A little diplomacy is in order before you can do what you need to do.

"Surely you can't just let Shadow cause damage to his shelter and the other ones as well, and he'll be more successful as it would appear that those ones don't have a sophisticated AI to protect them like this one does. Think about it if you let me do what I have to do, only two shelters will have their systems messed with, and in your case it won't be even be detrimental, I'm just using your network system, but if you let Shadow continue with his evil plans, then not one, but ALL of the shelters are in danger. Would GZS really want to take the risk of losing five shelters? One of those being mine and aren't you supposed to want to protect me?"
"But…but there is no proof…"
"I'm asking you to trust me on this. I know humanity, and I'm telling you this Shadow character needs to be stopped. I felt the deviousness oozing from Shadow merely talking to him. Let me take him out."

The Shelter is silent for awhile and then gives you an answer

"Very well. I will allow you to proceed, but I will be monitoring you! And I also will be advising and guiding you to what I want you to do."

You log on and see that Shadow and most of the others are there. You don't talk to anyone you start immediately tracing Shadow's address. Rockerchick attempts to invite you, but you rebuff her, you got serious shit to do.

Soon you're in and you start rooting around Shadow's computer.

"This looks all normal sir, standard system layout for GZS shelters. Not as complex as mine but…"
"NO! I know he's got something hidden! I'm turning his power off completely, let's see how he likes going from dim lighting to none at all with no food or water!"

Suddenly a private window opens up on your computer, its Shadow! He's detected what you're doing!

Shadow21: What the hell are you doing you crazy motherfucker!? I knew you were psycho! It's a good thing I had the intuition to set up a warning system!
OmegaMan23: HAH! See Shelter? He HAS been altering his shit! Why would he do that if he wasn't planning something?
Shadow21: I did it to protect myself from your crazy ass! And I see you're still talking to the voices in your head. Well I'm putting an end to this right now; you're not the only one who can fuck with computers!

Shadow launches his attack and attempt to shut your power down, but now seeing that it is in danger your Shelter allows you free reign to do whatever as well as attempting to self fix anything that gets damaged in this dual of malicious coding. You sort of have the advantage because you have a more active AI to help you, but it's also a detriment when Shadow finds out a way to siphon power from you. Since your Shelter is more complex it requires more power to work properly and you're in danger of losing everything. You attempt to do the same thing to him to get it back, but it's a catch 22 you don't have the power now to breach his firewalls, you begin to panic and the only thing you can think of to correct it is to draw power from the OTHER shelters that are online.

The others seem blissfully unaware of this secret war you're having with Shadow and are guessing you two are working something out as it only appears to them that you're having a conversation in private.

You hack into MissKitty's shelter, out of the other four hers seems to have the most power, probably from all those luxury accessories she had the privilege of having. You don't think you just do it. This is war, there's going to be casualties and you're not going to be one of them. Soon your Shelter is able to break through and start wreaking havoc on Shadow's system. You drop in a virus and his files start becoming corrupted.

Miss Kitty's name disappears from the screen as does Shadow's. You think you have won. RockerChick tries to invite you again and you hastily accommodate her, while still analyzing your Shelter's diagnostics.

RockerChick20: What's going on? All of us are experiencing some power fluctuations here.  MissKitty just disappeared suddenly and so did Shadow, it didn't even say they logged off. What's going on? What were you and Shadow doing?
OmegaMan23: Nevermind! I'm trying to fix something here.
Job24: Welcome to my world.
CaseyJones22: Hey you know what's weird, one of my doors finally opened up. I think I'll…

CaseyJones' name suddenly disappears and Shadow's reappears in your private window again.

Shadow21: Well hey guess what? Casey's shelter had a lot of untapped power! You wanna play ruthless I'll fucking accommodate you dickhead!


Shadow sends a worm into your system which starts to slow it down. He's probably going to follow up with something worse while you're having problems. Your Shelter addresses you again for the first time during this battle, its speech sounds like it's in slow motion.

"Sssssssssir….nnnnnnneeeeeed….mmmmmmooooooore pooooooweeeeeer…."

There's only two candidates left, Job or Rocker Chick.

You hack Rocker Chick

(Sigh) You really didn't want it to come to this, but this is for survival now. You hack Rocker Chick's shelter and siphon her power, which gives you enough boost to send a violent surge of it to Shadow to purposely overload and fry out some vital components, from what you can tell you succeed. The last of his protection programs go completely down.

At this point both of your systems are a mess and working erratically. You're in a little bit better shape, but with the worm slowing down everything, you are unable to siphon from the last shelter available to give you the winning boost. As it turns out, this was fortuitous.

When Shadow siphons power from Job's shelter, it completely paralyzes and destroys his system, since all the errors and problems Job had were downloaded into Shadow's shelter. He's at your mercy, and even with your worm problems, you have enough time to apply the coup de grace. He loses all power and his name disappears once again. You stay on line for awhile to make sure he's really gone, but from your checking, he's definitely probably screaming in the darkness of his underground tomb now. You then think about how the others are probably doing the same thing.

It suddenly occurs to you that everyone was sentenced to their deaths and they weren't even involved in the fight. Innocents were killed in some misguided effort to "save" them. At best they were cannon fodder and "resources" for your war with Shadow.

This is the kind of thing that got the planet blown to fucking shit to begin with. Assholes, who don't like one another, don't back down and then insist on dragging everyone else into hell with them.

You didn't "win" anything. If anything you made things worse, not just for the others, but even for yourself. Your Shelter is never the same again. You spend weeks still trying to root out all the infections, and repair damaged files, but some things can't be repaired and the AI is fucked beyond any type of salvation even if you had the means. It never speaks again and barely runs at all. Ultimately you have to play it safe and just keep minimal lighting in the living area, and only keep the food and water dispensers working. Everything else that needs power is never used again for fear of your jury-rigging going all to shit and leaving you like the rest of your neighbors.

You spend your remaining years alone in near darkness pondering your judgment that day, slowly going mad.

"I was right…I was right…" you often mutter to yourself.