The back of the Leet cab was quiet, and with the partition in front of him, he had no idea whether or not there was a driver. Nor did it matter. Rich sat there, head between his hands, and tried to figure out what to do.

He’d messaged his dad, but gotten bounced every time. His dad was working, probably in a dangerous place without network access. And anyway, the company charged its workers for messages received from outside, so there was no guarantee his dad would pick up anyway.

After trying a dozen times, he’d given up and used Dad’s credit card to arrange a Leet cab home. It was too far to walk, and it was through some really really bad neighborhoods, so he’d paid the fee... even though it was more than he was comfortable with. There was no way Dad wouldn’t notice this.

Given the situation, Rich didn’t care. Mom was in danger; he knew that would take priority over money. He had to be there when Dad was there and get his help as fast as possible.

To be honest, though, Rich didn’t know what Dad could do.

But he sure as hell would be a problem if Rich kept him ignorant of what was going on. Rich had two days and twenty-three hours to figure out a solution, and he couldn’t afford to spend any of that fighting with Dad.

He arrived at his building without a plan, got to his hab without a plan, and dug again in the fridge until he found a box of Cheesusrice™ shells that had probably been there for years. Rich heated up water, dumped it in, and waited until it was semiliquid before cooking it. It was horrible, and he ate every bit, trying to fill the void in his belly. Then he spent twenty precious minutes trying to keep it down.

After that...

After that Rich lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, and wondering what to do.

His Dad wouldn’t pick up, so his Dad was out. He had no idea how to contact Agent Cutter, and now that another agent was in the mix, trying to blindly contact Cutter’s agency and ask for him might get detected. Joel’s dad wouldn’t hesitate to punish Mom if that happened.

What could he do?

Maybe the smuggler could help? He headed out to the houseflopper link again, and spent several minutes paining walls blue while begging for help. But no words appeared. Nobody replied. Frustrated, he threw the paint brush against the wall and watched it slowly disappear and return to the paint bucket in slow-mo pixelated teleportation.

Rich logged out before he could do something he’d regret. Mom had said once he’d inherited Dad’s temper, and he knew it was true.

Then, while he sulked on his bed, he realized that they might not have been ignoring him. He checked the time, and sure enough it was a bit after noon.

Mister Tassle was teaching right now.

Rich chewed on his lip, as he thought. They’d told him to use houseflopper to contact them, but this was an emergency.

But how to contact him? Rich was still expelled. A message? He was teaching right now. And any message he could send that would get Mister Tassle’s attention might get him in trouble. He was an honest to God traitor to the state; Rich had to be careful here, or he’d be exposed.

Then it occurred to him that he had a way to pass on a message that probably wouldn’t be watched.

Messaging >> Norman Sikowsky

Dude, I need help. Like right now. Please answer.

It felt like an eternity passed, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before he got a reply.

Norman Sikowsky >> Can it wait till after class? We’re about to have a test.

>>No, it can’t. Please, just tell Mister Tassle that Rich is having a painting kind of emergency. Just like that. Okay?

>>What the fuck, dude? What is that even about?

>>I need you to do this. Please. And don’t ask why.

>>Okay, but we’re gonna talk in game later, yeah?

>>Yes. Yes, we can. Thanks!

Then he closed the messenger, opened up houseflopper again, and got to work.

Minutes passed, and he didn’t care. They crawled by, but he kept on going.

And his patience was rewarded, when white words appeared under the roller’s trail.

We understand you’re having trouble.

“Big trouble,” Rich gasped. “How much can I talk here? It’s really, really big trouble.”

Are you compromised?

“Yes! No. I don’t know. I got hauled in to talk to the guy I wasn’t supposed to talk to. And there was another agent there.”

This does sound like you’ve been compromised. But perhaps not in a way that impacts our dealings.

“So, what do I do?” Rich knew he was whining. It was that or sob. “My mom, they’re gonna... he’s gonna... help me, please!”

No details. Not now. Also, we’re going to fry this app after you’re gone. Delete the link and scrub your history when we’re done here.

“Not now? You want details some other time?” Rich sniffled, grasping at straws.

Yes. Soon. We’re going to give you an address. Find a way to get to it that doesn’t leave any digital records.

“I um... okay.”

This is harder than you think. Consider anything you do carefully. We are taking a big risk, here, but we need a face-to-face if we are to help you.

“Okay,” Rich gasped. An address spooled across the next swipe of the paint, and he took a picture of it. The address disappeared by itself, and another paint roll revealed a few last words.

We’re done. See you soon.

Rich logged out and thought about his next move.

A Leet cab would leave a digital record. Someone would be able to see where he’d gone. They had cameras and stuff in them, too. There were cameras everywhere.

No, it was worse than that, he realized. To look up the address he’d have to put it in one of the US.net search engines. They would record his query, and mark that he’d been the one who did it. Unless...

Another frantic message to Norm but no reply came back.

So, he messaged Midian instead.

>>Rutger? I’m at work.

>>I know, and I’m sorry. I need help. Can you run a mapsearch on these two addresses, and send me a route? Don’t send the actual link to the route, just screenshot it.

>>I can, sure, but why?

>>It’s a long story, and I really need you to not ask questions. I’m sorry.

>>Beezy Bub kind of trouble?

>>Yeah, this is one of the reasons I was talking about him earlier.

>>Okay... but I’ll want an explanation. Talk to you in game later, okay?

>>That works for me.

The less he told his friends, the less trouble they’d be in if he got blackbagged. That was the hope, here. They didn’t know he was breaking the law... or trying to, anyway.

A moment later, his inbox pinged with an image. He pulled it up and looked at it in dismay. It wasn’t far, not in the grand scheme of things, but it was across the river. And the bridges all had cameras and surveillance on them. There had been scares there before, back during the terror times. There was no way he could cross without leaving a digital record unless he was in a vehicle. And he couldn’t get ahold of a vehicle without leaving a digital record.

Rich closed his eyes and thought.

If he were Rutger, what would he do? Well, if he were Rutger, he could fly over. Except no, that would get him noticed. Try to sneak onto some passing vehicle? Ridiculous. The traffic wasn’t thick enough to do that without being noticed. If he were in a bigger city, there might be one of those crowds like what he saw in movies, but there wasn’t.

Rich looked at the river, a cold and uncaring barrier that squiggled across the map, and felt frustration build up inside him. He pounded his hand on his knee, hissing in pain as his bruises flared with every jiggle. He didn’t care; the pain kept the pity away. The pain forced him to think.

And then the answer came to him. It would be hard. It would be really stupid. He’d probably pay for it later. No, no there was no probably about it, he’d definitely pay for it later.

But he was desperate.

Rich rose and started out the door, searching for videos and loading them as he went. Judging by how far he had to walk, he had about twenty minutes to learn how to swim.

Twenty-eight minutes later, bleeding and torn from where he’d brushed across a tangle of razor wire on the shore, Rich put his glasses back on his nose and pulled soaked shoes back on over his aching feet.

He’d nearly died.

But the water was shallower and slower than he’d expected, and he’d managed. Every part of him ached now, not just the bruised bits. Parts he didn’t know existed ached, and the back of his throat burned from where he’d swallowed some of the chemically-tainted water. Rich knew, he knew he’d be sick later, but there was no help for it.

His body ached again, and he remembered how he’d gotten sick yesterday. Had it been only yesterday? At any rate, the ache was familiar... and not as bad as it had been back then.

Still, combined with the rest of his wounds, it almost did him in. He almost sagged there and gave up, almost laid down to rest and let whatever happened happen.

Almost.

After a few minutes of building up his nerve, he rose and limped off toward his destination, checking the screen-shotted map and looking for landmarks.

Up the berm, and through a hole in a rusty fence, and onto the street. A few drones followed him for a bit before deciding he wasn’t interesting. There was nobody out in this part of town, unsurprising given the heat wave that had broken this morning.

The neighborhood turned nicer as he went, and he gnawed his lip in worry. Right now he looked pretty bad, and bad meant suspicious in this sort of place.

Fortunately, he didn’t have far to go, and before long he was standing in front of an honest-to-god house.

You didn’t see many of those anymore, outside of movies or shows. The utility costs were insane, according to his dad.

The dwelling, like every other building on the block, was gated. Swallowing hard, Rich moved up to it. There were cameras, he knew. If he tried to break in or scale the wall, then all his efforts, all his troubles to get to this point would be for nothing.

But when he pressed the buzzer at the gate, it clicked open.

He walked up to the door, dampness from the sweat and acrid river water blending together and knocked.

“Come on in,” Mister Tassle’s voice crackled from the speaker. “I’m busy teaching, so excuse my distraction.”

Rich opened the door and found himself surrounded by pure whiteness. White paint, white carpet, white shelves by the door. The paleness was broken here with monochrome contrast from black shoes, umbrella, and a briefcase all sitting in spots that were clearly meant just for them.

The only bits of color that weren’t white or black were green plants, hung from ceiling planters or on more shelves lining the walls. Everything had its order; everything had its place. And Rich looked down with dismay to see that he was staining the carpet.

“I’m kind of a mess,” he said, taking off his shoes and putting them on a free spot on the shelves. “I had to swim.”

“You had to what?”

A door opened down the hall, and Mister Tassle glanced out. He looked the same as his teaching avatar, only a little fatter in the face... and in general. To Rich’s surprise, he was wearing the same sort of suit he always did. He’d half expected that his teacher would be wearing comfy clothes or like underwear or something. That was the joke speculation most of his class had about the teachers... though the speculation was a bit fiercer when it came to the attractive ones.

I could probably settle a few of the girls’ betting pools, Rich realized. Then immediately realized that he wouldn’t be talking about this to begin with. He was still in trouble. This was still a secret visit. And if he fucked up, his mom was worse than dead.

Mister Tassle hadn’t said anything, and Rich saw his eyes had gone unfocused. After a minute he nodded and looked back to Rich once more. “All right. You’re a mess. The shower’s in back, and the laundry’s there too. I can’t take a chance our actions won’t be reviewed later, so I’m going to go for a drive. The last thing I need is to be present in my house while a student is going naked, even temporarily. You understand, I trust?”

“Yeah.” Rich nodded. That would be all kinds of bad.

“All right. I’ll be back in an hour. Scrub up fast. There’s food in the refrigerator and bandages and medical supplies in the back cupboard. Don’t worry about cleaning anything up, I’ll get it later. And in case you have to answer questions later, you came to me because you were panicking, and I’ve been friendly to you and gave you some free software. Sound good? Do you understand?”

“Y-yes,” Rich stuttered.

“Good.” Mister Tassle walked up to him and patted him on the shoulder and even that simple contact almost undid Rich. He wanted to hug the man, knew he was a mess and shouldn’t, and so instead he just let out a sob.

And to his utter surprise, his teacher knelt and hugged him.

He did cry then, big honking sobs as he squeezed Mister Tassle, the sole adult besides his mother who had ever helped him without wanting something from him. The only one who had told him he had a future.

“Hey,” said Mister Tassle, who was far more solid than he looked. “Hey. You’ve been through a lot. But that’s over now. The hard part’s done. Wash up, eat, and relax. The hard part’s done. We’ll figure it out, okay?”

“Okkkkaaaaayyyy...” Rich sobbed.

One more squeeze, then Mister Tassle let go of him and slipped his shoes on, grabbed his briefcase, and went out of the door. Rich watched through a one-way window as his teacher left the gate in time to meet a Leet cab and ride off down the street.

Rich got cleaned up, exploring the house after a fast shower. It was as small, neat, and orderly as the entryway had been. About the only thing that seemed a little disorganized was a half-assembled server on a workbench in Mister Tassle’s study.

The study itself was worth some scrutiny, too. This was the first time Rich had seen actual books in real life, and he spent a while looking them over, turning the pages, and reading words that didn’t move when you ran your finger down the side.

It was only after his arm was bandaged, and he was heating up some lasagna with what looked like actual meat in it, that he wondered what the hell he was doing.

Mister Tassle had told him to relax, but this was no time to relax! Mom was...

Three days.

Haskeen had given him three days.

He had gotten here early. He could talk with Mister Tassle, figure out a plan, and maybe make it home before Dad showed up. Then he’d get Dad on his side... at least as much as he could, and they could all go from there.

Rich thought that maybe, maybe he could relax. Just a bit.

Maybe the hard part was done. Please God let the hard part be done.

With that prayer, he found a comfy chair, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.

But he couldn’t.

His body was a mass of aches and exhaustion, but his brain was wired; he couldn’t get tired. Rich gnawed his lip, tried to figure out how to kill time until his teacher returned.

It wasn’t until he found the darknet router, that he realized what he could do.

It lay there, in a heap of other server components, camouflaged with a casing for a power source. Blended in with all the rest in plain sight, and if it hadn’t had a small slot for a familiar series of flickering lights, he wouldn’t have figured it out. Pretty cunning, actually.

To his infinite joy he found he had been added to the house’s whitelist as a guest. And from there, he gladly sagged back in his chair...

...and paused.

He’d set up a recording with the vestigial logout-watch code, hadn’t he? Now might be a good time to see what was going on, before he logged in blind again.

Rutger was still within the respawn delay window, so all he should see was a mass of gray nothing. Seeing anything except that would be proof that the game was animating his character when he was logged off.

Biting his lip, he opened up the recording...

...and gasped at what he saw.

His character was able to use G.O.L.D tokens without his approval!

Furthermore, it was capable of conversing, even if it did act appropriately for its race.

The recording wasn’t clean... there was no audio capability. He hadn’t found that part of the code, or maybe it didn’t exist. What he had was a kludge of a debugging log with limited video. So once Rutger left the respawn time-out, Rich couldn’t hear a damned thing. But he watched in amazement as the dragon panicked at the sight of Caunal...

...and as Caunal responded to him.

Slowly, the notion began to tease through his mind that his logged-out activities might not be an error. That the chained dragon had set more things in motion than Rich knew.

Rich watched the dragon flex its hand again and again, fingers twisting in patterns. Watched scales rip and blood flow, as it worked against the chains.

It was only when some of the patterns repeated, that he realized it was a code.

This is like the logic gates, he thought. There’s something there that no NPC will understand, but I might.

It took him a little while to find the correlation, but he did.

The dragon was spelling out letters with American Sign Language.

Rich pulled up his notepad program and began transcribing, and by the end of it he had a sentence.

“NEXT TIME MAKE TICKET HERE.”

Rich blinked.

This was some meta-level shit. Was the god an actual player or developer or something? What kind of hidden plot had he stumbled into?

Curious, he watched on. His eyes went wide as he saw his character charge the griefers, and somehow not die. But to his annoyance, he saw that his PK switch was on now. He’d have to deal with the fallout of that.

Then came the discussion with the Icon, and things started to fuzz and breakup. Digital quality fell, again and again. For some reason, the recording kept skewing its perspective, glaring at the lines of words covering the walls. It did that for about thirty seconds, then it errored out. That was where the recording stopped.

It keeps focusing on the words I thought were code, Rich thought.

Maybe they were? The characters were unfamiliar, but that could be a different language or something.

Well. The search engines hadn’t failed him yet.

And twenty minutes later, as he was pulling his much-abused clothes out of the dryer, he had his answer.

The character set was Arabic, which used to be a big thing in the Middle East before the black glass wars.

And the language was something called Haskell. An old programming language, pretty much dead at this point. Rich dug into it a bit, tried to figure out what the code on the walls actually said... but the angles were bad. He was getting partial records at best. Going back to the original recording of the hut and his meeting with the Icon didn’t help. Several of the lines had shifted since then or been rewritten. It didn’t help that he was trying to work in a language he had no experience with.

After a few minutes of fruitless labor, he was forced to admit he couldn’t find the significance, here. Maybe if he saw what the code was doing when it was doing it... assuming it was running at all and not just decorations.

In either case, the recording was done. He checked the clock, found he had about an hour left.

Well, why not?

WELCOME BACK! Generica Online told him.

...and then he logged in to absolute chaos.