The NextWorld 02: Spawn Point by Jaron Lee Knuth

Author:Jaron Lee Knuth [Knuth, Jaron Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: virtual reality, video games, hackers, artificial intelligence
Published: 2014-07-05T05:00:00+00:00

01000100

“Fantom?” I mumble the name with an equal mix of disbelief and hopefulness.

She smirks. “Not exactly.”

I open the social page attached to her avatar and see the name “Rayth.”

“Fantom's a wanted criminal, yo. I can't be walkin' around usin' a flagged account.” She taps her finger on my avatar's chest as she says, “And neither can you.”

I look down at myself and see the avatar of a teenage boy. It's well-designed, but it isn't mine.

“I didn't exactly have time to clean your old account. I was a little busy trackin' you down and hackin' into your nanomachines. When I found out Ekko was still hangin' on to his son's old E-Womb, waitin' for their child license, well... It's sad, don't get me wrong, but it's good for you. The E-Womb was wiped when his son died, which made it easy for me to tag one of my ghost accounts on to the log-in functions.”

I look down at my hand, waiting to see the flicker of bandwidth lag that Ekko suffered from, but nothing happens.

“I thought Old Mongolia's connections were toast. Outdated. But I'm not experiencing any lag.”

“It isn't the infrastructure, yo,” Fantom says. “It's DOTgov limitin' their access because they ain't providin' credits like the other countries. They're doin' the same with North America.” She leans back with a smug grin. “But that ain't nothin'. If I can hack your nanomachines, you think a bandwidth cap is goin' to stop me?”

“I still don't understand how you could hack my nanomachines. No one can do that. I mean, how is that even possible?”

“I guess I'm just that good,” she says, shrugging her shoulders and doing a poor job of looking humble.

“Being able to do something like that is... I mean, the privacy laws that you're breaking are-”

“Breakin' the law? I ain't exactly worried about that, Cowboy. DOTgov didn't protect us when we were stuck in that game, and they ain't fessin' up to the error either. So if I want to spend my time findin' the flaws in NextWorld, the stuff they ain't tellin' us about, then I'm figurin' there are worse ways to spend my time. Think about what I found. Hackin' nanomachines? I might be usin' it for good, but in the wrong hands? That could be seriously dangerous, yo.”

“So that's what you've been doing since you logged out? Fighting against DOTgov? Starting your own private revolution?”

I know I'm mocking her, but that's only to mask how impressed I am. She's always made me feel like less of a player. She's tough and cool and smart and confident and not impressed by me at all.

“DOTgov ain't evil, yo. They're just inept. I'm tryin' to pick up the slack.”

“But how can you-”

“Look, Cowboy, we don't have time to catch up.”

“Cyren,” I manage to gasp her name. “How do you know the virus hasn't deleted her? It was consuming the world and-”

“I know. It deleted everything, yo. Includin' her. She hung on for a long time, but this morning it erased the last bit of code.

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