There is a data breach; no one knows from where. I learn it from my phone when it explodes with a million notifications from everywhere and everyone. At first there's denial and anger and all those stages of grief and it's happening all over the world but when I show the news to my mother she just scoffs at me. "See? Downloading all those video games again." She's still laughing when her Xiaomi falls off the table under the weight of a billion chain-forwarded WhatsApp messages: the breach had reached even her circle, too. I run out of the door and it's going on everywhere; there is a great error notification in the sky warning us to change our door locks and buy new safes, and change our names too while we're at it. I can't even drive because the streets are packed with all the people driving to the State Registry. That and someone's already locked me out of my car. People are milling around my block trying to figure out what's happened but nobody can really explain it, it's something to do with an agreement we signed a long time ago and can't remember, some sort of waiver or compact between this and that, because maybe someone high up got hit with a malware and refused to pay the ransom... whatever it is, it doesn't matter. The fibre-optics sag under the weight of the leak; the designs for everything are posted everywhere and for once we really get a taste of what it's like to get existentially PWNED. I'm locked out of my pet and the street I grew up on and my mother loses her entire maiden name. Everyone's bank accounts are all maxed out because money got hacked too; we're all trillionaires and we can finally buy anything we want. Like a better life in a landed property in an upscale neighbourhood, or move to a nice farm, which is always possible because land's just an unsalted hash anyway and someone posts how you can revert it to its base state with just One Neat Trick; it's not like you're doing anything wrong because we can change all the numbers now and we never agreed to the terms anyway. Law and order breaks down. Asymmetry folds. I move to my new farm with my father and my nameless mother and we raise a few cryptographically-secure chickens, nice fat red ones, and I feed them on little worms I find in the grass. The planet still spins. No system is safe.