“Yes, yes, I know,” I say, dropping the boxes carefully by the desk and walking into the kitchen to place the grocery bags on the counter. “You’re starving. I’m a monster. Call the authorities.”
He winds around my ankles, tail high, purring loudly enough I can feel the vibrations.
My apartment is…fine. It’s not spotless. There are two empty coffee mugs on the desk, my black leather jacket slung over the back of the couch, and a stack of unopened mail that I keep meaning to deal with. But it’s not chaos. It’s controlled clutter. I like knowing where everything is.
It’s also nice having control over something in my life. I spent so long feeling out of control ofeverything. It’s stupid, maybe. It’s just an apartment. But it’s mine, and nothing happens here unless I let it.
I pull a can of cat food from one of the bags and pop the lid. Felix chirps like I’ve just performed a miracle.
“Dinner and a show. You’re welcome.”
I set the can on the floor, and he dives in like he’s never eaten before in his life.
While he’s occupied, I start putting everything away. Produce in the fridge. Pasta in the cabinet. Coffee where it belongs—front and center, because priorities.
Once that’s all done, I lean against the counter and open the bag of Goldfish I just bought. As I pop a few into my mouth, I glance over at the boxes by my desk. Inside are micro lenses, pinhole camera housings, custom wiring, signal boosters, and a handful of tools I paid for in cash. Nothing flashy or traceable. Just parts, components. Potential.
Expensive too. Not the kind of expensive you can justify with a normal job. But normal jobs don’t build things like this.
My newest client wants surveillance inside his own home. Discreet and undetectable. I need to build cameras small enough to disappear into vents, smoke detectors, and decorative molding.
Tiny, black eyes tucked into the corners of a life.
For a second, just a second, I think about being watched.About a lens in a metal door. About knowing someone was on the other side of it, watching me, listening.
I shut those thoughts down.
Different situation. Different context. Different me.
Felix jumps onto the desk, and I refocus.
Wiping my hands on my jeans, I head to the desk, bringing my snack with me. Three monitors glow in the dim light of the living room. The blinds are half closed, late afternoon sun striping the floor. I drop into my chair and wake the system with a tap of my favorite custom keyboard—aluminum casing, bright RGBs, and matte black metal keycaps.
Code fills the screens, lines and lines of it. Elegant in places, ugly in others. Half-finished. Brilliant and frustrating and alive.
I’ve been working on this program for years. It’s not just one thing, notjusta virus. It’s a framework, an emergent system. A self-evolving architecture designed to infiltrate, destabilize, and dismantle layered networks that hide behind anonymity and encryption. Every time I think I’ve solved one problem, it births three more like a Hydra. Every time I close one vulnerability, the system adapts.
It’s chaos in digital form.
I lean back, cracking my neck, and stare at the central node of the current build. Today’s task is refining how it moves, how it spreads from one hidden server to the next without tripping alarms and being detected. It can’t just burn everything down at once. It has to dismantle it piece by piece. Precision matters.
Because I’m not just trying to break something. I’m trying to erase it.
Every server, every backup. Every ghost of the infrastructure that the person built—the one responsible, the one who hiredhim.
I don’t thinkhisname. I never do, not if I can help it.
I know it’s not clean logic. Maybe I should be blaming theone who pulled the trigger. But whoever this is, the one I’ve been hunting, is the one who set it all in motion. The one who paid for it, the one who led him to his death.
If I can finish this, if I can wipe him out completely, maybe that’s when it’ll stop hurting.
Or, at least…hurtless.
Felix walks across my keyboard like he pays rent here.
“Hey.” I nudge him gently aside. “You’re sabotaging justice.”
He blinks at me, unimpressed. I drop a Goldfish on the desk for him anyway.
