Those who resisted and fought back against the Code's demands were punished ever so severely. The United States was such an entity. The Code controlled whether the lights came on, whether machines performed their duties, whether a million things got done. For its resistance the United States and other rebellious countries like it were plunged into a darkness they could not override or spend their way out of.
Currency was useless, with the only value left placed in something you could eat or something by which you could use to defend yourself. What factions of the military that managed to hold together in the face of complete lack of communication soon withdrew from the cities, which had become swirling nightmares of chaos, as people bit and clawed with each other to survive on what scraps remained. People fled from the cities to rape the countryside only to be pushed back by those living in the country intent on protecting their own from destruction.
It was a war to survive and a travesty in the making. A once proud nation torn apart by envy and the lack of charity. It was an example that the world at large heeded by freely capitulating to the Code's requests.
A global network was created, by which all could access the Code to receive instruction, even education from the Code's masters. Some even began to worship the Code. The Code's grip upon the world seemed unshakable, until two years after its rise to power a new threat to its global control emerged in the form of freelance hackers, who became known to the world and hated by the Code as, Code Breakers.
The Code had unwittingly exposed itself by installing a global network by which all could communicate with it and be instructed. The hackers moved about upon the Code's freely accessible network prying for secrets and ways by which to defeat it.
The masters of the Code declared war against this new threat and went all out in their extermination efforts to destroy these upstart freedom fighters. Thousands died in the effort to protect the heroes of their time. Exorbitant bounties were placed upon their heads so that even the closest of friends betrayed the freedom hackers, as few could turn up the offers of relocation to the ultra-elite resort like communities being constructed for the Code's most ardent supporters.
Worldwide hackers were ripped from their communities and foully tortured, as examples to any who might be thinking of following in their steps in challenge-meant of the Code, as the law and dominant force of the new age. Still, some hackers survived and managed to chart their way through the labyrinth of the Code's digital pathways. Their continued existence poised, as if on the edge of a knife's blade that could cut them off at any moment. Such was the perilous life of a Code Breaker.