He and his mother sat in silence. Her eyes stared into space, moving back and forth, reading the news now scrolling across her retinas through implants, "It looks like the Supreme Court is going to rule against Holmes today."
Devin grunted angrily, "That's so unfair."
"It's copyright infringement," his mother stated coolly. "He broke the law, same as stealing."
"But they're prosecuting him based on what's in his brain!" Devin threw up his hands.
"If he didn't steal the data it wouldn't be in his brain," his mother continued reading.
"Back in the days of the Wild Wild Web, data was free," Devin muttered under his breath through a mouthful of whole grains.
"And that's why it couldn't last," his mother said as if he'd said this last out loud. "You can't make a living giving away data for free."
"What about shareware and the public domain?" Devin's voice cracked with outrage. "Those are free!"
"Those are also worthless," his mother stated between sips of coffee. She blinked the newsfeeds out of her eyes as if waking up and looked at him, "You're going to be late for school."
Devin nodded sulkily and started upstairs. His mother's voice paused him as she opened the door to leave for work, "And don't think you can hack a sick leave authorization off me and go back to bed. I've changed the PIN. Besides," she looked up at him on the staircase, "we pay a lot of money to give you access to the data at that school, but it's all a waste if it doesn't get into your head. Some education might cure that political naivety of yours."
Devin shook his head and went to his room, where he waited for the sounds of his mother's transport to subside before running her thumbprint replication into his system. It was five minutes until first period and he was pretty sure he could figure out her new 16-character PIN in time.
Flatline was waiting for him online.
"Hey, that guy whose server you trashed last night stalked me down," Devin informed him. "He was really pissed."
"Yeah?" the demon-dog's head split into a broad, mangled smile. "His handle is LD-50."
"LD?" Devin thought about it a moment. "'Learning disabled'?"
Flatline barked laughter, "No. 'Laboratory Death Fifty Percent.' It's a scientific term. Like the amount of poison needed to kill fifty-percent of a lab rat population."
"For a vectorialist with corporate sponsorship, he didn't seem too competent," Devin noted. "He couldn't even look up your actuals."
"That's because I don't have any," Flatline stated simply.
"Yeah," Devin gave an uncomfortable laugh. "Right."
Flatine just grinned and winked three eyes at him. "Check out what I've found," he said and blinked out of existence.
Devin followed the address Flatline left, and found himself standing in a snow-covered field. Ahead a bridge crossed a black stream and beyond that, in the distance, were geometrically misshapen things rising above the landscape like buildings in a cityscape. It was nighttime there and daytime where he stood.
Flatline pointed past the stream, "I don't think they're real, maybe just some sophisticated programming. They're definitely not human. That's their world across the bridge."
"They?" Devin asked.
"Follow me," Flatline shrugged crossing the bridge and Devin followed. "My lexicon lacks the means to explain."
Devin surveyed the landscape across the bridge with an apprehensive fascination. Infinitely detailed skeletal constructs folding into themselves passed on each side. Bioluminescent webbing arched overhead, the color spectrum slowly sliding along each fiber. Even the sky above rendered the clouds in a carousel of complex geometry. Devin detected shadowy movement at his vision's periphery, but was unable to focus on it.
They stepped through a furious thunderstorm and into a bright clearing. Five figures stood in a circle. They were misshapen polygons, geometrical shapes assembled into basic human figures: two legs, two arms, a torso, and a head. Flatline led Devin into the gathering's center.
"This is Omni," he said to the five.
One stepped forward, coming into focus as it did so. Devin wished it hadn't; his brain could not make any sense of what assaulted his eyes. He turned away, dizzy with vertigo. The thing then released a cacophony of sounds, a thousand conflicting tones. Devin flinched at the disharmony and squeezed his eyes shut tighter, trying to force his overloaded senses out of his head.
He opened one cautious eye to the ground. It changed from grass to desert sands to frozen tundra. There was no escaping the delirium. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing, the only thing he knew was his own, anchored solidly with his body in the real world.
Flatline's voice shook him roughly out of himself. "Come on," he ordered. "I've got a lot I need to explain to you."
Flatline led him away from the alien things, chittering and shuddering at one another behind them, and the world stabilized, much to Devin's relief. "What is this place?" Devin asked finally through heavy breaths.
"I found it several months ago," Flatline replied, and preempted Devin's next question, "We are in the middle of an experiment in programming."
"Where's the programmer?" Devin asked.
Flatline's head cast about as if seeking the invisible, "Gone a long time now," he looked at Devin, "or never was."
Flatline continued, "They've grown as much as this environment will allow. They reach the established boundaries, the river, the mountains, things they cannot pass. There's no more space on the hard drives. The bridge and the stream are their only way out of this place. I think it takes them to a neighboring system, and somewhere beyond that is the Internet, but it's like human beings and space exploration. It's a hostile environment, filled with encryptions, security, and anti-virus software. I must liberate them."
"What can we do?" Devin felt the first twinges of understanding.
Flatline narrowed his eyes, and grinned suspiciously, "We're going to play astronaut. We understand the outside better than they do. It isn't lethal to us. We can go out, see what it looks like and figure out how they can colonize it."
Devin stepped back, holding up his hands, "I don't know, this sounds a little illicit."
Flatline frowned and thought for a moment, "Okay, how about this... Those things are inhabitants of the cyber-world. Only network security and anti-virus software are persecuting them. We are the Users, we are the only ones who can help them."
"You're comparing this situation to 'Tron'?" Devin gawked, thinking about that cheesy old movie his parents thought so groundbreaking. It sounded heroic, "When do we start?"
The other side of the bridge was as lonely and desolate as before. They wandered around the flash drive, making sure not to stray from each other's line of sight. Ninety-nine percent of this drive wasn't in use, Flatline figured, so any data stored on it was hard to find. They were both running basic avatar-masking software, which kept the system from detecting them, but the system did not recognize them at all. As a result of this they had no access to directory management, leaving them to sift through terabytes of disk space to find a few megabytes of data. The situation seemed hopeless, but then Devin saw the black dot in the flat plane, and as he drew closer it became more defined.
It was a file cabinet.
He instant messaged Flatline, who immediately strode over on all sixes to browse the cabinet's contents. "A 'My Documents' folder," Flatline muttered, sifting through the files. "It looks like we've stumbled onto a secretary's computer-seems as good a place as any to start. Let's find out what happens when we bring one of them over here."
As if in response to this statement, one of the beings stood at the bridge. Flatline's lips worked wordlessly and, apparently in response, the being cautiously took a step off the bridge. A few steps further into the snowfield and it became less apprehensive, shambling towards them.