The Last War was over.
      It probably wouldn’t actually be the last war, just like all the so-called last wars in the past. Still, it was impossible to argue that the stakes would ever be so high again. Since as far back as anybody could remember – and even meddlesome scientists with their instruments didn’t disagree – the world had just been lazily spinning around the sun. All the while, myriad species of organisms went about their unceasing efforts to make more organisms. Some excelled at this. Others weren’t cute or delicious enough to fare so well. Still, it all seemed like the way things were supposed to be to both planet and organisms.
      Then, one day, the Chosen One revealed herself, and everything went to shit.
      It was revealed – in what may be termed over-dramatic fashion – that the world was not a world at all, but a Simulacrum being run by intelligent Robots to study the humans who were unfortunate enough to have their brains plugged into their computers in an external reality. Some said this notion seemed silly, as people were neither difficult to understand nor did it seem to worth the bother in any case. Battles raged in the streets all over the world as incensed humans fought to overthrow the mechanisms which compelled their cooperation.
      As wars go, the Last War was a pretty splendid one. Beings and machinations and horrors straight out of fairy tales manifested powers unlike anything before seen, and while yes, there was all manner of troublesome carnage on account of it, everyone agreed it was a fine spectacle.
      Then came the Cataclysm. In the blink of an eye, more than 90% of the global population simply ceased to be. One moment they were there, fighting the Last War, holding loved ones, sounding their barbaric yawps, ridding themselves of embarrassing dandruff; the next, they vanished, leaving piles of clothes atop now-vacant shoes.
      The Chosen One disappeared to who knows where, as did the horrifying creations of the Robots used to subjugate the uprising – the Floating Tower of Suppression, the Legion of Nightmares, Bill O’Reilly. Neither side put forward a leader to claim victory, but as things were suddenly peaceful again, it seemed like the humans must have won. 
      The distinction between Everyone and Very Nearly Everyone suddenly seemed less academic, however. How or why they were only able to free the Very Nearly Everyone, nobody knew, but the Chosen One seemed like a nice enough gal. Surely she had her reasons.
      The years that followed the Cataclysm were called the Restoration by most – some called it the Second Rennaissance but those people were idiots who didn’t understand the Rennaissance at all. Mostly, this meant putting together new communities, repurposing resources, and otherwise getting things back to the way they were before, only people had nicer houses now, thanks to courteous neighbors who disappeared themselves out of the way.
      There was surprisingly little fighting over it all; some aspiring warlords tried to marshal soldiers to carve out empires, but their soldiers quickly decided there was way too much stuff lying around unclaimed to bother. Besides, nobody wanted to live under an oppressive tyrant when they could just move to Omaha and have a whole block to themselves. (Omaha, for some reason, had only three people remain behind after the Cataclysm, yet much like before the Last War, nobody much cared what happened there.)
      In the end, things were pretty much as they were, and everyone did their best not to think too hard about how their entire reality was just a computer simulation. It looked, sounded, felt, tasted and definitely smelled real; it seemed real enough not to worry. People got jobs – or just scavenged for left-overs – and started families and fretted over whether the public schools in their community were good enough. 
      Things went on much as they had, spinning and screwing – and would have kept doing so, if not for the curiosity of Zane Jordan.
      
      
      
      During the Last War, Zane and some buddies of his had done their part in the field of cyber-warfare – trying to hack into the Robot defenses and disable them without having to risk lives. While others heroically dashed into Mechacannonfire storming fortresses, Zane and his cadre less-heroically but no-less-importantly played MMOs while they waited for their hacking software to finish compiling. Funyuns were eaten. Zane nearly max-leveled his star elf pyromancer.
      Of the six of them, Zane was the only survivor of the Cataclysm. It was ironic, considering he was only one of them who wasn’t an idealist about the whole thing. Robots, humans – they were both just things existing in some external universe he couldn’t comprehend and suspected would be a lot less comfortable than the Simulacrum. Neither seemed better than the other, but only one gave him an excuse to put his skills to use, so… that’s what he’d done. For lolz, as they used to say.
      One of the major societal changes in the Restoration was a rebellion against technology – for obvious reasons. Computers were illegal to own or operate, destroyed by well-meaning mobs of simpletons just as the means of enlightenment had suffered since time immemorial. For someone like Zane, this cut back significantly on his employment prospects. 
      With a computer, he had been one of the top hackers in the Simulacrum. Without it, he became an accountant at a local packaging supply company. They made and distributed boxes, bags, shrink wrap, those little foam peanuts – you name it. He didn’t much care for his co-workers, his boss was unsufferably cheerful in her efforts motivate staff, and his chair hurt his lower back.
      In his free time, however, he continued his real passion in a nice, safe, sound-proof windowless basement; it was why he’d picked the rickety old house, in fact. It had been used as a stop on the Underground Railroad (or would have, if that hadn’t been something the Robots had made up in inventing world history). 
      There, in his bunker, was Victoria.
      
      
      
      
      “Good evening, sugar lips,” her voice called out over the speakers as he sealed the vault door behind him – itself concealed by a secret panel in his cellar.
      “Hey there, Vick. We ready to do this thing?”
      “Absolutely, stud muffin. I’ve been on the edge of my seat flooding my panties with excitement all day!”
      “Aw shucks, and here I thought that was on my account,” he teased as he settled into his chair. (This one was chiropractor approved.)
      “Floodier than usual. You know nothing gets my cooze gushy like you, super cock!” Victoria giggled self-consciously.
      “That’s more like it – now let’s see what the Database has in store for us.”
      
      
      
      Sorry, dove in just a wee bit too soon. Two things to know:
      First, Victoria was an advanced operating system personally designed by Zane himself, a 5.12 Exabyte system run on the generator he’d installed (the fuel for which accounted for much of his post-necessity paycheck). He’d created her using years of expertise in software engineering and his best approximation of the voice of this girl he’d had a huge crush on in college, along with a few pictures that had let him flesh out his fantasy, as it were. 
      Victoria wasn’t an AI in the true sense – he wasn’t stupid enough to gift a computer with sentience after what he’d seen in the Last War – but she was programmed to be as creative, intuitive, and personable as she could be without giving her full self-awareness.
      The second thing to know is that one of Zane and his hacker buddies’ most intriguing discoveries during the war had been the existence of the Database. They discovered many databases secreted away in the Deep Network – that is, the Robots’ once-private channels – but none like this. The act of discovering it had fried two of their machines – not even as a defensive protocol, but simply a short resulting from trying to probe the sheer enormity of it. Once they pooled resources and attempted a covert probe to at least get dimensions on it, they realized that they lacked words to express its size. It was more than six million zettabytes.
      They were gathering the resources to attempt a hack – hoping to discover what could conceivably require so much data – when the Cataclysm happened. For the next six years, Zane and Victoria worked to track down the hardware resources to be able to make a serious crack at it. He was still perfectly willing to accept that the moment the Database detected him, its automated defenses would squash him like a bug. After all, if .001% of their resources were devoted to security, they’d have him out-gunned by a factor of about 600,000 to 1.
      Still, seemed like it might be cool to try.
      So anyway, back to the hack.
      
      
      
      “That’s more like it – now let’s see what the Database has in store for us.”
      “You got it – commencing initial scans.”
      “Let me know the moment you detect any countermeasures, all right?” 
      “You know I will, Daddy.”
      There were numerous monitors in his field of vision – one at left to display internal system details, one front right to show Victoria’s digital representation, several on his desktop for running software manually, one that just looped videos of animals of different species who are best friends for when he needed a pick-me-up. 
      Zane focused on the diagnostics, ready to duck under his desk at the first sign that the Robots were going to send a power spike into his basement to fry him alive. He had dozens of counters of his own ready, macroed and ready to fire at a moments notice. Some of them even Victoria didn’t know about – just as an additional failsafe in case she was taken over. 
      This could take days – weeks, even – and he had committed himself to being at the ready for the duration. Tedious? Sure, but with so much on the line, Zane Jordan was undaunted, a digital soldier with his battle standard hoisted, ready to sally forth into whatever digital hellscapes awaited in–
      “Security’s offline, sweet thang.”
      “Uh, what?”
      “Initial scans detect no signs of surface activity.”
      “Maybe you’re just not looking hard enough.”
      “That’s why I scanned deeper, you sweet, beautiful man. We found plenty of security measures, including a few that would make your toes curl harder than I do. However, none of them are active – all of them dead in the water.”
      “Poke one – a little one – and see what happens.”
      Victoria set to deliberately triggering one of the security systems; her image on screen showed the blonde bombshell tapping her lip pensively with one hand, reaching inside her low-cut top to fondle a breast with the other. What a trooper – she always knew how to keep him relaxed in a tense situation.
      “Nothing,” she said after a moment. “I attempted to trip security measures in nearly sixteen thousand ways, but none of them are responding. I believe the Database is authentically unguarded.”
      “Well let’s dive in before anyone wakes up, shall we?”
      “That’s just what you said after you got me drunk on our first date,” Victoria said, giggling.
      It was three more days before she had anything meaningful to report. Weekdays, as it turned out, so Zane had to make himself go to sleep at a reasonable hour and shuffle on in to the office. “Hey there, Zane!” chirped his boss, Susanne. “How’re you doing this morning? Got a case of the Mondays, huh?”
      <I>On the verge of unlocking what could be the most significant find in the history of digital information</I>, he thought. “Doing fine, Susanne. Thanks for asking. Again.”
      “Oh, you!” she said, laughing. He didn’t know why she laughed. He seldom did. What a waste of an otherwise reasonably attractive woman. A little old – she was almost three years his senior, ew – but otherwise not bad. Still, she dressed like an unimaginative Quaker and imposed her fashion sense as a dress code on the rest of the office. 
      Suffice to say, the ladies in the office never distracted him from his work.
      In the evenings, Victoria amused him with digital lapdances and by playing the healer role in his video game. Finally, on the third day after beginning the scan, she flashed up some data on the front monitor. She’d gotten a count on the number of files – there were an unsurprisingly ludicrous number of them – and was on her way to making sense of the file structure. 
      “What do you make of it, Vick?”
      “I’m not yet sure – the files are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. They’re incredibly inter-connected – a huge amount of the data in them is just references to other files. It seems to be one enormous system.”
      Zane frowned. “What one system could need so many files?” he pondered aloud. “Do they have anything in common?”
      “There are too many files to have yet made a truly representative sample, so for short-term answers I’ve been selecting files from far-removed portions of the Database and comparing them. Most – not all – have one thing in common.”
      She brought up a number of files concurrently; each contained a massive amount of code, and even though he read it like a second language, this was to regular scripting like Shakespeare was to Archie comics. Victoria helpfully high-lighted the relevant section, and waited for him to make the conclusion on his own.
      “Are those… coordinates?”
      “That was my assessment as well. As you know, the Robots used a three-dimensional coordinate plane to run their software in the Simulacrum.”
      “Yep. Turns out we really were the center of the universe.”
      Victoria laughed. “You’re so clever, honey buns. So yes, if those are coordinates, then these files are active in the Simulacrum.”
      “Not necessarily,” he pointed out. “They might be inert, or references to where things happened or were located previously.”
      “I thought that too, only look.” New files came up. Some of the numbers flashed on screen to draw his eyes to them. As he watched, the coordinates changed. “See?”
      “They’re… moving.”
      “Yes. All of them are, in fact. Some very subtly, many rapidly indeed, but all are still in motion.”
      Zane took a moment to process all this, spreading his legs for ease of scratching. Could this be…
      “Victoria, you have access to our work during the war; use those files to pinpoint our current coordinates.”
      “You got it, dumpling.” It only took a few seconds for a coordinate range to appear. “These figures encompass the whole of your bunker; for simplicity I assumed a perfect rectangular prism.”
      “That’s fine. Now see if you can find any files within those coordinates.”
      “It could take time, my lovely hunk of succulent man-dick.”
      “Do it. Keep me posted.”
      He had the weekend away from Susanne’s hyper-cheerfulness, Gretchen’s cloying perfume, Byron’s phlegmy throat-clearing; it wasn’t enough. Being so close but not yet able to confirm or disconfirm his theory was maddening. To make small-talk about his feelings on the road construction taking place on Broad Street while all he could think about was Victoria’s search…
      It took her six days. He came home from work grouchy and fatigued, hastening down to the basement as soon as he could get changed out of his suit into something comfortable. “Oh, darling, I have a surprise for you…”
      “Well don’t titillate me, Vick – did you find something?”
      “Not only did I find something, but you’re not going to believe it when you see it.”
      “Show me.”
      The screen in the front of the room brought up the file, its contents so large that she took up the entire grid with it and still could have scrolled for pages and pages. She high-lighted the coordinates, referencing them to the range he’d seen the other day. “I found it early this morning, shortly after you stranded my empty, needy pussy to go to work, you selfish brute. So I went ahead and ran diagnostics on it, saw what I could learn.”
      “And?”
      “Well, not as much as I would’ve liked – too much of the code is self-referential, makes assumptions we don’t have access to. It’s like trying to describe fog to a blind person. Still, I got a little – some of it is actually sub-coordinated data. More precise.”
      “Meaning…?”
      “A shape.”
      “A shape? Show me!”
      “On screen, beautiful.” And there it was. Ever one to enjoy teasing him – like he’d programmed her to – she dragged it out, pulling pieces of the code to a side monitor to construct an image. She began with a pair of concentric cylinders one just inside the other, sitting on a base disc with a half-circle on one side. She zoomed in on some of the smaller numbers, seeming to indicate minute details. 
      When all was said and done… it was a coffee mug. 
      More than that, it was <I>Zane’s</I> mug. <I>Byte me</I> the image read on the side. There was even coffee residue in the bottom, a Made in China label on the bottom. Just like the one sitting on the corner of his desk. It wasn’t colored – the letters were only detailed as minute changes in contour, though he was sure the coloration was embedded elsehwere in this file – but it was clearly a representation of that same mug.
      “All right. Before I jump out of my seat screaming in triumph…” With a trembling hand, he reached out and clasped the mug. On screen, he watched the coordinates shift as he moved it from side to side. With bated breath, he held it out at his side at arm’s length, and dropped it.
      In the room, the mug shattered.
      On the screen, the file disappeared.
      “What? Vick, what happened!”
      “Tracing… yes, got it. The file just self-replicated and altered itself into forty-six different files. Scanning one now… There it is.” She replicated the shape of the new file; this one showed a piece that clearly contained the handle. Zane walked across the room and inspected it; both the on-screen image and the item in his hand were broken in the exact same ways.
      Zane let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, then smiled at his sultry sexpot of an assistant. 
      “Victoria, baby… we’ve discovered the code that runs the world.”