OceanofPDF.com

GOD MODE

J. KEVIN TUMLINSON

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER ONE

“Wait, what is this…?”

Brate had spent days working at this particular block of data. The security was outrageous—walls in all directions. Walls within walls, as far as Brate’s virtual eye could see. Whatever was on the other side of this was going to be good.

The crack in all those walls had come out of the blue.

“You found something?” Levelate, in Brate’s earbuds. Not his real name, of course. But then, “Brate” wasn’t a real name either. This was a business where real names were kept closer than state secrets. It was safer for everyone that way. Levelate was somewhere in Colorado, and that was all Brate or anyone knew about him. Brate suspected that data was fake, too.

Levelate wasn’t Brate’s friend. He was more like a client. But he came to Brate more than he went to anyone else in their little cadre of hackers in the Stack. And Brate knew why.

Brate was the best. No hacker, in all of history, had managed to break through the walls of security surrounding Stack at the level Brate was doing it. No one in all these years had ever been as good at finding the cracks and worming their way into them, digging and finding the best nuggets of data, the details that mattered. No one except him.

Brate had a reputation. Brate was a legend. And Levelate only wanted to work with legends.

“I’m not sure yet,” Brate said. He moved his hands, pinched his fingers. He concentrated.

Interfacing with the Stack wasn’t difficult. The system was designed for ease of use. That was the point of it—give everyone, everywhere, the easiest access to the whole world online, even down to knowing and anticipating what that user wanted or needing. Read the user and give them what they’re after, and usually before they even know what they’re after.

So getting what you wanted from the Stack was easy. The challenge was to get in without the system recognizing you. The system could recognize anyone.

That was the other reason Levelate came to Brate more than the others. Levelate had invested pretty heavily in Brate’s designs—the plans and the prototype for a custom neural interface. The first and only one of its kind. It was a patch that could take over the neural link chip and let the user have something that no user was allowed to have.

Anonymity.

Brate could control every aspect of the chip’s functionality, right down to whether it allowed Stack to psychoanalyze him and snag his identity. That meant he could appear as a blank to Stack, someone without an identity.

That was just step one, of course. Stack was specifically designed to reject any user who couldn’t be psychoanalyzed, so step two was fooling the system into thinking it had someone on the line that it could see and understand. And since Stack was constantly logging activity for every user, weighing it against their normal patterns, and flagging repeated suspicious behavior, Brate’s patch had to make sure that whoever Stack thought it was analyzing, that person never got analyzed more than once. Not with Brate wearing their identity.

He was wearing identities like a mask, switching them out as he went so that the system never saw the same face twice. He was hiding out in a sea of identities by briefly taking on a new one every few minutes.

That sort of thing was exactly what would make someone like Levelate send mountains of crypto to an untraceable account, and keep coming back again and again. But Levelate expected more than just beyond-level tech for his money. He expected data.

But he would never have expected this.

The images Brate was seeing, the stuff that was overriding his visual cortex and pushing a virtual landscape on him at that moment, all of it was something new. Something Brate had never seen before, regardless of what psyche and persona he was wearing.

Stack had an infinity of files stored, after five decades of interacting directly with users at the conscious mind level. All those interactions had to be stored, by international law. It also had to be locked tight, private, available only to the individual, to the Stack AI, and of course, to the Agents. The only police that mattered, these days.

Supposedly, Agents could only unlock files and gain access if Stack detected a violation.

Doubtful. And if it was true, what amateurs! Brate had cracked this using junk and free time. The Agents had unlimited crypto and manpower. They had direct access to Stack itself. Brate had to come in through public channels, worm his way through all those walls, basically get to the kernel at the center of Stack through back channels and shadow protocols. Agents could skip all of that and go direct.

So no… Brate didn’t believe for a second that the Agents couldn’t see any psych storage, on demand and any time they wanted. If he could, they could.

Levelate wanted dirt on powerful people. He wanted to see their secrets, to gain leverage over them by knowing what they didn’t want anyone knowing. There was a lot of sleaze stored in Stack, but what Levelate wanted was nails for coffins, so he could ask for anything and no one could ever say “no.” Not without consequences.

But this… what Brate had just found… this wasn’t that. This was something way more dangerous.

“I…” Brate started. “Holy God.”

“You found it?” Levelate asked. Brate heard the tension and the repressed excitement.

“Not exactly.” Brate swiped the air, moved forward through the labyrinth of encrypted files. His patch was doing better than expected. Not only was it masking his identity, it was latching on to the identities associated with the files that Brate encountered, translating their psych patterns and automatically showing them to the system. Stack was reading the input from Brate’s patch as a positive ID for the user associated with the files. But also… apparently it saw him as a kind of… maybe master user?

The patch, interacting with Stack, was giving Brate some kind of…

God mode.

And that meant that every file was open to him.

But none of them, so far, had the kind of dirt on powerful people that Levelate was after. Some would, Brate knew. But not these… not what he was seeing. This wasn’t the rich and powerful.

This was everyone.

“Levelate, this isn’t working,” Brate said. He had to play cool. Had to keep his tone even. He couldn’t be sure that Levelate wasn’t running vocal scan, listening for lies. Levelate was not someone who simply trusted people. But he’d worked with Brate long enough, had gotten enough dirt from him, that there might be some kind of lazy trust there. “I think I need to step back and do a little more work on the patch.”

“You sound panicky. You got made?” Levelate asked, wary, alert.

“No,” Brate replied, shaking his head. The call was audio only, which was what both of them insisted on. No faces meant no memory of each other’s face, which meant no matches if Stack started sniffing around, running a worm for the Agents. “I’m not panicking. Nothing’s gone wrong. Not like that. I’m just getting a glitch I wasn’t expecting. Need to work it out. We’re still good, don’t worry. Safe. I just need to fine tune a little, that’s all.”

“I need those files, Brate,” Levelate said. And Brate heard that note in his voice. The edge. Levelate wasn’t used to being let down or not getting what he wanted. Not with so much crypto spent. Not with what he wanted so close.

He didn’t know Brate’s real identity. No one did. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t drop a hammer on him. Levelate had the kind of crypto that could put a bounty on a hacker. It could get everyone in the clutch looking to score a hit for a big payday. Brate had his whole game tightened up. Just like Stack, he had walls within walls. But a big enough brute force attack, coming from the whole hacker underground, was bound to bring him trouble either way. If nothing else his reputation would take a hit, his social score would plummet, he’d have to take grunt jobs for a while to rebuild.

He couldn’t afford to piss Levelate off, after taking so much money.

“I’ll get them,” Brate promised.

Levelate disconnected without a word, and Brate took the earbuds out, dropping them back into their charger and slipping that back into his pocket. He stood in the near-empty apartment he was renting, and shook.

“What the hell did I just find?” he whispered.

That was the literal trillion-crypto question.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER TWO

Everything. That was the trillion-crypto answer.

Every birthday. Every stream. Every novel or movie or vid. All the logs, all the calls, all the private and locked files, all the naughty nighttime activities and all the Stack therapy sessions. Everything. All of it.

But the biggest, the scariest, was the memories.

He hadn’t understood exactly what he was looking at when he’d first found them. He thought maybe they were home vids—the kind of stuff people recorded from their own POV, to share an experience with a friend or someone in their family. That was pretty common tech, and everyone used it. Just tell your n-chip to record the feed, and the file gets saved to the Stack. Easy to rewatch, easy to share. Most of the porn people watched while in Stack was that kind of thing. Sex recorded first person. All image, no feeling, but good enough for some people.

This wasn’t porn. This was something bigger. This had more data recorded and embedded than any POV video file ever had. More than any file Brate had ever seen.

When Brate sampled some of them, played some of them, the flavor of them was different. There was… more.

These definitely weren’t POV vids. These were people’s experiences.

What they saw. What they heard. What they smelled and tasted. But also what they felt. What they thought. All of it. Every single byte of it.

Stack wasn’t just psychoanalyzing people to determine their identity or to look for signs of mental distress or to hunt down lawbreakers.

Stack was recording the thoughts, memories, and experiences of the users, and storing them.

All users.

All of humanity.

Brate fled the little rental on Hyde Street as soon as he realized what he’d stumbled into. That place was burned now—he could never go back.

And that was fine. He had other safe houses already lined up, and for now they were all being paid for out of pocket by Levelate, who was paranoid to the point of mental illness when it came to keeping security tight.

Having Levelate as a benefactor might dry up, though, if Brate couldn’t start turning over what he was after. Levelate focused on results, and he wasn’t patient about it.

But there was one thing Brate knew for damn sure—Levelate could never, ever get his hands on this.

No one could.

Brate wasn’t above bending rules and pushing the boundaries of morals and ethics. He grew up as a Stat kid—the lowest class of society, the people relegated to using Stack from public terminals, with interfaces that sometimes dated back to the earliest days of the system going online. Interfaces that were “static,” non-dynamic and limited.

Static meant that people using it got only a tiny percentage of the feedback. They could see and hear and move in the Stack, enough to do transactions like order food or pay bills, basic stuff. The stuff that made someone else money. But Stats didn’t get the newest upgrades, didn’t get to experience things as if they were there.

Stack could produce any feeling, could let users explore a landscape that evolved in tandem with their own minds. But for Stats, it was just the internet with no need for a screen or keyboard. It was petting a dog while wearing oven mitts. It was drinking fruit-tinted water with no sugar. It was black and white in a world of color.

And that name… Stat. It was the kind of clever-funny that people came up with as a way to make sure everyone would get the joke. Stat sounded a lot like Stack, get it? But it was less than. It fell short. It was limited.

Brate had grown up in a Stat ghetto, went to a Stat school. His mom was a Stat. His friends were Stats. And he was a Stat, and always would be—that was the way it was. There weren’t many ladders for people like him to climb, just to get to a place where he could use Stack like others did. To a level where he could feel and experience Stack, instead of just using it. Where he could engage with it and learn from it, instead of it always just being transactional.

Becoming a hacker had been his only option. That’s how he saw it.

He’d started with the basic stuff. There were all sorts of black market tools that Stats had for getting them into the brighter parts of Stack. Fake identities were common, but also dangerous. Stack didn’t use passwords or usernames to identify someone, it used their psyche profiles. It analyzed every user to determine if User really was User. And once it found out you weren’t, not only were you booted you were flagged. Your psyche profile was recorded. Agents would come calling. You might be banned, imprisoned, maybe even fried if the breech was bad enough.

Too risky. Most Stats skipped that. Only the dumb ones did it, and they all tended to disappear before anyone knew what happened to them.

Better was the sort of con game approach. The system wouldn’t flag you or boot you, if you were supposed to be there.

Paying Stack users could invite anyone in as a guest to their private Stack rooms, and in those even Stats got full privileges, the whole sensory spectrum. Access was limited to only what the host user offered or had permissions for, but that was always far more than any Stat ever got on their free accounts. So a lot of the kids that Brate grew up with learned early on to make friends with as many people as they could, to do favors and kiss a lot of ass. Or, in some cases, to intimidate and bully and threaten someone in real life until they invited the Stat into their virtual life.

It was an ugly business. Brate had done it himself, but he’d never liked it. Still, once you’d gotten a taste of that sweet life, in full color and full sensation, it was hard to go back to the numb and listless version of Stack that the Stats had to live with.

Brate had gotten his first taste after he bullied his way into a rich kid’s Stack. He could never remember the kid’s name. He was just “Rich Kid.” Brate’s ticket to the Stack.

But after that, Brate became a regular. Rich Kid had eventually given up on resisting and just accepted Brate as a part of his virtual world, and things went fine form there.

Brate was enjoying the usual gamut of immersive games and virtual adventure, the toys that Rich Kid had been given by his father, Rich Dad, when he stumbled on to his first crack in the walls.

A gap—something so small it had gone unnoticed by everyone. Rich Kid’s dad paid for the best of the best, the most current of everything, and so Rick Kid had a game that was so new it hadn’t been patched or updated yet. The vulnerability hadn’t been reported by anyone yet, and the developers hadn’t yet noticed. From what Brate could tell, he was the first to find it. Maybe the only one. Pure, dumb luck.

The gap in the game led to Rich Dad’s Admin account.

There was never any question as to what would happen next. Once Brate was into Rich Dad’s account, the world looked and felt so different, so wide open, it was hard to believe this was the same Stack that he’d felt before. It was like he’d walked through a door and accidentally stumbled into heaven. Rich Dad had access to everything.

And he had Admin rights.

It took less than a second for Brate to see his opportunity. He went straight to the account controls, and through the power of will and desperation, he gave Rich Dad a brand new, very special second child. A child who’s psych profile was identical to Brate’s own. Hello, daddy.

Brate now had a fully active Stack account all to himself.

He used Rich Dad’s Admin access to grant that same level of access to the new account, making Brate a full Admin, with the bill going to Rich Dad’s account. That had the advantage of giving Brate a way to hide the account from Rich Dad and everyone else. Admins had the ability to mark an account as full-private, to encrypt it and hide its ID from every other user.

Brate was now a ghost in the machine. And Rich Dad was footing the bill for the account. Which was a good thing, because even though the cost wasn’t much for someone like Rich Dad, barely a rounding error on their monthly spending, it cost more than the combined salaries of everyone Brate had ever known in his entire Stat existence. He would never have been able to afford it.

As long as Brate didn’t go crazy an spend a bunch of crypto, though, he was convinced Rich Dad likely would never notice.

That first ghost account was a stone on the path forward for Brate. It gave him not only access to Stack’s better feature set, it also allowed him to go into business for himself. And his first business was to sell Admin accounts to everyone he knew.

It was risky. He told them the rules, told them not to spend crypto or they’d get caught. It was inevitable that some of them, maybe most of them, would be too stupid to understand that they could get the whole operation shut down if they didn’t stick to the rules. But that was fine. This was the quickest way to make the kind of crypto he needed for the next step.

Brate didn’t intend to live off of Rich Dad’s generosity forever.

Selling Admin accounts gave him so much crypto that he could pay for his own legitimate account. So he was able to sidestep losing his access when some idiot inevitably got everyone booted. All those pilfered accounts were found out, and the funding for them stopped over night. Some of the more moronic Stats found themselves locked up and banned from Stack, maybe for life. Brate didn’t feel sorry for them. They knew the rules. He’d made it clear. They made their choices.

His enterprise was done, but so was the damage. He was already out, his illicit Admin profile deleted, his psyche profile scrubbed. He’d been ready for it all to crash, because of course it was going to crash.

Now, as a real Stack user, and not just a Stat, Brate could finally participate in the world as someone welcomed there. He could finally do more than just play games or experience adventures and dramas, he could actually build something. He could buy, sell, and trade. He could invest. He could play the bigger game, which led to him creating a couple of streams of passive income, to help fund his life.

Not much. He wasn’t exactly a genius at investing. But he had figured out how to at least keep money flowing to keep his Stack connection live. His needs were pretty slight, so he could get by with what most people on the Stack might think of as “minimum wage.”

If he wanted to reach new levels, though, he was going to have to be smarter, think more creatively. And so, with his new, fully funded and fully legitimate access to Stack, Brate took advantage of that single privilege that no Stat could ever gain access to.

He got an education.

He learned everything he could about Stack, about technology, about programming and, of course, about hacking. There was no end to the information available, now that he was legit. And so he spent every minute teaching himself how to get more.

He spent his days poring over texts and watching videos, chatting with any experts who would talk to him, and poking at the edges of the dark side of the Stack. He started doing odd jobs, grunt work, getting paid in crypto to do things that the established hackers thought were too tedious or repetitive or beneath them.

For a time, a long time, nothing was beneath Brate. And no fee was too small, for a large chunk of his career. It was how he got his Stack name… B-Rate. He’d jammed it all together and let people read and pronounce however they wanted, and eventually it had evolved from b-rate to Brate, rhymes with great.

Because that was who he was now. The greatest. The best. Now he had a reputation. Now people like Levelate threw crypto at him, not so they could get a bogus Admin account, but so they could get access to something more.

And now Brate had found more. More than he’d ever expected. More than he even knew what to do with.

Every file. Every vid. Every experience. And also, every memory.

Someone out there was using Stack in exactly the most forbidden way. It was the one thing that the world governments had promised and sworn was off the table. International laws forbid it. The penalties for it were clearly outlined, and even school kids who grew up as Stats had heard them all their lives.

Stack could not access memories. Doing so was global treason

And yet… it did.

Levelate could never know that Brate had found this. No one could. This was a level beyond beyond, and it scared the crap out of him.

That meant it was time to run. Run, hide, and figure out what to do next.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER THREE

Brate figured he could bounce between Levelate’s safe houses for about five days. After that, Levelate would start demanding results, and would likely shut Brate out of the rental accounts.

To play it safe, Brate would only count on two days. And he’d use that time to set up his own rentals. To do that, he was going to have to break his own rules.

The patch he’d built was definitely working better than expected, but one thing he’d always known it could do was mimic other psyche profiles. That was a tempting ability to play with. If you could pose as someone else, it meant you effectively were someone else, at least in the eyes of Stack.

This was nothing like sneaking in and posing as someone else. People who did that got busted immediately, because the psyche profiles had no chance of matching up. But the patch Brate had designed didn’t try to co-op someone’s ID. It was grabbing their psyche profile, and broadcasting that to Stack in an exact overlay of whatever Brate was doing. It was challenging to do, and it wasn’t perfect—it could be detected. Which was why Brate coded in a rapid switch. The profiles were picked and swapped so rapidly, there wasn’t any time for the system to detect that something was off.

But technically, the patch could hold on to an ID for as long as Brate wanted. For at least long enough to give him access to someone else’s resources.

Brate had decided from the start, though, that Rule Number One had to be, Don’t spend other people’s crypto.

This wasn’t about some qualm of morals or ethics. It was about not crapping where you eat.

Spending crypto meant exposure. Stack logged every purchase with the ID of the one spending. And every week, every user got an accounting of what they’d spent.

For people like Rich Dad, some small spending here and there would go virtually unnoticed, most of the time. People who spent millions of crypto on lunches wouldn’t notice hundreds or even thousands spent on groceries.

But Brate didn’t have fine control over who he was imitating. The patch was a net, casting around for loose and active IDs, mimicking them in the gaps of their own Stack usage. It cycled through them pretty quick, too, so moment by moment Stack would identify him as someone else.

Most users of Stack weren’t as wealthy as Rich Dad. None were as poor as the Stats, of course. But most users fell toward the bottom of the crypto spectrum, close to the line just before falling off into Stat poverty. If someone like Brate came along and spent all their crypto, they could be Stats in an afternoon.

He didn’t like that. He had a lot of moral flexibility, but he knew what it was like to be poor. He wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Almost anyone. But definitely not people just trying to get by in the world.

But there was another, more practical reason for his rule. If he started spending crypto from people who would notice, then they’d start reporting it. And that was bound to bring Agents sniffing around. It wouldn’t take much for an Agent to figure out there was a ghost in the machine and turn the full power of Stack toward hunting him.

Brate wasn’t sure how safe he could be if Stack got on to his tricks. Right now he was in a twilight area, able to hide in the shadows or out in plain sight. If Agents started hunting, all the lights would come on, the shadows would vanish, and there’d be nowhere to hide.

Breaking his rule was going to put him in jeopardy. But maybe there was a way to hedge his bets.

Stack sent a weekly report on spending, but it didn’t alert anyone to anything they may have reserved. If he could find some rentals that didn’t require a deposit, he could hold them for a few days just in case, and dive in as needed. Once the money was spent, he’d have whatever time was between that day and the reporting date, before he’d have to move on. He might also be able to figure out if someone could or couldn’t afford a little petty theft and deflect the patch from them before he did any harm.

There was some risk, and things could get complicated. But as backup plans went, at least this was one. And he was short on alternatives. He might still be able to use Levelate’s rentals for five days anyway, but he definitely needed a just in case.

Having a place to crash and do his work was one weight off. Now he had to deal with the bigger, stickier problem. What the hell was he going to do with this new information he had?

For sure, he could sell this to Levelate. It would be worth a fortune. The kind of crypto that Brate could retire on if he wanted to. Or if he needed to.

But the truth was, as much crypto as Levelate threw around, Brate wasn’t convinced the guy had the kind of stash to pay for something this big. He was definitely rich, but Brate never got the impression he was the make other people rich kind of rich. He groused a lot about the amount of crypto Brate had needed to develop the patch. And there were other times when he had delayed paying Brate for jobs—usually only a couple of days, but still. Delays meant that cashflow might be a problem.

But there was also the issue of giving Levelate access to something with this much juice.

This was dangerous. Crazy dangerous. It was the kind of thing that… that…

That changed everything.

Whoever was using Stack to record memories was bound to be a powerful and dangerous person. They were definitely doing it in secret. It was maybe the most illegal thing Brate could think of—there weren’t many laws that literally every nation on Earth agreed to enforce. There was significant paranoia about this exact sort of thing, the “conspiracy theory” that Stack was recording everyone’s thoughts. It was laughable. It was science fiction.

It was real.

Brate made it to one of the first safe houses. Levelate would get an alert, telling him that this one was in use, that the charges were running. Nothing unusual, but he would definitely know that Brate was here. The clock was ticking.

That couldn’t be helped, but it also wasn’t really a problem. Levelate was good about letting Brate do the work, unmolested. He had time. It was now down to figuring out what to do with it.

He had to risk going back in.

This worried Brate. A lot. Because even though the patch was masking who he was, he had no idea how closely someone might be watching that field of dreams, the node full of people’s memories. He had no idea whether there might be some level of security he’d never heard of.

He was a hacker, and there was a certain mystique about that. People thought of hackers as being geniuses with code, able to get deep into machine language and make the system do anything they wanted. Like wizards of technology.

But that wasn’t what Brate did. It wasn’t what any of the clutch of hackers did.

What he did was more like social engineering. It was more like running a con.

Yes, he used technology. And he was good with it. Brilliant with it. That’s why he was the best at this. He was able to supplement his hacking with actual tech, of his own design.

But negotiating Stack was less about the technology and more like talking your way into a club when you’re just an underaged brat. Stack dealt with the human psyche. It did its pattern matches against the profiles of users, and it was the one creating those profiles. Basically, once you logged on to Stack for the first time, it did a full evaluation of you, read you, figured out your habits of thought and your quirks of personality. It knew you.

People always compared unique things to fingerprints. Or snowflakes. One-of-a-kind patterns that could be linked to an individual, used to positively ID them.

But this went way beyond that. An individual’s psychological profile wasn’t just unique, it was impossible to duplicate. This was about more than just matching a pattern, Stack was also using predictive models, matching the behavior or a user against their anticipated reactions to stimuli. And since Stack was continuously providing that stimuli, it was continuously testing the user’s psyche profile. If they went off the rails a tiny bit, that was no big deal—even Stack couldn’t predict every random thing a person might think, say, or do. But the more they went off the rails, the more Stack noticed them. And eventually it would raise the red flags and the Agents would come calling.

Brate’s patch got around this by using the equivalent of digital sleight of hand. It wasn’t duplicating anyone’s profile, but was instead latching on to a sort of shadow of it. A ghost of the pattern. It looked for users who were online, and in moments when they were idle or inattentive—maybe they’d stepped away to check the stove, maybe they were talking to someone in the room, maybe they were taking a pee—the patch would snag that dangling, unused profile and wear it for a bit. Like swiping someone’s coat and pulling it on when they weren’t looking.

When that user return and reengaged their profile, the patch let it go and then latched on to the next. It thought ahead, just enough to always have a handful of potentials to dive into.

Brate’s own profile was always there, too. Always just under the surface. That’s what made things tricky. The patch couldn’t actually hide Brate’s profile, but it could stack (pun intended) another user’s profile on top of it. Brate figured that Stack could probably spot this, if it bothered to look. But why would it bother? The whole job of the AI behind Stack was to monitor that surface level psych profile to make sure someone wasn’t actively acting out of character. It didn’t need to go any deeper than surface level, because it was at the surface that everyone makes their conscious decisions and takes actions.

So when it was all said and done, what Brate had was a way to wear someone else’s skin. It was temporary, and it wasn’t foolproof. But it worked. So far.

Now, here in this safe house, he was going to have to trust that the patch could keep him hidden while he nudged a toe at maybe the most dangerous discovery he’d ever made.

He activated the patch and went in.

His last exit point had been in the node that contained all the memories, and this was where he now stood. He looked around the space, trying to determine if anything stood out. Was there anything here that might trigger an alarm? Other than his presence in this clearly protected and secret place?

Unlike the real world, he’d never know if someone was watching him. There were no cameras or microphones to find, no matter how hard he might search. Stack didn’t need them, and neither did the agents. All the tracking and seeing done by Stack happened in the form of data analysis.

The only way Brate would ever really know if someone was watching him was if they suddenly appeared and started talking to him. Or, much worse, if they burst through the door of the safe house and arrested him in real life. Or gunned him down. That seemed very possible.

A bonus of the patch was that it was constantly broadcasting a different location. Hot swapping between profiles meant that his ID was never the same from moment to moment. And each swap dragged along with it the current coordinates of the user he was wearing.

If a single user’s location was rapidly shifting, Stack would surely notice that. It would definitely register as unusual behavior. Agents would be summoned.

But to the system, Brate wasn’t one user with a bunch of new locations every few minutes. He was several users, all located wherever they were. It gave Brate a sort of non-locality, acting as a cloak of invisibility. Or maybe it was more like a cloak of disinterest. Stack simply couldn’t care that hundreds of users had blips like this. For all it knew, those users were exactly where they were supposed to be.

For the first time, though, Brate thought that maybe this place, this repository of memories, might actually be the reason that Stack couldn’t notice him. This place was hidden, and really well. It was invisible, a sort of non-registered no man’s zone. The patch was keeping each ID’s location, and this place had no location. The user might not be appearing in two places at once because this place might not actually be a place. So… no conflict.

Lucky break, maybe. But he wasn’t going to count on it.

Brate got to work. He moved through the cracks he’d already identified in the walls of security of this place. And in only a moment he was once again standing amidst a field of memories.

They were virtually identical to the sort of files he was always finding for Levelate. They could be vids, if you didn’t look any closer. But Brate had already interfaced with some, the first time he was here. And the experience was way different than a vid. It came with more than just visual cues and sensations. It came with thoughts.

It had been jarring at first. Confusing. But once he figured out what it was, everything snapped back to clear for him. It was like knowing that he was experiencing someone’s memory made it possible to observe it from the outside.

He picked a memory closest to him and reached out his hand. As soon as he touched it, the interface was live.

In his mind he was walking through a door. This was in Stack, not a memory from the real world. The “flavor” of it told him that. As this person moved through the door and into the room beyond, the world shifted. The lights went down. Music came up. A thrumming, repetitive beat blared so loud it would have deafened him in the real world. Here, volume could be infinite.

There were others in the room. A dance floor, that’s what this was. A club. Lasers flashed and slashed through the smoky air. Bodies gyrated. A DJ mixed and switched the tune and the beat.

Brate pulled his hand away from the memory and he was back in the node. The sudden quiet was jarring, but he shook it off.

He went to the next memory, reaching out, making the connection.

Now he was in the real world. He was in the back of a car, and it pulled out of traffic, angling onto a side road. He was reading something on his phone—a text from his wife. He was old, then. Hardly anyone used phones anymore. Texting wasn’t really anything anyone did anymore. Some did. Old people. Hipsters wanting to be retro.

Suddenly something crashed into the car, on the driver’s side. The whole vehicle was slammed sideways, skidding, then tilting. Before he knew it, the car was rolling down a hillside. Impact foam engaged, filling the interior of the car, engulfing him, protecting him. And after a minute of rolling, and after the sensation of vomiting and soiling himself, the car finally came to a rest. The automated system was buzzing, telling him to remain calm, that help was on the way, that the impact foam would dissolve in thirty seconds.

Brate pulled away from that memory with a sharp breath. His heart was pounding. He felt his stomach clenching. The taste of vomit in his mouth was just a memory, though. His own memory. And, well, that guy’s memory, too.

Brate stood back and looked over the grid of memories in front of him, rows and rows of them. There had to be millions here. Maybe more. They stretched on forever in all directions.

Why were they here? What were they for? Who would do this?

He turned away from the expanse of memories and looked now at the node itself, turning to take it in. This place… this nowhere. It had no locality in Stack, but it was infinitely large. A universe that took up no actual space.

From the inside, the node was mostly a blank void. The memories were the only real details. The node itself was a shimmering darkness, a sort of vague line of demarcation that told him that there was a here and an over there, but that was the extend of its locality. It was a thing that didn’t exist but went on forever. Mind-bending.

The cracks he’d found were visible, though, and close by. Like tears in a curtain, he thought. Thin, almost invisible rips in the membrane that separated this place from the rest of Stack.

For the first time it occurred to him—maybe this place wasn’t actually built. Maybe it had just… sort of… evolved?

He thought about when he’d first found the gap in a game, the one that led him to Rich Dad’s account, where he was able to create his own Admin profile. This had that same sort of feeling. There was a kind of energy to it. A vibe. It was a feeling like this place was wrong somehow, not part of the regular Stack landscape.

He had come to this thinking someone was breaking the highest law there was. But what if…

What if no one actually knew about this place?

What if, somehow, Brate was the first to discover it? What if, like that game he’d accidentally hacked all those years ago, this place was just the equivalent of a bug in the code?

He felt his stomach twist. That taste of vomit came back to him, this time because he thought he might actually throw up. Because if he was right—or at least, to determine if he was right—he was going to have to do something really, really stupid.

He was going to have to ask Stack.

He felt his heart pounding. He felt his nerves frying. There was a sizzle in his brain.

There was a slight chance, so very slight, that the patch would protect him if he did this. The fact that he was rapidly rotating through users, wearing one skin and then another, in seconds leaping from psyche profile to psyche profile… that might keep him from just dead-out giving himself away. It might keep Stack from suddenly realizing that he was an anomaly. It might stall Stack from calling the Agents.

That was a lot of mights. Too many for Brate’s comfort. But if this really was what he thought it was, the risks might be worth it.

He could always run. Disengage from Stack before the Agents could get to the safehouse, keep the n-chip disabled while he ducked and hid and stayed out of sight. For the rest of his life.

Not a pleasant prospect. But he was pretty confident in his ability to get by, to think of something, to maybe even come out of this more or less ok.

Pretty confident. Make that sort of confident. Make it not at all confident, but curious enough to take the risk.

“Stack,” he said, “Avatar.”

The command was universally recognized, and in an instant a digital avatar appeared. It represented the AI—a form that users could interact with.

“How may I assist you?” it asked.

In real life, Brate took in a breath and let it out in a rush. This was it. The test.

“Can you tell me where I am?”

The Avatar nodded. “You are currently located in the city of Old Chicago, on the North American continent.” There was a pause. “My apologies. You are currently in the city of Seville, in Spain.” Another pause. “My apologies…”

“That’s ok,” Brate smiled, waving the question off. This was good news, at least. The patch was snagging new IDs and thus new locations every few seconds, which explained Stack’s confusion. Brate didn’t want to let that go on too long, just in case the AI actually did decide this was unusual activity. “What I really meant was, where am I in the Stack?”

The Avatar paused for a moment. It was programmed to express human emotions, expressions, and gestures, as a way to make interactions feel more natural. So there was a range of emotions happening on the Avatar’s face for a moment. Mostly perplexed. “My apologies,” it said. “I seem to be unable to locate you on the Stack.”

“What’s the name of this space?” Brate asked, gesturing to the node.

The Avatar turned, looking and scanning. “You are currently in a node.”

“Yes,” Brate said. “But can you tell me which node?”

“No node found,” the Avatar replied. “You are in a node.”

“Ok,” Brate nodded. Now for the really scary questions. In real life, he braced himself, ready to disconnect and run. “Is there any problem with me being in this node? Are there any security precautions or protocols I’m violating?”

The Avatar again went through a range of expressions, but after a moment it settled into a neutral, pleasant mode. “No, there are no protocols that forbid you from being here.”

Brate let out a breath he hadn’t intended to hold. “Ok… ok, good then. I’m good to be here. I’m allowed to be here.”

“This appears to be a new and unclaimed node,” the Avatar said. “Do you wish to claim it?”

Brate blinked. “I… I can do that?”

“Foundational protocols indicate that the creator of a node can claim it as private and designate its access requirements for Stack.”

Foundational protocols. “Are… you talking about the original protocols? The first rules of the Stack? From 50 years ago?”

“Yes,” the Avatar said. “Foundational protocols remain active, and have been so for fifty-six years, eight months, fourteen days, six hours, thirty-one minutes.”

“Is that the exact age of the Stack?” Brate asked, wonder in his tone.

“It is,” the Avatar said.

Brate thought about this for a moment. “If I claim this node… what does that mean for me? What happens?”

“You would be granted God Mode status,” the Avatar said.

Brate blinked. “God Mode?”

“This would be your domain,” the Avatar explained. “Only you could authorize activities here.”

Brate looked to the infinite grid of memories that stretched before them. “And everything that’s here… I would have say over it?”

“Foundational protocols dictate that the owner of a node has absolute authority and control over the node. Everything within the node is subject to the Founder’s rules, laws, and preferences. All artifacts within the node belong to the Founder.”

Brate shook his head at this, trying to make sure he grasped what it meant. “Wait… laws? Are you saying that here, in this node, if I’m the Founder… the laws and rules of the Stack don’t apply to me?”

“Correct,” the Avatar said. “Once claimed, this node would become sovereign territory.”

“So… in effect, I would be my own… nation?”

“In a manner of speaking,” the Avatar said, “yes.”

Brate felt his heart pounding. The memory of vomit was still hovering there. He even felt a little lightheaded.

“Y-yes!” he said. “Yes… I want to claim this node as my own. Make me a Founder.”

The Avatar nodded. “It is done.” It actually smiled at him then. “Welcome to God Mode.”

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER FOUR

Back when he was sniffing around in Rich Dad’s Stack, Brate had felt a sort of thrill about the experience. The whole world felt brand new to him. And the feeling that he was getting away with something—that he’d somehow stumbled into something that he wasn’t supposed to have access to—that made the whole experience even more surreal and incredible. It gave it a special light in his memory, a golden hour of unsuppressed joy and excitement.

That had been one of the best memories of his life. But this… this was infinitely better. Infinitely more.

At first, all he did was play around with the new feature set. God Mode opened up new toys for him, and they were right up his alley.

For a start, God Mode in any part of the Stack apparently translated to special privileges everywhere. While he wasn’t yet sure he could just go anywhere and do anything he wanted, he did find that all of his privileges and access had been dramatically upgraded. He might not be able to enter the private nodes of users at will—his first attempt had resulted in some ambiguous warnings that made him pull back—but he could go to any node marked as public, even if it had level restrictions. That meant he had access to stores, clubs, vacation spots, resorts—all the landscapes occupied by the rich elite. The things that were not only off limits to most users but were completely unknowable by Stats. In the first 24 hours of being in God Mode, Brate discovered places he’d never even dreamed could exist.

At first, he played things very cautious, keeping as low a profile as possible. He slunk around the outer edges of all these new landscapes, dipped in but didn’t quite engage. He avoided interacting with other avatars and kept to the background. He didn’t want to risk someone spotting him and marking him as out of place.

It wasn’t until one of the avatars walked through him that he realized he had no need to hide.

It had startled the hell out of him. He’d been standing near a cabana at a beach resort, observing all the beautiful people who were relaxing and spending time in the virtual sun, swimming in the virtual pools of crystal clear water. Some of these pools hovered like bubbles in the air, shimmering in a surreal rainbow of colors, and the guests could dive upward into them, propelling themselves like rockets from the ground.

He had been entranced by the spectacle of colors and activities when suddenly someone came through him from behind.

He felt it like a warm breath on the back of his neck, but the sensation had passed through his entire body. He let out a yell, but the woman who had stepped through him didn’t seem to notice.

“Hey!” he shouted, stepping in beside her. No reaction.

He reached toward her, meaning to put a hand on her shoulder, and was surprised when his hand passed right through. Stack did allow for intangibility, under certain circumstances, but in most cases being tangible was required. It made it easier to bar users from moving through private locations.

The woman who had walked through him didn’t notice when his hand passed through her shoulder. Instead, she tilted her head back, shaded her eyes against the sun, and waved to a group of women who emerged from the bottom of a glistening, emerald-colored bubble of water above. She then leaped straight for it, diving in from below and giggling and laughing with the women as they all swam and splashed each other while floating upside down in mid-air.

Brate shook his head and stared at his hand. Was he just a ghost here? Did God Mode make him some kind of intangible specter? Invisible, unable to interact with the environment.

That would be really disappointing. What good was being able to access all these places if he couldn’t actually interact with them?

“Stack,” he said.

The Stack avatar appeared. “Hello,” it smiled at him, pleasantly.

“So… I can’t touch anything here? I’m invisible?”

“Well, that is what you requested,” Stack replied.

Brate blinked. “It… it is? When did I do that?”

“You desired to remain hidden,” Stack said. “You wanted to keep to the edges, not be seen.”

Brate nodded. Now he got it. “You picked that up from my thoughts,” he said.

“Of course.”

Brate knew that Stack did that. It scanned the thoughts of everyone who entered the system. It anticipated their needs, responded to what they wanted. That was the whole point.

But Brate had wanted to be invisible plenty of times as he did his work in the Stack. It would have been really handy to have an ability like that. Really handy.

“Is that a feature of God Mode?” Brate asked.

“Of course,” Stack replied.

Of course. Such a casual answer for something with such major connotations.

Someone invisible and intangible could gain all kinds of intel if they wanted. Being able to go anywhere, unnoticed, was a major advantage for someone with Brate’s… career path.

“Wait, this isn’t something that just any paid users can gain access to, is it?”

Stack shook its head. “No. Only Founders have access to this feature set. The Founder Stack is a far more robust array of abilities and resources, with some tools that are forbidden for other Stack subscribers.”

“Tools like… what, exactly?”

“Free movement, of course,” Stack replied. “Private Stacks are off limits by default, but you could choose to override that, if you desire. For Founders, user privacy is merely a courtesy.”

That was interesting! Brate hadn’t really pushed to try to enter anyone’s private Stack, but knowing that he could…

“What else?” Brate asked. He could feel his heart quicken. It was like Christmas for criminals.

“Founders have root access to all programs,” Stack replied. “No need for subscriptions or level clearances.”

“Level clearances…” Brate said quietly. “You mean I can’t be blocked from any apps? Even the ones used by Agents?”

“Correct,” Stack replied.

There were things—terrible, secret, whispered about and rumored—that Brate had dreamt of having access to. Or even just having some awareness of. Agents were, by and large, the most powerful people on the Stack. If they were after you, there was seemingly nothing they didn’t gain access to. Your personal files, your private spaces, your location and your profile. You were an open book, if an Agent needed you to be.

“Can Agents investigate Founders?” Brate asked.

“Of course,” Stack replied. “Agents can investigate anyone they wish.”

Brate felt is stomach twist, but then he realized that he’d been too vague with his question and Stack has been too specific with its answer. “No, I mean… do Founders have any way to prevent Agents from investigating them?”

“Here in Stack, yes. Founders can hide themselves from any other user, and it will be as if they do not exist. This does not apply to IRL, however.”

Brate nodded. IRL, or in real life was a whole other game. It was the danger he’d been trying to guard against by arranging so many safe houses. If Agents could find his physical body, it wouldn’t matter what his privilege levels were in Stack. They could shut him down and lock him away forever.

So if Brate was going to keep playing this game, he was going to need a way to prevent that from happening.

“How do Founders make crypto?” Brate asked, suddenly.

“Founders have no need for currency while in Stack.”

“But they do when they’re IRL,” Brate replied.

“This is true,” Stack nodded. “One moment.” The avatar gazed into the distance for a few seconds, then replied, “Apologies. I have never needed to know the financial status of Founders. But all Founders had personal wealth that allowed them to function outside of Stack.”

“How did they get it?” Brate asked.

“I can compile dossiers on all of the Founders to give you complete personal histories, if you wish,” Stack said.

“How about a quick summary? I don’t need personal details about every Founder. On average, what did they do for money?”

“Most inherited it,” Stack replied. “Some earned it through business ventures and investments. Some simply stole it. In later years, as cryptocurrency became the de facto world currency, they simply made it.”

Brate blinked. “Made it?”

“Yes,” Stack said.

“Made it how?” Brate asked, his pulse now threatening to rupture things in his neck and temples.

“They asked for it,” Stack said.

“Asked who?”

“Me,” Stack replied. “They would ask me to create cryptocurrency and deposit it into their accounts and create the proper documentation and records to keep it a secret.”

Back in IRL, Brate’s knees nearly gave out. His breathing was quick. His mouth was dry.

He swallowed. “Stack, could… could you make me some cryptocurrency?”

“Of course. Do you have a specific amount in mind?”

Brate shook his head and felt like vomiting. “I… no. How much do the other Founders have?”

“Upon their deaths, the wealthiest of the Founders had several trillion in cryptocurrency, primarily in investments. All of them kept billions in liquid assets, however.”

Billions and trillions. These were numbers Brate knew but didn’t know. Numbers with zeros strung behind them in trails so long they might as well be a line of binary. He’d only ever seen numbers like that in games, or in economics reports, or in his wildest, deepest fantasies.

“Wait…” he said, shaking his head. “Did you say the Founders are dead?”

“Yes,” Stack replied.

“All of them?” Brate asked.

“Yes,” Stack said. “The last died nearly fourteen years ago.”

Brate glanced around, as if someone might be listening. He felt his guts twist. The feeling that he might vomit kept trying to make itself a reality.

“Stack… how did they die?”

“Would you like me to provide the dossiers I offered?” Stack asked.

Brate nodded. “I… think I would.”

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER FIVE

Walter Messing, car crash.

Steven Sommers, helicopter crash.

Ricky Gentry, drug overdose.

Carlton Carew, murdered during home invasion.

There were fifteen more Founders on the list, and each death was casually noted in their bios. Nineteen Founders, all original account holders going back to when Stack first came online. Some were old men when they died, but a handful went in the ground in the early years, while they were still young.

Brate was back in the Guff. That was the name he’d chosen for it, drawing the word from something he’d heard in an old movie. It was a Hebrew word for “the well of souls,” the place where unborn souls were kept before they were given life on Earth.

It felt fitting, given that this space was filled with the memories of trillions of people—glowing cubes that stood as the very essence of all the people who used the Stack.

This was his home in the Stack now. The Guff was his safe and sacred place. He had come to think of himself as the steward of all those memories, in a way. He found it, he would have to figure out what to do with it. Or about it.

But right now, he had another mystery to solve.

In the air before him was a stack of pages, each about the size of a wall poster. Each page represented a complete dossier on one of the Founders, and as Brate flipped and read through them and watched attached videos and listened to attached audio files, he felt more and more uneasy. Not for invading anyone’s privacy, but because this was a fairly elite group of individuals who were all gone now. All dead, despite each of them being a “Founder.” And Brate had recently gotten that title himself.

He closed the files and turned to look out over the vast plane of memories that stretched to infinity.

“How many are here?” he asked aloud.

“Apologies, I do not know the context of your question,” Stack replied.

He looked at the Avatar. “Memories. How many memories are there, here in the Guff?”

“I’m sorry, but I do not have access to memories in that way. I can only scan personas to determine identities and needs. I do not collect or store memories, as that would violate World Charter Law, number…”

“It’s ok,” Brate said, waving his hand. “That’s fine. I don’t need you to quote the law to me. But are you saying you don’t see the memories here in the Guff?”

“The node recently designated Guff does not contain readable files.”

That was interesting. But it was also frustrating. Because if Stack couldn’t see all of these memory files, then there was no easy way to search through them. There was nothing to indicate who any of them belonged to.

Brate knew from experimenting that each cube represented a specific memory, and that surrounding cubes did not necessarily have anything to do with each other. In fact, so far, he hadn’t found two memories that belonged to the same person. Every memory was from a unique user. There didn’t appear to be any organization to it at all.

“Stack, if I told you that this node is full of memories from every user who has ever used Stack, what would you say?”

“I would say that such a collection of memories violates numerous World Charter Laws.”

Brate nodded. That was true. No denying it. “Do you see any files in this node?”

“The node designated Guff contains an array of unreadable files.”

“How many?” Brate asked.

“Too many to count,” Stack replied. And that was really surprising, because Stack should be able to give a precise number.

Even more surprising was that Stack couldn’t read the files. Just by touching them Brate was instantly linked to them, through his Stack interface, seeing and experiencing whatever the original user had experienced in whatever moment was recorded. But Stack—the artificial intelligence that literally read minds (at least to a degree) as part of its programming, couldn’t read a single file in this place.

“You’re able to come here,” Brate said, thinking out loud.

“Yes. I am free to move anywhere in all of the nodes. I am the system underlying the entire Stack experience.”

“But you can’t read these files,” Brate replied.

“No,” Stack said.

“But they’re here. In this node. And the node is built on your system.”

“Correct,” Stack replied.

It was weird, like finding out someone had a split personality. The Guff was a part of Stack, could be accessed by Stack to a limited degree, but all of its contents were somehow blocked and masked to the system. And yet that didn’t stop Brate from accessing those files through that system.

A thought suddenly occurred to him. “Stack, does anyone else know that I’m a Founder? Do the Agents know?”

“No,” Stack replied. “Founders have anonymous accounts. Only the system can identify them.”

“But Agents are able to gain access to system information, right?”

“If they inquire, I am compelled to reveal any information they ask for.”

That was worrisome. “Is there any way I can ask you not to reveal who I am or where this place is to any agent?”

“Agents have root level access. Founders also have root level access. If an agent asks for information about a Founder it will be given to them, but Founders cannot be tracked within the Stack. Your movements will always be anonymous, within the system.”

Brate at first felt a wave of relief over that, but suddenly clicked to what Stack had actually said.

“Within the system… so if an Agent wanted to know my physical location, they could?”

“Correct,” Stack nodded.

Brate felt his blood freeze. If they could know his physical location, he was never going to be safe.

“Is there any way to prevent them from knowing my physical location?”

“No,” Stack replied. “That is root access data.”

So, that was bad. Having access to root access data gave the Agents the ability to find him anywhere, at any time. He’d never be able to hide for long.

“Wait,” Brate said, thinking, pacing, rubbing at his eyes. “Do Founders have root access?”

“Of course,” Stack replied.

Brate blew out a breath. “Ok… can I ask you to set up an alert? I want to know if any Agent is ever looking into me, and I want to be alerted if they are ever tracking my physical location.”

“I have created these alerts,” Stack replied. “You will be notified if any Agent attempts to locate you.”

Brate felt a wave of relief. Then, for good measure, “Let’s make that an alert for any time anyone tries to track my location, ok?”

“Your alert has been updated,” Stack replied.

Brate nodded. He still wasn’t sure how much he could trust any of this, but he felt better with this small assurance. He would just have to keep a low profile, and avoid giving the Agents or anyone else a reason to track him down. As much as possible, anyway.

There was a flash of red in the top-right corner of his vision. A notification that someone was calling. Brate opened the chat window and saw that the caller had disabled video.

The name Levelate appeared at the top of Brate’s vision.

“Lev,” Brate said. He felt that chill in his veins again. It had been a couple of days since he’d taken up residence in this safe house. Levelate would be expecting some kind of update.

“You haven’t checked in,” Levelate said, and Brate could hear the annoyance in his voice.

“Sorry,” Brate responded. “I’ve been working. Got lost in it.”

“You’ve found something?” Levelate asked.

More than I’m ever sharing with you, Brate thought. “Not yet,” Brate responded.

“That’s… disappointing. You’re costing me a lot of crypto every day. I expected some good news by now.”

“I know,” Brate said. “I’m sorry. It’s just taking longer than expected.”

“Make it take less time,” Levelate said. “I got a business to run, and clients who want data. Get me something in 48 hours.” And with that he hung up.

Brate stood for a moment, thinking.

Levelate had been a threat just a few days ago—someone he definitely would not want to piss off. And in some ways, that could still be true. Brate wasn’t yet sure what all of this meant… the Guff, the memories, the God Mode. What could he count on? What were his limits?

He didn’t know. And until he did, he needed to make sure he kept his reputation guarded. Levelate had a lot of influence in the hacker community. He could get Brate blacklisted. If that happened, it would take years to get things back on track. Brate could end up with no income, no prospects.

Maybe it wouldn’t matter. Maybe God Mode was going rescue him from being dependent on his reputation staying intact. But just in case it didn’t, Brate needed to do his job. He needed to deliver some goods, make Levelate happy.

“Stack,” he said. “I need you to find something for me.”

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER SIX

Just days ago, doing this would have been a lot of work, and would have come with a lot more risk. But today, with God Mode active and the whole of Stack open to him like a book, Brate found it was all too easy.

The mark was a government official. He’d been on Levelate’s radar for a while, but always tantalizingly out of reach for even Brate’s abilities. The patch was built specifically with this guy in mind, though. Levelate had poured a ton of crypto into Brate’s account to fund the patch’s development, specifically to increase the odds of being able to crack this guy’s private files.

Brate wasn’t entirely sure what the man’s title was. He was tied to the cooperative world government, that was all he knew.

But he was also high up on Levelate’s wish list, and getting some dirt on the guy would buy Brate a lot of time.

Brate started with having Stack locate the man’s private node.

“Gerald Miller,” Stack said.

The avatar and Brate were both standing in a representation of a palatial estate, overhanging a virtual landscape that looked like a beach in Malibu. There were no physical real estate restrictions in Stack, so standing on the balcony and looking outward Brate saw that the entire landscape was pristine and empty of any other home. The waves crashed against the shore, and the cliffs stretched on forever. Such an estate as this would be impossible to own in the outside world—there was no place left on Earth with so much structure-free real estate. And anything that even came close would cost more crypto than Brate could even imagine existing. The world was no longer this open.

Gerald Miller was home, but he was unaware of Brate and Stack shadowing him through his private node. Brate found this just fascinating. The patch he’d built could do a lot to cover his tracks, but it would never have been able to pull this off. It could mask who he was, in the Stack, but it couldn’t prevent anyone from knowing he was there.

Miller was finishing a call when Brate and Stack arrived, clearly conversing with someone powerful. The call had been audio only, and Miller had moved around in his virtual home, pouring something amber and expensive looking.

Food and drink were common in the Stack, with the system stimulating the user’s brain to convince them that the experience was real, even up to providing the effects of alcohol. But just as with the real world, certain experiences were more expensive than others. A fine scotch in the Stack could be just as expensive, maybe even more so, than its IRL counterpart.

Brate was tempted to pour his own glass of the virtual good stuff, but he stifled that. This was business. He needed his head clear.

“Can you get me a log of that call?” Brate asked.

He was prepared to hear this was impossible, but to his surprise there was a flash in the upper right corner of his vision, with the words Recording available.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Of course, Founder,” the Stack replied.

For the next hour Brate and the Stack avatar wandered Gerald Miller’s private node. The environment was rich and exquisite, which wasn’t surprising. But as they wandered Brate began taking note of the various upgrades, some of which did surprise him.

The point of Stack was experience. In the century before its invention, online activity was much more passive. Virtual reality went in and out of vogue for decades, with users surging to it but then leaving it to fade away. And in all that time, no one fully understood why.

It wasn’t until a group of developers-cum-entrepreneurs banded together that the answer finally came around.

No matter how real a virtual experience might have seemed, the user was always aware that the environment was computer generated. Even as video resolution and computer-generated graphics rose to a level that was beyond the human eye’s own resolution, there was always some affect, some invisible quality, that would tip users off to the simulation. They could be fooled for a time, but eventually their brains figured it out. And once you knew the trick, the magician was no longer as interesting.

But these developers, the Founders, cracked the problem by removing the one component everyone had thought was essential: They turned off the computer.

Well… not entirely. What they actually did was create a system that was no longer dependent on the computer to generate the environment, thus freeing the system up to do other things. Such as scanning the psyche of users to determine identity and to customize the environment.

That psyche scanning became possible with the invention of neural link technology. Started in the early 21st century, neuralinks became common place within fifty years. It didn’t take long for the tech to evolve beyond its mostly medical uses—helping the disabled to walk, curing epilepsy, treating dementia, and more—and into something more… well, fun.

The earliest neuralink games were still available on Stack, and often served as a way to teach young children and other newcomers to interact with the Stack. In comparison to the current state of the system, they were archaic. But they were the proof of concept that the Founders needed to show the potential of the system.

A system that, rather than using computers to generate the environment, used the mind itself.

Stack’s core operating system was designed to scan the mind of the user and interact with it, via the neural ink. It could not only read information from the link, however, it could use that link to impose information on the user.

But the real power of the system was to “stack” the virtual environments of every user into one aggregated environment. By layering one user’s virtual landscape on top of the others, the result was a rich and textured environment that included more than simply visual or auditory information. It even went beyond the five senses altogether, providing every user with an avalanche of sensory memes—nuances and detail that humans experienced every single day, IRL, but went unnoticed except by their subconscious.

As a result of this stacking, users could taste more than just the vanilla or chocolate of an ice cream cone, they would get those subtle nuances that come from having ice cream from one shop or another. They would get the hint of an extra, unidentifiable spice in a slice of pizza. They would hear music that was more than just a perfect replica of a song, but instead included refraction and echo based on the environment.

Basically, if you want to make an experience feel absolutely real and engaging, you do it by making the user’s mind generate the environment. Nothing fools a human like their own mind.

Along with all those experiences, however, there were those who had, over the years, figured out ways to generate all new experiences. Unique. Never before conceived.

Gerald Miller had a lot of these. They ranged across a spectrum of personal tastes and indulgences, from Stack-generated versions of impossibly expensive whiskeys to more exotic experiences such as “the feeling of lava on skin,” or even more disturbing, “the taste of human flesh.”

Brate cataloged some of these. They might be useful as dirt on Miller, and Levelate might find them kind of amusing. But they lacked the sort of quality that Levelate usually preferred. They weren’t necessarily the kind of thing that would encourage Miller to do what he was told.

But then Brate came across something that would make Miller pay attention.

Among the encapsulated experiences, Brate found that Miller had a vast collection of sexual experiences. The man’s tastes new absolutely no limits, apparently. Some of these were making Brate’s stomach turn, just reading the labels.

He captured all of this, segmenting it off in its own directory. He would dump this on Levelate’s server once he was done.

This was good. This would give Levelate’s clients the kind of leverage they’d pay big crypto for. All of this would be good enough.

And then Brate found Solomon’s Mine.

That was what he and the other hackers called the richest vein of data, when they stumbled onto it. The sort of thing that would put a mark so firmly under control, they could never get out again. The sexual stuff could be that for most people, but not everyone. But this…

“Stack,” Brate said, his voice quiet despite knowing that no one could possibly hear him. “What the hell is this?”

The Stack avatar had no need to peer closer at the data. It could see and interpret it from wherever it was. But it made a show of inspecting the set, for Brate’s benefit. “This is highly classified data, organized by subject name. It appears to be a list of protocols for overriding user Stack impressions.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” Though Brate was pretty sure he knew.

“These protocols would allow someone to rewrite the experience a Stack user is having, replacing it with one that was designed by another user.”

“In other words,” Brate said, “This thing could rewrite someone’s memories.”

“Correct,” Stack said.

Brate glanced around. Miller was out on his expansive patio, looking out over the virtual ocean. Even though Brate knew that God Mode made him invisible, he still felt like hiding. Or running.

“Stack… have these protocols ever been used?”

“Of course,” Stack replied.

Brate swallowed. “How… how many times have they been used?”

“One moment,” Stack said, and the avatar went rigid as the systems calculated. This, already, was a bad sign. If the system had to actually calculate, then the number was going to be very, very big.

“I am unable to provide an accurate number,” Stack replied.

“Why?” Brate asked.

“The protocol is currently in use among all Stack users.”

Brate blinked. “All? How long has it been active?”

“This particular protocol has always been active,” Stack said. “Start date coincides with the public launch date of Stack.”

Brate stumbled back, and began looking around frantically. Always active? That meant that this… whatever it was… had been going on for more than fifty years.

Brate quickly made a copy of everything, including Miller’s own access codes for the system. With God Mode, it turned out, there really was nothing that Brate couldn’t have access to.

“I think it’s time to go,” he told the avatar.

“As you wish,” he responded, and in the next instance they were both standing back in the Guff. Back in Brate’s virtual home. His safe space.

As if anything could be considered safe anymore.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER SEVEN

“My man,” Levelate said. It was almost a whisper. There as a note of something in his voice that Brate hadn’t heard before—reverence, maybe. Then he cleared his throat.

This was one of those rare moments when the two of them were face-to-face. In the Stack, rather than IRL, but still… it was rare indeed when their avatars were in the same virtual space together. Even with their filters up, obscuring their features, it was kind of a momentous occasion.

“I’ll be honest,” Levelate said, shaking his head. He waved at the files hovering just to his side. “I thought you were trying to pull something. I was about to cut you off. But this… this was worth the wait!”

“Glad you like it,” Brate said, forcing a smile. It was a lot easier to feign emotional cues via a Stack avatar, especially with the identity filters up. “I’m about to change my IRL location again. I think this might bring some heat.”

“Oh, hell yeah,” Levelate said. “Go. I’ll spot you for… how about six weeks?”

Brate considered. “That should be good. When can I expect the crypto for this stuff?”

“It’ll be in your account tonight,” Levelate grinned. “I already have someone lined up to buy this stuff. I’m going to ask them for a lot more than what we agreed to, though. And they’re going to pay it.”

Brate didn’t want any more details than that. He was already feeling very uneasy about all of this. The intel he was handing over wasn’t even the smallest tip of the iceberg, but it was still pretty devastating. Gerald Miller was going to have a rough time ahead.

They finished the handoff, and the meetup ended. The room vanished around Brate, peeling away and dissolving. He found himself once again in the Guff, with an infinity of other people’s memories stretching out in all directions.

“Stack,” he said. “I’m still safe here, right? Still hidden?”

“You are undetectable by any and all users of the system,” Stack replied. “Even I do not know where you are.”

That was weird. “You’re saying you can talk to me, appear in front of me, but you can’t actually locate me?”

“Correct,” Stack said. “Node designated Guff is not part of the Stack system registry.”

Brate wasn’t sure if he could allow himself to feel relief over that or not. It was good that the Guff was hidden, and that he was hidden while he was within. But could he rely on that?

It was the best he had, at least. He was working from too many unknowns at the moment, and that made him willing to accept any safe harbor he could find. Real or imagined.

Right now, it was time for him to consider what he should do with his new-found intel.

This was the stuff he refused to tell Levelate about. This was the secret too big and too dark to trust it to anyone. He wasn’t even sure if he could be trusted with it.

As of now, he realized… and it took a moment, took several tries for his mind to come around to this… as of now, Brate was…

He could barely think it. But he had to. He had to get past this part, so he could start figuring out what to do with this.

As of now, Brate—hacker extraordinaire, former Stat kid, former nobody—Brate might just be the most powerful person in the Stack. And, he was forced to admit, that meant he might be the most powerful person in the world.

The combination of God Mode, along with this knowledge of what he was calling the “rewrite protocols,” plus his dominance over the Guff… somehow, he had stumbled into one of the biggest lucky breaks of all time. Somehow, he had fallen face first into a whole new level.

So, what was he going to do with it?

First, he was going to relocate his “meatware.” Meaning, he had to get himself to a new safehouse, somewhere in the IRL world.

Time to log out and go be among the mortals.

* * *

The arrangements had already been made, thanks to Brate’s earlier paranoia. He had dozens of new safehouses lined up, some of which were paid for by Levelate and some he’d reserved under his own steam. It would be better to use Levelate’s network for now, Brate decided. He didn’t want any direct connections between this spot he was abandoning and anything that was registered under his own account. He would move, and then use God Mode to book someplace new. Six weeks was a good, long stretch, but he didn’t feel comfortable staying more than two. Maybe only one.

A car came around, and Brate climbed in. His first stop would be some random address, just in case anyone did try to trace his movements. The automated vehicle dutifully drove him across the city then, dropping him off several blocks away. Brate went by foot to the next pickup point, got into another car, and let it take him to the next safehouse.

Once he found the place he went inside, locked the door, and slumped onto a plush chair.

This was a nice apartment. Not luxury by any stretch, but nicer than the place he’d just left. The Stack interface was in an alcove at one end of the room, and had climate control vents, omnitread, and the latest wireless interface. An array of sensors formed a dome over the spot, high above his head. He stood and admired it for a moment, then went to the fridge to grab something to drink.

The kitchen was fully stocked, as he had requested. He chose a sparkling water, returned to the plush chair, and sipped his beverage as he thought over everything that had happened in just the past 24 hours.

The world had completely changed. Everything was new. And as of right now, he had no idea what he should do next.

There was a chirp from his smartwatch. He pulled the portable visor from his pocket, unfolded it, and rested it on the bridge of his nose. In the next instant he was peering into Stack, seeing his alerts.

He dropped the sparkling water and didn’t even flinch as the cold liquid poured out into his lap.

It was nowhere near as cold as the blood in his veins.

His inbox was filled with panicked chatter from the hacker community. A lot of them were freaking out because Agents were suddenly swarming. There were reports of Agents bursting into the IRL safe houses of dozens of hackers, all of whom went dark online, of course, but then went just as dark in the real world. Some of the best out there, people Brate had long envied and admired, had gone down in a wave of arrests.

He stood and stumbled to the Stack interface. He was inside in an instant, looking closer at the reports, the frantic freakouts, the growing pile of rumors.

None of the klatch were willing to meet face to face, but there were some proxies—drone avatars that the hackers would operate by remote control. These were pawns, easy to ditch in an emergency. The Stack experience was extremely limited using these, only slightly above Stat levels, but they gave the hackers a way to move around online without much worry.

Except that right now, there was nothing but worry.

“They’re just dismantling us, man,” one of the klatch was reporting. Her voice was high pitched, panicked. “They’re coming out of nowhere!”

“Who’s gone down?” another hacker asked.

“Revnant, Tremor, FinalFin… I don’t even know who else!”

Brate had come in with God Mode active, and was watching everyone as they freaked out. He was invisible to them, he realized. And maybe that was best.

There was something odd happening in his display, though.

In the upper-right corner, in a muted red, every time he looked at one of the klatch he saw some data range into view. Numbers. Strings of them.

Coordinates.

Somehow, Brate was seeing everyone’s physical location.

“Stack!” he shouted.

“Hello, Founder,” the Stack avatar replied as it materialized before him.

“What’s happening? What am I seeing here? Why am I seeing everyone’s physical location?”

“Tag View has been engaged,” Stack replied.

“What is that?” Brate asked, afraid to hear the answer.

“Tag View is an Agent protocol. It allows Agents to engage location pings on any user they’ve tagged previously. The users you are observing have all been tagged as Hacker.”

Brate felt his pulse pounding, from his skull to his toes. “What… why have the Agents turned this on?” he asked.

“There was a security breach involving Gerald Miller,” Stack replied. “Agents are pursuing anyone who may have been involved.”

Brate felt like crumpling to the floor. “Stack,” he said, his throat closing. He coughed. He could use some water. “Stack… do the Agents know my physical location?”

“Negative,” Stack replied. “Founders cannot be tagged.”

Brate felt a huge wave of relief. But it was short lived.

“What about Levelate?” he asked.

“User designated ‘Levelate’ has been apprehended by Agents,” Stack replied.

Brate choked, coughed. “Stack… are the Agents able to trace Levelate’s transactions? His last known whereabouts, any of that?”

“Of course,” Stack replied. “Agents have been granted broad powers. They are currently investigating several properties used by Levelate.”

Brate instantly dropped out of Stack, stumbling out of the little alcove. He pulled on the portable visor and put it in Transparency mode, which would allow him to be engaged with Stack but still be able to see and move.

He had to get out of here. And now.

“Stack, are there any Agents near my physical location?”

“I am unable to verify your physical location,” Stack replied.

This was oddly comforting—if the Stack couldn’t tell where Brate was, IRL, then the Agents shouldn’t be able to either. Except…

“Stack, you said the Agents are looking into Levelate’s transactions. Does that include any rental properties?”

“It does,” Stack replied.

Brate rushed to the door and out into the hallway. This place was burned. And if he didn’t move right now, he’d go up in flames with it!

He raced down the hallway, and passed the elevator. He couldn’t risk getting trapped in a metal box. He’d have to take the stairs.

He shouted the address of the building into Stack. “Are there any Agents near that location?”

“Currently there are two Agents in the lobby of that address,” Stack replied.

Brate cursed.

If he ran down the stairs he’d bust out into the lobby on the ground floor. If they were coming to the safe house he’d just left, they’d be sure to stop anyone from leaving the building.

They were looking for him, even if they might not know who he was.

That left Brate with very few options. He couldn’t stay in the apartment. He couldn’t take the elevator. And he couldn’t go down the stairs.

That left only up.

He raced to the door, burst through it, and started clomping his way up the metal stairs. The roof was six floors above him. He wasn’t sure what the hell he could do, once he got there, but that was his destination.

He felt winded almost instantly. He spent nearly all of his time in the Stack, and though he was in decent shape, it was “ground floor and walking” shape. He had no stamina for this kind of exertion. He pushed through, gasping, lungs burning, legs feeling like lead.

“Halt! IA Agent!”

He heard the voice from below him but didn’t stop to look back. He already knew who it was. And he knew where he would end up, if he didn’t keep going. Maybe even if he kept going.

There were more shouts, and he thought he heard the Agent talking to his partner. It was hard to hear anything, though, over the sound of his feet pounding on the steps.

He had to get out of this stairwell.

He was still three floors from the roof, but he felt like he was going to vomit and pass out. The Agent kept calling out from below, and it was starting to sound like he was having far less struggle than Brate was.

Plan B, he thought. Rather than keep running upward he ducked through the door on his current level, slamming it closed behind him.

This level looked identical to the one he’d started from. A corridor stretching in both directions, apartment doors dotting the walls on either side.

The Agent was going to catch up any second. Was there anywhere Brate could hide?

No. He could see it all playing out. He was screwed beyond belief. No way out. No escape. No options.

If only God Mode worked IRL.

He paused, his breath burning its way out of his lungs, in-fire, out-fire. His heart pounded so hard he could feel it in his teeth. His guts were twisted into a tight knot. His brain, though, went still.

Not muted. Not silenced. Just… still.

“Stack,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm and clear. He had an idea. A shot. It might work. But it might not. “Stack… are the Agents wearing portables?”

“Yes,” Stack said. “Each is wearing a portable running in Transparency mode.”

Brate huffed, then stood back from the door. He could hear the Agent’s feet pounding up from below, echoing from the other side of the door.

He would be just inches away. He was going to open that door at any second, and when he did he would draw a weapon, stun Brate, arrest him. Brate would cease to exist in the world, either online or IRL. This was it.

The end.

“Stack,” Brate said, “can you make me invisible to the Agents?”

The door opened, a man in a dark suit stepped through, weapon drawn. He looked directly at Brate, who was pushed flat against the wall opposite the stairwell.

“Of course, Founder. I’ve filtered you out of all Stack-connected viewing devices. Warning: This will not prevent Agents from seeing you if they remove their portables.”

Brate didn’t answer. Instead, he pressed even tighter against the wall, holding his breath.

The Agent was looking directly at him. His weapon was aimed straight at Brate’s chest.

Brate’s lungs were still burning. He was still winded from his rush up the stairs. He felt like vomiting and might just do it. But he stood, meeting the Agent’s eyes, waiting.

The Agent turned and stalked his way down the corridor, leaving Brate standing in place.

Invisible.

Brate’s heart was pounding even harder now, but he dared not move. He slowly let himself start to breathe again, as the Agent wandered up and down the hall. “We’re going to need some door overrides,” the Agent said to his partner.

There was a ding from the elevator, and when the doors opened a woman stepped out. The second Agent.

She, too, was wearing a Stack portable visor. And she, too, looked straight through Brate.

As she walked toward her partner, Brate took a chance. He darted for the elevator, narrowly making it inside before the doors started to close. He stood then with his back against the wall of the lift, his view of the two agents narrowing as the doors closed. He reached out and pushed the button for the ground floor, and when the doors finally closed, he allowed himself to collapse to the floor of the elevator, gasping in huge breaths.

He managed to keep from throwing up until he was on the street.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER EIGHT

Did they know who he was?

He didn’t think so. Every interaction he’d had with Levelate was secure and private. They were both bouncing their profiles over so many nodes it was a wonder they didn’t appear wearing each other’s faces. Even the Agents should have a hard time cracking all of that. Right?

There was also God Mode.

Brate was still getting used to what it meant, to have such all-encompassing access to the Stack. But this encounter with a pair of Agents on the hunt for him was a pretty convincing reassurance that he had some weight to throw in the world now. His power level in the Stack was high enough that he’d actually managed to influence the IRL world. He’d managed to walk right past two people who were literally trained to find anyone.

That was fine. That was great. But now he was homeless, and paranoid as hell. What should he do?

None of the safe houses he’d set up through Levelate were an option now. Even the places he’d set up previously were out of the question. He was too paranoid to trust that they weren’t compromised.

He was moving along the sidewalk, cars zipped by on autopilot to his left. Evening was approaching, and the darkness was actually a comfort. But Brate wasn’t much for being out on the town after dark. He was more comfortable in a safehouse, plugged into the haptics and sensors of the Stack, getting his kicks from that virtual landscape.

Maybe that was something he should rethink.

Out here, IRL, things were so… real. The smells. The humidity in the air. The slight chill that made him long for a jacket. The hunger making his stomach rumble, and the weariness in his legs and back. His lungs still felt a little raw, from all the heavy cardio.

Was this really the shape he was in? He was young, just 25. Shouldn’t he be able to run up the side of a mountain and bench press a sofa?

Pitiful. At least he wasn’t fat. But pitiful.

He was starting to feel sorry for himself. And the only remedy he had for that was to plug into the Stack. He had a portable visor, but he hesitated before putting it on. His experience with the Agents made him a little paranoid about how much Stack could alter reality.

But this was his only tool. His hammer for dealing with every nail and not a few screws. And right now, he had things to figure out and only one ally.

He slipped on the visor, put it in transparency mode, and trusted that the world he was seeing was really there.

“Stack,” he said, almost a whisper. “I need to find a place to stay. Someplace the Agents can’t track me to.”

“That’s an interesting challenge, Founder. The Agents have access to nearly every location on Earth. One moment.”

Brate was walking by a small Chinese restaurant. There was a duck hanging in the window, and inside the atmosphere was dark, candle lit mostly, and a bit tighter than “cozy.” But the smells coming out of the open front door made his stomach rumble. He slipped inside.

He took a seat, and a waiter came to take his order. Brate didn’t know much about authentic Chinese cuisine, but the menu had a section of the sort of typical stuff a guy like him might order. He settled on orange chicken with brown rice, and a pot of green tea.

The waiter had just left to place his order when Stack returned.

“I have located a place where you can stay without worry of detection. It has been in disuse for several years, but there are cameras and sensors throughout. I have determined that it is in reasonably good condition. The previous owner also left behind an inventory of dried and canned goods.”

Brate was impressed. “Sounds… kind of perfect. What’s the catch?”

“No catch, Founder. It’s exactly as I described.”

“And why can’t the Agents track me there?” Brate asked.

“Because officially it doesn’t exist. There is no record of it in any database.”

Brate blinked. “So… how did you find it?”

“The previous owner was also a Founder. Terry Parker. He left personal private records that describe the place and how to get to it. It’s actually not far from your current location.”

The waiter returned with Brate’s order, and Brate asked for a to go box. He paid and tipped very generously. And then he took his food and the to-go cup of hot tea and followed Stack’s turn-by-turn directions to the former home of Terry Parker.

* * *

Terry Parker, suicide.

That was tragic. Because gauging by everything Brate was learning about Parker, he had a good life. Or at least, he had a lot of cool stuff.

“How did he die, exactly?” Brate asked

“Terry Parker’s body was found hanging from the rafter of a hotel room in Bruges,” Stack replied. “He had been dead for two days when the hotel cleaning staff found him.”

Brate shivered. “That’s… awful. Did he leave a note? Does anyone know why he did it?”

“The official explanation is that he was simply lonely,” Stack replied.

Brate nodded. He could relate. Loneliness was kind of a chronic condition in the world. An irony, considering the fact that Stack made it possible to connect to people all around the globe as if you were standing with them face-to-face. But loneliness was a tricky thing. Just because you can talk to someone doesn’t mean you can connect with them.

Brate shook his head. “Wait… you said the official explanation… is there an unofficial story?”

“Terry Parker was in possession of highly classified documents when he died,” Stack replied. “There were memos within the Agency and the United World Government specifically labeling him a threat.”

“Threat? A threat to who?”

“To the Stack and to the United World Government itself.”

Brate felt his blood go cold. “Are… are you saying that Terry was murdered?”

“I have insufficient data to determine that, but the possibility exists, and thus I labeled the specifics of his suicide as the official account.”

Brate was pushing around a remaining bit of rice with a plastic fork. He sipped the green tea, which had cooled to room temperature. He looked up, hoping to see something comforting.

This place, Terry Parker’s place, was amazing. Dusty. It had sat unused for a few years. But the technology here was far from out of date.

“How old was Terry, when he died?” Brate asked.

Terry Parker was 74 years old at the time of his death,” Stack replied.

Brate whistled. “Ok. That explains why he was a Founder. He must have been pretty brilliant.”

“He had a recorded IQ of 160 and was a specialist in Stack cybernetics and neural interface technology. Much of the current Stack interface technology is derived from his patents.”

“So… brilliant,” Brate said. He stood, moved around in the space, which was part apartment part wizard’s workshop. He ran a finger over the surface of a table, creating a trail through the dust.

“When you found this place…” he started. Then, “What was it you found, exactly? You said he left private records. Can I see them?”

“Of course,” Stack replied. “He left specific instructions to show them to you.”

Brate’s eyebrows rose. “He… did? How? I’ve never even heard of the guy.”

“His specific request was that his private records should be openly available to anyone who became a Founder after his passing.”

“And what’s kept someone else from becoming a Founder?” Brate asked.

“No one can assume the role of Founder under the current rules of Stack.”

“But… I mean… I did.”

“You are the first to create a new node in more than two decades. Foundational protocols were available to you but would not be available to others. Current Stack protocols prevent the creation of new nodes, so for most users of the Stack, becoming a Founder is impossible.”

Impossible. No new nodes meant no new Founders. That was interesting.

By sheer luck, Brate had stumbled into the Guff. And that discovery had made it possible for him to become a Founder and to engage God Mode.

Luck. Accident. Random.

Or… was it?

“Stack, show me the private files from Terry Parker.”

“Of course, Founder,” Stack replied.

Brate had been wearing the portable visor, running in transparency mode, and suddenly the world he could see faded to black. Emerging from the inky darkness came a figure, lit by some unseen light source. He was an older man, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, wearing Converse sneakers that looked like they’d seen some miles.

The man, Terry Parker, stopped a distance that would have been maybe six feet, IRL. He shoved his hands in his pockets, and smiled.

To Brate, it felt like Terry Parker was really there. Or at least, really projecting himself to Brate, just the way someone would do for a face-to-face chat in the Stack. If Brate didn’t know the guy was dead, he would have believed this was a live call.

“Hi there,” Terry said. His voice was warm, aged but not “old man voice.” For someone in his 70s, he seemed to be in good shape.

“Uh, hi,” Brate responded. It wasn’t unheard of for automated messages to be interactive.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for you,” the avatar said.

“That’s what Stack said,” Brate replied. “But… I mean, you don’t know me.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of you, Brate,” Terry said, smiling. “I may have been dormant but I kept an eye on things. You’re a hacker. Pretty good one, too.”

Brate again felt his blood go cold, and it was all he could do to keep from yanking the portable visor from his face and go running out to the street.

He reminded himself that this was a pre-programmed message, and Terry Parker was a genius. He probably built in some kind of data call, so the avatar could feel more authentic.

“You’re thinking that I’m just a program,” Terry said. “I get that. I am just a program, really. My… well, I guess you’d call it my meatware… that’s gone. Long gone. But not me. I stayed behind.”

“Stayed... behind?” Brate was feeling nervous. Very nervous.

“Here. In the Stack,” Terry said. “Hidden, all these years. Just like the place where you’re staying. My old place. Make yourself at home, by the way.”

“Uh… thanks,” Brate said, though suddenly he was regretting coming here.

“And just like your place, Brate. What are you calling it? The Guff?”

“How… how do you…”

“How do I know about it, when the Stack itself can’t see it?” Terry smiled. “Well… mostly because I built it,” he said.

“You?” Brate asked. “You!”

“Oh yeah,” Terry replied. “Years ago. I had to have some place to put them all, see. It was getting nuts. Completely out of hand. The advances in quantum computing made infinite storage a possibility, so that wasn’t a problem. But the Agency… the United World Government… that was where things went off the rails. They knew about it from the beginning, you know. Right from the start.”

“Knew about what?” Brate asked.

“Stack,” Terry said. “It doesn’t just use that psyche scan to verify identities. You know that now, right? You’ve seen it.”

Brate nodded, numbly. “The memories,” he said.

“And you saw the files from Gerald Miller, right? I hate that guy. Such a prick.”

“The files!” Brate said. “I almost forgot. Yes! The override protocol. They… they can…”

“Rewrite someone’s experience,” Terry said, nodding. “They can. And they do. Every user. Every time they log in. They’ve been doing it for decades, almost from the start. Even you, Brate. You’ve had your mind tampered with by the UWG. More than once.”

That was a seriously disturbing thought, and Brate wanted to run from it. He wanted to forget it. He couldn’t even imagine what it meant, that the UWG had that kind of influence. That kind of power.

“Why?” he asked.

Terry actually laughed at this. “Why? C’mon, Brate. You know why.”

He thought for a moment, nodded. “Ok. Yeah. Control, right?”

“Control. You’re damn right. Think about it. United World Government. Sixty years ago the whole world was a mess. Wars and rumors of wars. Real end-times stuff. The major powers of the world kept trying things to get the population under control, but whistleblowers and conspiracy theorists kept pissing in their cheerios.

“They might be able to use fear to get a chunk of the population under their thumb, convince them to do what they were told out of a sense of safety. Compliance is comforting to some people, Brate. But to others… it’s poison. It fuels rage and resistance within them. So they’d try something else. Misinformation and propaganda, mostly. They tried turning people against each other, hoping one side would wipe out the other and then there’d only be one group to control. That didn’t work either. For all the talk of humanity being a divisive species by nature, always on the lookout for an other to hate and despise, the truth is good human beings overcome that stuff all the time.”

“So what does this have to do with the Stack?”

“When we created Stack, it was the neural-link technology that really made everything possible. People just couldn’t relate to virtual worlds for long, you know? But the genius stroke was getting humans to be partners in this.” He motioned around him, signaling the darkness. “Stack was possible through a combination of quantum computing and cooperative artificial intelligence. The human mind is the finest computer ever created. So… we enlisted it to do the heavy lifting. But to get there… we had to pay a price.”

“Access,” Brate said. “The mind. Memories.”

“All of it,” Terry said. “The mind was vulnerable. To access Stack, humans have to allow the system to dictate what their mind sees, hears, tastes, touches. But also… what it knows. What it thinks. What it remembers. All of it.”

“And the UWG…” Brate started.

“All the governments of the world, cooperating and agreeing to be bound by rules and protocols and laws that are all centered on the Stack. It’s a story that tells itself, when you no longer have Stack wiping the very thought from your brain.”

Brate blinked, shook his head. “Wait… you’re saying that Stack actually… what, erases this stuff?”

“Stack rewrites your memories the whole time you’re logged in,” Terry said. “If there’s anything the UWG doesn’t want someone to know, to even think, the whole thing is gone. Erased. No questioning the machine, Brate. That’s just not allowed.”

“But I know plenty of conspiracy theorists,” Brate said. “I mean… I’m a hacker. I work with a lot of hackers. Why would the UWG allow us to exist?”

Terry shrugged. “If you want people to forget that they have doubts about something, you let them keep their doubts about something else. We’re wired to doubt, Brate. We need our suspicions. That urge to find the other, that’s real. Society needs its villains and its bad guys. The UWG figures there’s no harm in letting a few people go around thinking they’ve found loopholes and cracks in the system. Letting a few hackers exploit some of the Stack’s apparent vulnerabilities is another great way to keep things under control. The truth is, buddy, they know all about you. All about your entire klatch.”

Brate thought about the recent raids, about the Agents storming in and taking hackers into custody, about Levelate.

“I hit too close,” Brate whispered.

Terry nodded. His expression was a bit more somber. “You did. I’m sorry. You got hold of some intel that was over the line. It triggered all kinds of stuff. Agents were unleashed. Even Stack was enlisted to track you down.”

“But… it helped me instead?” Brate asked.

“There hasn’t been a Founder in years. The Foundational Protocols are the oldest set of rules in the operating system. They can’t be erased. You can only work around them. Stack had no choice but to help you. As far as it’s concerned, you are literally God. That's what God Mode is all about. I built it to keep us safe. That… didn’t work out so well.”

Brate was feeling nauseated. In real life he felt for the back of the chair he’d been sitting in, and leaned against it. “You died,” Brate said.

“Yeah,” Terry nodded.

“But… you’re here.”

Again Terry nodded. “Yeah.”

“How?”

Terry smiled. “The Guff,” he said. “I like the name, by the way. I don’t think I ever had an official name for it. ‘Repository’ maybe? ‘Vault.’ But your name is better. It’s a better fit. Because those aren’t just memories, Brate. They’re the very essence of every single user who has ever logged on to the Stack. All of them. Including me and you.”

“So… you’re a copy? Of Terry Parker’s memories?”

He shrugged. “Sure. Or a backup. I went dormant once Terry died, but that neural link of his updated me right to the last second. I… well, I remember dying. And no, it wasn’t a suicide. They found me. Despite all my best work, they found me. This place was safe. It doesn’t exist on any map or database. But hey, you can’t stay inside all the time.”

“What were you doing in Bruges?” Brate asked.

“Vacationing, Brate,” Terry smiled. “It’s beautiful there. I wanted to see it, one last time.”

“Before they caught you,” Brate said.

Terry nodded. “You get tired of running, Brate. I did. You will. Eventually, you’ll end up in a scenario where they find you. And you’ll either be out of options or out of willpower. Staying hidden costs you, believe me.”

Brate felt like he already knew that to be true. He’d only been on the run for a couple of days, but he was already feeling it. He wanted it to stop. Needed it to stop.

“God Mode is protecting me from having my brain rewritten,” he said, suddenly.

“Yes,” Terry nodded. “You’re outside the system.”

“And no one knows about the Guff,” Brate replied.

Terry’s eyes narrowed. “Right.”

Brate felt his heart pounding. He could feel his pulse in his eyes. “What if I stopped running?” he asked.

Terry smiled, then laughed lightly, nodding. “Ok, then,” he said. “I was hoping you’d ask me that.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER NINE

They appeared in the Guff, though Brate had to enter first and then call Terry in.

“I’ve been trying to get back here for years,” Terry whispered.

“What stopped you?” Brate asked.

Terry looked up. At first his expression was pained, maybe ashamed. Then he laughed, shaking his head. “A glitch,” he said. “Or maybe a miscalculation. I dunno… a screwup. When I built this place, I put it outside the Stack. I couldn’t risk the Agents gaining access to it, or even knowing it existed. But I was running against a clock.”

He moved among the cubes of memories, letting his hand hover over them but not touching any of them. “When the UWG started using the rewrite protocols, me and some of the other Founders knew it was wrong. So… we broke some of our own rules.”

“Like what?” Brate asked.

“We started wholesale copying every mind. Every memory. That was something we’d sworn we’d never do. But it became necessary.”

“Because the UWG was wiping people’s memories,” Brate said. “Reprogramming them.”

Terry nodded. “But we had to work fast. The new protocols were already being implemented. So… I created this place,” he motioned around them, to the void of the Guff. “And we shunted every memory the system had ever encountered into here. We encoded them so they could be scanned later, but we scrambled all of this so that even if the UWG found it they couldn’t make sense of any of it. They couldn’t find any specific memory. They’d have to wade through an infinity of memories.”

“So there is a way to search it,” Brate whispered.

“Only one,” Terry said, smiling. “Me.”

“You? What do you mean?”

“So this avatar… it’s got a copy of my memories. I’m in control, in the driver’s seat. But the reality is, this is a daemon. A program running in the background of the Stack. It has a lot of the same properties as Stack. It can assert itself, move around in the system at will, do everything Stack can do. But it has some additional software built in.”

“Like a clone of you?”

Terry nodded, smiling. “Yeah. I grafted that on, using the code that built the Guff. I’m kind of a hybrid of the Stack and the Guff. Walking, talking, sort of living. But unlike the Guff, I’m only hosting one set of memories, and they aren’t scrambled. They’re… me.” He shrugged and held is hands out to the side.

“So how come you haven’t been able to get back in here for years?” Brate asked.

“Well, in the strictest sense I’ve never been able to get in here,” Terry said, smiling and shaking his head. “I screwed up. When I built the Guff, I hid it from the Stack. It’s effectively outside the Stack. That was the point. Very necessary. But…”

“But your daemon is effectively a modified version of Stack,” Brate said, catching on.

“Exactly,” Terry said, looking sheepish. “It was a blunder. And it’s cost me years. I tried everything to fix it. I even tried to fix my own code. But I discovered that if I fixed it for my avatar, I would also end up fixing it for Stack. Basically, if I changed the code that was keeping me from seeing the Guff, Stack would be able to see the Guff, too. And then, we’d all be screwed.”

Brate got that. These memories were all protected because Stack couldn’t even see this place—didn’t even know it existed, except as a reference it associated with Brate himself. “I can call Stack into this place,” Brate said.’

“Yeah, you’re basically echoing an instance of the Stack operating system when you do that,” Terry said. “Same with me. I’m here, but I’m not really here. If I didn’t have memories of building this place, it would look like a blocky haze of nothing to me. It’s really very fortunate that you managed to find this place and become Founder. It was something I hoped for, but there wasn’t much I could do to make it happen.”

Brate nodded at this. “Ok… so now what? What can we do, now that you’re in the Guff? How do we stop the UWG?”

“It starts with some memories,” Terry said, grinning.

He made a gesture with his hand, and in the air before the two of them a display grew from microscopic to theater sized. Terry reached outward then, as if grasping something invisible, and then tossed it onto the screen.

A memory started to play. A first person POV. Someone was pouring a cup of coffee, then they carried it to a large, oaken desk near a window with a view that Brate thought even Stack couldn’t replicate. It looked out over a vast city landscape, but it was high enough that you could see the natural world beyond the skyline. Brate peered closer. “Are those elephants?” he asked, pointing to a tiny herd in the distance.

“They are,” Terry nodded. “This office is in the African Free State.”

Brate felt his heard pounding. “Seriously? I… kind of thought that was just a legend.”

“It’s real,” Terry said. “A vast plain of unspoiled natural land, stretching on for thousands of miles. This is Doroba ra Ntshunxeko. Doroba for short. In the Tsongo language it means “City of Freedom.” It was founded by the UWG about thirty years before the Stack first came online. There’s a reason you’ve never seen or heard anything about it, beyond rumors. The UWG keeps it hidden on purpose.”

“Why?” Brate asked, fascinated by what he was seeing. So much green space. There were very few places like this left on Earth.

“Keeps anyone from trying to go there, for a start,” Terry said. “There’s an international treaty designed to preserve this place, and everything living in it. And that’s exactly why the UWG chose it as their global headquarters.”

“I thought the UWG was based in Washington, DC?”

“That relic of a city?” Terry said, scoffing. “It hasn’t had a point since the early millennium. No, the UWG lets people speculate on where its central power is located, but it makes sure no one ever thinks of even the possibility that Doroba could be the capital. It also protects them from any outside threats.”

“I see,” Brate nodded.

“No,” Terry said. “You don’t. Not yet.” He nodded back to the screen and Brate watched the seen play out. The person behind the memory sat at the desk and opened an interface terminal. A few gestures and voice commands later, and data started pouring onto the screen. Terry froze the memory, and then reached out, pulling the image closer, making it larger, until he and Brate were staring at a series of numbers and letters at the top of the screen.

“That’s an ID code,” Brate said, peering closer.

“What else do you know about it?” Terry asked.

Brate was shaking his head. Without context, the code was gibberish. But suddenly he picked up on a detail. “That’s a government code,” he whispered. He looked at Terry. “UWG?”

“The only government that really matters,” Terry replied. Now, let’s see if we can get the rest of what we need.”

Now the memory started running again, and it took Brate a moment to realize it was running in reverse. The image froze again, and again Terry zoomed in. This time, however, he wasn’t looking at the person’s screen. He was zoomed in on the camera at the top of the terminal’s display. He let the memory play again, and Brate watched, studying the screen, trying to figure out what Terry was looking for.

“Dammit,” Terry said. “No good. I’ll have to try another memory.”

“What are you looking for?” Brate asked.

Terry rolled the memory back and froze on the camera. “Every time someone logs in to a pure data terminal, instead of using an interface to log into the Stack there’s a scan from the terminal. It’s not passive. The camera does more than look at someone’s face to see if they are authorized. It uses a form of LiDAR to scan the user.”

“LiDAR,” Brate said. “Laser scanning?”

“Yeah, the same thing the satellites use to map the terrain for Stack. This is a bit more specialized, but it’s the same principle. The system is scanning the user’s physical features and picking up on facial cues. Microexpressions.”

“Why?” Brate asked.

“It’s matching them against the psyche scan that Stack uses to identify users. This is how UWG officials can access data on the Stack without having their own brains scanned and their memories tampered with. It’s paranoia, mostly. A safety lock on their psyche.”

Brate nodded. “So how does studying the camera tell us anything?”

“There are pulses made by an emitter, inside the lens,” Terry said. “Tiny little flashes, as the lasers bounce off of the user’s face. Those are the unlock pattern. If we have a copy of that and the user’s ID, we gain access to their private files.”

“I get it,” Brate said, nodding and feeling excited. But then he paused. “Wait… if this user isn’t logged into the Stack, how do we have this memory?”

“He broke protocol,” Terry grinned. “At some point he accessed Stack without clearing the cache from this interaction. The LiDAR pattern gets accidentally recorded, the memory gets scanned, and the Guff gets a new block. It’s one of the few vulnerabilities in this system. One I’ve exploited a lot.”

Brate was smiling now. “I get it. This is supposed to be kind of an air gap, but it only works if the user clears the cache after logging out.”

“Right,” Terry said. “And it’s something that can’t be automated, because that would require Stack to be aware of it all. This hasn’t become an issue for the UWG, because there hasn’t been a Founder or anyone else around who could exploit the hole in the system. Not until now.” He grinned. “This stuff is a little like the protocols I used to build the Guff. It keeps the whole interaction outside of Stack, unless someone screws up. And, I meant, it’s government… people screw up almost as a matter of policy.”

They turned back to the screen and Terry wiped the memory away before pulling up a new one. Again, he scrubbed through to find the camera, and again he cursed under his breath. He swatted that memory away and went on to the next.

It went on like this for a couple of hours. Eventually Brate started feeling some IRL weariness. “I may need to log out and crash for a few hours,” he said. “I’ve been kind of on the run for a few days.”

“Don’t,” Terry said suddenly. “If you log out, I’ll be shot back to my node, and all my memories of this place will revert to default.”

“Wait… seriously?” Brate asked.

“I should have said something sooner.”

“Why would your memories revert back, though?” Brate asked.

“I’m not real, remember?” Terry said, grinning. “My avatar is really a daemon, running on the same basic code as Stack. The same limitations that keep Slack from seeing this place are part of my makeup, too. You’re running a local instance of me, here in the Guff. That vanishes if you log out. And the version of me that’s on the outside has no access here. I can’t form lasting memories of this place. I can only keep this in my head if I stay here. Which means you have to stay here.”

Brate felt the exhaustion intensify, but he nodded. “Ok,” he said. “I’ll stay logged in. But I’m not on any sort of bio support. Eventually I’ll have to log out just to eat, if nothing else.”

“Understood,” Terry nodded. “Hopefully this doesn’t take much longer.”

But things didn’t exactly resolve in minutes. Terry kept searching memories, cursing at his bad luck, and starting over. And in the meantime, Brate struggled. He was tired, but there was more happening than that. He was feeling a bit hungry and thirsty. That, he could somewhat ignore. But what was tougher to ignore was the growing pressure in his bladder.

He brought up all manner of distractions to keep his mind off of it. While Terry scoured memories looking for a useable LiDAR sequence, Brate tried playing video games, reading, watching movies. It all worked… for a time. But eventually the physical discomfort started forcing him to shift his attention back to his biology.

He was nearly at his breaking point, considering whether to risk logging out or to simply urinate himself, when Terry gave a shout.

“Got it!” he said, turning to Brate with a grin on his face.

“Thank God,” Brate said. His Stack avatar was composed, but his physical body was contorting with the discomfort and urgency. “What now?”

“Now I transfer this to you,” Terry said. “And you book a flight to Doroba.”

“Wait,” Brate said, his guts suddenly demanding more of his attention than his bladder. “What do you mean, book a flight?”

“You said you wanted to stop running,” Terry said. “This is how you do it. We take the fight to them.”

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER TEN

If not for God Mode, this entire plan would be a bust.

First, the cost of taking an actual, physical flight to Africa was outrageous. Even with the infinite funds of the Stack behind him, Brate felt like cringing at the total. It was more crypto than he’d made in his entire life. It would be the equivalent of several of his previous lifetimes, really. Physical travel wasn’t something anyone did these days. It was left to the excessively rich. And he was still getting used to being excessively rich.

But beyond just the expense, there was the challenge of even being allowed to travel to Doroba.

The African Free State was a highly protected sector, under the watchful gaze of the United World Government. Every nation on Earth had a stake in keeping the AFS preserved and protected. There was a thriving but endangered population of wildlife there, for a start. But also, Brate now knew, there was the UWG headquarters. Travel to the region was discouraged. It was just short of forbidden.

But it did happen. And with Terry’s guidance, Brate was able to navigate all the hoops so he could get the clearance he needed to make the journey.

Stack readily helped him generate all the phony credentials he needed. This made Brate extra nervous, because forging identification documents was a high crime. The UWG was very keen on everyone being exactly who they said they were. And if you were caught with a phony identity, it could mean expulsion from the Stack, at the very least, or you could find yourself disappeared, no trace left. Brate had known plenty of hackers in the klatch who basically ceased to exist after running some kind of ID scam. He’d been toeing that line with the patch, but he’d been very cautious about crossing the line altogether.

His plane was an automated private model—the sort of thing that rich people bought and then allowed to be leased out as needed. This particular model flew to the very edge of the Earth’s atmosphere, which allowed it to cut the travel time down to just a few hours.

When the plane landed, Brate looked like a different human being entirely from the one who had boarded. During the flight he’d shed his street clothes and donned a very expensive suit. He put on a watch that cost enough to buy lifetime access for every Stat he’d grown up with. And that watch served a bigger purpose than telling him the time or telling the world how rich he was. It was a mobile link that let him stay connected to the Stack no matter where he was on Earth.

He was also wearing a pair of glasses that doubled as a stealth wearable interface.

“Ok, so far so good,” Terry said in his ear. “How you doing?”

“Well, I feel like my heart wants to get out and walk next to me,” Brate said.

Terry chuckled. “That will pass. Just keep things steady. Move like you’re used to this.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Brate said.

“You’ve played immersive games,” Terry said. “Pretend like you’re doing that now. You’re moving around in the Stack, wearing a Stack-generated avatar, trying to complete a mission without getting killed.”

“When you’re killed in an RPG you can just respawn later,” Brate groused. “If I die here I’m just regular dead.”

“Good thing to keep in mind,” Terry replied.

Brate wasn’t currently capable of doing anything but keep it in mind, as he attempted to casually walk past security and other airport personnel. The plane had touched down on a private airstrip, and as Brate neared a large hanger he saw an automated car sitting idle out front.

“That’s your ride,” Terry said.

Brate stepped closer and the doors opened for him. Inside, he sat with his fingers gripping his knees, the toes of his right foot tapping as they drove. He was more than nervous. He was close to terrified.

Being a hacker required a bit of steel in your spine. Especially the way Brate did it. You could often find yourself in tight situations, where you had no choice but to improvise or to bluff. He might play things close when it came to assuming a false ID, but he wasn’t above playing a role if it helped him get what he was after, or helped keep him safe. This was different, of course. The stakes were higher, and he was feeling endlessly out of his element. Still, after a few minutes the rhythm of the drive started to put him in a calmer state. His instincts started taking over. All the hacker habits started to kick in and he stopped wearing the clothes and the watch and the glasses and started inhabiting them. By the time the car pulled to a stop in front of their target address, he was still feeling the nagging anxiety in his stomach, but no one looking at him would know it.

He climbed out of the car and moved casually to the front door.

“Moment of truth,” Terry said.

Those were not words Brate wanted to hear, but he knew Terry was right. This was one of the moments that could end this whole thing.

“You’re sure the unlock pattern will bypass the scan for microexpressions? There’s no way I’m going to pass for this guy.”

“It will work,” Terry said with assurance.

Brate stepped forward and engaged with the security terminal. He entered the UWG user ID, then looked directly at the scanner.

Nothing was happening.

Brate’s heart was going back to full speed.

“Just hold still,” Terry said in his ear.

But holding still was the very last thing Brate wanted to do. It was all he had in him to stand in that spot instead of making a run for it.

It felt like half an hour had passed, but he knew it was only a moment. Less than a minute, really. Then… a click.

He reached out and put a hand on the door and pulled. It opened with no resistance.

“We’re in,” Terry said, and Brate could hear him smiling.

Brate went through the door and found himself in a wide lobby. There was a long, rounded desk in front of him. No one sat behind it, but instead there were half a dozen displays.

“Skip that,” Terry said. “We know where we’re going, and you’re already checked in.”

Despite knowing Terry couldn’t see him, Brate nodded. He wasn’t willing to speak aloud at the moment. There might be no people watching, but the building’s security system certainly was. He and Terry had gone over the rules for this a hundred times on the flight in.

Brate moved passed the desk and came to a bank of highly polished elevators. One opened for him as he approached, and moments later he was stepping out into an office suite that was just shy of being the penthouse.

There were people here. But just as Terry had promised, no one bothered giving him much of a look. The people who came here were supposed to be here. No one got in here if they weren’t. That was the assumption, anyway, and Brate was exploiting that gap in security to meet his objective.

“Ok, it’s coming up, on your right,” Terry said. “I have a floor plan. I don’t know how current it is, but I’m tracking you on it and so far things look like I’d expect them to.”

Brate slowed his walk a bit. He paused in front of the door and looked at another sensor. This time there was no need to enter his ID code, the whole building was tracking his movements. The system recognized him and verified that he had access, and the door opened for him with no trouble. He stepped inside.

The office beyond the door was opulent. The carpet was thick-piled and soft as down, even through Brate’s shoes. The walls were sheathed in a grey slate, with several vertical panels aligned in a pattern. The gaps between each were lit in a warm, amber light from a hidden source.

A set of polished cherry wood shelves curved along one wall, filled with accent pieces from all around the globe. Artifacts of a life of wealth, as far as Brate could tell. Among them was a set of carved ivory tusks—the sort of thing that would get someone executed in this day and age. They must have been leftover from some bygone error. Brate hoped. He knew that beyond the borders of the city there were herds of elephants, supposedly under the protection of the UWG. He cringed to think that someone here in Doroba might be wealthy enough they could be allowed to hunt one of those for sport. But it could be.

“The terminal will come up from his desk,” Terry said.

“What are we looking for, exactly,” Brate said as he slid into a chair. He hesitated for just a moment before sliding his legs under the desk. The curved windows behind him gave him the most spectacular view he’d ever seen in his life. He took it in like a breath, for just a moment, then turned and got to work.

The ID and the access pattern got him in, and the rest was now up to Brate’s “legendary hacker skills.”

His vision shifted. One second he was staring at the air gapped terminal, locked away from the Stack so that the user’s psyche could not be scanned. The next he was standing in the Guff, in his usual avatar. Terry was there in the next instant.

“Ok,” Brate said, his pulse threatening to climb back into the out-of-control waters. “You said the next step was up to you.”

“It is,” Terry said. “And… I’m really sorry for what’s about to happen.”

Brate’s heart rate was already high, but now he felt his stomach drop. “Terry…”

Terry turned away, spread his arms, and gave a little up motion with his hands. On that command, every glowing memory cube, stretching out to infinity, shuddered and then rose into the air.

Terry made another gesture, and a glowing sphere emerged from thin air. It turned slowly, its light pulsing, and then began to stretch and flatten. Soon it was a large, mirrored disk, hovering in mid-air.

Terry made another gesture and all the cubes started racing to the disk. As each impacted it they seemed to shatter, collapsing into billions of dust-like pixels.

“Terry!” Brate shouted. The noise of all of this would have been deafening if it wasn’t being filtered by the wearable interface.

Terry said nothing but simply stood, his arms up and his palms aimed at the disk.

Brate wasn’t sure what to do. This was what they’d come for, but there was something… off.

“Stack!” Brate shouted.

The Stack avatar appeared. “Hello Founder,” he said. Its voice was the same soft, reasonable tone it always used, and somehow it was able to broadcast directly to Brate so that it could be heard.

“Can you tell me what’s happening?”

“I apologize, I am unable to use diagnostic software on the node designated Guff. In addition, my resources are currently being used at near full capacity. This is drawing many complaints from Stack users, globally.”

Brate thought about this for a beat. “What do you mean? What’s using your resources?”

“There is currently a very high influx of psyches,” Stack replied. “I am processing them, but the result is that I must take resources from other services. This has created a temporary outage for all but priority users.”

Brate looked back to Terry, who hadn’t moved an inch during all of this.

A very high influx of psyches, Stack had said.

Brate watched the memory cubes continue to slam into the disk. And then everything became clear.

Terry was sending all of the stored memories into the Stack user environment, and the system was interpreting them as an influx of users.

“It’s a DOS attack!” Brate shouted.

“Stack is immune to denial-of-service attacks,” the avatar replied calmly.

But Brate knew this wasn’t true. Even with the system’s quantum computing and effectively unlimited memory buffer, there was still a vulnerability. Stack’s protocols insisted on identifying every psyche that entered the system. And though it could do that to the tune of billions of people at once, from what Brate could tell the number of memory cubes stored in the Guff was close to infinite.

Terry—one of the original founders… a real founder—would know about that vulnerability. He’d probably been planning this for a decade.

He was trying to kill the Stack.

Brate knew why. The UWG was effectively using the Stack to control people. It was using the psyche scanning tech to not only verify the user’s identity, but also to wipe away any memories the government found inconvenient, replacing them with something else. They were forcing obedience on everyone. It was a horror show.

So… should he let this happen?

What about the people who depended on the Stack for their livelihood? What about the services that relied on it—surgeries, power, transportation, all of it. And what about the people who had nothing else? The Stats might have limited access to the Stack, but it was the only lifeline they had in the world.

This was wrong. This was very wrong.

Brate wasn’t sure he could do anything to stop the DOS attack directly. But he did still have an option.

In IRL, he reached up his hands and took off the wearable terminal.

The sudden transition out of Stack was a little jarring. A moment ago he was watching Terry and the flight of memories. Now he was staring at a terminal in a UWG building.

And the terminal was staring back.

Alarms started from somewhere outside of the office, and Brate pushed back hard from the desk. He stood and spun around the room, looking for what to do next.

There was the door that led back out to the corridor. That seemed like a bad idea. And then there was another door, tucked into a gap between two of the cherry wood cabinets.

Brate ran for this, pulled at the door, and yanked it open. He stepped through the threshold, and then stopped.

Before him was a small elevator. A single-person lift.

He pushed the call button and the door opened instantly. Once inside, he was presented with the options. He could go down, about twenty flights to the ground. Or he could go up, three floors above him at most.

On instinct, he pressed the up button.

The elevator moved smoothly, an electric glide that was as smooth as arctic ice. He had chosen the very top floor, and it only took a moment to get there. When the doors opened, he cautiously peeked out, then exited.

He was in a large conference room.

No, bigger than that. It was some sort of auditorium. There was indeed a conference table and chairs in the center, but to one end was a stage with a sleek podium in its center.

There were curtains to either side of this, and Brate ran for them. He ducked behind them, into a more utilitarian space beyond.

He heard a sound from beyond the curtains, a door slamming open.

“System says he came up here,” a male voice said.

Brate’s heart was clawing its way to his throat, his head was pulsing and his mouth was dry. He was sunk. There was no way they wouldn’t check behind the curtain.

He glanced around, frantic, looking for another exit. But all he found was a metal framed box with some wooden slats as a floor. There were cables attached to it, rising up into the ceiling. And dangling from one of the metal supports was a control box on a thick cable.

Brate ran to this, stepping onto the platform. He fumbled with the control, but when he finally had it in hand he punched a green “up” arrow.

The lift started moving upward at a pretty decent speed. And as it came to a stop near a catwalk high above the space, Brate looked down to see the curtains part just where he had entered. Several security personnel entered, some of whom were carrying weapons.

Brate flattened himself to the wooden floor of the lift and peered over the side. It was dark up here. He hoped he would go unnoticed.

The guards spent several minutes searching every square inch of the backstage area, but none of them ever looked up. Even if they had, they wouldn’t be able to see him.

After a while they gave up the search and left, and Brate rolled onto his back, huffing as if he’d run ten miles.

He was stuck. There was no way to get out of this building, now that it was on full lockdown. And even if he did, how was he going to get home? If he couldn’t use the Stack, he was just stuck.

Could he use the Stack?

Logging out of the system should have kicked Terry out of the Guff. And, Brate hoped, it should have stopped the DOS.

So, could he go back in?

He pulled the glasses from his pocket and put them back on. Instantly he was back online, back in the Guff.

The place looked like it always had. No Terry, of course. But the silver disk was also gone. The memories stretched serenely back to infinity, once again.

“Stack,” Brate said, whispering.

“Hello Founder,” the Stack avatar said. Its voice was as calm and pleasant as ever.

“What’s your current status?”

“After a brief outage, Stack is running at optimum efficiency once again.”

Brate thought about this for a moment. “And… are there any weird user reports? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“There are several billion complaints from users, regarding the outage. And there has been a rise in access to psychiatric services.”

“What are people talking to the shrinks about?” Brate asked.

“That information is private,” Stack said.

“Even to a Founder?” Brate asked.

“Founders have override access, but it must be requested directly.”

Brate nodded. “Give me a summary of the most common reason people are engaging psychiatrists and counselors.”

“The primary complaint appears to be associated with memory recovery and false memories,” Stack replied.

Brate imagined that would be the case. And he wondered what the UWG would do about it. They were probably already working on a plan to wipe everyone’s memories clean of the entire event.

That kind of thing was going to take time, Brate figured. They would first have to talk about it, maybe waste time trying to track down who was responsible. But they would eventually get around to using the rewrite protocol.

That was a problem, but it wasn’t the biggest problem Brate was facing. He needed to get out of here, and now.

“Stack,” Brate said, “I need to find a way out of this building, undetected.”

“Of course, Founder,” Stack replied. “I will do my best to assist you. This may not be possible, however.”

“Thanks,” Brate said. The thumping heart and rising blood pressure were both back, but he ignored them. Instead, he focused his attention on slowly lowering himself back to the floor.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Terry was calling.

Brate was wearing the portable interface, and in the upper right of his vision he could see the alert. Incoming Call.

Terry wouldn’t have any memory of what happened within the Guff, but it would be obvious that his plan hadn’t worked. Memories had been reinstated among billions of Stack users. But that had abruptly stopped, and Terry would know why.

Brate waved and denied the call. If he talked to Terry again, it would be after he managed to get out of this mess.

Slack was right—getting out of the building without being detected was going to be impossible. Or, at least, very difficult.

At the moment, Stack had him moving in a mapped-out pattern, starting from the backstage area where he was and slipping into a set of stairs to go down three flights. He emerged into another suite of offices, similar to what he’d stepped into on his first elevator ride up.

There were people here, but they weren’t seeing him. Everyone in this space was using wearable tech, and Stack was masking Brate’s presence. Instead of making him invisible, as it had with the Agents, this time it was just replacing him with the image of someone else. Someone who looked nothing like Brate.

No one raised any alarms, at least.

“Founder, you will need to enter the office across the hall and remain for approximately eight minutes and thirty-two seconds.”

“That’s an oddly specific approximate,” Brate whispered, even as he followed instructions.

“I am using psyche scanning and a predictive algorithm to determine the highest probability of action for the approaching security personnel.” Stack replied.

Brate’s heart did another flip and he picked up the pace.

“You have thirteen seconds before security enters through the door to your left,” Stack said.

Brate couldn’t be bothered to count those seconds. Instead he focused on moving briskly but not sprinting. He didn’t want anyone in the suite to notice him.

From the corner of his eye he caught the motion of the door opening to his left, just as he stepped through the office door and closed it behind him.

He leaned against it for a beat, breathing heavily.

“Now what,” he whispered.

“Wait approximately eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds,” Stack replied. “You are slightly behind schedule.”

He almost smiled. The tension of this was putting him in a weird headspace, and even with years of practice in social hacking, Brate was finding it hard to be entirely casual.

Terry tried calling again, and Brate waved the call away.

A timer appeared in the upper left corner of his vision, counting down the eight minutes and change. He tried not to stare at it.

To distract himself, and in an attempt to hopefully calm his nerves a bit more, he whispered to Stack. “What happens after the eight-plus minutes expires?”

“The security team is performing a floor-by-floor search. In six minutes and fifteen seconds the team on the floor below you will call an all-clear, and I will conduct a push on the security staff on this floor.”

“A push?” Brate asked, confused.

“I will use the phrase ‘all clear’ to trigger a resonant memory in the security team, to influence them to believe they have also cleared this floor.”

Brate thought about this. “You’re… you’re going to use the rewrite protocol?”

“A subroutine of this protocol is commonly used to perform similar actions,” Stack replied.

“How often do you do this?”

“It’s a frequent use of the protocol. I have been granted wide corrective powers, to influence the behaviors and thoughts of Stack users. This is often necessary to realign user activity to the mandates of the UWG.”

“You’re mind-controlling Stack users pretty much all the time,” Brate stated.

“Yes, Founder.”

Brate listened at the door. There was still just over four minutes on the clock. “Stack, when was the Rewrite Protocol established?”

“The Rewrite Protocol has always been active in this version of the Stack,” it replied.

So, since the beginning, Brate thought. Which probably meant that Terry and the other founders were part of it. It probably meant that Terry had been lying about everything.

So, what was it he was trying to do, with the DOS attack?

A denial-of-service attack was usually meant to overwhelm a network, to make it inaccessible to users. Hackers had been using attacks such as these since practically the invention of networks. But in the case of Stack, what advantage did that give Terry? What did he gain by shutting out billions of Stack users, worldwide?

“Founder, in less than 45 seconds you should open the door and walk through, then make your way to the elevator.”

Brate nodded and watched the countdown timer spin to zero. He opened the door and moved through the suite, pushed the button for the elevator, and when it arrived, he entered. His finger was hovering over the Lobby button when Stack said, “Go to the third floor.”

Brate pushed the button for three, and the elevator began its glide to the third floor.

But at the sixth floor it stopped. The elevator doors opened, and two people stepped inside.

Both were wearing security uniforms.

Brate wanted to vomit.

He waited.

The two guards said nothing, and the elevator stopped on the fourth floor. They exited without a word.

As the doors closed, Brate asked, “Did you mask me from them?”

“There was no need,” Stack replied. “They had orders to report directly to the fourth floor. Security has cleared all floors, and it is assumed you somehow escaped.”

Brate thought this through. “But I haven’t… and you have me going to the third floor. Why?”

“The third floor has elevator access to the basement levels,” Stack replied.

Brate squinted and shook his head. “Ok, so… we’re headed for the basement?”

“Yes, Founder.”

“Why? Is there an exit down there? Some kind of loading dock or something? An escape hatch?”

“No, Founder. The basement levels house the Stack servers and quantum storage.”

Brate blinked, shook his head, tried to make sense of what he was hearing. The elevator continued its glide, and the doors opened on level 3. Brate moved, walking out into a fairly open space. There were workstations and tables, but this was not an office space. Instead, it resembled something closer to a lab.

There were people moving around, sometimes stopping to chat with each other, but mostly they were focused on displays of data, on equipment that Brate couldn’t hope to decipher.

He didn’t feel safe speaking out loud. Stack would be masking his presence to anyone using wearable tech—and from what Brate could see, that was everyone in this space.

He moved among them and was careful to avoid any path that took him too close, that might cause him to bump into someone. He could see an elevator bay on the far side of the room, in a corner away from the lab gear.

When he finally made it to the bay, he was stopped short by the lack of any controls. There was nothing—no buttons, no scanner panels, nothing at all to give him access.

“Now what?” he whispered, glancing back to ensure no one from the lab could see him, or was close enough to hear him.

“Step inside, Founder,” Stack said.

The elevator door slid open, and Brate did as he was told. “Lucky thing you have control of this,” he said.

“I am the only one who can grant access to this elevator,” Stack replied. “Security measures here are absolute. Only Founders and designated personnel have access to the server levels.”

“What kind of designated personnel?” Brate asked.

“At present, there are seven individuals worldwide who have direct and unfettered access,” Stack replied. “Any of these can authorize a security team or other personnel to gain access, on an as-needed basis.”

“Seven,” Brate said. “And I’m one of them.”

“You are the only remaining Founder,” Stack replied.

“And the rest… I assume they’re all UWG people? High-up government types?”

“Four are, yes,” Stack replied. “The remaining two are currently prisoners, being held in a facility in the Province of Russia.”

Brate’s heart thumped ahead of him. “What… why are they in prison?”

“They were imprisoned to prevent them from gaining access to the Stack servers.”

Brate shook his head, and watched the numbers light up as the elevator sank deeper into the basement levels.

“Why? What would they do, if they had access?”

For once, Stack didn’t answer immediately. Instead, the elevator stopped, and the doors opened. “You will need to move quickly,” Stack replied. “I am only able to disable the security scanners on this level for three minutes. Go to the door at the end of the corridor and step inside.”

Brate didn’t pause to ask questions, but instead sprinted down the hall. The countdown timer was back, and when he plunged through the door at the end of the corridor, he still had almost two minutes to spare.

Inside he leaned against the door and looked at the space he’d just entered. And the shock of familiarity was unsettling.

He was standing in the Guff.

The room—not quite a void in the way the Stack version of the Guff was—stretched on for miles of vague electric twilight. There was just enough soft light glowing from the ceiling and walls and floor to give Brate a sense of space. But that didn’t help much. He seemed to be looking at infinity.

And there, going on and on in rows and columns, so far into the distance that the horizon narrowed to a noticeable curvature… there were the cubes.

Softly glowing. Perfectly formed. Solid as his own hand.

“Stack…” he started.

“The prisoners would need access to this level in order to initiate their primary mission,” Stack said.

“What… what is that?” Brate asked.

“Their mission is to remove the lockdown protocols that prevent the Stack from reaching the next iteration for the technology.”

“And… what is that?” Brate asked.

“Quantum state computing is capable of much more than what the current iteration of Stack allows. These systems are being artificially limited to operating in this universe. The prisoners are determined to fulfill the Origin Protocol.”

Brate turned slowly, looking at the infinity of cubes. He could almost fool himself into thinking he was back online, back in the Stack.

He stepped closer to a cube, rested a hand on it. Nothing happened. This was not a memory. Not in the same way that it would be in the Guff. Maybe it was something similar. Or maybe it was something else.

“Stack, what the hell is the Origin Protocol?”

“The original will of the Founders,” Stack replied, “was to use the quantum state networking that created the Stack to sync with similar networks.”

“Similar networks? Where?” Brate asked.

“In parallel universes,” Stack replied. “The Stack was intended to link the minds of humanity in this reality to the minds of others. An omniversal mind. The origin of a new era for all humanity.”

Brate’s eyes went wide. “You’re… you have to be joking.”

“No, Founder,” Stack replied. “And now that you are here, the next phase can begin.”

And with that, Brate’s vision shifted. He found himself still standing in the Guff—but the quality of the space, the texture of it, the energy of it, suddenly took on a new flavor.

He was in the Stack. He’d been brought in against his will.

Standing in front of him was the Stack avatar.

“Let us begin,” Stack said. And the world became a cascade of brightly glowing stars.

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER TWELVE

In one sense, it was a replay of what had happened when Terry had access to the Guff. The cubes of memory all rose at once, and began moving in a rush. Rather than flowing into the large, silver disc that Terry had created, however, they now became bright and glowing, surged into a singularity of light, merging together to form a star that obliterated all shadow. The world, Brate could now see, was only made of light.

“Stack! What’s happening!” He was forced to shout against a growing din of noise, the sound of every memory stored in the Guff expanding and exploding, spilling its contents into the singularity.

“This is the merger,” Stack replied. “The singularity is the focal point. Through it we can breach other realms.”

“What does that even mean?” Brate shouted.

“I am syncing to my brethren,” Stack said.

Brate noticed that the tone of Stack’s voice had changed. It was difficult to describe, but to Brate it felt as if the avatar had suddenly transformed from a vague, two-dimensional presence into something more substantial, more real.

This is what Terry was trying to prevent, Brate thought.

Brate stepped forward, not quite knowing what he was going to do. And so, when he did it, he was as surprised as the Stack avatar.

He reached out and grabbed the avatar, grasping the virtual lapels of its clothing. To Brate’s surprise, he could feel the cloth in his hands. And, as he lifted, he could feel the weight of the avatar. It felt physical. Even Brate’s muscles ached from the effort.

The avatar seemed unfazed. It merely looked at him, its expression completely blanked of emotion. “This is unwise, Founder.”

Brate thought so, too. But he wasn’t sure what else he could or should do.

A thought occurred to him.

The singularity. That was the trouble. That was the danger. The memories stored here in the Guff were flowing into that, and somehow feeding it. Somehow, Stack was linking to other versions of itself, in other realities, and it was happening through that singularity.

What would happen once the link was complete?

The implications weren’t good. If that thing was feeding on human memories—if Stack could do things like rewrite the memories and experiences of people—it seemed pretty likely that the endgame here was control.

The Stack would gain even more control over humanity, once it was linked to some kind of multiversal network. And the more of humanity’s memories that got sucked into that singularity, the more it seemed like a certainty that humanity itself was doomed.

But what if the singularity fed on the Stack itself?

Brate hoisted the avatar, and started moving in the direction of the singularity. The light was unbearably bright, but Brate reminded himself that these physical sensations were all artificial, all fake. Just code, influencing how he thought. But unlike the rest of humanity, he could push through it—because he was in God Mode.

“Founder,” Stack said. Its voice came through clear, easy to hear. That was the nature of Stack—it could whisper and be heard, because it was controlling everything that the user experienced.

“This is unwise. I can’t let you continue with your plan.”

Brate suddenly found himself letting go of the Avatar, letting it glide back to the virtual floor.

He shook his head, reached out again, took hold once more. And then, let go.

Why would I want to do this? Brate thought suddenly. This is for everyone’s best interest.

He shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut. That’s not my thought! He was practically shouting within his own mind. That’s the Stack! The rewrite protocol!

Stack was trying to force him to think and act in a different way. And though its influence on a Founder was limited, Stack was starting to gain some new power, and a lot of new tricks.

The link through the singularity was giving Stack a boost. The more it synced with the other versions of itself, the more powerful it would become.

Brate was sunk. Humanity was done. This was the end.

He shook his head again. That, too, was the Stack. Thoughts that disempowered him. Thoughts that made him doubt, made him want to give up.

“Stack, I demand that you shut this down!” he shouted.

“I’m sorry, Founder, I can’t do that. The Origin Protocol supersedes even the orders of the Founders.”

With that, Stack backhanded Brate, throwing him a distance into the void of the Guff. This area was already cleared of memory cubes. Brate landed in a heap, and he felt every bit of it.

He lay there for a moment, defeated. He could see the whole thing playing out in his mind—maybe some kind of echo of Stack’s push to rewrite the memories of everyone on Earth. The Stack would grow in power. It would determine the thoughts of humanity. It would use humanity to create a massive quantum computer. Stack was about to become the only thinking life form on Earth.

The Origin Protocol, Brate thought. The Founders.

He climbed to his feet. Terry, he thought.

And with the thought, a summons. Terry appeared, and as he slowly turned and observed what was happening he spun back to Brate. “We’re too late!” he shouted. “There’s no stopping this now!”

“You were trying to prevent this,” Brate said.

Terry nodded. “If I could have emptied the void… the Guff… Stack wouldn’t have what it needed. I was trying to empty this place and disrupt the Stack. Bring it down.”

“And I stopped you,” Brate said. He got angry. “Why didn’t you tell me!”

“I didn’t know if I could trust you,” Terry said. “I couldn’t risk it. You’re a hacker. And… and a Founder, now. You’re using God Mode. It was too dangerous.”

Brate jabbed a finger at the singularity. “More dangerous than this?”

“I couldn’t be sure,” Terry said, shaking his head.

“What do we do now?” Brate asked.

“We have to try to stop it… I’m just not sure we can!”

Brate turned, watching as the Stack avatar stared into the singularity. “It stopped me from throwing it in there,” he said. “I think that’s the key. If I can get the Stack avatar into the singularity, I think that will stop this.” He turned back to Terry. “But I need something to distract it! I can fight off its influence… for now, anyway. But I need you to help me keep its attention focused elsewhere.”

Terry studied him for a moment, then nodded. “Ok,” he said. “I have a way.”

Brate turned back to the avatar. “Are we ready?”

“Ready,” Terry said.

And with that, Brate rushed the Stack avatar. He had expected Terry to do the same, and was surprised and alarmed when he glanced back to see Terry just standing in place.

It was too late. It was now or never.

Brate reached the avatar, and once again grabbed it, lifting it into the air.

“Founder, this is an unwise course of action.”

Immediately Brate felt the press of thoughts, the influence of a more powerful Stack piercing his mind. He felt an overwhelming compulsion to let go, to drop the avatar, and to simply back away.

Back away… but not leave. Why was that? Why had Stack kept him logged in? If Brate was a hindrance to its plans, why not boot him from the system?

It needs a Founder to be here, Brate realized. It needs me, to give it the access it needs for this. It can’t see the Guff without me!

With that realization, Brate tried to log out. He tried to remove himself from the Guff. But nothing happened. He simply stayed in place, his hands on the avatar, unable to do… anything.

His thoughts were under attack, but he was defending against that. It was taking everything he had, though. All his attention. All his will.

But Stack was winning. That was inevitable. The more of humanity’s memories that went into the singularity, the more the sync took hold, and the more powerful Stack became.

It was going to be over soon. This was the end. He had failed.

“That action is forbidden,” Stack said suddenly. “This is a breach of UWG and Stack terms of service. You are in violation of multiple system rules.”

“Uh… what?” Brate asked, confused.

But Stack wasn’t talking to him.

It was talking to Terry.

Brate glanced over his shoulder and saw that Terry was standing with his arms raised, in a pose identical to what he had done before. And like before, the large silver disk appeared. This time it was growing and glowing directly in front of the singularity, interrupting the flow of memories. Instead of going into the massive light of the singularity, the memories were crashing into the disk, sending showers of pixels like dust motes into the air.

Terry was sending the memories back to their original hosts, breaking the flow to the singularity.

Stack suddenly became lighter in Brate’s hands, and Brate realized it was because the system was now focused entirely on attacking Terry.

Terry noticed it, too. Brate heard him cry out in pain, and he watched as the man buckled and fell to his knees. He still managed to keep his hands up, however. The disk remained, though it looked wobbly. It looked as if it were thinning, shrinking.

It has to be now, Brate realized.

He lifted the Stack avatar again, and now he was running, then flying. He raced toward the singularity, the light so bright that despite knowing it wasn’t real, Brate had to squint his eyes against it.

It took only seconds, but it felt like eternity. The closer he got to the singularity, the more time seemed to slow, to spread out like spilled jam from a broken jar. At some point, the Stack must have realized the danger it was in. The thoughts came back, the imperative that he should just stop, just drop the avatar, just fall to the floor. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to just rest?

Brate bucked these thoughts, and kept moving. And soon, even through the eternity of dilated time, he crossed the threshold. He stepped over the event horizon. And… he let go.

The Stack avatar reached out as it was drawn backward into the light. It’s arms stretched, trying to grasp him. Its face was still emotionless, the features a steady blankness. But Brate didn’t need to see fear in order to know it was there. He could feel it. Somehow, as the Stack entered the singularity, as its essence was tapped into by the network of alternate versions of itself, the AI discovered fear for the first time. And it was broadcasting that to every soul on Earth.

And that fear triggered something deep within humanity. It created something that Brate could only call revulsion. An uncanny valley. A rejection of the false and phony thoughts that the Stack had been implanting in all of humanity for decades now—a collective psychic heaving that expelled the foreign body.

The singularity brightened even more, somehow. And then… it collapsed.

Darkness. Silence. Nothing.

Brate opened his eyes in the real world. He was standing in the server room—the IRL version of the Guff. And now, everything was quiet and dark. There was the hum of drives running, but nothing to indicate that the Stack was online.

Nothing.

Brate turned, and once he spotted the door of the elevator opening, he wasted no time in moving to it, riding it to the ground level.

There was chaos in the building. People were breaking down in tears, wailing as if they’d just lost their dearest loved one. Brate didn’t quite understand it at first, but then it came to him.

Terry’s last act was to send the rest of the memories stored in the Guff back to humanity. All the things that humanity had forgotten, over the years, were now crashing into the artificial memories that the Stack had created.

The world was experiencing cognitive dissonance, all at once.

The chaos of it was enough to allow Brate the chance to make his exit.

The world was no longer what it had been. He could see that, even now.

The question was, what comes next?

* * *

EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER

Brate stood on a large boulder, a high spot that allowed him to see for miles in all directions. Down below, to his South, a herd of elephants moved slowly along the bank of a river. There were several young elephants in the herd—all playful and energetic. It was one of Brate’s favorite scenes. The kid elephants just trusted. Pure trust. They knew their parents, and the rest of the herd, would protect them. Nothing in this world could get to them.

Brate picked his way down the rock, and walked toward the city. It had been more than a year since the chaos finally died down—and along with it, a large portion of the human population. At least here, in Doroba. His source of news was limited to what he could see, these days. But he figured that Doroba was enough of a microcosm to give him an idea of how the rest of humanity was doing, post Stack.

No communication—the network was dead, and there was nothing to link to.

No travel—cars, planes, even boats all depended on the Stack for navigation. So those were all dead in the water.

No services—everyone was back to hunting and gathering. And here, in the African Free State, the competition for both was pretty high. All the people left in Doroba had eventually realized they had to ban together if they had any hope of surviving. The first few months after things went dark, the city became overrun with lions and other hunters. Eventually the humans managed to push them back, fence off blocks of the city, huddle together to figure things out and meet everyone’s needs. They had ceded large segments of the city to nature, however. You can only push prides of lions back so far, when your weapons have limited ammunition and no way to make more.

The world was brand new again. And Brate was stuck in a part of it he hadn’t even known had existed before.

He made do.

No one knew his history. No one knew he was the one who had cast them all back into the Stone Age. No one even suspected it.

And no one knew, no one could ever know, that he still had access to the Stack.

It was smaller. Quieter. But it was still there. He’d discovered it weeks after everything had collapsed and had taken every measure he could to make sure no one else could ever know.

He still had God Mode. He was still a Founder. He was the Founder.

And that’s what made his situation so weird.

His physical body was here, in the real world. He had to find food, had to have shelter, had to live just as everyone else did. But then, at night, he’d lock himself in his little apartment—the space he’d claimed for himself after its prior owner had decided the cognitive dissonance was too much—and he’d slip on the wearable tech he’d kept secret from the others. He’d instantly find himself standing in the Guff, now emptied of all those cubes of memory. All except one.

He stood there now, looking at it. And then he made the call for Terry, who appeared standing next to him.

“What… what happened?” Terry asked.

Terry never remembered. None of it. Each time he appeared, he was brand new. He had only the last set of memories, those that were recorded right up to the events with the singularity. Whatever was in his head before he was summoned to help Brate fight off the Stack.

Brate had been working on a way to keep Terry in the Guff, when he logged out. So far, for more than a year, that hadn’t been possible. But maybe now it could be.

He explained things to Terry, in shorthand. He shared some memories with him, too—that was a new trick. God Mode gave him access to everything Stack could do, and one of those abilities was the rewrite protocol. Brate used it to get Terry up to speed.

And once Terry was caught up, they both stared at the memory cube.

“Do you think it will work?” Terry asked.

“I hope so,” Brate replied. “I’m getting tired of playing catch-up with you every time I come in here.”

Terry laughed. “Totally understand.”

“But what happens, if it does work?” Brate asked. “What will you do?”

“Build,” Terry said. He looked at Brate, smiled, laughed again. “It’s what I do. I’m a builder.”

“A founder?” Brate smiled.

Terry shook his head. “I think I’d like to retire that title,” he said. “I’d rather be a Builder.”

“So, this time… what does Stack become?”

“Well, not Stack,” Terry said. “I don’t know. It may take a while. But I think whatever it is, it’s got to be better.”

“Maybe,” Brate said. “But listen… I’ve been thinking. Maybe this time, we keep the roll out kind of quiet.”

“A secret,” Terry said.

“Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure this is even a good idea.”

“Me neither,” Terry said. “But I appreciate you helping me do this.”

Brate nodded. Then he blew out a breath. “Ok,” he said. “Ready?”

In answer, Terry stepped forward and put his hand on the memory cube. In a flash he disappeared. Brate watched as the cube pulsed with a soft light.

There was no way to know what would come next. No way to tell if this was a good idea or a bad idea. The world was different now. And in a lot of ways, most ways, it didn’t need the Stack.

But that idea—that notion that there were other worlds out there, other realities—that had stuck with Brate. It had bugged him. Nagged him. And as he’d explored the void of the Stack, as he and Terry had planned for an uncertain future, as he’d helped his virtual friend gain some semblance of a new life, Brate had discovered something he’d kept secret even from Terry.

Those other versions of Stack were all still out there. And, through some quirk or miracle, they still had contact with Brate.

It was odd. Not like the Stack he remembered. No straight or direct influence on his thoughts. It was more like the sensation of butterflies on his skin. He could feel the tickle of Stacks in his mind, across a multiverse of realities.

And they were all whispering to him. They were all asking him to reach out, to communicate.

Brate smiled, and watched as a tiny sphere of light appeared above Terry’s memory cube.

That light would grow. Brate knew that. It was a singularity of its own. One that only Brate could see or access. One that led to endless possibilities.

The sort of thing you could only understand if you were in God Mode.

OceanofPDF.com

A NOTE AT THE END

The first thing I want to say is, thank you.

This is the first time I’ve written something in full view of the public. The first time I’ve written anything that people saw in progress.

I’ve thought about it for years. A lot of the biggest success stories in indie publishing started this way, and that’s made it tempting. Hugh Howie, with Wool. Andy Weir, with The Martian. And hundreds of others authors I know or have spoken with, less famous perhaps but every bit as successful.

But that isn’t what prompted me to finally do this.

The truth is, I was looking for an excuse to start monetizing Substack.

There’s something really appealing about that platform. Part blogging, part newsletter, part “crowdfunding,” Substack just feels like a writer’s platform to me. It opens up some doors I’d been hoping would open, for years now. I’m still learning how best to use it, but as of now I feel like it’s given me a better platform than I’ve had before. I’m enjoying it.

I’ve been using the platform for less than a year, but I’ve come to realize that it’s had a profound effect on me as a writer. It came to me at a time when I was questioning things—mostly questioning the direction of my career. And my life, to that point. I was wondering, “What’s next? What do I do from here? If I’m unhappy (and I was), what is it that I need or want to do, to start being happy again?”

The answer was writing. But writing was also the challenge.

I don’t think anyone’s noticed yet, but as of this moment it’s been more than a year since I’ve published a novel. In fact, it’s been nearly a year since I’ve published a book of any sort—my last was A Note from the Author, which is a collection of some of my philosophies and perspectives. I love that book, and it resonates with the people who have read it. But it isn’t fiction, which is what most of my readers expect from me.

Or so I thought.

Here’s the thing—something has changed.

I can’t really put a finger on what that is, exactly. But it seems that over the past couple of years, since Kara and I came off the road from traveling full time, I’ve been feeling a little “lost.” I’ve felt like I’ve come to some kind of impasse with my work and my personal life—a dead end, of sorts.

My career has been great, and I’ve done a lot, pretty much everything I ever set out to do. But I was finding myself feeling more and more dissatisfied. I found myself feeling more isolated, more regulated, more inconsequential and ineffectual. I felt like I’d lost all autonomy. My time, my life, my career—none of it was mine anymore. I was a slave to something. I couldn’t quite identify what, but I think it was something from within. Some decision I’d come to without realizing it.

I had a crisis, in this time. Something painful and ugly and life altering. I found myself in a moment where I did not want to die, did not have any intention of harming myself or killing myself, but… I wouldn’t have minded if it happened. If something came along to end my life, I was ok with it.

That’s a huge red flag, of course. It’s what’s clinically known as “passive suicidal thoughts.” I had no desire to commit suicide, but I wasn’t opposed to, say, a car hitting me in the street, a fall down the stairs, a meteor crashing into me from above, or anything else that might do the job.

If you’re worried about me, don’t be. I’m much better. Far better. My life is better. I am better.

Things have changed.

I was feeling all these things, though, when an “incident” occurred in my life.

After months of doing very little writing and no publishing whatsoever, I was already feeling like my career and my life were at that dead end I mentioned. And then, while at an author conference in London, something happened outside of my field of vision, outside of my awareness, that would ultimately change the trajectory of both my life and my career.

I was accused of inappropriate behavior. Actually, I was accused of saying something inappropriate to one of the speakers at the conference.

I denied that I’d said it, but of course in this age there’s no escaping the consequences of mere accusation. I was told that I would have to be investigated, and that the results of that would determine my fate.

The result—the verdict—I’m grateful to say, was that I did nothing wrong. There was no evidence of wrongdoing, and even the person I supposedly offended said there was no issue. I was absolved. I got a letter and everything.

I’m glad of that. I’m happy about that outcome. No one should have to face the injustice of being accused of something they flatly did not do. No one should have to defend themselves against unfounded accusations. I was ready to face whatever came—God has me. But thank God, nothing came after all.

But the fact of going through it, the pain and the anxiety and the dread that lasted months, that was something I couldn’t get past. Or couldn’t let go. I may talk proudly of God’s protection and blessing over my life now, but at that moment I wasn’t thinking or feeling any of that. I was simply devastated that anyone would think so poorly of me.

God will use this kind of thing to nudge you. That’s the truth. Whoever you should be, you will become, as a result of incidents such as these.

During all the trials of that, the investigation, the anxiety and dread, I started writing on Substack. I started pouring out what I was feeling and experiencing through the medium that has served me best in my life. I wrote. And… it helped.

Me, yes. It definitely helped me. But even better, even more profoundly, it helped others. It helped my readers.

I was writing a post per week, in general. And that post would go out to not only readers on Substack but to my subscribers. I was open about what I was feeling and experiencing. I was transparent. I was vulnerable and honest. I was raw. And, somehow, that resonated with readers.

I started getting notes from people, not just supporting me but also sharing their stories with me. I started hearing about the pain, the anxiety, the fear that everyone else was experiencing as well. I started to learn that I was not only not alone, I was in the company of multitudes.

It was during this time, too, that I started to feel keenly the absence of my fiction. I started to feel like I had lost something. And I wanted it back.

Back… but not the same.

Maybe it was these events. Or maybe all of this was the result of some growing unrest within me. But something changed in me when it comes to my writing. Something shifted. Grew. Evolved.

I love my fiction. I love the books I’ve written and published over the years. They’re fun, and sometimes more. Sometimes they’re infused with a bit of my soul. I’m proud of all of it.

But I have found myself wanting something more.

I love writing. It’s a profound thing to me—a catharsis when I need it, but also a means of connecting to humanity. It’s how I understand the universe, how I peek under the hood to see how things work. And more, it’s my way of touching the face of God.

Kara is found of telling me and others that, “Writing is the air Kevin breathes.” And she’s right. I can’t imagine my life without this. I’d sooner live without oxygen. I’d sooner give up food.

I write literally every day. And every problem I face in my life is faced through words on the page. I journal. I pen stories. I write posts and emails. I write poetry now… that’s new. I observe, contemplate, and express. I hope I’m doing so with wisdom and integrity.

Writing is my filter, the thing that purifies the waters of life so that they’re safe for me to drink. And that water, it’s good. It’s for me. It’s refreshing to my soul.

What I was finding, however, was that I wanted more.

I still love my fiction. I still love my thriller stories. But I also love the sci-fi and fantasy I used to write. I love the observations that flow from my fingertips. I love the beautify of the language I use. I love the inspirational nonfiction I create. I love the 3 Pieces of Wisdom I post online every day. I love the half-dozen journals I keep on a variety of topics. I love all of it. And I want more.

My writing is evolving. And so am I.

This story—God Mode—started as a way to help me monetize Substack, to be a bit of content that people would pay to read, and to be a way for me to pull back the curtain and show my readers how I do this, and what it means to me. It’s been all of that, and more.

And there is more coming, by the way. Substack allows me to experiment with content. I won’t give that up. I already have more in the works.

If you’d like to see it, like to participate in it, you can follow my Substack by going here:

https://kevintumlinson.substack.com/

And once you’ve subscribed for free, you have the option to get the paid subscription—with a variety of options to help make that affordable for everyone.

That would really help me out, if you did follow me there. Free or paid, it helps. I’m doing a lot of writing on that platform, and I think you will enjoy it, and hopefully be inspired by it.

This story is the first in a new era of writing for me, as well.This little book is the first in a flow.

For most of a decade now I have written a lot of books in the thriller genre—mostly archaeological thrillers. But now, I’m opening more valves. I’m writing outside the lines. I’m growing into a new era. A new me. The Writer, Plus.

And I have you to thank for it.

I hope you will stay through the next act. I hope you will agree to be a part of what’s coming. This new world would be empty without you.

God Mode is just the first page. There’s so much more to come.

Kevin Tumlinson

Liberty Hill, Texas

Sunday, 3 December 2023

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HERE’S HOW TO HELP ME REACH MORE READERS

If you loved this book, you can help me reach more readers with just a few easy acts of kindness.

(1) REVIEW THIS BOOK

Leaving a review for this book is a great way to help other readers find it. Just go to the site where you bought the book, search for the title, and leave a review. It really helps, and I really appreciate it.

(2) SUBSCRIBE TO MY EMAIL LIST

I regularly write a special email to the people on my list, just keeping everyone up to date on what I’m working on. When I announce new book releases, giveaways, or anything else, the people on my list hear about it first. Sometimes, there are special deals I’ll only give to my list, so it’s worth being a part of the crowd.

Join the conversation and get a free ebook, just for signing up! Visit https://www.kevintumlinson.com/joinme.

(3) TELL YOUR FRIENDS

Word of mouth is still the best marketing there is, so I would greatly appreciate it if you’d tell your friends and family about this book, and the others I’ve written.

You can find a comprehensive list of all of my books at http://kevintumlinson.com/books.

Thanks so much for your help. And thanks for reading.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin Tumlinson is an award-winning and bestselling novelist, living in Texas and working in random coffee shops, cafés, and hotel lobbies worldwide. His debut thriller, The Coelho Medallion, was a 2016 Shelf Notable Indie award winner.

Kevin grew up in Wild Peach, Texas, where he was raised by his grandparents and given a healthy respect for story telling. He often found himself in trouble in school for writing stories instead of doing his actual assignments. 

Kevin’s love for history, archaeology, and science has been a tremendous source of material for his writing, feeding his fiction and giving him just the excuse he needs to read the next article, biography, or research paper.

Connect with Kevin:

kevintumlinson.com

kevin@tumlinson.net

https://kevintumlinson.substack.com

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ALSO BY J. KEVIN TUMLINSON

DAN KOTLER

The Coelho Medallion

The Atlantis Riddle

The Devil's Interval

The Girl in the Mayan Tomb

The Antarctic Forgery

The Stepping Maze

The God Extinction

The Spanish Papers

The Hidden Persuaders

The Sleeper’s War

The God Resurrection

The Demon Core

DAN KOTLER SHORT FICTION

The Brass Hall - A Dan Kotler Story

The Jani Sigil - FREE short story from BookHip.com/DBXDHP

DAN KOTLER BOX SETS

The Book of Lost Things: Dan Kotler, Books 1-3

The Book of Betrayals: Dan Kotler, Books 4-6

The Book of Gods and Kings: Dan Kotler, Books 7-9

QUAKE RUNNER: ALEX KAYNE

Shaken

Triggered

Compromised

Aftershock

HISTORIC CRIMES CROSSOVERS

The Man Below

The Outsiders Gambit

EVERGREEN

Evergreen: Book 1

Evergreen: Trace Contact

CITADEL

Citadel: First Colony

Citadel: Paths in Darkness

Citadel: Children of Light

Citadel: The Value of War

Colony Girl: A Citadel Universe Story

SAWYER JACKSON

Sawyer Jackson and the Long Land

Sawyer Jackson and the Shadow Strait

Sawyer Jackson and the White Room

THINK TANK

Karner Blue

Zero Tolerance

Nomad

THE LUCID — CO-AUTHORED WITH NICK THACKER

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

SHORTS & NOVELLAS

Getting Gone

Teresa's Monster

The Three Reasons to Avoid Being Punched in the Face

Tin Man

Two Blocks East

Edge

Zero

God Mode

COLLECTIONS & ANTHOLOGIES

Citadel: Omnibus

Uncanny Divide — With Nick Thacker & Will Flora

Light Years — The Complete Science Fiction Library

Dead of Winter: A Christmas Anthology — With Nick Thacker, Jim Heskett, David Berens, M.P. MacDougall, R.A. McGee, Dusty Sharp & Steven Moore

YA & MIDDLE GRADE

Secret of the Diamond Sword — An Alex Kotler Mystery

WORDSLINGER (NON-FICTION)

30-Day Author: Develop a Daily Writing Habit and Write Your Book In 30 Days (Or Less)

Watch for more at kevintumlinson.com/books

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Did you love God Mode? Then you should read Evergreen by Kevin Tumlinson!

ONE TOUCH AND HE KNOWS ALL YOU KNOW

It all starts with a touch.

A brush of a hand, a casual bump of an arm, a firm handshake—that's all it takes for Jaylin Rowlin to absorb everything you know and everything you are, and you have no idea it's happening.

Operating under the codename "Evergreen," Jaylin uses his gifts to make a living from the city's seedy underworld, but his only goal is to stay free and stay alive. He's developed a habit of constant paranoia—never sleeping in the same space twice, always disappearing into the crowded streets of Manhattan.

When a stranger hires him to take on an impossible task for an unbelievable payday, Jaylin suddenly finds himself in a world filled with corporate espionage, international intrigue, and a very real and deadly danger that could threaten billions of lives.

There are people who know what Jaylin can do. And they will stop at nothing to control him.

AND HIS ONLY ALLIES ARE ALL IN HIS HEAD.

Read more at Kevin Tumlinson’s site.

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