Three Strikes, and You’re Out
Speculative Fiction
The Interworks has been in business for well over a decade, but there are still bugs in the system. Glady knows the weaves and turns well as she shifts her feet across the changing landscape. Each step brings with it a bubble that alights her to the next step, like she’s climbing stairs up a high-rise, but her target is all too clear: the luminous insectoid with its pincers dripping neon venom meets the end of her guitar before she smashes its face in. The answering screech is cut off, thankfully, short.
“Well done, Glady Marxon, you have cleared the latest attribute stage. Collect your winnings at the nearest guild.”
Guild. Her lips quirk. The Interworks was once a pristine system, like something from a fantasy storybook, before the hackers came in and demolished it with mal-code of all kinds. Now, the Guild nearest to her location is like a dump strewn out of an apocalyptic scenario. And through it all is the haze of colorful streams of numbers and letters that tell her to be glad she keeps her anti-ware up to date to make sure no one can hijack her at any moment.
It happened once, and Glady vowed it would never happen again.
As she glides on streams left over from the Sweeps Season — hosted by Amazon Ultra, of course — Glady hums to herself and wonders how she would feel if the freedom of the Interworks were one day robbed from her. The truth is she doesn’t want to imagine such a future, dimming all other thoughts but the movement of her limbs through the stratos of this strange world that blends the reality of home with the necessity of how the world came to rely on the once-heralded Internet.
The Internet did strange things to people, brought out their compulsions and emotions in more skewed contempt, until micro-wars started to bleed off Web. The Interworks was created from some of that blowback as a way for people to take their aggressions elsewhere. What better way to take off the edge than to smash apart insectoids in a controlled environment. Well — controlled being before the hackers had a footing in the Interworks.
When Glady steps off-stream to meet the Guild door, she frowns to see a message in hot pink and lime green emblazoned across the door: Seize the day if you dare. She thinks it might just be a prank, something from the hackers who still masqueraded behind the scenes of things in the Interworks, but a part of her feels a chill anyway as she pushes through the door.
A rush of cold air tells her something’s wrong even before her player sensors go off. Glady ducks just as a baseball bat swings by her head. For once, she’s glad for the old interface of the over-sensitive system that allows cognition and ease of movement to go hand in hand within the Interworks controls.
“Oh, we’ve got a live one,” someone says, a whoop to a feminine voice, right before another bat goes swinging for her again. Glady jumps away, utilizing one of her last Guild gifts to hover in the air and face her attackers. A boy and a girl face her, both armed, and Glady can tell from the way they glitch in and out of view that they are far more than the typical hackers who take over Guilds for fun.
“Guess you didn’t get the memo,” the boy says, his face betraying nothing. “The Interworks mainframe has been broken into. Any minute, we’re all going to go offline anyway, so we may as well go down fighting.”
Glady wants to argue — that’s impossible, the messenger system would have alerted a breach — but then she notices something about the two standing before her. The way the glitch clings to them, their features blurring in and out of focus —
The breeze rustles her hair, and she smells something like disinfectant. She looks down at her hands wielding the black guitar she’s used as her weapon ever since the day she stepped into the Interworks. Her hands look almost transparent.
It’s not something about them — the ones who appear to be glitching — but herself?
“Are you hackers?” she asks, not knowing if the duo’s words are true but dreading them anyway. If they’re right, then she could be booted from the Interworks in moments. If that happens, then — then —
The girl’s sneer actually droops into a pout of confusion. “You really don’t know anything?”
“I’m not a hacker — ”
But then Glady’s words lodge in her throat as she finds herself halted with what feels like an electric spark. The second time it happens, it’s almost painful. She’s reminded in dizzying waves of the one time she got hijacked and the weeks it took before her interface was repaired and patched back up, ready to go. Those had been the longest days of her life.
“Please,” she finds herself begging, “please, please, I don’t want to go back — ”
But another spark lights through her body, and she feels like a magnet drawing everything in the universe rushing straight to her. The interface begins to break down, the inner sanctum of the Guild begins to dissipate from her vision, and the sterile white ceiling begins to pepper through her view.
“Glady,” a woman says, and she’s dressed like a nurse, a concerned look etched on her face, “you’ve been gone a long time. But you can’t play forever. The Interworks is just a game.”
Glady wants to spit out her protest — take me back, take me back — but she remembers that she cannot speak here. She can barely move any of her extremities. Her right leg is gone in this world — the real world, the deficient world, the world she hates.
The Interworks may have begun as the escape for everyone, but now it was used only for the potential rehabilitation of those who could not fend for themselves in reality. Psychiatric patients, quadriplegics, people with different kinds of disabilities — anyone who could benefit from it were allowed to take to the Interworks as they saw fit while they were in centers that had the proper funding and equipment.
But no more. The hackers had won.
If Glady could have, she would have screamed.