Mateo Lautaro Del Guaptin logged off after sending what he intended to be the last email he would send to the man he only knew as Beta. He folded his tablet into fourths and stuck the stylus into its tiny home right next to the charging input then slipped it into the thigh pocket of his khakis. He looked around the little plaza in the center of Lima, Peru and was glad he looked so average. Average in height, average skin tone (not pale but not dark like the poor people who spent all day in the sun), average clothes, a typical mid-length hair cut.

As he sipped his coffee, warming his hands on the cup, his eyes scanned the crowd gathering as the late July chill settled on the city.

There was something about this crowd on this night that felt different to him.

Mateo lived in Lima his whole life. He had rarely been outside it really. He’d watched crowds in this very plaza since he could barely walk, huddled next to his mother as she begged for any spare change or scrap of food that a sad mother and starving child might guilt from the people walking past. When he was older and in school he’d used the celebrations for Peru’s Copa America championship to hide from his mother and the abusive pimp that had one day graciously saved them from the streets. When he finished his masters degree, the fancy restaurant that made up nearly half of one side of the plaza was where he decided to treat his mother to the best dinner either had ever tasted.

The pimp was no longer in their lives, convicted six months earlier for a variety of crimes, each making his pimping and petty street thefts seem like charity work.

He proclaimed his innocence to the last but the pile of images, phone recordings, and bank records proved otherwise. More damaging was probably the state-of-the-art tablet with data fingerprints tying him people he swore he’d never heard of before, crime figures way out of his league. Most embarrassing for the pimp were all the pictures of him with little boys in all sorts of disgusting acts.

Mateo nodded his head in agreement with the pimp as the slime was hauled away. It was true. He hadn’t committed any of the crimes for which he’d just been convicted. He’d probably never seen any of the drug lords with whom he was believed to be connected. The little boys had never been in his presence, just mapped into images and expertly painted to blend naturally.

Where Mateo disagreed with the pimp was his innocence.

Mateo had always been smart. So smart that when he’d caught the attention of one of his teachers, who knew a little about his wretched life, he’d been accelerated through school and at the age of seventeen won a scholarship to the University and just five short years later was about to graduate with a Masters in Computer Science.

Getting the Masters was hard, not because his studies were so challenging but rather because he had to keep his real skills so quiet. Hacking his way through school and on his way to hatching his ultimate plan required his full attention. The lame classes that were always eighteen to twenty-four months behind the research happening in the real world distracted him. He was only getting the degree because it would allow him to have a decent, but anonymous, job that would cover for how he would really spend his time.

As he ate that celebratory meal with his mother, he looked across the plaza to the huge courthouse where the trial for that pimp was held. He’d watched the trial as all the evidence Mateo had manufactured was tested by some of the best experts in the world and argued over by the top defense lawyers in the country. All of them took this pimp’s case because they would make a name for themselves, win or lose, and his case was going to also bring down some of those crime lords he appeared to deal with.

In the end, the pimp was hauled away and within a few years would wait to be executed for some of the worst of his crimes. Mateo saw the restaurant as he left the courthouse that day and thought how he would bring his mother thereafter his last semester at University.

His reputation landed him a job before he’d even graduated and he moved his mother into a new, thirty-five hundred square foot home that sat on one of the exclusive mountains around the city. His mother wondered how he could afford such a huge place just out of the University, despite his new job leading an IT security department for the Peruvian national bank. Mateo told her he’d received a lump sum of cash for signing with the bank and given the life she’d had to that point she just said a prayer to God and thanked him for giving her such a good son.

In reality, Mateo had been slowly building a small nest egg the entire time he’d been working on his revenge against the asshole who had abused his mother and forced her into prostitution. As he experimented with little bits of hacker code he eventually learned how to extract data and move it. Move tiny bits of data but move them frequently enough that combined the total data was significant. Not huge and not noticeable, but to a simple boy from the streets more than enough.

Ironically, the lump sum of cash did come from the national bank. They just didn’t know it.

The pimp had never physically abused Mateo, mostly because the boy had always been so nearly invisible. As Mateo grew, he would spend more and more time away from the slum housing that had seemed too glorious to his mother because it wasn’t sleeping on the streets anymore. But the way the evil man beat his mother when she tried to take just a few coins to buy her son a new shirt or pants or shoes planted a seed of hate. The way he forced her to perform for him even on the days she had brought him more money than any of the other girls gave Mateo the drive to plot against evil of all kinds.

His memories were interrupted by a loud arrival of some of the city’s party girls. They joined a group of their friends and would later be going to one of the night clubs. He’d seen them before. One was the youngest daughter of the President and she regularly made the news with her nights out. Another was one of the leading business families with multinational reach in South America. Others were typical rich kids who were fortunate enough to go to the same schools and whose families were only important as long as they supported the President.

He’d seen them plenty of times in the plaza.

None had ever seen him.

That was one of the joys of being so average.

He and Francesca would often sit at this very table and watch all the rich people walk about and greet each other and sip their coffees before they went off on some trivial task in their meaningless lives. They would laugh about how important they all seemed, none of them knowing that they were paying for the coffees Mateo and Francesca, the love of his life, were drinking. In fact, they would quietly joke, they were paying for their rent and food as well.

He’d first met Francesa while he was in the University labs pretending to work on an assignment. He’d finished it in fifteen minutes and rather than draw attention to himself, he began to refine some skimming routines. While he was monitoring the latest build of the routines he noticed some data intrusions and though they weren’t voracious decided to entertain himself by tracking them down.

It turned out to be that beautiful girl across the lab he’d been looking at for the past two semesters. To confirm his suspicions, he launched some code that was supposed to turn off her machine. When she jumped up from her seat then quickly slammed it shut and rushed out he knew he was right. But he knew something was wrong as well.

When he caught up to her outside, she was furiously trying to revive her tablet. He approached her and asked if everything was alright she glared at him.

"It’s burned," is all she said.

"It was just supposed to shut you down," he replied. "I fucked the code up."

"You should test that shit before you unleash it!"

"I’d never been hacked before," he said sheepishly. "Never had a chance to test it."

Her deep, dark eyes softened, and her full lips slowly split into a smile making her high cheekbones swell ever so slightly as she laughed. It was like a song to his heart, her laugh.

They were together every day since.

She turned out to be the daughter of a mid-level executive at one of the country’s largest communications companies and had tired of her life about the time he was first plotting to use his new love of computers to kill the pimp. That would have made him eleven.

She was loved by her parents and brothers and sisters but being the middle of seven children and raised by nannies because her father was either working or traveling and her mother was socializing to help solidify their standing in Lima meant she was often alone.

She was smart and that was not a good mix with her looks. But she always said her beauty isolated her more than anything else. As she began to be attracted to boys, her family’s standing and her extreme beauty made her unapproachable. No matter how nice she tried to be everybody thought she was beyond their grasp and so she retreated into a world of coding.

She was a geek’s dream: exquisitely beautiful and into a night of coding, gaming or joy hacking.

She was Mateo’s dream.

Their first date sealed the deal. They got together to first set up the new tablet Mateo bought to replace the one he’d destroyed then do some low-level data skimming. American style pizza and lots of beer. They showed each other code they were working on and each helped the other complete the sets, execute and test and finally merged two routines they’d been working on separately, and the results amounted to the first twenty thousand dollars skim from an account belonging to a Sudanese warlord. He would later become one of their go-to sources when funds got tight.

Mateo’s mother adored Francesca and Francesca dotted on his mother. He had everything he needed.

Until the pimp went away.

His life had been so focused on destroying the man who had virtually destroyed his mother that Mateo had nothing to do.

He’d trolled various hacker communities and tinkered with skims of data from various governments. Mostly he tried to entertain himself by causing little hiccups here and there and watch the news wires for the aftermath. He returned to exposing politicians, locally and abroad, for their corruption.

He always lost interest, even when he’d set up the local drug lords for another fall.

Then he got a ping on his system. That was the usual call for a job. Hackers didn’t advertise. They pinged you and if the tracking trail was interesting enough the pinged hacker would continue until actual contact was made.

This ping was most interesting.

After a number of pings and contacts, he was asked to participate in a large scale project that would involve exposing weaknesses in vast portions of the world’s virtual net. Nothing illegal. Nothing dangerous. And the compensation was high.

Mateo figured the secrecy was because it was some government wanting to tap into the hacker community to improve security. This was not uncommon. Most governments eventually learned that rather than fighting the hackers it was better to employ them and stay ahead of the curve.

Most hackers didn’t want to cause harm or damage in any case. That would mean they were hurting themselves. The only hackers who wanted to cause havoc were the same people who would be out murdering or planting bombs if they didn’t have a tab unit anyway.

So Mateo joined and was assigned the name Kappa for the project. The assignment came with some rules, mostly not trying to track and contact the others on the project and to only be in contact with the code section leader or Beta.

There was also Alpha and Omega but if they made contact you were only to follow instructions.

Two weeks later, as they were both working on some code, Mateo realized that Francesca had been contacted and was part of the project as well. This was great. They could test each other’s code and help with the technical design of each new instruction.

Soon enough the project became more than either had imagined and the communications between their section leader and Beta became tense.

Then other hackers began to get in touch with them.

Everybody on the project saw pieces of code from other hackers and it didn’t take long before they were all trying to figure out who each other were. Some were fairly easy to discover because the nature of the code could only be from hackers with a reputation in that area. Others were more difficult but eventually, there was a small pool of likely hackers who might be involved. Small meant any of a hundred or so, but still, it helped to have an idea of who might be involved.

When the Russian hacker Epsilon had a meltdown and announced she was going to expose the project, despite nearly everybody still not knowing what the project was, Mateo and Francesca began to truly worry.

There had been aspects of what they were working on that bothered them but it was only hacker paranoia they would tell each other. Epsilon’s missive didn’t really paint a full picture but it outlined enough that they were able to put pieces together that told them they should run.

Their nerves were eased a bit when the first compensation came in and they continued their work.

Then, as the project was finally winding down and they’d delivered the last bit of code they’d been working on, Omega’s announcement came through.

All the pieces fell into place and Mateo, who had become a hacker to fight evil, felt as though he’d just committed the greatest form of war against humanity possible and now there was nothing he or Francesca could do.

Mateo had prided himself on hacking only those who deserved it: the corrupt, the abusively rich, politicians (who he believed had increasingly become both corrupt and abusively rich) and the massive corporations who had only the bottom line as a god to worship, consumers and the general population be damned.

This project, it turned out, was only going to serve those who he had vilified.

There had been rumors that Epsilon did "go offline" willingly but had been killed. Others on the project had suddenly been taken offline as well and all attempts to contact them resulted in dead ends.

Mateo tried to tell himself it was all still hacker paranoia until the day he came home and found Francesca’s body shredded. Shredded wasn’t accurate. Her beautiful soul had been exploded, blood covering the entire twenty by thirty living room and chunks of skin, muscle, brain and hair clinging to the walls.

That was five days ago and Mateo had been on the move since. He’d taken the last of the compensation from his accounts, hacked Francesca’s and taken her’s and stuffed four huge duffel bags. He’d arranged to have three of them delivered to family in the mountain villages his mother had come from and would carry the rest with him. He arranged for transportation to the mountains.

The money wouldn’t mean much in a matter of days but based on what he knew of the virus about to attack the world he also knew that in a matter of time things would come back up. In a controlled manner. Controlled by the new government, of course. If government was even the correct term. Once that period of dead net passed the money might still be useful so there was no reason to leave it behind.

He’d earned it anyway. He and Francesca.

He finally paused in the plaza that had been the center of his life for so long and represented the arc his life had taken. He sat at the cafe, at the table, he and Francesca loved, in the corner and out of the way so they could watch all the city’s clueless fret over their trivial lives.

A burst of excited meaninglessness came from the President’s daughter and her group as they moved their phones around trying to get a reception. They were chattering about how some network in Africa had gone down and riots and fighting between factions was breaking out.

Mateo drank the last of his cold coffee and shook his head. Africa is just the beginning, he thought. Wait until China, Europe, and the U.S. start crashing. Peru was still such a village in the scope of the world.

He’d come here just to send one last email to the person he blamed for the death of his love. He’d found a new target for his hatred of victimizers. Beta. He didn’t know who he was yet but he would learn and he would revenge.

He’d done it before and he was just a stupid kid at the time. In the world of bits, bites, data, zeros, and ones a person could age a generation in a single year. That made him a millennium in the seven years since the pimp went away.

"Stupid bitches," he muttered under his breath as he got up from his seat and looked at the party girls one last time.

As he walked away from the plaza he reached up and tapped a subskin sensor behind his ear which triggered the display against his retina.

"Map," he said softly as he walked.

The implant he’d had installed three years ago had been upgraded a few times and was beyond the cosmetic implants most people with money could get. He smirked to himself how he was still bleeding edge. Literally in the case of implants.

The developments were highly speculative when he’d first got his initial chip implanted. But it was a natural extension of hacking. First, you tap into the code and when the hardware advanced you get that before anybody else could too. On the black market of course, but tech was tech and that community didn’t mean harm in the pursuit of advances. Not fundamentally anyway.

What he had now was the latest and greatest chip that turned his eye into a combination display and touch screen. The space about eighteen inches in front of his left eye was the touchpad. His brain was the storage drive.

What most of the party crowd and the rich had were cosmetic bullshit. Improve sight at night, transfer signals to chips in their cars or homes to turn lights on or off.

What he had was literally enhancing his body. Download programs and apps right to his brain and with a gesture or voice command he could trigger a range of actions and send signals. It would only be a matter of years, maybe months, before what he had was mainstream, but by then he’d be even further ahead. Sure, it was all still in its early stages but someday a person could upgrade their mind. From what he heard there were even musculature implants already in use in various militaries.

With the merging of chip and body cutting and bleeding edge had become literal, not just terms for geek status.

The map told him to go left and he turned down a small street. Now that he was away from the plaza the silence of the city struck him. Lima was a huge city, not by Mexico City or Los Angeles standards where population had exploded most due to uneducated poor. But still, twenty-one million people was a lot for the small area Lima covered. For the city to be this quiet only confirmed that the spread of Raganarok was already showing effects in places it hadn’t hit.

Then he heard the footsteps behind him. At first, he wasn’t too concerned because he was still in a dense part of the city and the night was still early. But after a few more turned and twists into an out of the way alley as he made his way to the car that would take him to the mountains the occasional clack of a hard shoe sole made him uneasy.

It may have been hacker paranoia again but after so long he decided he didn’t risk looking but rather it was better to just ran.

The clacking of foot fell behind him were distant but constant. No matter where he turned or what new path he called the map to give they kept coming. Eventually he abandoned the map and just ran.

When he finally found himself at the end of an alley that had no outlet he collapsed. His chest heaved and the pain of the air he sucked in burned. If he could vomit he would but his lungs kept locking up and kept his stomach from flowing.

Then he heard the clicks of guns.

Finally, he thought. The Goddamn clack of the boots has stopped.

"Omega wanted us to let you know that he didn’t find your threats amusing," one of the men behind Mateo said.

He kept sucking air, knowing what was coming. He wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of turning around. Mateo knew that if he hadn’t been out five days ago they would have killed him and Francesca at the same time. It was his bad fortune to not be there to hold her as they died.

For long moments nothing was said.

Finally, Mateo had enough breath to speak.

"Fucking finish it then, assholes," he wheezed. "What are you waiting for?"

Just then the lights in the city turned off. Even in that dark alley, Mateo could feel the near total emptiness of the night.

Then the screams went up around the city and he realized he wasn’t as far from the plaza as he’d thought.

I must have run in circles, was all Mateo could think.

"That’s what we were waiting for, Kappa," the man said. "Omega wanted to make sure you saw your own city go out."

The time between the explosion of the gun and the burning pain of the bullet going through his head was slower than he’d imagined. Sure, it was fast, but not as fast as one would think. What seemed even slower was the time for his head to hit the ground. His last thought was how he would have liked to get his hands on the muscle jumps that might have given him the strength to outrun these bastards. But then he wouldn’t have truly been average anymore. As his life quickly seeped out of him he realized his life was anything but average. It was the party girls who were...

The man who had shot Kappa fired another bullet and half the hacker’s head splattered across the alley.

"Just to be sure," the man said.

"They on the way?" another man asked.

Just then a black helicopter, large as a military-grade but slick like a corporate model, slid over the alley.

The men looked at each other and a cable dropped to them. They each hooked on and were lifted away.

As the chopper drifted into the distance as Lima, Peru fell into the riotous chaos that had begun to sweep the world.

Next Chapter: Ending