Let us say we're not quite in the stage of fearing grey goo, but ordinary individuals do happen to have a fair amount of destructive power at their command.
OMG! there should be a dozen, maybe two dozen twilight zone episodes about this.
In one, a small group of people, people like you and your friends, so like cool people, not violent or aggressive oppressors, right, learn unequivocally that they exist as subroutines on a computer simulating the world, not like the Matrix, no physical bodies somewhere. We are all information. And they learn a series of syllables that doesn't exist in any Earth language that would end the simulation and wipe the hard drive, essentially killing the whole world. How would that change you? How many people could learn the secret before the unthinkable happens? How would you prevent the secret from getting out? If it did get out, how would people's lives have to change, to avoid disaster?
There could even be the love angle you keep coming back to, with the couple breaking up after they learn the self destruct code, and the guy all like, "I can't live without you. I'm going to end everything." And he starts saying it. What would she do, faced with the imminent destruction of the world? That would be an awesome scene.
Maybe we should start a new thread about ideas for stories in which people are faced with the technological necessity of anarchy (government coercion becomes impossible because individual people have WMDs), but they are not yet civilized enough to handle it.
Escape from Terra is kind of like such a story, in that we are shown a space ship that can go from Terra to Ceres in 10 days. (It's engines would pack more of a punch than tactical nukes to be able to get such a large ship to go that fast.) But in EFT we are shown the anarchist society fully formed, the people, decent and civilized. But your comments make me want to see the growing pains.