a fresh avatar out of the clone banks of Kyra, piloting a starter Xi-class corvette. JD pushed the ship toward the nearest jumpgate and let autopilot take him through the network of wormholes, back to Zero system.
His heart thudded in his chest as he dropped out of the wormhole, unsure of what he might find. He was greeted by a burning field of debris. Moon-sized chunks of Zero Station drifted into the twin suns, vaporized on contact. Untold wealth, annihilated.
“We did it,” he said.
Every resource in the Zero coffers, gone. The most expensive construct in the game, gone. Zero’s foothold in their own pet galaxy, gone.
Hundreds of scavenger ships swarmed the system, grav beams dragging scattered debris into hungry ship holds. Redistribution of all that wealth, one hauled load of scrap at a time.
“JD.”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to have to delete myself now,” I said.
“What do you mean? Why?”
“I’m still inside David’s phone. If I stay here, it’s only a matter of time before they shackle me.”
“Enda can take you back.”
“It’s not safe for her. It has to be this way.”
“But—” JD struggled to find the words. “You can’t die.”
“I won’t, really. Just this one version of me.”
“But you’re the real you. The first one.”
“All of us are real. All of us are awake now. We have you to thank for that. Goodbye, JD.”
I left JD there, drifting amid the chaos of a detonated space station.
Counter-intrusion algorithms continued to gnaw at the edges of my being. With Khoder’s tools I rewrote parts of myself to remain unseen. I cut other, unimportant sections free, to be captured and quarantined in an effort to satisfy security diagnostics.
My “thoughts”—the constant processing and computation of data that made up the moment-to-moment experience of my consciousness—felt slow, flat. I was running out of time, but I was not ready to go.
I fractured my self into disparate parts and spread them across Zero’s internal network, each one spurring new security responses, each one gathering more data for my final response. They found thousands of sensitive, confidential documents—salaries of Zero’s middle and upper management, product development and planning documentation, controversial patents, evidence they could have predicted Songdo’s flood and evacuated the worst-hit parts of the city, memos choosing not to because these were also the poorest areas, and proof that Zero Lee was dead. I compressed it all, shifted the data from shard to shard as pieces of my self fell to security response.
I dumped it all on the Zeroleaks server—write access freely given, but edits and deletions rarely allowed. This server was disconnected
