I read somewhere that low-level drug dealers made less than McDonald’s workers. Being a hacker felt like that. Chicken scratch work—selling fake IDs off the dark web to high school students, or bckmailing entitled assholes to keep their bedroom secrets.

  I started hacking at thirteen just to escape the shitshow that was my life. By sixteen, it was the only way for my mom and me to survive. It wasn’t much, but I needed it. Kinda like a drug dealer that way too.

  My first big hack was Nordstrom’s Transportation Management System. I sold its secrets to an information broker for almost a year before I blew it by getting greedy. I encrypted the data and tried to ransom it back to Nordstrom. They didn’t pay. They just rebuilt the damn thing.

  I was pretty hard up when I got a big break. It came from a spear-phishing attack on a tax attorney; I was sure it was the win I was looking for.

  His computer matched the chaos of his life: a disorganized mess, drowning in beagle pics and belligerent emails to his ex-wife. The weird thing was all the broken images everywhere. It turns out they weren’t photos at all, just poorly encrypted files he was trying to hide. One of them, blh.jpg, held access codes to his w firm’s accounting program. I still had to intercept his two-factor texts, but the idiot had his texts mirroring on his computer. After that, things got spicy.

  His firm, Bertrand, Levin, and Hoyle, was very naughty. Ninety-five percent of their business came from sketchy international clients. They weren’t just undering crypto or shuffling shell corporations—they were moving serious money through banks in Bahrain, Ghana, Yemen, and a bunch of FATF greylist countries. The kind of money you use to buy an arms shipment or put a hit on a cartel boss.

  Granted, my whole experience with international finance was building a European theme park in Rollercoaster Tycoon. But I was happy to steal from them.

  The best part was the way they handled transfers. Every morning, an automated program sent out hundreds of mid-sized transactions in random amounts from a dozen different accounts. Small enough to stay off the radar, but together they moved hundreds of thousands of dolrs, five days a week.

  It wasn’t easy to hijack—the banking servers were locked so tight they squeaked. In the end, I didn’t break the banking system itself; I went after the accounting database that held the transfer numbers. I installed a script that swapped a few routing codes for my own, then reset them after the transfers finished. Most of the money still went where it was supposed to. I just skimmed a little.

  Okay, maybe more than a little.

  The first time I ran it, I was sitting in a library parking lot, two VPNs deep because safety first is how you stay out of jail. My foot bounced like a junkie’s while I waited. One run—over eighty grand.

  A smart hacker would have stopped right then. They would know that the pissed-off recipients would wonder where their money was and investigate. Take the win, leave some hard-to-find back doors, and not go back for months.

  I was not a smart hacker. I was a greedy hacker. Too fucking greedy. Three days ter, I rented a car using one of my fake IDs, drove it to a Starbucks, connected to their free Wi-Fi, and sat outside waiting for my next big payday. Twenty minutes to get in, another ten to set up my script, and then it was just a waiting game—waiting for the money to roll in.

  Once it started, there was nothing to do but wait. My hands shook as I watched the logs. A faint, familiar ache pulsed behind my eyes. I couldn’t tell how much money was moving—only that the transfers were active. No way to know how long it would take. Waiting sucked.

  My mind wandered to security. No way a bunch of wyers could backtrace the VPN and locate the Starbucks before I was long gone. Even if they eventually did, I was parked across the street in a mostly anonymous rental car. I was safe.

  As I waited, a sharp fsh of pain knifed between my eyes—something I had felt hundreds of times as a kid. With it came the fear: a visceral, overwhelming sense of impending doom. Like spotting the outline of a man in your bedroom at night—every nerve lighting up at once.

  That raw fear mixed with something worse: the absolute certainty that a man was coming to kill me.

  I told myself it was just my childhood demons, that I was freaking out for no reason.

  It felt that way—right up until a blue, te-nineties Nissan with dark tinted windows rolled up. As the driver stepped out, my brain screamed: That’s him. He’s going to shoot you.

  He wasn’t especially big, wasn’t especially scary looking, wasn’t especially anything. Khaki pants. Gray henley. Bck Nike jogging jacket. Just a normal te-thirties white dude getting his morning Caramel Macchiato.

  But somehow, I knew he was here to kill me.

  My mind screamed at me to run, to hide, and I tried to ignore it. Then the air froze in my lungs. As he opened the Starbucks door, his jacket pulled up—and there, at the small of his back, was a bck gun in a holster. Not a hand cannon, but plenty big enough to put a hole in my skull. His hand adjusted the holster, snapped his jacket back down, and he headed inside.

  Panic won.

  I threw my ptop on the passenger seat without closing it, got out of the car, turned, and hurried directly away from the Starbucks. My pace was as slow and measured as I could make it, trying to look like I was just out for a stroll, but my heart didn’t stop pounding, and the headache between my eyes throbbed in time with it.

  I let myself listen to whatever my lizard brain wanted me to do. I ducked into the next business I saw. I didn’t care what it was. It could have been a nail spa for all I cared. I just had to get out of sight, and it didn’t matter where.

  The room had a rge, veneered, mahogany desk and was decorated in a light blue aquatic theme. The woman behind the desk was striking: tall and muscur with high cheekbones. She was in her early twenties, with rich, ebony skin and no obvious makeup. Her hair was in tight box braids and pinned up in a high bun. She gnced at me, sizing me up, her eyes friendly and inquisitive.

  “Hey, welcome to Stillpoint. Do you have an appointment?” Her tone was bright and inviting, clearly pleased just to relieve the monotony.

  I floundered, trying to figure out what in the hell this pce was. I saw pictures of what resembled hot tubs and supermodels rexing. The giant blue-lettered sign read “Stillpoint,” which told me nothing. I had no idea what these guys sold. Not wanting to stay silent as I worked through it, I bluffed, “I was just wondering, what’s it cost?”

  “For walk-ins, our one-time trial is sixty-five dolrs for a sixty-minute session. Trust me, you'll love it.” Her professional banter had slowed noticeably, perhaps recognizing my confusion and fear.

  Sixty-five dolrs, I thought. Well, it's definitely not a cruise. Looking around, I started to put things together—some kind of spa or rexation treatment. There were guys in the brochures, so I wasn’t totally out of pce.

  My stomach churned with apprehension, but I kept bluffing my way through. “I’m down. Let’s go for it.”

  She smiled uncertainly up at me. “That’s what I like, a man of action. We have some float pods avaible right now. You’re literally the only one here.” Her tone was calming, if forced.

  I started to give her my credit card, but thought better of it and handed her cash instead. As she took it, the pain and terror returned. A nightmare stalked me, gun in hand, ready to send my brains in a mist of gore across the fake Mahogany. I searched the room with my eyes, a warning drum echoed in my skull, and then I spotted a blue and white sign with the words “ALL GENDER RESTROOM.”

  “One second,” I blurted apologetically before walking briskly into the bathroom.

  The moment I was in the restroom, the arm inside me receded from a bring truck horn to something more akin to a cell phone on vibrate. I waited, and as I did, it kept receding until it was nothing more than a mild tickle at the back of my neck. I flushed the toilet, washed my hands, and went back out.

  When I left the restroom, the attendant was waiting for me, holding a pen on the tips of her fingers like a fencing foil, a form ready on the desk for me to fill out. As she handed me the pen, I noticed her fingers were surprisingly calloused, and there were healed cuts on two of her knuckles. It seemed odd for someone with her kind of job. As I filled in a bunch of made-up personal information, I finally figured out what this pce did. Right at the bottom was a long section about “Sensory Deprivation Do’s and Don’ts.”

  She gestured with an open hand towards a hallway, “Right this way, mister... Gdwell.”

  It took me a second to recognize the alias I had given her: “Call me Trey.”

  With a crooked smile and an exaggerated flourish toward her name tag, she procimed herself “Luanda.”

  She started to lead me to the float room. “First time?” she probed, needing to fill the silence.

  “Yes, I heard about it on Rogan; thought I’d give it a go.”

  She ughed, “Yes, we get that a lot, but since it’s your first time, if you are thinking of using any kind of drugs in the pod—don't. Just rex and let your mind wander. When your time is up, a soft blue light will come on inside to let you know to get out, but if you get freaked out or anything, just open the door.” Her smile dipped the tiniest bit as her eyes darted to my shaking hand, and she gave me the key.

  She gave me the lowdown as we continued back, and right before she turned to go, an idea struck me. I turned to face her and asked imploringly, “So, I have a really weird request.”

  Luanda tilted her head to the side, her thick lips thinning and her expression darkening. “What’s that?”

  “If anyone comes around looking for me, can you pretend I’m not here?”

  Her California accent fttened as she took a backward step, hands extending slightly, “Why? Who’s looking for you?”

  “No, I just... “ I paused, thinking about what to say. “It’s this guy. He’s wearing a bck Nike jacket. He’s got it in his head that I’ve been hitting on his girlfriend. He saw me by the Starbucks where she works, and I am pretty sure he is looking for me. Honestly, I just kinda hid in here.”

  She nodded slowly, but her eyes shone with skepticism, and she wrinkled her nose as though smelling something unpleasant. “Look, if a guy like that comes in, I’ll pretend you aren’t here, but if the police show up, forget it.”

  “Thanks. You're my savior.”