EverWare

We have ten seconds to place charges, take out security cameras, and duck for cover before our targets realize what hit them. We are outside the central control room deep inside Daehan Industries’ headquarters, a gigantic floating factory and data center, located in the sea between North Korea and the eastern seaboard of China. I am one of six operatives – the only female – in a private “guns-for-hire” outfit whose mission is to destroy Daehan’s EverWare servers before Protocol 669 goes live.

Grieger, our boss, is back at HQ directing from afar, awaiting my crypto-beacon to signal the attack. If we succeed, we finally shut down 669, a digital trojan horse that could wreak havoc among the earth’s remaining population. Jordy and Rosner are also on the outside with armored drones at the ready. On signal, they will rain down a barrage of precision ballistics that will barrel deep into the fortress, destroying Daehan’s core. But first, I must shutdown Daehan’s defenses.

Three, two, one, BOOM!

The debris from our blast flies outwards keeping the target room intact. Nato and Mack – contractors for Daehan who we screened, recruited, and trained up for this mission – sweep in and swiftly take out control room security.

I take my position at the control desk, heart pounding, adrenaline surging. This is what I live for. Having graduated top of class from Stanford U in Computer Science, I had the rare ability to master new programming languages in single sittings. This led to many hacking exploits that others dared not touch. I became hot property after hacking four world powers’ intranets and simultaneously bombing said governments’ computer screens with an April Fools’ Day joke that went viral.

My mother, who migrated to the States in the 90s, would have been mortified at my exploits had she been alive at the time. I was doing a stint at Samsung’s Blockchain Innovations division. I wish I had been there for mom when she took her life that year. All I have of hers is the necklace she gave me when I left for South Korea.

Now I work for an anti-terrorist unit turned private ops firm that is hired by governments (or what remains of them) and corporations for our covert brains and brawn expertise. We made our reputation averting World War III in 2030. Our team disabled Russia’s EMP takedown of major military sites across South Korea and Japan as North Korean missiles were being fired at them. By keeping America’s military bases online, all missiles were intercepted, and a breakout of war avoided. However, a renewed Cold War was birthed.

Unfortunately, tensions did not subside. The third World War erupted a decade later. It escalated over six months, ending with the detonation of nuclear missiles that decimated most of North America, parts of Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and the western halves of Russia and China. The Southern Hemisphere remained relatively unscathed. As the nuclear winter spread across the Northern Hemisphere, trust in governments plummeted and corporations rose to fill the vacuum of supplying hope to the world.

One such corporation was Daehan Industries, a South Korean metals, semiconductor, and robotics manufacturer. They rose to prominence in 2027 when US big tech companies were demolished by repeals of Section 230 protections and a crusade by radical advocates of the blockchain revolution against big data.

Before 2030, the leading corporations were in the information and software fields. During the 30s, health and cybernetics had become the leading industries globally. These were industries that were already on an upward trajectory since the 20s due to back-to-back pandemics, followed by the pervasive frailty felt under the resurgent Cold War milieu. It was in this setting that Daehan Industries, now a leader in cybernetics and health augmentation products, released its EverTech product suite to the public, two years before World War III began.

There were three keys to Daehan’s success. The first key was their EverLife elixir that was the culmination of research in healing and life extension by a company Daehan acquired in 2022. Daehan were the first company to extend a human life beyond a hundred and thirty years. Their elixir could be ingested with food or given directly into the blood stream by injection.

The second key was Daehan’s exo-suits. Daehan’s Metals and Nanotech division had created an armor-grade yet lightweight augmented full-body suit that not only housed the human body but could connect directly to the wearer’s brain, allowing full control of the exo-suit by even a paraplegic.

Once these two keys were combined into a single product called EverTech, Daehan became the hottest trending purchase among the wealthy. Daehan gave the hope of immortality to humanity. They also provided a host of extra services including designer exo-skins molded after celebrities’ bodies and “Life Rule” protocols that helped keep users automatically safe from harm’s way. Life Rules could also be pre-programmed to “wake up” a user’s exo-suit from sleep mode and carry out mundane tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and putting out the washing on autopilot, leaving the user free to read a book or catch up on more sleep.

People started to literally live in these things. All this was managed by Daehan’s EverWare servers and when they bundled their exo-suits and EverLife supply with the third key – an EverWare subscription – their sales sky-rocketed as their suits came within reach of the average consumer.

The catch? The exo-suits remained the property of Daehan Industries and users had to sign a contract that locked them in for life. Daehan’s business model was supremely devilish. Sell their products as a subscription and lock them in forever, literally.

By a stroke of luck, genius foresight, or insider knowledge – you decide – Daehan Industries moved off-shore to a floating factory just before the war broke out protecting their operations from nuclear fallout. Many conglomerates followed suite in the years following. Triple the size of a standard oil rig, Daehan’s headquarters is an impenetrable megalith. Its main control center and server rooms are a mile under sea level. Above sea level is a protected dome that contains the communications hub connecting Daehan to the outside world.

So how did we get in?

When Grieger got the call for this job, Daehan was already in the news for a massive data breach that leaked millions of users’ details including their Life Rule Protocol usage. If you consider that Protocols 200 to 369 are mainly to do with acts of a sexual nature, you can see why this immediately turned out to be a PR nightmare for Daehan. Being the last giant to fell in the war against big data, it was confirmed that a crypto revolutionary was out to take them down.

Daehan immediately embraced blockchain technology to create its own “blind” data, keeping that data out of reach of outsiders but also re-assuring users and regulators that they could not access that data for themselves.

That wasn’t the real story, however. The real story was Protocol 669. This Protocol was marketed as the Life Rule for those that needed deep undisturbed rest. It was designed for people suffering from chronic fatigue or needing major medical recovery. Our client got access to the leaked dataset and analyzed it. Thoroughly.

What they found was so scary it shook my soul when I heard it from Grieger. They found a clear correlation between Protocol 669 and berserkers, a term we use for EverTech clientele that went on brutal killing sprees, and in some cases were traced to corporate sabotage, but always within weeks of downloading 669. The common ending in all cases of berserker events was suicide or accidental death, after which Daehan’s service units would recover their property and clean-up the mess.

Our involvement began when our client discovered an acceleration in people who downloaded Protocol 669 into their Life Rules stack – healthy people who had no need for Protocol 669. The downloads happened while they were running sleep-based Life Rules. In other words, without their consent. Daehan’s sleep protocols were triggering Protocol 669 downloads. Crucially, berserker-like incidents have also risen sharply.

Despite this, Daehan keeps getting bigger and their competitors keep going bust. Add to this, rumors of influence from the North Korean regime and mounting lawsuits against Daehan, and you see a behemoth getting cornered.

According to data not yet released to the public, Protocol 669 will be installed in every Daehan exo-suit by 2042. That’s six months away. That’s also 1.2 trillion customers and growing. 669 is a deadly virus that if left unchecked gives Daehan access to the most unstoppable sleeper army known to humanity. We must complete this mission, even if we die.

With the pierce of the blast still ringing in my ears, I start hacking Daehan’s systems. Security alarms activate. I have less than ninety seconds to gain access, shutdown 669, and disable defenses before Daehan’s security rush us. They haven’t updated their internal network with blockchain encryption which gives me hope that we can get out of here alive. I guess they never imagined anyone getting in.

Grieger figured the only way in was to do a clandestine buyout of Daehan’s cleaning contractors. They are the only people who have access to every room in the facility, bar the production and storage floors, the server rooms, and the control room. Everyone else stays strictly within their department. It’s ironic how even the biggest of giants can fall with the smallest of pebbles, and of all the workers in the chain of command, it’s the people who take out the trash that can do the job.

I lived the life of a contractor undercover for nine months, after which I was swapped in as a cleaning contractor for Daehan. As for Nato and Mack, Grieger screened the cleaning roster for two loyal candidates that he could train up for this job. They went from garbage collectors to formidable bodyguards in twelve months.

I crack Daehan’s initial security wall, but their defense program is putting up a fight. I have located the live and backup servers and activated code to bleachbit them, grinding them to a halt. I now have to deactivate the defense systems so our drones can strike hard. With forty seconds to go, I finally break through and disable Daehan’s lock systems and their anti-missile arrays. As I send off my crypto-beacon, I shout to the others, “Go! Go! Go! T minus five for Eagle Strike!”

We rapidly retrace our steps back through the concrete corridors, sirens still blaring. We turn the corner towards the elevator. Four security guards in exo-suits barge out, shouting. Before we can hear what they are saying, Mack has already thrown a flashbang while Nato pulls me to cover. He and I start firing, but our bullets don’t seem to penetrate their military-grade exo-suits.

We all realise we are not getting out of here alive. Mack, who is in a hacked exo-suit charges them and takes one to the ground. Nato and I stand our ground. Bullets zip past my face. I take a bullet to the shoulder and start to fall backwards. Suddenly, I see bullets approaching me, but gliding slowly through the air as a surge of adrenaline hits me. Sounds become muffled.

By instinct I clutch the heart-shaped locket my mother gave me. She had received it from her mother when she married dad. It’s a pity he only stuck around till I was seven.

It’s uncanny how trauma shapes the way you live your life. I was always out to prove my worth. Mom took her life when she lost all reason to live. Grandma experienced two world wars but lived to see a hundred and ten.

I am not even half her age, but as I hit the floor and see the world crumbling around me, I am left with one devastating realization echoing through my head.

“I don’t want to die now…”