The Final System

Prologue

“Sure you don’t wanna come, Jase?”

Jason had set his phone to Do Not Disturb, but his smartbuds knew to make an exception for his twin sister, so they let her voice cut through the snarls of the trolls surrounding him.

When he looked toward her, the game world faded out, and the real world faded in, allowing him to see Mia as a dark silhouette in the bright rectangle of the doorway.

For a moment he hesitated, then shook his head. “Maybe tomorrow.”

She cocked her eyes at him over her smartglasses. “You’re wilting all over the couch. You need sunlight and fresh air.”

He let his lounging, splayed-out limbs sink deeper into the cushions. “I’m not wilting, I’m taking root. Wait till you see what I grow into. Anyway, fresh air? In LA? It’s not exactly DC out there.”

“Change of scenery, then.”

He tapped his smartglasses. In the VR view, his avatar had been about to mar a pastoral paradise with generous helpings of steaming troll blood. “There’s more scenery in here than out there.”

Mia scrunched her nose. “That ain’t real.”

“Neither is that,” he said, nodding to the backpack hanging heavily from her shoulder. There were probably a dozen books in there, and it was a good bet most were fairy-tale retellings. “Aren’t you too old for that stuff?”

Her eyes flicked to the kitchen doorway and back. “Guess we each have our escape,” she said softly.

A crash, a muttered curse, and a zoned-out giggle came from the kitchen.

“He’s still in the mellow stage,” Jason said, mirroring her soft tone.

“Better get out while you can.” Jason could handle their foster dad even after he’d hit the belligerent stage of the evening’s drinking, but it was easier when he didn’t have to worry about how the man was looking at Mia.

“Come with me,” she said. “You can take root at the library. The soil’s healthier there.”

“I’d lose reception on the bus.”

“The horror. Then we could spend the trip plotting, like old times.”

He wavered. But he was plotting already, more seriously than she knew. No more the old daydreams. And no more aimless running, like when he’d squandered that ghost MeNetID. He had a real plan now—a good plan.

She thought he was just playing a game, and maybe he was.

Life was like one of those live-service video games, the ones that strung you along with a million tiny goals colorfully presented, multiple completion bars filling and counters rolling upward, sparkling loot boxes opening with carefully designed dopamine bursts of light and sound, offering an insignificant reward while reminding you that the next one might, might be game changing.

The only way to guarantee the reward was to pay, and Jason and Mia were low in every one of life’s in-game currencies—money, status, friends, a MeNetID history that would open doors instead of shutting them.

But what if you could rig the game?

He’d found an exploit that allowed him to boost the power of any weapon in BloodReign while it still displayed the original, lower stats.

If he was careful about how he sold the hacked weapons, in a few months, they could have enough money to buy two ghost MeNetIDs and the matching lifestyle to avoid suspicion.

They’d no longer be at the mercy of the system, cogs in the machine, names and numbers in a file to be placed here or there as the system dictated.

The judgment and negativity tugging like anchors on their MeNetIDs would be left behind. They’d be free.

“Last chance,” Mia pressed.

Last chance. In two months, they would be eighteen and turned loose from the foster system to enter American society under an even stricter rule book, one with no safety net. So he shook his head again. “Tomorrow. Promise.”

She nodded, hefted her backpack, and stepped away. The door swung closed, cutting off the sunlight.

Jason subvocalized a command to restore the VR view.

The smartbuds deep in his ears captured the electrical signals of his face, tongue, and throat muscles almost imperceptibly tightening and moving as he interiorly voiced the words, and a complex AI on his phone decoded his command into understandable text.

Another AI parsed that text and followed the command, masking the real world with the world of BloodReign.

The trolls were still there, taunting his avatar, watching what he’d do.

He thought at first they were GeNPCs, generative AI–controlled units whose sole purpose of existence was to react to him, creating a story on the fly in which he was the main character.

But as the first fell under his hacked sword and he saw its name appear in the killfeed, he realized it was a human player.

So were the next two. They’d been trolls in more ways than one, acting like GeNPCs while intending to surprise him with human capability, but they’d been the ones surprised.

“You ph—” the final dying troll said over voice, before the word was bleeped out by the automatic profanity filter.

Jason had left the filter open, so he knew the word that had been censored wasn’t the first expletive that came to mind that started with the /f/ phoneme. There were a few words that every dev, everywhere, bleeped regardless of user settings, and none was censored more than phreaker.

Even the tamer synonym hacker wasn’t said lightly.

But phreaker was a whole different level.

“Hello, World, you’ve been phreaked” might be the most famous sentence in history, and its impact on the world in question had been so powerful that teachers covering the Cybercrash added trigger warnings before saying it aloud in class.

Jason grinned. Maybe he should consider this word of mouth for his business.

His grin died. Or maybe he shouldn’t be stupid.

In this business, no publicity was good publicity.

Nobody drew the heat in these United States of Andrew Norman like a phreaker.

The careers of even the best tended to be meteoric: brief and ending in flames.

Jason’s few remaining months of minority wouldn’t matter to Norman, who famously, vindictively, treated all hackers like Hacksaw himself.

Phreak it. He’d accomplished enough for the day. He thumbed the power button on the glasses, jumped up, and slipped out the front door, closing it softly to avoid drawing attention.

Down the block, Mia’s slim form was about to step onto the crosswalk. “Hey,” he called, “wait up!” She turned, and he saw her smile as she paused and waited for him.

Jason was steps away from her, beginning to smile in response, when a roar cut across the electric whine of traffic.

He had only heard the sound in movies, so at first he didn’t realize what it was, but as it grew aggressively in volume and pitch, it drew Jason’s eye to a low-slung, bright-red, old-fashioned sports car—a gas guzzler—gunning up the street, slaloming between cars, leaving a trail of swerving, slowing vehicles, their windshield status lights changing from green to emergency red.

It was a joyrider, driving on manual control at well over the TransNet’s speed, weaving through the spaces in the automatic traffic with only human reflexes to guide them.

That was a staple of every action movie, and Jason had done it many times in VR, but for some—usually rich—people, movies and video games weren’t enough of a thrill.

Jason’s first thought was a hope that this didn’t cause TransNet to go into redlock and delay their bus ride.

He didn’t have time for a second thought.

A cab crossed the intersection into the sports car’s path, its passenger, a dark-haired woman, beginning to turn her head toward the noise.

Through the sports car’s windshield, Jason saw its driver, eyes and mouth wide, throw his arms in front of him.

The car swerved, grew, filled the world. Jason jumped back.

Mia didn’t.

Her body buckled, her hair seeming almost to float around her face as her head whiplashed off the hood of the car.

She landed like a broken, discarded doll in the street, books and torn pages raining around her.

Jason ran to her, but at first, he couldn’t bring himself to look, turning his head instead to the sports car slanted on the sidewalk, dented hood smoking, and the woman leaning out the door of her now-stationary autocab, hands over her mouth.

Then he looked at Mia—and looked away. Because she wasn’t there anymore.

Later, Jason would remember that time as a series of individual moments.

The moment the bag was zipped over Mia’s head.

The moment their foster dad asked if he’d still receive a support check for two kids that month.

The moment Jason was told that the car that had run her down had been traveling sixty-four point two miles per hour.

The moment he learned the driver was getting a ticket for driving on manual but no manslaughter charge, because he’d put the car back into automatic just before it hit Mia.

The moment he realized the car itself had swerved into her, that it had chosen to hit her instead of the cab because she was one person and the occupants of car plus cab equaled two.

And the moment he realized that although everyone else thought this was sad, they didn’t think anyone was responsible.

It was just one of those things. The automatic system had worked as it should have.

Jason considered rage quitting, doing the life equivalent of throwing the game controller at the console before switching it off, but he made it to his eighteenth birthday because Mia would have wanted him to.

He went through the emancipation process with a disinterested social worker and walked out of her office an adult, but neither he nor the universe felt any different.

There seemed to be no point in playing another turn.

But then, as he sat in the park watching what he thought was his last sunset, life offered a new questline.

The email slipped past the AI filters that made spam almost unknown and landed in his inbox with an urgent flag that triggered a notification in his glasses and drew his attention.

The email was blank—until he looked deeper and found in its code commands to turn a block of text transparent, set its font size to zero, and bury it below the edges of the window.

Only someone looking at the code could see it.

The hidden text was a long sequence of numbers and characters.

Jason spent too much time running it through cryptoanalysis programs before realizing he was looking at a piece of ANSI art, a form of computer graphics so ancient it had been popular on the old proto-networks that predated not only OverNet but even the old internet.

Assembled and interpreted, the letters and digits transformed into low-resolution artwork depicting a fairy.

Despite the blocky pixels and limited color palette, the fairy’s featureless face and delicate shape evoked menace.

Maybe it was her vaguely predatory posture, like a bird of prey about to descend.

Accompanying the image was a set of instructions, signed with one word: Sprite.

Sprite. Jason had heard the name whispered in the few dim corners that remained of the old darknets.

Rumor had it she’d smashed China’s XAI Syndicate so hard they’d disappeared entirely from America’s Nets.

That had led to her recruitment as the youngest (in reputational terms, because who knew how old she was in real life?) phreaker in the Collective, the most infamous hacker organization in the American Nets.

In the tiny, dangerous world of black-hat hacking, she was royalty.

And she was recruiting Jason.

It was a fetch quest: Infiltrate an old corporate archive and retrieve a specific document. It took only a few hours and a couple of phone calls, and then he was paid—generously, like a professional.

But his true payment for the job, the reward he’d been meant to find, was the document itself, which he of course read. It was the auto-generated transcript of a decades-ago meeting, and it concluded with a few perfunctory sentences spoken to put an end to a debate:

“Cut this trolley-problem bullshit. The only and obvious answer is utilitarianism: Prioritize the happiness of the greatest number of people who might potentially complain. Can you imagine if we wiped out a school bus just because the person it would’ve hit was innocent?

Our careers would be deader than the kids whose faces showed up on the news. ”

The words were tagged with the name of the man responsible for the algorithms baked into TransNet and active in every car rolling in perfect coordination along the millions of miles of American roads: Andrew Norman.

Jason’s future didn’t open up again at that moment; it narrowed to a point, and that point was aimed directly at Andrew Norman. Never mind that he was the most powerful man in the world, the man who ran the networks that ran everything else, the man who literally made the rules.

All Jason had to do was figure out how to rig the game.