When I saw The Matrix (I was 11), I wanted to become a hacker. A never did. I suck at coding. But I admire people who can talk to the machine.

I wrote this story at my writing group in Taipei. The prompt was Feeding the Ravens. Back then, I had just tried using Oculus Rift SDK1, my friends started a VR startup and everyone was reading Ready Player One. It’s a cyberpunkish Twilight Zone/Black Mirror style cautionary tale dedicated to my VR friends and the console cowboys anywhere.

The Conspiracy of Ravens

Dade was hitting the keyboard, trying to keep up with the dateapp chat on the right screen, messaging on a bunch of subreddits on the middle, and feeding the ravens on the left. His typing echoed in the cramped room lit by dim neon lights. It was filled with unfinished pcbs, component packages and tangles of wires mixed with chocolate wrappers, crushed cans of soda and beer, and oily Dominos boxes.

Me: Send me more of ur pics. SEND

Dade hunched back over to the left screen, split between a coding window with green lines on a black background, and a render of a virtual reality workroom. There, his brother’s avatar was surrounded by a conspiracy of black ravens, jumping back and forth and jacking their heads in sync.

Cypher: Are you coding, or still fucking around? I’m almost finished here.

Dade saw the words on the screen and heard his brother’s voice from behind simultaneously.

“I’m on it, chill man.” Dade blurted into his headphone’s mic.

Cypher: You still on that dating chat?

“Ye, chattin’up that Serbian chick. She’s hot, man.”

Cypher: She’s probably a fat dude name Slava, farting and eating canned spam. How’s that for an image for your night’s fap session?

Cypher laughed making a gurgling noise.

“Fuck off, man. Just do your design, m’kay?” Dade picked up a can of beer and jiggled it – empty.

A few exotic birds appeared on the screen. They were disproportionately large, allowing Cypher to sculpt the minute details of their design. Resplendent Quetzal or Pharomachrus mocinno, Dade recognized the bird species. Eight months ago he couldn’t have done that, even at gunpoint. But days and nights of programming this stuff carved the knowledge into his brain.

“If everything goes shitways we can still become ornithologists.” He suggested to Cypher once. Both were very high at that point.

“Yea, sure. You know what they do to ornithologists in the can?” Dade shook his head then. “I don’t either, but I think it ain’t pretty.”

The whole thing began as a simple side project they called “Birds for Scale”. They used it to learn to design and program for VR. But the app enhanced user experience and smoothening chain of persuasion in the virtual worlds that were spawning quickly these days. It caught on among the Rift community first. And then WIRED featured, and it was game on.

But they weren’t some UX designers in it for upvotes and an ego boost. Something extra came with every install of the free app – the ravens, small packs of black code. Now the malware was sitting dormant in the homes of millions of users. They did some small-scale testing and the birds brought back treasures, like passwords and tumbled bitcoin private keys. Just a little taste of what will happen on the cash-out day.

“Time to feed the ravens.” Dade said to himself and smiled, easing himself into a coding session for a patch.

Then a flicker on the right screen caught his attention and broke the coding flow.

Cynibunny89: What kinda pics u want? ;)))))))))0

He was about to reply, but now he couldn’t shake off the image of Slava, the fat slob. “Thanks a lot, bro.” He thought, picking up the beer can to realize again that it was empty. He crushed the aluminum in his hand and threw it to the side.

He took his headphones off, stood up and stretched his body. He crept slowly towards a small fridge in the corner of the room, cringing from dull rods of pain diving through his shins – he was sitting for too long. A cold can of beer felt good in his hand. He took a sip, burped, and turned around, embracing the whole of the room in his gaze.

Cypher was sitting on a black leather chair at the back of the room strapped into a full immersion kit. They built the whole damn thing by themselves from under-the-table CPU’s and other components from southern China, custom mechanical parts printed at unmarked 3D printing spots. It all looked like crap, with the bare PCBs and open wires taking up half of the room, but it was un-fucking-tracable.

Still, the most luxurious part was the prototype sensor gloves made in some Japanese high-tech lab. They spent a lot of cash on those in the back market. It wasn’t any tech they had seen before. The gloves plugged directed into the body, the nanofibers on the inner layer went into the user’s fingertips. It allowed a very tactile sculpting in VR, what Cypher described as “mind-to-fingers-to-polygons highway”. Dade never had the stomach to try it.

Then he saw Cypher shuffling in his seat, arching his back.

“Stop it. Get me out. Fuuuuuck.” He screamed.

“What the…” Dade dropped the can, spilt beer foam hissed on the floor. He reached the screens in a few steps.

“What’s going on, man?” He shouted into the mic.

Cypher didn’t reply. Both his body and the avatar were convulsing. As were the ravens. The screen flickered and one of the ravens started shaking violently. It pumped up and exploded. Screen flickered again. The second raven burst.

Dade tried typing, but the PC hung. His code on the split screen suddenly disappeared replaced by words in a red tint on the black screen:

“Are you the master of ravens?”

“Quoth the Raven.

Nevermore

Nevermore

Nevermore

Nevermore

Nevermore”

“We’re being hacked.” Dade grunted. “We’re being fucking hacked!”

He pulled out the cables and the screens died. He rushed to Cypher, his body limp under a bundle of equipment.

“Cypher? Man, we just got fucking hacked. Cypher?”

The body twitched again, making Dade jump back.

“Get me ooouut. It’s itching. Fuck, my hands.” Cypher shouted.

“Jeez man, you’re giving me the creepers. Someone must’ve packed a virus in a returning raven package…” He was helping Cypher to get out of equipment, taking off the headset and the gloves last.

Cypher then clutched his arms to him and started scratching.

“It itches. It itches so much. Fuck. I can’t…” He was panting loudly, looking at his arms.

“Tom?”

Dade realized he hadn’t called his brother his real name in years. A train of thought served him memories of their mom’s irritation. Her trying to make them stop using their handles -She tried bribes, she tried threats – but nothing worked. One day she gave up, and rolled her eyes “Ok, ok, let it be Cypher and Dade if you don’t like the names I gave you.” It was only five years ago, but it seemed like eons.

Dade shook his head and jumped to turn the lights on – he had almost forgotten where the switch was. His reality was massively lagged.

Cypher was tucked on the ground besides the black chair, still clawing at his arms and mumbling. Dade took his brother’s arm:

“What’s wrong, bro?”

Cypher opened up from the clutch, exposing the skin of his forearm to the light. Dade jumped back. Cypher’s skin, from his fingers to elbows, had turned into necrotic tissue. He clawed at himself with bloodied pulped fingers. The taint was spreading. Blackening veins snaking up to his shoulders.

Cypher jerked his head, staring straight at Dade, his eyes wide with terror.

“Make it stop. Make it stoooop! Fucking virus. It’s in me.”

Dade couldn’t move a muscle.

Cypher collapsed, the dark patterns spreading through his body, through his throat, into his head, like plague marks in fast-forward. His body jerked. His hand reached up in an unnatural angle. He jerked again, pulsing his body up to sitting, and collapsed again.

Dade moved back, crab sliding on his hands.

Cypher stood, leaning on the wall, his body jerking like a doll controlled by an insane puppeteer.

“Cypher?…” he whispered though dry lips.

His brother looked at him, but it wasn’t the eyes he knew. They were black, his face marked with the inky trail of the virus.

“Qhrr,” he slurred.

“Cypher?…” Dade swallowed, reaching for something to grab on, something. This couldn’t be real, this had to be his anxiety dream or he was tripping, or…

“Quath,” he slurred again. “Quath, quatth.”

“Polygons-fingers-mind,” Dade thought.

Then Cypher let the wall go and stood, wiggly, but standing. The head turned, staring at Dade. He opened his mouth and took a step closer.

“Quath, quath, quath,” the sound from his mouth on a loop.