I immediately went back to ‘working’ on the security system. My nervousness about the situation was festering. I knew something was up, there were just too many little things. I had a bad feeling about this. Yes, yes, I know, hackers are always paranoid, but this seemed a little more visceral.

“So what are you up to?” Frederik asked while leaning over my shoulder.

Frederik did not know anything about or care anything for the kind of work I did, the guy was as ‘bout as smart as a box full of rocks. This just screamed suspicious, he was also nervous around me and checking up on me!

It was a bit pointless of him to stare at the monitor and try to discern what I was working on, he wouldn’t know whether I was working on a game or coding a super virus. Sometimes people just did pointless shit like that. Especially if they’re dumb.

“I am double checking that there are no booby traps left behind in the security system. Wouldn’t want to get tripped up.”

He nodded his head vigorously in approval.

Seriously? Booby traps?

This is what I meant, I could have said, I wanted to check for alien spies and he wouldn’t have known the difference!

Frederik remained fidgety the whole time and kept glancing at me. This is just getting old now.

“Hey Frederik, what ya doing this weekend? I’m planning to go shopping. Figured I could get myself that nice new PS5, maybe also a VR set.”

Frederik’s expression darkened. “Sounds nice, not all of us are flush with cash you know.”

Yeah, that settled it. I hit enter to update the lighting configuration one more time and then turned to face Frederik full on.

Frederik tensed up a bit and pulled his gun out and rested it at his side. “You know we know, don’t you?”

I frowned.

“Yeah, of course you do. Clever little brat like you.”, he tapped his gun against his head for effect.

Frederik was always the most loyal of us, it made sense Miche would leave him down here to watch me. It also meant I would not be able to ‘persuade’ Frederik to let me go.

“What do you know?”

“Don’t play dumb with me kid, we know you been stealing from us.”

He said ‘us’ but he obviously meant ‘Miche’. What’s really annoying was that it was Jonas that was forcing me to do it and he was taking most of the damn cash to begin with. Of course he wasn’t THAT stupid and did always leave me with some of it just so that I would be implicated and could not easily rat him out.

And when I say force, well I mean, look at the size of the guy. Coupled with that he was in a lot tighter with Miche than I was, it would be my word against his and since I’m the only one between the two of us that can actually hack, well…. Fill in the blanks.

Shit. My heart was racing, climbing all the way up my throat and pounding its way into my head. Was this the adrenaline? I wasn’t panicking because I had a gun pointed at me, no, it was more for what came next, for what I knew I had to do.

The timer finally elapsed and the lights in the building all switched off at once. We were plunged into complete darkness. Well not complete darkness, there was still moonlight after all, but given the sudden change it certainly felt like it. Either way, I still had a gun trained on me, so I waited, motionless.

“What did you-”

And then the external floodlights behind Frederik turned on. He spun around in alarm. It was the moment I needed.

I lunged forward and grabbed a hold of his gun. He panicked and tried to pull away, but I held on fast and the two of us went tumbling to the floor instead. There was a scramble of limbs at that point.

The two of us were playing a tug of war with our arms, each trying to rest control of the gun away from the other, while legs were in turn kicking away at each other.

I myself was trying to get the gun pointed at Frederik instead. The idea of killing someone made me sick like most normal human beings, but not that sick. I had killed a man once before, pretty much in self defense, the last several years have been rough after all. And I can tell you that while it is still an awful thing to do, you do tend to have slightly less qualms about it the second time round.

*BANG*

Oh my god, my ears! That was too fucking loud!

Wait, why am I still on the ground and Frederik was getting up with the gun in his hand. He was looking a little pale there. You alright man? Wait, am I alright?

Pulling my hand away from my stomach and it being covered in blood, was probably a good indicator that I was not, in fact okay. Fuck the sight of blood always made me squeamish, I started feeling nauseous. Or was that because there was a big bleeding hole in my gut.

Shit there was blood everywhere, where the hell did he shoot me exactly!

What a stupid life. I had nothing but regrets, seriously, fuck whatever higher power existed, whether that be God, aliens or the fucking matrix. I really deserved better than this.

My body was growing cold and my vision dark around the edges. Well, at least I can die smug. These idiots have no idea, I already locked down the lift again and set up a delayed notification to call the building's armed response force.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Suck it.

----------------------------------------

My consciousness faded into focus, or at least as well as it could. I had been robbed of my body, I felt weightless. What happened? Where am I?

Oh, right, I died. Is this the afterlife? Honestly of all the possibilities for answers to the big questions, I seriously doubted the whole ‘soul’ thing was real. But here I am

All around me, there was a wash of colors and patterns, yet always seemingly out of focus. Wait, how was I seeing any of this without eyes?

Suddenly I started floating towards… well somewhere. I quickly picked up speed and now could see a tunnel made of colorful lightning patterns. It felt like I was being sucked through a hypertube of some kind. As my focus improved further, I could even make out the twists and turns in the lightning tunnel further along as I went.

Hello Ash Mayfair. You have died. Your actions and alignment have been judged to be ‘Bad’ therefore you are being sent to G̶̬̝̩͓̓͜͝ͅȩ̴̛̲͔̘̩̹̓͌̾̐̎͛̈́̄̽ư̵̢̦̩̘̗̟̻̜͒̏͂̂̀̏͗̊͝ş̵͈͕̩̻͇͉̭̼͋̑̏̌̋̊͒̑t̶̢̨̲̐̈̈́͝u̸͔͓͎̯̼͒̓͋̊̔̓̽̿͌͜ͅs̶̰̲̖̐̆̿̔̀̐͠. If you wish to dispute this assessment you may contact our support center.

The screen had a line art background that looked like it was something stock out of powerpoint.

The only options that existed were ‘My profile’ and ‘newLife support’.

The lighting tunnel turned a combination of bright white and red shades of glowing energy and I could finally see the end in of it-

Aaaaarrrrggghh.

I had to look away. It felt like my head was being clawed out through my eye sockets. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, more like I was looking at a concept than something tangible, but whatever it was, it filled me with such a deep sense of dread, that I would have immediately shat my pants if I still had a body.

No matter what, I had to go somewhere else! No matter what!. Panic induced bile was rising in my throat, clawing at my sanity. I had to momentarily forget that place existed or I would lose my sanity before I even got there.

How do I operate this thing? I quickly tried focusing on the ‘newLife support’ button, but nothing happened. I then tried to mentally mouse click on it and it changed to a ‘calling’ symbol with three dots.

Progress!

“Thank you for calling the newLife soul support center.” An almost angelic calming voice responded, “We are currently experiencing a high call volume, please be patient and we will have a representative speak with you as soon as possible. Your call is important to us. Your call is currently number ‘19350376’ in the queue”

Mother fucker!

I dropped the pointless call and ‘clicked’ on ‘my profile’ instead.

All I got was an ‘Under construction’ page instead.

This is a joke right? I’m a guinee pig for your incompetent and incomplete software and services! I noticed the profile page had a small logo in the bottom right corner: ‘newLife systems - v0.3.897’

What the fuck?! I’m being sent to my doom by software that doesn’t even have a stable release yet? And what’s with that ‘patch’ number: 897. How may fucking bugs can one system have, that you need to release 897 versions worth of fixes!

Panic was blossoming in full swing now, stinging my stomach with nausea.

I need a solution, I’m not going to fucking hell, I deserve better than that. I know I’m not a saint, but I’m not fucking evil you know!

I went back to the main menu. There was nothing useful here, but I did try clicking on the company logo regardless. Nothing happened. So I started spam clicking it, as well as spam clicking the menu buttons and back buttons. Nothing really happened at first, but at one point, the voice call distorted and everything seemed to freeze up for a moment. But nothing happened beyond that.

Next I started trying to click on different parts of the various menus, especially in places where there was nothing to click on.

I finally got a lucky break, when I clicked on a blank space in the top left corner of the under construction ‘my profile’ page. The page suddenly opened up a developer console. That’s the thing about stuff that’s still underdevelopment, sometimes, developers leave little things in like that to give them access to tools to make their own development and testing lives easier.

I first tried mentally typing in things like v or version, but that yielded nothing then h and help. That at least got a response.

“What am I supposed to say here, we are the only ones that use this y̵̛̼̪̤̜͑̆̎̾̃͋͛̑͂͂͛͝ȑ̷̮̥̪̅̾͛̿̚ś̶̨̝̠̮̝̻̫̘̗̝̬̳̞͘e̴̡̨̦̮̣̙̫͓͉͍͎̺̫̅̐̊̉͝v̷̢̺̳̺̍̓̍͝. Just type whatever code you need here.”

Whatever that word was, I could not seem to focus on it and when I did, it seemed to make my head hurt. Some kind of language of the gods or something? I wasn’t sure, but if it was, it sure was nice that most of it was being translated for me.

So this seemingly half assed developer comment that made up the clearly custom made developer help info, seemed to suggest this was more like a browser console that I could code in.

So code, I did. There was no autocomplete. It took a lot of trial and error to figure out what the different keywords and statements and syntax of the language was like. Most of the time I was relying on the steady flow of error messages to guide me through the process. Even though only some parts of them were translated to English, it was enough to get the job done.

You would be amazed how quickly a genius programmer could work when he did not have the physical limits of a body. As time went on, and I got used to the mind-machine style interface, I was able to write entire sections of code with just a thought. The language itself turned out to be not too dissimilar from Javascript, but was even more disorganized and ad hoc.

It might seem implausible to learn a new language in minutes, but it’s not that far-fetched in reality. I am obviously not an expert in god-code yet, but I can write passable code. Once you write in enough different languages you start to realize that they are mostly similar in a lot of different ways. The underlying concepts of programming are pretty stable.

That place was getting closer now and I could feel the clutches of insanity sinking its teeth into my soul, threatening to pull it apart. And no, I don’t mean that metaphorically, this was some kind of actual physical effect.

I need to work faster.

Without context for how networking worked in this place and with not enough time to figure it out, I settled for a mixture of trying random commands or hitting random commands in what parsed for assembly in this thing. I also tried to write scripts to spam different UI instructions, just to see what would happen. Eventually I started to get some errors, then a lot of errors!

I could feel the weight of that place bearing down upon me. Madness was gripping me somehow and squeezing.

These errors were different from the ones from before. Not only were they structured differently, but they also had almost no English in them.

I was out of time. I noticed some prompts in the error message? Or maybe they were not error messages after all. I immediately started following random prompts and filling in random crap whenever prompted for it.

Suddenly, the tunnel erupted in energy and an all consuming white enveloped me.