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“In other words, they were expendable?”
Pan shrugged, visibly not sorry at all.
“The others... Father hoped they would survive. He knew how risky things were, and he just couldn’t help them. He instilled the idea of an Edge that would perdure past the first generation... and I was to watch the other survivors. It didn’t matter who, as long as just one of them made it. I could give them the information to start over, and rally more hackers.”
“...I don’t understand. How was he so sure some of them would make it?”
Pan smiled and brought one of the portraits forward. It was a young man among the Edge, visibly one of the youngest. He was the only one who wasn’t just glaring at the camera that had taken his picture but was smirking with a haughty expression. The prison-like outfit looked a bit large on him, and he was wearing it messily, a shoulder out. He had red hair in a two-inch-long mess, a small nose with some freckles on it, clear blue eyes, and a little silver earring. The more Eden stared at him, the more she felt like she knew him. After a few seconds, it finally hit her.
“...No fucking way,” she muttered.
“Ah,” smiled Pan. “Do you recognize him?”
“That’s... Loir?”
Never in a million years would she have identified that young man as Loir, if not for the hints dropped before. The Loir she knew was much, much skinnier than that, and covered in dark tattoos on most of his visible skin. She had never seen the real color of his eyes either under the screen of dark ink that covered them. His head was shaved too. Who would have known he used to be a redhead... She even wondered how he had never joked about that when he had told her a hundred times about his missing toes.
“...What happened to him?”
“You should already have heard,” sighed Pan. “After the Edge was stopped, your friend and the others were captured and tortured... He was the most stubborn of all and went through much worse as a result. He was incredibly successful in pissing off his jailers.”
Eden smirked without thinking. Yeah, Loir definitely had that effect on people...
“He was the one in which Father had the most hope.”
“...What do you mean?”
Pan smiled and stepped closer to Loir’s image, looking as if he was staring at the portrait of a friend. Eden suddenly remembered: Pan was the one who had led her to find Loir. Her friend had been such a recluse, she would have never been able to find him if it hadn’t been for Pan guiding her to his hideout. Even their first encounter had been rowdy. Loir wasn’t so ready to trust anyone, and she had been the one to insist on them becoming partners, persuaded by Pan. To think their bond was actually so much more complicated than that.
“Of all the aliases we have known him by,” said Pan, “the one most likely to be his real name is Yulian Laskin.”
“...Yulian?”
Pan nodded.
“At least, that’s the name that was on his official papers... From what I found, Loir was born in a now-destroyed country in Eastern Europe. Parents unknown. Year, city, and date of birth unknown. He was probably an orphan among many, many more. What is known for sure was that his official trace was first found in some old paperwork about a growing group of young hacktivists that was opposing the military and dictatorial regime. After that, he has a long, long list of short stays in all sorts of carceral establishments. Funny enough, his age and name vary in each establishment he visited, so despite my best efforts, I hardly ever managed to actually find the next piece of information about him. He did cross paths several times with the Russian Mafia, working for or against them, transiting groups very frequently. I even once found traces of him working for two opposite sides at the same time. God knows which one he was actually rooting for...”
Eden was stunned. Somehow, it felt like Pan was talking about a stranger, yet all those pieces were perfectly fitting into the strange puzzle that was Loir... She was mesmerized, and, somehow, also a bit happy to hear more about her friend, even if it was too late.
“One of his most remarkable talents was jail-breaking,” said Pan, an amused smile on his lips. “Out of all the times he was incarcerated, I found him to have a surprisingly high rate of successful evasion attempts. Only the most cruel and strict prisons too, as if he had been comfortable staying in the low-level ones.”
“...Free food and bed,” chuckled Eden, not even surprised.
“I think so too,” her brother smiled. “He stopped escaping facilities a couple of decades back, though. In fact, it seemed like Loir had found a more stable group to stay in. They weren’t particularly remarkable, actually. Just another young group of hacktivists, protesting against the local figures of power. Their members got arrested a few times and released. Each time, Loir was among those caught, and waited until his release, up to six months later.”
“Only six months?”
Pan shrugged.
“From what I saw, small crimes overfill prisons. Back then, hacking crimes weren’t properly regulated yet, so half the time they got arrested, the penal system didn’t know what to do or how to properly punish their crimes, so a legal gray area got them out in no time. Sadly, that ended with the first appearance of the Cores.”
“...When they updated all the cyber criminal legal systems,” muttered Eden.
As a Dive Hacker, she knew all too well about the risks of the job. Being a hacker meant exposing herself to dozens of cyber laws with each Dive. The creation of the System had been a good occasion for an old and decadent legal system to update itself on the latent issue of cyber criminality. They hadn’t just found proper punishments for all the crimes that weren’t even identified before; they made them much stricter and implemented all sorts of schemes for the System to be the judge of the hackers’ wrongs. While hackers weren’t often caught by the System itself, being caught in the real world meant dealing with very real, physical consequences of what had been done on the other side. Eden was too young to have known a time when cyber criminality wasn’t regulated, but now, she was all too aware of the laws that existed, although she ignored them all daily...
“Exactly. It was a turning point for all hackers.”
“What happened to Loir? And his group?”
