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“Holy shit! Your hack worked?” At the shout, my poor dog flinches, but when he sees it’s just Newman, sets his snout on his paws and sighs.
Yeah, Buddy. Me, too.
Newman finishes the chip, chomping away, staring intently at my screen. A bear of a man, he’s tall, bearded, and wearing a stained t-shirt with a saying so faded I can’t read it. Bigger than me, with the swollen face of someone whose innards are inflamed by too much alcohol, sugar, and salt, he’s a miracle worker with security, but a foul-mouthed jerk, so we tolerate him.
“Never doubted it would.”
He sighs. “Too bad it’s just a test account. At least we figured it out, though. Next time it’ll be a real person.”
“Right,” I agree, thinking about them. Wondering what their life is like.
Feeling their pain.
Failure floats over our heads as we search for the Viking Virgins, our sick name for the women who are part of a cult and don’t know it.
Ever try to find a needle in a haystack? Of course not. It's just a saying, right?
What if someone told you a person would die if you didn't find the needle? You'd look, wouldn't you? You'd sort the hay. Find a system for determining where the needle definitely wasn't, and the terrain remaining for searching. You'd try to find patterns and change your search area for maximum chance of discovery.
You would pivot.
You would fail.
And you'd adapt again.
That's our job. Finding human needles in evil haystacks.
And until just now, we were failing miserably, over and over.
Nonstop.
Shaking the small potato chip bag, Newman sorts through what’s left, picking out the biggest chips and munching away. Newman is a slob. Not that I’m much better, but at least I don’t have crumbs in my keyboard so bad that ants invade it.
“Can you believe this, man?” he says, pouring the potato chip dust from the bottom of the bag into his palm and shoving it down his throat, followed by a long lick of his palm with a wide tongue. “Most of what we do is just code,” he mutters around a mouthful of food. “But when you think about what we’re trying to do…”
Closer than my eyes can decipher, the screen is a mosaic of images and hidden links. I can see the pixels of the monitor and the back of Newman’s head. He leans forward, peering over my shoulder. When he turns his neck, the glowing screen reflects in his eyes.
In it, I see my face full of dust, a chip bag in Newman’s hand, my desk littered with snack bags, empty cans and bottles.
The computer screen is huge, a symphony of lines, symbols, and code.
A protective rush fills my blood. Every line of code on my screen is attached to our mission to find the Viking Virgins. Real women are attached to the characters and strings in front of us.
If I didn’t do this job, I wouldn’t believe it exists.
Yet it does.
The briefings for this job were insane. Insane.
Newman and I, along with the rest of our team, had to pass security checks so thorough, I’m pretty sure they bleached my prostate.
But here we are, holed up in a safe house. It’s not that we’re in any specific danger, it’s more that we need to be as covert as possible because of the people who are controlling the Viking Virgins. Everything we do involves breaking high-level cybersecurity systems to get access to data that helps us find the women in danger.
Women who have no idea they’re in danger.
Women who’ve been brainwashed into believing they are genetic goddesses.
See? Crazy.
