ZOMG!

There were two worlds. The real world, and the unreal world. There were three people. Real people, unreal people and people. There were four sides, because all were for and none were against. There were ten ideas, and the other one involved binary.

''Now don't think this is some spinoff of The Matrix, there are no simulation programs, evil robots or some crazy thing where humans are used as batteries (even though the machines would spend more energy keeping the humans alive than they would receive from said humans) because some people thought that saying the brains were memory space was too complicated. There are just some who do not wander the unreal.

Razar
Elzm was an outsider. This meant she had no personal existence over the internet. She held her livings free of hackers, only targeted by runners. Her family left her with a good deal of inheritance money, and she had only made great profit with it. She was now the owner and CEO of Razar, that worked with software development, specially antivirus software. Economically, she was undefeatable. Even if the competition united, they would have a hard time.

Today was a special day at the tallest building of Kuonishi city, where, in the tallest five floors, operated the China division of the Razar corporation. Elzm came to the country after reports of lowering production and had just finished checking the place for any problems, with her service efficiency advisor, and having a meeting to tell the division administrators what needed to change.

Now she was sitting on the administrator's chair, her legs on the table, looking through the glass wall to the illuminated buildings of Kuonishi (which for some reason sounded Japanese). The problems with the division were simply poor decisions, if the place didn't get better soon, she would fire those assheads in charge.

Well, if she left soon she would have enough time to do something interesting in the city, before going somewhere else. Sometimes she wished that she didn't own the company --and the responsibilities that came with it-- at all. It was while she thought about this that suddenly, there was a black-out.

The chance of an overload was nil, and that of the power plants dying less. Backup after backup would have to fail. Luckily, the back-up power kept the mainframe working, though all other computers were immediately shut off. Elzm stood up from the chair and looked through the window. Nearby buildings were in complete darkness too, but far-off, she could see lights near the streets.

The problem, whatever it was, happened only locally, so it was probably deliberate. The door of the office opened up, Hoo Lin, the administrator, appeared, his white skin visible under the dim moonlight, "Are you alright, ma'am?"

"Yes. What the hell happened?"

"A black-out, it's unusual, but not entirely rare, unfortunately. The lights should start working soo..." the lights came back on, before he could finish, "There. See? Nothing to worry about."

"That was no black-out. The lights only went off in this neighbourhood, the rest of the city was still lit. Where's Sven? Call the power company!" she said, while leaving the room to find Sven, her second-in-command.

Energy locks were down, they had been bypassed quite well. The commission wouldn't be that hard after all, though the hacker didn't know how his commissioner had control of the energy grid. Either way, he's just have to pry open the door that lay in front of him now. The locks were back in order, and he was able to break the password inputs so that he'd have some time to himself while they authorized their proper methods of bypass.

Quickly the hacker used his fake keycard (he had accessed the ID department of the company earlier) to unlock the last door, the last obstacle between him and a direct link to Razar's mainframe, where most of the security measures wouldn't be active. He inserted his fake keycard in a slot on the wall, and another slot opened, where he could insert the optic fiber cable of his palm top. The console came together before his eyes, he was finally doing what he was truly sent for. Too bad there wasn't any security to break this time, just permissions to use. :LOGIN "ELZM0","5J&Q@4L_"
 * INJECT/DB :INT $V 1 :LOOP /DB/USERS[SIZE]{:SET ACCESS("/DB/USERS/"+$V) 0 :SET $V $V+1}
 * DOWNLOAD(:SEARCH "POLQUIN","SLAYER23RUN")
 * CONNECT "ORBITAL_FIVE.SAT",2943,"SLAYER23","PAZ42@R"

>Done
 * UPLOAD "SLAYER23RUN"

>Done
 * DISCONNECT

>Done
 * KTHXBAI LOL SUXORS God, he loved typing in caps. Whatever, he now had to get out somehow. He had known he might not get out alive, that's why they sent him.

Ten minutes after the computers were turned on again, the electronics technicians of the company found out that they didn't have any access rights.

He was strapped to a chair now. He had tried to get out as fast as he could, but they caught him when he hesitated to jump out of a window.

One of the building's security employees had taken him, and before he could take him to the police, Hoo Lin discovered it and paid the guard for an hour with the thief. Elzm heard about it twenty minutes later, and when she entered the dim lit, minuscule room, he was being beaten by the security guard.

"Is he the guy?" she said.

He sobbed and spoke something in Chinese, Elzm demanded to know what he had said.

"No, I'm not, I was only coming home late from work," the security guard translated, in a rather calmer tone.

Hoo Lin was red from anger. "He's obviously lying! Ma'am, give me some time with him, I interrogated some people during my time in the People's Army."

Elzm hesitated. Those files were of utmost importance. Introducing completely new virus identification and repair methods never before seen in any product of the industry. That could get her trillions of euros. On the other hand, she didn't want problems with the local authorities, and all time spent with this man would be wasted time if he wasn't the thief.

Not once did she consider to let the man go for ethical reasons.

"Go ahead." said Elzm, "Find out where he sent Polquin, what does he have on his palm?"

Hoo Lin passed Elzm the palm that had hacked their secrets of the Polquin Algorithms. Elzm left off to have it scanned over, closing the door to leave the hacker, Hoo Lin and the security guard alone.

Hoo Lin was quick to start, "We both know what's going on here, so I'll be blunt. Where did you send the data?"

"I don't know nothing about no data," said the hacker.

Hoo Lin took no time to punch the man's stomach, knocking back his chair and then left if fallen, "Look here, fellow, our technicians will find out where you sent those files even if you don't tell us, but then I'll have no reason to not kill you. Do you understand?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," the hacker said. Hoo Lin knelt down, pulling him up by his collar with the chair. Anger could be seen in his eyes, before he spat in the hackers face and shoved him aside while walking away.

Ten minutes later he came back, with some papers and a pistol, grinning.

"There, I told you," he said, released the safelock and aimed the gun at the man's head.

The wide-eyed man blurted out, almost by accident, "What? But there's no way they could have found out..." and then, noticing his mistake, he forced his own mouth shut.

Hoo Lin threw the pistol at the ground, grinning victoriously. Reading the paper, he said "Memo to all employees of Razar, Elzm Kilternas is coming to our offices to supervise the operations. We need you all doing your best, any person that publicly shames the company will be fired."

Crumpling the paper, he added, "With that out of the way, how about you start talking?"

The man kept silent.

Disappointed, Hoo Lin left the room, but before, he ominously said, "Don't worry, I'll be right back. And I hope you don't need your fingers."

The hacker leaned back a little. There was a reason they sent him instead of another, more superior runner, he was loyal. He just had to get a little more control over his nerves.

Iqbal Fahim Hashim Abd Al'Aziz
"GOOOOAAAAL!!!" the narrator screamed at the top of his lungs, and a man, almost one hundred kilometres distant from him was almost deafened by the sound. Iqbal turned the big television set off, what was the use of buying the latest Home Theater system if his team was being massacred one game after the next since the beginning of the championship?

Iqbal Fahim Hashim Abd Al'Aziz lived in Al'Rahman, one of the wealthiest cities in Palestine. And he wasn't one of the less wealthy citizens of it. He lived at the top floor of a fifty stories luxury hotel. Living in a hotel was a good deal overall, he had to pay more, but he didn't have to bother with preparing meals or cleaning his own house.

His cell phone rang, the tune of "God save the Queen," this could only mean...

"Hello, Elzm?" he answered the phone, the voice at the other side of the line was authoritarian, and angry. Iqbal just kept answering while he went to his PC, a big, black, and sleek CPU box (in which he put a transparent green "window"), with a completely new Spd processor (it would only reach the stores next month) and twenty Gbs of memory, a flat screen LCD monitor.

He turned it on, while telling Elzm to calm down (Don't you fucking tell me to calm down!), she was an obnoxious, annoying bitch, but she had the right to be, since she was also rich. Elzm was Iqbal's wealthiest clients, and paid even better than his official job as a security consultant in a Israeli company.

She wanted him to find out who the hell received files that were stolen from her company's Chinese branch by a hacker she captured. She sent the contents of a PDA to his ghost e-mail account, he created a different one every time he did a job, Iqbal told her to send him a picture of the guy first, so he could know who the hell he was. She yelled at him again, but ended up doing it.

He did a quick face-search on the net with a software he had stolen earlier from the InterPol and found six passports, eight identities and one family picture. The guy was freelance. Looking through the articles, he seemed to have a thing against corporal selling of softwares.

Maybe he could do a face search on the family members, find some names, and search for that address in the site of whatever police force watched over them. But he had to choose, was the family to be trusted? They probably knew some thing or another, but if his persistence ran with the family, they'd only alert the hailings to some associate.

There were the passports. Tracking travel would prove possible, and that could allow a tracing of past workings. Not to mention that most travelling companies were relatively easy to hack. After some time of thought, he decided to put the family idea on hold and to discover where the hell he had come from.

Dead heaps of trash were easier to eat than the bull of agency quota on customer privacy. Fahim had tried asking for records before, and he had always been turned down with pages of standard protocols. Government was best left out of things, since they were slow and constricting. They'd follow the protocols of the agency before helping some company tracing a theft. They only helped with the thief, and even that had to be kept civil.

He sighed with frustration as another official walked up to him and asked for his identification. "Fine, it's been what, only the twentieth time I had to do THAT procedure?" he shouted at him.

"Whoa, there, why're you shouting at me!" said the Chinese dude who evidently thought that the bureau was slick.

Fahim just stared at him. "Huh?"

"Now, if you'd let me get started, I'm here to tell you that you've got access to this stuff you were requesting," he said.

"Whoa, really?"

"Yeah."

"You mean it???" Fahim thought, no--knew--that it had to be a first.

"Yeah."

"Whoa, really?" he said again, before following the man into the office.