Hackers

The Blazing Glory continued to fire away rapidly. One down enemy fell, and then another, then another until none were in sight any more.

None of this is real, I kept reminding myself. None of it! It was pure, unadulterated madness, but the remarkable part was that none of this was real. In fact, it was all just a computer simulated scenario, but everything was still a very real threat. While all of this was just a simulation, the enemies I was against were hackers, aiming to bring the whole world to a standstill.

This was how wars are fought, here in the future. They were called NetWars.

The year is 2027, and while these wars were previously fought in real-life (and some still are!), the war on the net had much bigger consequences. If the net was lost, the world was lost. While some regions of the globe are without the net, eventually they will come in contact with it. Nothing stays out the greedy reach of the Upper Cloud.

I stood on a helipad, my weapon to my side, overlooking the Web. By the looks of it, we were on a high tower. I say that because I could barely see the pathways we called 'roads' in the net. Far in the distance, I saw smoke arising from another tall building. While the smoke was virtual, the threat was real; that building was probably the site of another NetWar, or maybe even the hackers had gone in, copied what they needed, and started destroying everything.

I felt my entire body jerking and my body armor gave way to the painful sting of incendiary rounds. I was burning alive, it felt like. The vision that my helmet gave me became nothing but static, and it felt as if my soul was leaving my body.

And it was.

I looked around and saw my body on the ground, holes punched in the armor and the entire thing coated in fire. Then, it disintegrated into nothingness. My assailant was a few meters away and he was waggling his finger in the direction of my quickly-decaying corpse? Could he see me? I moved to the right, and he didn't follow; instead, he turned around and ran the other way.

I felt my soul jerked in one direction, towards the other end of the map. My body became whole again and I found myself breathing heavily. I have died many times before, but I still never got used to it. I checked my body for bullet wounds and found none. Even if I had found any, who cared? This was the net. I could just revive myself later, or be revived automatically by our Net like what had just happened now.

I heard the boom of a shotgun and quickly darted towards the door to the garage in front of me. I quickly pressed a few digits to hack the machine and the garage closed and I swung around my SMG and was lucky enough to see my enemy before they could see me. My finger squeezed the trigger, the muzzle flared, and the man's body jerked with each bullet he took.

I checked the read-out on my helmet. My vital signs were stabilized – both the vitals of myself in the real world and my virtual self. I also noted my ammo count. It read '21/30', and I was honestly surprised it took my nine shots to down that target. I also noted that his weapon had flown up into the air and landed only a meter away from me. It was a shotgun painted black with a tea-bag tag dangling from the left.

I grabbed the weapon and looked inside. Closer, I noticed it was an automatic combat shotgun which made things so much easier on me. A split-second after I had looked inside the weapon, my ammo-count changed to '3/8'. The icon for my SMG moved above the ammo-count of the shotgun as I slung it over my shoulder.

I heard the rapid 'cack-cack-cack' of an automatic weapon and quickly pressed against the wall. In the upper right of my read-out, I saw that one of my teammates had been killed by the same individual who had killed me. And he was close. My vision was suddenly filled with blue, with an orange out-line of my target and several other orange shapes in the distance. He began running towards me. He was only a second away.

I moved first and rounded the corner, the shotgun held in my hand. I pulled the trigger and the first volley of bullets fired out. I saw my target jerk backwards in surprise. Before I could fire again, their weapon has been discarded and they pulled out a crowbar. They dashed for me and their head exploded as the next round went directly into their head and sent gore everywhere.

I felt my soul jerking at me again and I was suddenly on the helipad again with my new shotgun over my chest and looking at a camera-like thing hovering around us. I heard a deep bass in my helmet and noticed someone to my left and someone ahead of us but in the middle. That middle individual waggled his finger at the camera, almost mocking everyone.

This was the new reality.