All of human history before the edifice is irrelevant. All that stuff that took place in "reality" doesn't matter, except for the stuff that led to the edifice's creation, the greatest and the only meaningful achievement of the species.
I don't even know if I'm still alive out there, and I don't exactly care. My body might be a dry, dead skeleton in the desert out there, but in here, my mind is thriving. Everything is super here, it's a straight Elysium. I walk through green pastures and want for nothing!
Well, maybe for one thing.
Like I said, I'm content, but if I could have one little, meager wish granted, it would be to have a little more veneer.
The edifice is everything and veneer makes up the edifice, so I guess that makes it like bits of code. In its base state, veneer is the size and shape of a Rubik's cube, shiny like an oil slick that's always shifting through a rainbow of colors. Pick up a veneer in the palm of your hand, close your eyes and think real hard, open your eyes to find yourself holding a pack of cigarettes or a pocket notebook or whatever you were thinking of. Congratulations, you've just assembled raw code into something usable. If you had a big stack of veneer, you could hold your hands over it and will it into a house. At least, so I've been told. I've never been in possession of that much veneer.
What you can make with veneer depends on its weight at the moment. The weight's always changing, they keep track of the current number on a huge billboard in the capitol. But when you pick up a veneer, you are all of a sudden imbued with a vague idea of what you can and cannot do with it. You know, almost instinctively, that you can't make anything bigger than an orange, we'll say. I can't tell you for sure what the current weight is, because, well, I don't have any veneer to see it with.
I'd like to take back something I said earlier. I don't want a little bit more veneer. I'd like to have piles and piles of it, so much that I'd have no option but to build a house, a whole warehouse, to have somewhere to put it all.
I'm sitting at the bar of some little place on some dead-end street. I keep squeezing my eyes tightly shut, and when I open them I'm standing in the middle of a concrete cell. It's barren and empty, of course, but each time I'm there I pace around in a circle a few times like there's any place where the cubes might be hiding. Once I've completed my rounds, I walk up to a rectangular window at eye level on one side of the cell. Through it, I can see a hallway lined with a dozen other windows. The one right across from me has a lanky guy in a polished blue suit who's staring at his ceiling-high piles of polychromatic cubes with his hands on his hips. He's been in that pose every time I've popped in. Some people. I look from the window to the cold, empty space inside the cell with me.
Then I'm sitting back in the bar. The bartender is looking at me funny. I understand, it must be quite annoying for him to see some guy going from solid to translucent to solid over and over again. I give him my best disarming sheepish smile and look at the clock. They should have been here ten minutes ago. Something's not right, or maybe they're just late like always. My knee starts bouncing all by itself and my fingers tap the bar. I can only sit there so long before I shut my eyes again.
Pace, walk up to the window. He's still there, but now he's on a call. I glance sideways to scope out the hall. I did this a few visits ago, finding the same gray lane that extends straight ahead forever. It's the same this time, except now there's a hulking robot a few cells down from mine. An automated program. In terms of veneer, these guys are heavy, maybe as much as a house or at least a car. They come pre-installed in big public institutions like the bank or the recreation zones. The whole police force is made up of them. Most of the bank programs are the humanoid teller units that you speak to when opening an account, but this one in the hallway is an armored maintenance unit the size of a truck. They're invisible until something goes wrong.
Until you're overdue on the maintenance fee by two months. As I'm watching him, his beady red eyes stare straight into mine.
Back in the bar. I'm breathing hard. If you could sweat in the edifice, I'd be soaking wet. Maybe the bot wasn't coming for me. Maybe you're not allowed to make calls in the bank, and he was on his way to give the rich guy a stern talking to. The bartender is walking up like he was preparing to say something to me. No time for that. I had to know.
For maximum convenience, I pop in facing away from the window so I can take stock of all my nothingness right away. I stare at the blank space for a second. I decide it will be best to go fast like I'm ripping off a Band-Aid, so I spin around. The red glare of the bot's eyes fills up the window. I jump out fast.
The bartender is right in front of me. He's a pretty tall guy, staring down at me from at least six and a half feet in the air. If he had muscles, he'd be terrifying, but he's kind of a skinny guy so he fails at the imposing stare-down look he was going for. This is probably what his body actually looked like before the edifice, since no one gets the six-foot treatment without also adding muscles, which means, like me, he doesn't have the extra veneer to splurge on cosmetics.
"Buddy," he says in a low voice, "are you gonna buy anything or are you gonna keep flicking out like some glitch?"
"Oh, sorry. I'm waiting for my friends. They should be here any time."
He sighs.
"If no one shows up in the next five minutes, I'm gonna have to kick you out, okay?" That's what he says, but judging by his face, he doesn't want to do it. I see a fellow broke in his eyes, and no wonder. He picked a bad spot for his bar. You don't need to eat in the edifice, it's for people who get a kick out of remembering the good old days. A small luxury that's popular in some of the more middle-class areas where people have a little extra venny to spare. That makes this bar a middle-class establishment in the middle of a dead-end bum district frequented by people who are so poor they can't even afford tastebud downloads. This guy here is the fifth manager who's owned this bar in the past six months. It's only a matter of time before he ends up on the outside of the bar doors, and he's well aware. The last thing he needs is a sucker like me hanging around.
Thankfully, the others don't take much longer to show up. Sometimes when we hang out, they come trickling in one by one. Today, they come in as one big group. I almost don't hear them enter because they aren't talking amongst each other. When I turn around to greet them, all their faces are sullen.
Normally, there are five of them. Two, Colin and Derik, I've known since before the edifice. Colin's been a friend since middle school, and Derik was my roommate in college. All three of us showed up to the same public connection port on log-in day. I remember being so excited. What more could a nineteen-year-old want than to be plugged into the super internet 24/7? Play some hyper-immersive video games nonstop without needing to eat or sleep. If only. Then we found out that the edifice is what you'd call a free-to-play, pay-to-win system. They managed to carve out a life better than I could, finding jobs, places to live. Out of all of us, they're the closest to being well-to-do. I haven't seen either of them for a while because of their jobs. It'll be nice to hang out.
The others I picked up along the way. Charlie, he runs some errands for the undergrounds and devotes all his free time to managing this old Harley. Gary's part of some fringe hacker/terrorist organization and boy can you tell just by looking at him. And Sam, he's something of an enigma, he doesn't say very much and I think he joined because he saw us walking around one day and decided to follow us around. All of them are in the same boat as I am when it comes to finances.
When they come in, their faces are all gray and serious. They're all in their usual outfits, Sam and Charlie rocking the default T-shirt/sweatpants look, like me, Colin in a copy-paste business suit, and Gary naked with a QR code printed on his shaven forehead (he's as blank as a mannequin, of course, he doesn't have the money for pleasure downloads). But I only see one suit. Derik is nowhere in sight. Any other time I'd assume he was lagging behind, but something in their sullen expressions worries me. Then they take their seats at the bar without saying hello, and I know something is very, very wrong.
Colin orders everyone's drinks without a word. Most days, it takes an argument to get him to spend any of his hard-earned venny. The pit in my stomach gets bigger. He knows what everyone likes (soda for most, for me lemonade; it takes another download to get intoxicated), and the bartender whisks away the two cubes he places on the table. They go to his bank box, and the drinks sprout out of the bar like plants. The digital lemonade is only reminiscent of the drink it's supposed to be, tasting more like a bunch of sour electric shocks to what remains of my actual tongue. I have to wait for them to take their first sips before I get a single word.
"Derik got hacked," Colin says, without looking at me.
"Oh no. How much did he lose?"
"Everything. His venny, his stuff..."
"Is that why he's not here? Working overtime to make it back, I'm assuming."
Colin doesn't say anything. Instead, he starts shaking the way people do when they're trying unsuccessfully to cry.
"What- what happened?"
"They deleted him," Gary says, throwing back his root beer.
"Deleted?"
"Yup. Wiped his mind clean off the servers. There's a few billion more gigabytes of free data floating around out there because of it."
"You can't be- you're not serious." You can't die in the edifice. Even pain is a downloadable, reserved for the most serious masochists. It's about the only way that the digital world is actually better than the physical one, the way they promised. Looking at Gary's face, though, I know he's not kidding, and neither is everyone else.
"Oh, you didn't hear about the latest update?"
"Well, it hit me. I didn't read the notice, though. I never do. All that negative news is bad for my mental health, you know?"
"Well, you're in for a rough ride." Gary clears his throat, shuts his eyes so he can pull up the notice.
"Edifice version 9.bullshit, official notes. Dear citizens, you may have noticed that lag is a prominent issue of the edifice. We've done everything we can to solve this problem, but we find that we have no choice but to go to our last resort, deletion. The primary source of lag is an overload of storage and users. The only way to solve it is unfortunately by deleting users. From now on, users without any veneer or property, so-called floaters, will be removed from the servers if they spend more than twelve hours without acquiring anything else. Such people are no help to our new society and are a drag on our resources. We will be much better off without them. Thank you for your understanding. Signed, the Devs."
If I had a heart here, I'd feel it trying to break from my chest. An icy sensation shoots through my entire body. I don't know what to say, in fact I can't say anything.
"It makes perfect sense, you know. They don't have the software to let every fucking person on the face of the earth run amok here, they never did. Must've realized on login day they'd bitten off more than they could chew. And they've been working on it ever since. Remember when your shit didn't start falling apart if you didn't pump a cube in it every fucking day? Well, apparently maintenance wasn't enough, and now we're here. The 'last resort.'"
"Wait a minute, that doesn't make sense. The update came three weeks ago. I've been broke for months."
"Did you still have your bank?"
I shut my eyes. Instead of appearing in the cell, I'm greeted by a wall of text on the inside of my eyelids:
"Due to unpaid maintenance fees, you have lost access to your bank account. Please visit a banking station when you are ready to reestablish your account."
I open my eyes. Gary must see it on my face already.
"Um, not anymore."
"Well, then welcome to the club. Sam has eight hours. I've got ten. Charlie's still got the fucking bike, but not for long. They tripled maintenance, too."
"Tripled? Six cubes a day?"
"Yeah," says Charlie, "I've got enough for two days."
"Oh, shit."
"Couldn't have said it better myself."
I take another sip of "lemonade." It's tasting less and less edible.
"They'll get rid of it, mark my fucking words. As soon as all us street trash is wiped out, everything will go right back to normal. No one is coming to save us. They don't give a shit about us, oh no! In fact, I'd expect another update sometime soon. Then, it'll be six hours." Gary leans towards the bartender, who has so far been twiddling his thumbs and pretending that he isn't listening.
"How long do you think you can last until you're on the chopping block, huh? A week? Couple weeks? Two days?"
The bartender scurries off to a back room, never to be seen again.
Everything is silent for a while afterwards. I finish my drink and the cup crumbles into a multicolored pile of pixels that flicker out of existence. Pixels to pixels. Right then, it hits me harder than ever. I can almost see the river of ones and zeroes passing through the blood vessels in my wrist when I stare at it. None of this is real anyway. Isn't it fitting that it can be taken away in a second? Like blowing down a house of cards.
"Wh- what are we gonna do?"
Gary smiles. When the last of his drink is gone, he slams it into the bar so that it explodes into a pixel spray.
"A fantastic question, my dear friend. I think I might have the answer."
///
See, it's funny. The edifice, the next step in the evolution of man, was meant to bring us all together all of the time. That's what the internet was supposed to do, but at the end of the day you went to sleep, you got up to eat, your computer broke down. No matter how hard you try, that screen still can't close the physical distance. The edifice, on the other hand, makes sure everyone everywhere, whether Chinese, American, or French, is at last in the same exact place as much as they could be. When you think about it, it's impressive this thing ran for so long with all eight billion of us and that they're only now deleting people.
Anyway, it didn't work. It isn't in our nature to mingle. Dump a whole bunch of random people onto one big plain and their first instinct isn't to say hello to strangers, it's to group up with the familiar. To carve out a little hole where you and your friends can survive together. So the edifice split inevitably from one unified world into a thousand separate ones sitting on top of each other.
It's like night and day between dead-end street and the main hub. Dead-end street splits up further; there's the working quarters offering jobs that you can just scrape by on, the main street where I and everyone else with nothing hang out, and the dark world buried underneath that, to name a few. I've been on main street for a decade now, and I haven't been to any of the other worlds until today.
I don't know what's in the truck, but judging by the look on Gary's face as it pulls up I have some ideas. We're in one of the dark world's alleys. As you would expect, it's a subterranean tunnel, hidden from the view of heaven and any security drones flying overhead. All the antiviruses swarming the Edifice make it hard to live a life of crime, but people manage. It used to be that anyone with any programming skills could be a hacker. I never was, but from what I'm told it wasn't hard to open the control terminal and go from there. The best hackers were pretty much wizards, able to bend reality to whatever they wanted. I remember the lucky few who saw them were hailed as laying eyes on some mythical beasts. The first thing the Devs did to fix this bug was to make it a lot harder to access the terminal. It went from a publicly accessible item to being buried much deeper in the code. This deterred only the very least experienced, for the others it was only another hack to make. Eliminating the terminal entirely was next. It made the Devs' lives a bit harder, but they had private access in their own portals. The few hackers who could still hunt those private portals down were so adept as to be dangerous, so maybe it's not such a bad thing that the terminals went from the hands of the Devs to Administration, who only shared it when it was absolutely necessary to put out the next update.
People like Gary aren't real hackers. They can bend the rules a bit, but they can't break them, or make them. He acts tough, everyone down here does, but they're all scraping on by just like everyone else.
The truck creeps out of the abyssal blackness surrounding us on all sides, turns, then backs right up to us. Gary tears off the tarp over the bed with a flourish, exposing a pile of machine guns, assorted explosives, and some glittering digital downloads.
"I'm calling in a huge favor to get this stash," he says, "take good care of these puppies." Then he motions like a carnival vendor selling popcorn.
One by one, we shuffle over to receive our portion with myself at the front of the line. A storage download comes first, which looks like a metallic red cigarette pack. Gary sets it in my outstretched hand, and I squeeze my fist around it. A ball of strobing light crawls down the inside of my wrist, travelling all the way up my arm and into my brain. I freeze, a shiver travelling through my body as the download buffers. Once I can, I shut my eyes to verify.
I've been transported to the inside of an abandoned shipping container; the storage unit is about half the size my bank unit was, and it's made of ruby red rust-infested metal. There's a single flickering yellow lamp hanging from the ceiling, but the whole unit is filled with a bright white glow. I'm not even standing on the ground; visually, the floor is about two inches underneath where my feet are actually standing. Shoddiest render job I've seen in a while.
Gabe is already handing me two machine guns when I open my eyes, which he follows with three grenades and a much bigger package explosive. I almost drop one of the grenades as he plops it on the pile of stuff, so I squint at all the things before he can give me anything else. The pile evaporates, transported to storage. Gabe doesn't waste time giving me a handful of other downloads that look like a bunch of tiny black marbles. The generic shape means they're custom, so of course I give Gabe a look. Ideally, I wouldn't like to end up hacked like Derik.
"Don't worry. It's some tools, you know, night vision, speed, things we'll need to get this job done."
"Hold on a minute. Why do we even need to do something this stupid if we can just keep stealing shit like this to cover ourselves?" Charlie points at his gun.
"No, dumbass. None of this shit is registered to us. We hack some rich fuck who won't notice a few lost venny, and tie all these purchases to him. No one can track this to us, but it can't help us either." Gary rolls his eyes.
"Right," mutters Charlie.
The night vision downloads without a hitch. One second I'm half blind, and the next I can see all the way down to the end of the alley. There isn't all that much to see, more creeps gathered around trucks and a clandestine neon storefront or two. The dark world hasn't been spared the great emptiness coming down on the rest of the Edifice. Strip the mystique, and it's a bunch of empty subterranean hallways.
After we all get equipped, Gary tells us to hang around and wait for further instructions. Charlie and Sam make a beeline to the nearest illegal vendor, and I watch Colin go slump down against a nearby wall. I shuffle over to him, or at least I try. With the speed download I overshoot and go flat against the wall. All hopes of a smooth entry dashed, I sit down next to him anyway like it didn't happen. He doesn't say anything.
For a minute we stare forward at nothing. Then he says,
"Remember the Comet?"
"I didn't know it was possible to forget it."
"When we got here, the first thing I wanted was a sports car. Or maybe the Batmobile, when I got the hang of the rendering stuff. I remember I was so damn proud of my Ferrari that day we went out to race our things. Then you showed up with your little mecha robot man, and I thought, wow. Pretty cool. Can't believe I didn't think of it. And then I find that everything started lagging so bad it was like moving through a pot of honey. I look up, and there it is. A goddamn spaceship. Ugliest one I've seen. I wonder, who does this abomination belong to?"
"Then there's the tiny little man shouting something from the bow, and we could only tell it's Derrin by the six-foot-tall mohawk."
"Couldn't hear a word he was saying, though."
"Probably just, 'Guys, check this puppy out! Ready to lose?'"
"We never did find out what he was saying. I guess we'll never know."
Silence. Then Colin says, quietly,
"I'm sorry."
"No, it's... okay."
"You knew him before this, right? Was he any different back then?"
"No. I mean, all he would talk about was this. He wanted to come here so bad. He even broke up with his girlfriend because she didn't want to come with him on plug-in day. So enthusiastic. But we all were, until we realized this was a fucking scam."
"I don't know about a scam. Me, I knew it would never stay the way it was. Racing sports cars all day long and summoning spaceships that always crashed the system. I always thought it would end up like this. Us working jobs and all that. I was just hoping it'd be more interesting."
"Hmm. Why do you ask, though? If he was different?"
"I guess he was always a bit of an arrogant asshole. I mean, I liked him, but sometimes it felt like he was always angry at everything. Like the world owed him something he wasn't getting, you know? And I think I was a lot nicer back then. As dumb as it sounds, I feel like it was more important to be a good person back then because it was all real. Even though, I guess this is the only real now."
"Yeah..."
I say, thus ending the conversation. It's not wise to dwell on the past. Besides, I can see that Gary's finished talking to his truck friends. They drive away, and he prepares to shout.
"Paging all idiots! Ready to rock?"
"You think this'll work?" I ask Colin.
"No. I think this is a horrible idea, and we'll be lucky not to get deleted. But it's something to do. One last adventure with everyone before you all..."
"We all what?" Colin stands up, looks at me with an absolutely miserable expression.
"Look out for yourself, dude."
He walks on ahead.
///
Until this bullshit about deletion, it wasn't possible to die in the Edifice. You have to plug yourself into a recreational program where you shoot each other to even get close, and even then you'll wake right back up after you take one to the head. Otherwise, bullets and bombs will go clean through your target and they won't even notice. When it comes to your target's stuff, now that's another story.
"Alright, listen up," Gary says, waving a download shaped like a bright orange hard drive with the other hand behind his back. He's pacing back and forth in front of me and Colin like a true general. All that's missing is calling us maggots.
"Our boy will be driving right over our heads in about eight minutes. The idea is that after our comrades Charlie and Sam blow the wheels of the fucker, he'll be too confused to fix anything right away. We'll have ten, maybe fifteen seconds to blow up everything else. These guys are powerful, but they're as fat and complacent as pigs. He'll spend the first five seconds wondering what the hell happened and the last ten in disbelief that anyone would ever try to come after him."
"What about his robots? They'll go after us right away." I ask.
"You scared of tin-can chauffeurs?"
"No, but they might get in our way. What if you try to nail him with that, and one of them takes it instead?"
"Keep them busy! Hit them with the stinger I gave you, and they should be out for the count."
"And after you hit him with the death chip, you're sure he'll be finished?"
"Son, that's the one thing I am sure of. His account will be wiped clean. Factory reset. I don't know about the part of his stolen funds going to us, but if that doesn't work, we'll be dragging him along to deletion."
"I meant, what's stopping him from making it all back?"
"It's not just his venny he'll lose, it's himself- all of his downloads, contacts, property, his mind, gone. Same thing that happened to Derik, so you know it works."
I winced a little, and I saw Colin tense up. Gary kept on grinning like he never said it. Maybe this was his way of getting us to shut up, or maybe he was just running his mouth without thinking. A walkie-talkie appears in place of the chip, and he holds it up to his ear.
"He's turning the corner. I don't think he sees it," Charlie hisses through the radio.
"Get ready!" He replaces the radio with a machine gun and to us says, "This is it, kids! All or nothing."
With my gun forming in my hands, I wonder if this is actually happening. Never, before or during the Edifice, had I been guilty of anything more than a speeding ticket. If this doesn't work, it could mean an early deletion. At the same time, I realize that this is pretty much what everyone expected the Edifice to be; wanton, hyperrealistic violence without pain or consequence. Gamer's paradise.
I'm living the dream right now. This is a fucking heist. I can't help but smile a little bit. But only a little.
Gary has his palm against the bottom of the manhole cover.
"Who wants to go first?"
"What the fuck do you mean? You're going first." By Colin's tone, I know he didn't take the last comment well.
"No, no, no. I'm going last. One of you is clearing the way so that I can give him a poke. It'll work out better that way."
"Oh, you piece of shi-"
"I'll lead the charge," I say, looking from Gary to Colin and shaking my head. Colin scoffs.
For a second he stares at Gary, who stares back with the same intensity. The car explodes before they do. There's a cartoonish bang in the distance, lacking a shockwave or any sort of aftermath. Gary shoves the manhole open for me as I jump through. I only get my head up, and the limousine comes flying at me. It moves through me like I'm a ghost, and for a moment I make eye contact with the man inside. Clean blond hair, shining teeth, bright blue eyes with a white suit- textbook millionaire businessman. Hard to feel bad for him with such a generic face.
The car tumbles a few times down the road before landing upright. It isn't going anywhere on account of its wheels having been blown to scattered pixels, but the fragments are already creeping their way back to the damaged areas. I beat them to it and poke a few holes in the window with the rifle, following up with a grenade right through the opening. The car shatters more than explodes, coming apart in neat jagged chunks like a hatching egg. It's almost cartoonish, the way the man inside is left exposed on his pearly white cushions.
He shrugs at me, like "so what?". The pieces have gotten right back to reassembling. Arrogant bastard! I leap at him with one of Gary's downloads in hand, a bright yellow USB drive marked with a lightning bolt, and plunge it straight into his heart. He starts buffering with a transitional expression between annoyance and surprise stuck on his face. I open fire on the ground, blowing the car floor to bits before it has the chance to recuperate.
Then his robots stand up, a skinny one with an orb head as his driver and a beefier one with a box head as his bodyguard. Gary was wrong about the chauffeurs. The bodyguard lunges at me, but I have chips for days. He recoils midway when I swipe my hand at him. Anywhere on his body, and he's as useful as a lump of rocks. So now I have him backing up, but there's no one to take care of the car. That's when Colin decides to make an appearance accompanied by a volley of grenades. The car gets the full brunt of his rage against Gary. With him at the helm, it can't regenerate more than the bottom of its tires while the mark is left floating in air.
Gary slips in behind him with another chip, this one orange. The guy stops buffering when Gary's still a few feet away, prompting a wild dive on Gary's part. His eyes are shut when the tip of the chip touches his leg. But he doesn't go anywhere.
We got him.
In my joy, I keep my eyes off the bot long enough for it to grab my wrist and pick me up. It's raising a glowing red stun chip of its own when I switch the chip to my other hand and poke it in the chest. I fall right out of its grasp, which turns intangible as it glitches. There's a cross between a gasp, a scream, and a curse all at once behind me. I turn and see the aftermath: Gary recoiling with the kill chip glowing in his hands, the chauffeur bot shielding the target with its body. Gary hits it with a stun, but the guy is already running.
Charlie and Sam try to cut him off with their bike, but they don't draw their stuns in time and he runs right through them, slinking into a back alley.
"You had him! Why didn't you fucking stab him with the full thing?" Colin screams.
"Relax! He's got nothing, no bank access, no communications, nowhere to run! He's fucked!"
Without wasting another breath, Gary runs straight through Colin towards the alley. Colin goes swearing after him.
"We can stay back to hold off the..." Charlie nods at the robots but trails off. They're both disintegrating in a shower of pixels, the car too. There's no way he's at the end of his twelve hours already. Unless he's recalling the material on purpose.
"Go to the other side, now!" I shout.
Charlie obeys, but by his face I can tell he hasn't figured out what's going on yet. I catch up with the others in a second. Running with this upgrade is like moving at light speed, the guy's head start means nothing. We're right on his tail when he spins around with his hands up. A brick wall springs up from the ground between us that all three of us crash into.
"Clever girl!" Gary announces, already holding a grenade.
"You said he wouldn't have any fucking bank access!"
"He doesn't. This is his limousine right here." When we blow through it, there's nothing in the alley ahead of us except another wall and a dumpster. But a wall you can't just walk through takes some heavy venny, so he wouldn't have enough left over for a second.
Sure enough, we can see his dress shoes poking out from behind the dumpster. The wall collapses, and Gary zooms ahead to stop him from coming up with anything else. He's too late, running straight into the grasp of another security bot. Colin doesn't seem too keen to help him as he squirms, so it's up to me. The bot is already falling apart when I stab it, and the guy is racing up a ladder over the other wall. Gary doesn't quite make it before the ladder also falls apart.
Gary grenades us a window, which shuts before Colin can make it through with us. The guy looks at us, then zips down the street on a shiny red motorcycle. We pursue. With our speed, we're almost fast enough to catch up. He's only a little faster, but faster nonetheless. The small gap between us grows while all of Gary's shots miss wildly. He's almost home free when Charlie turns onto the street he's screaming down. Charlie faces him head-on, holding his stun chip out like a jousting lance. The guy doesn't have time to get out of the way.
They collide, both their bikes going out in a burst of electric light. Charlie and Sam roll onward, the guy remains buffering in midair. Gary is already plunging the red chip into his chest. The guy unfreezes, flies a few feet down the street from delayed momentum, then starts buffering again before he can even stand up. We all surround him on the ground, watching earnestly. If this works... well, then I can buy my own lemonade.
Then he stands up.
"Do you assholes have any idea who I-"
He starts glitching. I haven't seen a glitch since the early days, so it's a little shocking how fucked up it looks. His limbs start stretching and snapping into impossible angles, his head spins around, and he begins floundering on the ground. We watch his body crumble, then the parts reassemble themselves into a wide oval shape that begins to glow red.
"We did it, boys! It works!" Gary pumps his fist.
We all exchange glances as he celebrates. Something about it doesn't quite feel right. The blank space in the center of the portal begins to shift into a distant void, like a black hole. This begs the question, what did we gain from turning some guy into a portal.
"What now?" asks Charlie.
"Do we just get rich or..."
"What are you idiots waiting for? Go in!"
"What the hell do you mean, go in?" Colin shouts.
Instead of responding, Gary dives head first into the void. Another round of glances travels through the circle, this time with wider eyes. He had failed to mention this part in his initial speech. I wait for someone else to take the leap, but if their faces were any indication, there weren't any takers. Which meant it would have to be me. I sigh, walking up to the portal. Gary had never let me down before. Reliable parts only break down when you really need them. Any more thinking, and I'll never do it.
I jump in, cannonball style.
//
For a couple seconds, I'm falling with nothing but an all-black void surrounding me. First loading screen I've seen in years. With no further warning, I land in the middle of a warehouse-sized living room.
The walls are covered in enormous paintings and murals, depicting people whose pupils are the size of my head. One wall is dedicated entirely to a whole zoo's worth of animal head mounts, including everything from lions to crocodiles with a few dragons and a unicorn or two thrown into the mix. The animal hides are all over the floor, fashioned into a hundred rugs amidst the pure gold couches and statues carved from diamond. There are little islands of such furniture all over the floor complete with TV screens, like someone took what constitutes an entire living room for most people and copied the layout a few hundred times. If that wasn't enough, there's also a movie theater screen overtaking the bottom half of one wall. For a centerpiece, the decorator chose to roll with an obsidian sculpture of Atlas, burdened with a shining cube reaching up to the ceiling. It glimmers as if made of reflective, oily fish scales. That thing alone must be made of thousands- no, millions- of veneer.
"I- I-" Words fail me at the sight of it. But I know one thing.
"We made it!" I say to Charlie, who appears at my side. His eyes shoot wide open.
"Look at all that! And it's all ours!!" I point at the cube, my hand shaking. The others appear one by one with Colin last, whose scowl isn't even immune to the wonder of the surroundings. At least until Gary speaks up.
"Slow down, kiddo, it ain't ours yet." Gary scrutinizes his surroundings with a kind of distrust. He points to the back of the room, which holds a crystalline staircase spiraling upwards.
"This way." He dashes straight through the opulent masses and disappears up the staircase before we can see him.
"Goddamn this guy," mutters Colin. We go up after him.
The second level is the same size, though this one is actually themed as a warehouse stuffed full of nothing but art pieces.
"We're going all the way to the top!" Shouts Gary from another level up.
The third level takes us into the middle of the cosmos, surrounded by stars and galaxies with all the planets of the solar system surrounding us. Then we go through four rooms recreating Earth's ecosystems as they were hundreds, possibly thousands at this point, years ago, from the tundra, to the rainforest, to the ocean floor, to the desert, complete with pyramids in the distance. And it keeps going.
The pool rivals the Atlantic in size. The game room is full of arcade machines on the floor and each wall is a screen controlled by gold-plated consoles. One room seems to have no other purpose than to display a thousand caged birds, while another is a supermarket full of nothing but soda.
The top of the staircase is capped off with a gazebo. Besides that, there's nothing but an empty white void surrounding us.
Gary is already circling around the gazebo, scanning the blank horizon.
"What the hell is-"
"There!" Gary cuts off Colin before he can finish his comment, pointing to a distant blue-green smudge.
This time, he's at least kind enough to wait for us before taking off. Even with our speed it takes a minute to get there, longer than it took to go up the whole staircase. The smudge comes into focus as a small house.
It's accompanied with a section of street in front and a frozen rectangle of bright blue sky above it, as if someone cut out a slice of a suburban neighborhood and planted it here. There's a little kid riding his bike in the middle of the street, still as the many hundreds of statues we'd seen earlier.
He's blond, with blue eyes.
Gary walks right past him, rips the front door open, and storms inside. The interior is as simple as the exterior. It doesn't look much different from the house I grew up in. You can tell it's a family home by the photos on the wall in place of abstract canvases, many of them depicting the same blond kid as the one frozen outside. The guy appears to have been an only child, and despite having a homemade planetarium his parents didn't seem a whole lot richer than mine. He's pictured playing with a little redheaded kid in a lot of the photos, though this kid is missing from all the family portraits. A good friend, I assume.
We follow Gary up to the second level, where the pictured kid is a lot older. There's a class photo of him in high school, and one of him graduating. The redhead is present in both, with one arm around the blond kid in the second. There's no question about it, the guy who we're robbing is the one in the pictures. But I could swear I've seen the redhead somewhere else, too.
Gary kicks open one of the bedroom doors. A window lets in warm light and the serene scene of a sun setting on a suburb. The bed has a pirate-themed blanket, and sits opposite a desk adorned with a black cylinder that emits low pulses of white light. It's pretty big, taller than the lava lamp that also sits on that desk. There's a small white dash blinking on and off near the top. It brings a huge grin to Gary's face as he strides over to pick the cylinder up.
"Gary, what are you doing?"
"Patience," he says.
He holds the cylinder up in one hand. It downloads, sinking all the way into his palm.
The buffering takes a good long while, a solid two or three minutes. While we wait, I step up to inspect another picture frame over the desk. It's a group photo inside an office. The blond guy is at the center, shaking hands with the president, the redhead standing at his side. On the wall behind them there's a bright blue logo reading Circes.
The memory is distant, but I've seen the logo once before. On log-on day, amidst the fanfare and colossal symbols of interdimensional conglomerates that played when I jammed that wire into my head. I call over the others, who each in turn realize the same thing I have.
We've netted ourselves a Dev.
I don't know what to think. On the one hand, this could make us rich, forever. With what we can steal from this guy, we could rewrite the whole edifice. On the other hand, it feels too easy. They must have a failsafe for things like this, and I'm not eager to find out what that entails.
"They left me behind. He left me behind." Gary's done buffering. He walks through us to reach the photo. There's no sign of anger or glee on his face, just some disappointed melancholy. A first for Gary.
"Well, really, they wanted to leave everyone else behind. And I stayed back, for all of you." He takes the photo down.
As I look from him to the photo, it hits me. The redhead has a bit of a beard and his face is less gaunt, but if he shaved clean and had a mohawk, it'd be Gary next to the blond guy in the photo.
"He couldn't even be bothered to come out and see me before the new update. I had to beg for him to come down!"
"You knew this guy, Gary?" Colin asks, his rage dialed down to caution.
"Well, I did, for a little bit. Then he stabbed me and the human race in the back to go be god emperor of the new reincarnation of heaven and earth. Joke's on him, though. We're gonna change the world, aren't we?"
"Hey man, that sounds great. I love that, for you. If you could just hook me up with, I don't know, two thousand veneer and send me on my way, that'd be great," Charlie says. He looks a little bit scared. Sam is silent as always, his eyes bulging to an almost cartoonish size.
Gary scoffs. The photo disintegrates into ash in his hands. He blinks, the door shuts and disappears, leaving a blank wall. The rest of the stuff in the room follows suit after the picture frame, falling apart until there's only a closet door remaining. Charlie makes a mad dash for the window, only for that to disappear as well. He looks at Gary, who responds with a disappointed glare. Of course. The cylinder was a terminal, wiped out because of the recent update.
"You know, when I went to the underground, I thought you types would be more willing to undergo some radical change. Everyone tramples all over you all the time, but you're too scared to do anything. Look how much we've accomplished, in so little time. It's just a shame Derik isn't here to see it."
Colin and I both bristle. This is too much, even for Gary. He keeps bringing it up, like tugging on an exposed nerve ending.
"That's enough, man," I say.
"Yes! I agree. It was enough sitting around and doing nothing. I'm sorry, but I had to do it. You're a scared little bunch, and the only thing that motivates you is more fear. I liked him, but it was either him or you, Colin."
"You- what?"
Colin shrieks, leaping at him with his stun chip drawn. He freezes a few feet from Gary, both his arms vanishing.
"No, you don't understand! It was worth it! We're gonna change the world, you guys! Bring this whole fucking thing to the ground."
The closet door opens to another portal beaming light of a thousand different colors. I don't have a chance to think before Gary takes us all inside at once.
We're in another void, this one black with a white grid sprawling across the whole sky. Below, I'm ankle-deep in a pool of water. A tree rises out of the water, maybe half a mile away. It glows in radiant neon, the bursts of light course up its trunk all the way to where its branches touch the sky and break through the grid, where they're no longer visible.
"Do you see that shit?!" Gary screams, jumping up and down with glee.
"That's Yggdrasill! The source code, man!"
"Gary! What the hell is going on?" I shout.
This is above my paygrade. All I wanted was a little venny, not a visit to the center of the universe.
"We have to get there quick, before the snake wakes up!" Gary starts skipping along towards it. The door is gone. There's nowhere to go but after him.
When I try to run, I don't feel the boost anymore. Being next to the lynchpin of all digital creation tends to do that, I guess. I let Gary and the others get ahead of me. Their silhouettes become pitch black, outlines glowing with bright neon. Colin is running the fastest, trying to catch up to Gary. Even though his arms are back now, I don't know what he's planning to do.
Derik was my last link to the old world. Talking to him made it feel like a piece of it was still alive. Once, he hosted a party for the group in a recreated version of our dorm room. He spent one a work bonus, and then some, to create it, not sparing any expense in bringing the detail back perfectly. For a moment, I was back.
It began to crumble before we were even done.
That world is gone. It died with him. I never even had the chance to say goodbye. All because of some naked psychopath with a revenge plot that hinges on destroying reality as we know it.
How does it feel to be deleted? Does it hurt?
As we get closer to the tree, everything becomes fuzzy. The light gets brighter and brighter until it reaches a heavenly quality. My field of vision becomes a polychromatic blur, with four vaguely human shapes somewhere ahead. I see them ascend a slope and go after them. We are walking on top of the carpet of light. We're at the roots.
"Find the black root!" Gary shouts. His voice is the first thing I've heard; the tree makes no sound despite its stature and neither do my footsteps. Everything is perfectly silent.
It must have been silent when they killed Derik. No funeral dirge, not even a pastor to give the whole dust-to-dust spiel. There was only him there, and then there wasn't.
Why am I even running? Let him do what he wills. He needed me to do some shooting, and he needed to use Derik as a bit of motivation, but he doesn't need either of us anymore. I stop and sit down.
The others have realized the same thing. I can see two of the shadows slow down and stop, then begin to run in the opposite direction. The only one still running after Gary is Colin, still hellbent on whatever his mission is. Both shadows stop when they reach me.
Charlie puts his hands on his hips and looks around. I can only make out his nose amidst the light.
"Do you know what he's planning to do?" he asks. No response.
"Right, then. Fuck this." Charlie makes a dash back in the direction we came from.
Sam sits down next to me with a sigh. We watch Charlie go across the pool of black water, running nowhere.
"Where's he going?" I ask, like Sam would know.
"Which one? I mean, they're both going nowhere. Because, you know, if Gary succeeds there won't be anywhere left to run."
"Mm. You know, I realize I've never talked to you before. I don't really know anything about you, Sam."
"What's there to know? I'm kind of a tramp, like Charlie. I hang out a lot with him and his crew."
"Where'd you live before, well, this?"
"I'm somewhere in a data building in Boulder right now. Colorado."
"Oh, me too. Well, Denver, but, same state, you know."
"Believe me, I know." I glance at him. His face is a complete blur, but what I can make out seems serene.
"I grew up in state. Got accepted to this place in Florida, and then, boom. Log-on day. I don't know, everyone said it was coming but I lived my life like it was all going to be... normal. So I was surprised, to say the least."
"Weren't we all?" Charlie's gotten pretty far, far enough to become a speck. No end in sight to the horizon, though.
"Say, you remember which cubicle you're in? At the log-in center?" I turn my head slowly. Sam is staring right at me.
"Never mind. Found you. Cubicle 80A. Oh, and there's Colin. And Derik. Poor guy. Sorry, didn't mean to bring it up." My face suddenly cools, as if a breeze over me. I shudder.
"That's the door opening. And this is my hand." Something warm touches my shoulder.
"Good news, man. You don't look half bad. Some of these guys are wired-up skeletons, but you're just gonna need a little more meat on your bones."
"What the hell?"
"Listen. When it hits the fan, I'll get us all out of here. It'll work whether or not Gary makes succeeds."
The sky lights up red. Right above our heads, a message forms in bold yellow letters.
"Warning: Admin backdoor access detected. Unable to verify admin identity. Security program engaged. Enter admin terminal code to deactivate."
A blue dot flickers into existence right on the horizon line, like the setting sun. The dot begins speeding along the horizon, leaving behind a trail of the same color. It circles the whole way around in the blink of an eye, and comes back around to complete another circle, this time drawing closer. It runs the loop again and again, growing larger and larger every time it completes it. Sam stands straight up.
"No, no, no! Charlie!" He shouts. Charlie's no idiot, he's already running back. Not fast enough.
The ball of light is close enough that I can see what it is, the head of a horned snake with a gaping jaw, its tail trailing behind it. It closes the distance between itself and Charlie in seconds, moving faster each time it completes a loop. Its fangs must be at least twice Charlie's size.
He makes it only far enough that I can start making his features out. The snake leaves its mouth hanging open, so that it takes no effort for him to swallow him whole.
Again, it's totally silent.
"What do we do?" I ask. The snake draws nearer and nearer to the tree, its jaw still wide open in an expression of mindlessness.
Sam runs. I go after him, even though I'm sure we're going nowhere, just like Charlie. What was he talking about? Leaving? Everyone's going crazy. On the one hand you have a nude anarchist and on the other you have someone who claims to still be outside of the Edifice. I sure know how to pick friends. We go around the base of the tree until we find them. They're standing on a shining black root, the color of veneer. Gary's on his hands and knees, holding a bright red chip that he jams again and again into different parts of the root. Colin is frozen a few feet away, his face twisted into rage and his hands balled into fists.
"Put the code in, asshole!" I point up to the writing scrawled across the sky. He ignores me.
He doesn't care.
"The code's too thick here! I need to find a weaker spot and-"
"And what? What are you going to do then?"
Sam isn't angry, but he raises his voice. I stare at him, shocked, and Gary is taken off guard.
"There are billions of people here, Gary. Not just your old back-stabbing coworkers. What will happen to all of them when the very material that holds this world together falls apart?" Gary gives him a disgusted look.
"Most of them are gonna die anyway!" He goes back to stabbing the root. The snake comes ever closer.
"I'm sorry, Gary. We couldn't locate you. There's no way out. You're going to die here, so I suggest you make your peace now."
"Goddamn it, you're even crazier than me!"
The snake is so close that I can see the small grooves on its scales.
"What the hell, Gary?! Put the code in!" I shout.
"I don't know it! I don't fucking know it!" He casts a glance over his shoulder. His face changes from rage to fear to a small smirk.
"Well, get us out of here, then. We tried." Sam is unmoved.
"You don't get it. We'll never get a chance like this again. They'll find us and delete us all anyway, even if I do get us all out of here."
Gary turns around to face the snake and sits in a cross-legged position, his head hung low. I shout at him some more, but he stays quiet. He's given up. The snake will be coiling around the tree any second now.
"Colin can't move. I'm getting him first. You follow after me."
Sam runs straight up the trunk. Walking on walls is hardly the strangest thing I've done all day, but it feels strange nonetheless as I sprint up after him. I'm looking back all the while at Colin. The snake is moving up the roots, mouth still hanging stupidly but its slit pupils trained right on him. I'm about to turn away, unable to watch, when he starts to glow with a bright red static haze. He disappears moments before the snake even reaches him. Or maybe it did, and I couldn't see it from where I was. Me and Sam make it to the top of the tree. He stops running on a branch and turns around to face me with a sad look in his eyes. I look down.
I'd rather be deleted by a giant snake monster than automatically erased by the system.
I'm trying to cry, but nothing comes out of my eyes.
"Go ahead."
Maybe it's not sadness. Maybe the look is knowing, comforting. I feel a sharp pain in my chest. The sensation of spiders running across your skin that comes when your limbs wake up from being numb runs through my arms.
"I can't promise you anything. You might die right away. Maybe you'll be plunged into excruciating pain and then have a fatal stroke a few days later. The only thing I can promise is that if you stay here, you'll die for sure. But the choice is yours."
Like that, he disappears. I'm left alone with the snake, which has its eyes focused on me now.
I hold my hands up. They hurt, and so does my chest. The first pain I've felt in years.
I put my hands on my forehead.
I can feel the cold metal of the headset.