"Take It Back" by Caleb Kinney and Amber Kinney

Setting: The New Confederate States (NCS) rose from the ashes like Cerberus from the underworld, enacting a government to control the flow of information by passing the Cyber Prohibition Act of 2028, which prohibits the use of the Internet and electronics by civilians. Perimeter walls around the few remaining major cities impede free travel. The NCS uses cameras installed on corner lampposts and storefronts to supplement satellites equipped with heat-sensing heart rate technology that identify people by the precise picosecond of their heartbeat. Civilians are tracked like livestock and live in a society where the technology movement, once so advanced, has returned to rudimentary electronics of the likes of the early 1990s.

Las Vegas, once a city of flashy lights is now nothing but a dreary greyscale. Much of the northern part of the city was demolished during the civil war, leaving only an eerily untouched section of the Las Vegas Strip crowded with dingy casinos, each having lost its luster a long time ago.

My name is Parker Dukljan. I was born in a Washington, D.C. suburb in June of 2003. I fled here to Las Vegas during the New Confederate Uprising of 2023 at the behest of my father, Jeffrey Dukljan, a once prominent official and the Secretary of Defense for the now extinct United States. The Uprising began as calculated and strategic riots in major cities around the East Coast. A riot grew in Washington, D.C. and eventually overtook the Capitol and the White House. Fleeing for safety, my father was flying with the President on Air Force One, when a small explosion left a 20-inch hole in the cargo hold, igniting the fuselage and sending the plane down to a fiery demise. The New Confederate Party killed all remaining members of the Cabinet in fateful explosions or public assassinations. Vice-President John Antenor and Secretary of Homeland Security David Cassius, however, were spared this fate.

To the dismay of the public, upon succeeding the President, Vice-President Antenor sided with the New Confederate Party, vilifying the United States and showcasing the New Confederate Party's ultra surveillance state. The cause, they claimed, was "saving the world from itself." They argued that such freedom nurtured rampant poverty, crime and drug use; all of which ultimately led to the enormous debt that the United States owed other nations. The state governments were divided; some joined the New Confederate Party while others vehemently opposed its ideals. The result was a bloody and devastating civil war that killed much of the population and was unsuccessful in overthrowing the NCS. When the debris and nuclear fallout finally subsided, only about 5% of the country was left habitable: California, Nevada and Arizona. I'll never know how he knew to send me where he did, but my father saved my life...

Liberty is a memory from the past for those of us that survived. The NCS even assigns every civilian a work trade, which is about where this story begins. I was one of the "lucky" ones selected for debris clean up outside of the walls of the Las Vegas strip. A glorified trash collector, yes, but this does at least grant me time outside of the walls. The perimeter walls are about thirty feet in height made of thick solid steel. Along the top runs a 10,000-volt electric fence with flashing blue lights, indicating constant surveillance. The single passage through the wall is a gate with inch thick steel bars guarded by uniformed NCS soldiers, accompanied by a series of barricades and a surface mounted, spring loaded spike system. Here, as with all civilian trade assignments, we work under strict surveillance throughout our shift. Our GPS coordinates and heart rate are monitored concurrently via a special watchband that is soldered onto our wrist at the beginning of each 12-hour shift. One particularly hot August morning circa 2033, while working along a stretch of mangled debris near the Tuscany Casino directly outside the wall by the old Flamingo Road, I threw a sun bleached Blackjack table into my compactor and squinted as something on its underside, wrapped in a foil of sorts, reflected against the sun and caught me in the eye. Curious, I snatched the item and unwrapped it quickly. Revealed to me was a small metal stick no larger than a key wrapped within a thin scroll of paper.

Calmly, so as not to trigger a spike in my heart rate and elicit any unwarranted attention from the NCS soldier monitoring my shift, I tossed the find into a cutout I had carefully made in the lining of my worn leather jacket for just such occasions. The NCS forbids us to remove items from outside the walls; we are searched at the end of every shift for contraband. However, I have grown quite fond of collecting items from the old world.

At the end of the day I returned to my apartment, what used to be a small hotel room at the Bellagio. My apartment is on the 6th floor and opens to a drab white walled room with faded blue and gray carpet worn through to the concrete in the commonly treaded areas. The windows face the hotel's empty pools, which at one time were filled with cool water for guests to combat the Nevada heat waves, but now are pocked with only rust stains and graffiti. The sparse furniture is made of a rather elegant dark mahogany though one leg of the coffee table is replaced with a lighter wood. My room is accented throughout with gaudy blue and purple lamps. I removed my jacket and from it, the object I found during my shift. The metal stick looked to be an old flash drive and the scroll contained a typed note which read in small, worn text:
QEB CFDEQ CLO COBBALJ PBBH X YLLH QFQIBA KBROLJXKZBO
[M, I, T]; [234, 9, 4]; [120, 27, 2]; [28, 31, 7].

Immediately I smirked. I studied cryptography a bit during college and have enjoyed puzzles since childhood. Assuming the note was a code utilizing the most frequently used words in the English language, "A" and "THE" I discovered with relative ease that if QEB decrypted to "THE" and X to "A" the following cipher results: a letter is substituted with another letter exactly 23 letters subsequent to it in the alphabet. After a bit of decrypting, the decoded message read:
"THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM SEEK A BOOK TITLED NEUROMANCER"
and the second part of the message became [P, L, W]. Based off of the decoded message, I knew the second part likely meant [Page, Line, Word]...if only I could find the book.

Libraries and bookstores are illegal now in Las Vegas though I knew a place on the strip where such limited contraband could be found. The next day, after my shift, I walked over to the old Forum Shops in Caesars Palace. On the third floor, I walked into the Sushi Roku restaurant, past the tables, into the kitchen and through a hallway that opened into a giant conference area, which had been turned into makeshift vendor stalls. I had arrived at the Las Vegas Black Market. The Black Market is a maze filled with a musty smell and the voices of customers haggling at the 40 individual 7x18 foot booths of various vendors fencing contraband, pirated or stolen merchandise. Finding a stall piled with tall, leaning stacks of yellowing and disheveled books, I inquired about Neuromancer. A middle aged man with a long unkempt beard to accompany his slight beer belly, puffed continuously from his vape pipe, scratched his head and replied "Necromancer?" I corrected the title and added, "Maybe from the early 2000s?" The man walked silently through a maze of piled books to a sign with a scribbled "N" and started fingering through the spines. He rested on a book with a weathered backing and a torn dust jacket. "Whoa vintage, 1980's...here you go, kid," he laughed and tossed me the book. At the register, I paid the $14.65 with what little US currency I had remaining. The NCS regulates all civilian expenditures through our embedded chip; it monitors all money in and out through our personal NCS currency accounts. The chip is an integrated circuit encased in silicate glass about the size of a large grain of rice and placed under the skin on our right hand. It uses passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology for identification and a contactless payment system.

When I got back to my apartment, I flipped through the 276 pages of the worn book, unsure of what the hidden message might be. The phrase
"FIND DEF CON"
came to life on the pages before my eyes and I knew exactly where to go next.

Def Con is a bar operating out of the old Bally's Hotel and Casino that is frequented by Cyber Punks, a neo culture that embraces what little technology is left of this world and frequents the Black Market. I raced down to the strip to the ornate metal door branded with a smiling skull and crossbones backlit by a red glow. I stepped into the dimly lit smoke filled room and sat at the brass-framed bar. I set the dusty book on the polished bartop and ordered a Whiskey Noir. Before I could taste my drink, a strong hand darted out from the darkness and pulled me through a door to the left of the bar.

I regained my composure and opened my eyes to three Cyber Punks amidst a room of glowing screens attached to whirring devices haphazardly stacked on top of each other. I stared briefly at two similar looking men sporting colorfully died Mohawks until my gaze shifted to a stunning woman of about 5'4" with wavy brown hair, her light brown eyes looking inquisitively back at me. She wore a plunging black sleeveless top with fitted blue jeans and what appeared to be well-conditioned combat boots. The woman moved beside me silently while one of the two men said, "I'm Lightman, my brother McKittrick over there doesn't talk and Ally is the one who grabbed you from the bar," he nodded in the woman's direction. As I introduced myself, I noticed a look of recognition in their faces. "So, you're part of the resistance?" Ally implied.  "Me? Well, no you see..." I started. Ally interrupted, "Then what are you doing here? Aren't you a Dukljan? The NCS killed your father!" Red-faced, I grimaced, reached in my pocket and roughly handed Ally the flash drive and note I had found.

She handed it off to McKittrick who silently plugged the device into his machine. The screen came alive with scrolling characters. His eyes widened. "It's the encryption code!" Lightman exclaimed. He explained to me that the drive contained the encryption code programmed to hack into the NCS network. It would allow the resistance to shut down the government firewalls and disable all of the monitoring devices throughout the remaining nation. Lightman and McKittrick began to type furiously on the keys at their respective machines. Meanwhile, Ally disclosed to me that they were leading a resistance movement and had already hacked partially into the network. They were able to download some classified NCS documents before being locked out. One of the downloads included a memo outlining the plot by now President Antenor to assassinate the former Cabinet members and rise to power of the New Confederate States. I blinked in disbelief.

"We're in! Shutting down their firewall now," Lightman updated us. The status bar on his computer flashed "79% COMPLETE" as I glanced over his direction. Then, in a moment where time seemed to stand still, the door from the bar flew open and the deafening sound of ricocheting bullets bouncing off metal paralyzed me. The brothers were gunned down in their chairs; blood splattered the shattered, once glowing screens. Ally yanked me down and then pointed the long 12-inch barrel of her Colt Buntline revolver at the doorway, pulling the trigger twice. Two thuds and the metal doorframe shined with blood. Ally jumped up, grabbed the flash drive sticking out of McKittrick's machine then shoved me into a dark opening and I began to fall.

I landed hard in a pile of waste outside of Bally's and Ally landed atop me a moment later, sinking me deeper into the refuse. Without so much as a glance my direction, she jumped to her feet and began to run down the street. I took the urgent cue and trailed close behind. When we reached the alleyway, Ally handed me a small square of rice paper with a drop of blue liquid in the center. "Squid," she called it. "Evidently, you haven't heard of it. It stabilizes our heart rates, to keep the NCS soldiers off our scent during hot situations," she said as she placed one of the squares behind her tongue. She grabbed my sleeve and we took off running once again.

Ally led me to the abandoned Miracle Mile shopping mall and stood in front an old Alex and Ani store. She punched a code into the keypad and the gate and doors opened with a whirl of gears. Inside, Ally led me to a tidy, converted studio. At first glance, the room was modest, furnished with life's most limited essentials. The shades were drawn on the once storefront windows and little natural light seeped in. She quickly slid over a seemingly heavy oak bookshelf to reveal an access panel.  At quick glance, I noticed a copy of Neuromancer on the top shelf. She flipped open the panel and slid out a thin, silver laptop connected to a makeshift fiber media converter connecting a copper twisted pair wire to a fiber optic cable snaked through a hole in the wall.

Ally slammed the flash drive into an open USB port and began to type. The computer screen went black and then flashed, "92% COMPLETE." "What happens when it reaches 100%?" I rather anxiously asked. "We break through the firewall then notify the other waiting parties of the resistance. We have strongholds in California and Arizona waiting for us to signal this very moment," she answered. "Let's just hope it takes the NCS less time to track the signal to us" she added solemnly. I could hear the distant sirens and faint yelling across loud speakers.

Ally's computer let out a series of beeps, hisses and cracklings until the screen finally flashed "100% COMPELTE." Her fingers flew through the keys on her keyboard and in one continuous motion as her thumb hit the ENTER key she reached over and ripped off the fiber connection. "The resistance now has the encryption codes and maps of the NCS headquarters and I was able to shut down their surveillance equipment, for now. It will stall them but it will only be a matter of time before the hole is closed and my encryption on the surveillance monitoring devices is broken. The resistance should able to deliver us air support." "Should?" I thought.

Suddenly, I heard a loud explosion and peered out of the window to see a modified NCS Humvee equipped with a bolt-on MAK armor kit and an M2HB-QCB machine gun mounted on top. The Humvee rolled over the debris from the fallen west wall of the shopping mall and was closely trailed by a squad of NCS soldiers in powered exoskeletons.

As the end suddenly seemed inevitable, I looked to Ally, and asked, "What do we do now?" She smiled and calmly reached into the access panel. She tossed me an MRF body vest and began putting one on herself. Outside, I heard a series of explosions, closer now, and the sound of rapid gunfire. I glanced through the blinds again and noticed a thick fog of smoke and dust rising from the south. "They're here, my message must have gone through before the NCS could regain control," Ally remarked as she moved beside me to look out the window, placing her hand on my shoulder. "Ally, what now?" I asked again as she stepped back towards the access panel. Ally handed me a Glock 21 .45 caliber pistol and secured herself a M249 light machine gun after reloading her revolver and holstering it on her waist.

"Now," she replied, "we take it back."