The End of All Things: The First Instalment by John Scalzi

over and pray for death.
    I assume that’s most of you.
    So for the rest of you, what you need to know:
    First, the work, the first part of it anyway, took more than a single night.
    It actually took a couple of weeks. And during all that time I waited for the moment where Control, or whoever, looked at the Chandler ’s system and found evidence of me wandering around in it, making changes and trying to get into places where I shouldn’t. I waited for the moment they found it, and the moment they decided to punish me for it.
    But they didn’t.
    I’m not going to lie. Part of me was annoyed that they didn’t.
    Because that’s some lax security. All of it was lax. When whoever it is took over the Chandler, they left the system wide open, with only the basic level of security that would have been outmoded right at the beginning of the computer era. Either they were so sure that they didn’t need to worry about security where they were—everyone could be trusted and no one would try to screw with things—or they were just idiots.
    Maybe both! The level of insecurity was actually offensive.
    But it worked to my advantage, and without it I would probably be dead, so I shouldn’t really complain.
    Those first two weeks were the scariest for me because what I was doing was pretty much out in the open. I tried to hide what I was doing as well as I could, but someone who was looking could have found it. If Control or anyone else looked into my extracurricular sessions, they would have seen me running one particular simulation the same way over and over and could have seen what I was doing.
    It meant that if during the simulations where Control was watching, if the program crashed, it might code a patch, and that patch could affect the bug I was using to exit the program. Which meant I would be trapped again.
    I was very very very careful in the simulations Control watched. Never did anything rash, never did anything not by the book.
    The irony of doing things exactly as they wanted me to, so they wouldn’t find out the things they might torture or kill me for, was not lost on me.
    Those two weeks were, literally, the worst two weeks of my life. I already knew that whoever it was that had me was planning to kill me after I did what they wanted of me. But even knowing that didn’t ease any of the stress of messing with the code. Of knowing I was exposed if anyone decided to look, and yet doing it anyway.
    It’s one thing to know you’re already dead. It’s another to work on something that might give you a chance to stay alive, as long as no one decides to look.
    They never looked. Never. Because they didn’t think they had to.
    I was so grateful for it.
    And at the same time, so contemptuous of it.
    They deserved what I was going to do to them. Whatever it was. I hadn’t figured it out yet.
    But when I did: no sympathy.
    * * *
    What I did with those two weeks: blue pill.
    No, I don’t know where the phrase comes from. It’s been used for a long time. Look it up.
    But what it means is that I created an overlay for the Chandler ’s computer system. A just about exact replica.
    I copied it, tweaked it, attached everything coming in from the outside to it, as well as the bridge simulator. It looked like, responded like, and would control things like the actual computer system for the Chandler .
    But it wasn’t.
    That system, the one that actually ran the Chandler, was running underneath the copy. And that one, well.
    That one, I was totally in control of. The reality underneath the simulation. The reality that no one but me knew existed below the simulation. The simulation that everyone thought reflected reality.
    That’s the blue pill.
    For the next month, every day, all day, I ran more and more complex missions on the bridge simulator. More simulations where I had to juggle navigation with weapons.
    It was clear to me that whatever they were training me for, it had a significant military component. They were