─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
"Contrary to popular belief, money can buy a person anything—even a cure for cancer.
Private preventative checkups allow the wealthy to discover tumors at Stage 0 and have them removed. That's a cure for cancer.
Poor people can't afford checkups when they know they're sick. That's the difference money makes.
Yep, money can buy a person anything—even [your] life.
If that happens, you'll be hacking a sketchy target for a mob underboss at 2:34 am, four hours before you need to be up forjdlwjsafekdjqwaotierywaqiuythrwioqhrie3whqrew!"
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
-
Grey slammed his keyboard with watery eyes, typing an unsaved text document on his leftmost computer monitor. "I'm so bored that I'd argue with people over the word [cure]."
His two other monitors had blue backgrounds with the Kali Linux dragon, the logo for the top hacking operating system in the world.
Anyone could guess he was hacking by the dozens of half-transparent black boxes with white text changing rapidly. These were [terminals], windows to execute programs.
While system administrators often used terminals, Grey was seventeen. He wasn't a career professional—a legal one, anyway.
"This is miserable." Grey groaned, watching his listeners blinking lifelessly, "Hacking sounds cool, but it's just a sys admin job with a prison sentence."
He had to wait for a lower-level employee to turn on their computer, so he pulled out his phone, scrolling through his news feed to kill time.
"Myriad Online." Grey whispered bitterly, seeing almost every story sharing the same topic, "Millions pre-registered to play tomorrow, yet I'm setting up a gambling event. So much for teenage youth."
The attractive curly-haired teen, wearing a starch-pressed charcoal grey button-up and slacks, had never played a video game.
Grey spent all his time running illegal gambling events or hacking extortion targets for his adoptive father, Vincent Lawrence Maxwell, a successful underboss in a criminal syndicate called [Murder of Crows]. He didn't have a choice—he had to work to pay off the debt he owed.
The teen left his news feed and opened Razz, the top social media app in the world, to avoid the new stories. Unfortunately, that didn't help much.
"Myriad Online." He chuckled bitterly, "Myriad Online, Myriad, Myriad, Myriad. I can't go five seconds without being reminded of what I'm missing out on.
It's the only topic people are talking about. Wait…."
Grey's eyes flashed with petty inspiration, and he immediately returned to his keyboard, opening a terminal and typing a command. "It's all that people are thinking about, right?
Well, let's test just how obsessed people are."
He had an exceedingly petty and cynical hypothesis: Myriad Online was so popular people would make lazy game-related passwords—even top-level system admin professionals.
So he downloaded a list of millions of potential Myriad Online-related passwords and uploaded it into John the Ripper, a password hash cracker to check against his target's password hash.
"I'd die laughing if something popped up." He chuckled, unbuttoning his shirt to get a few hours of sleep. However—
Ding!
—his heart pulsed when John the Ripper cracked his target's root-level password in less than a second.
-
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
GHoSt@IntheWires~# [+] Password Found!
Password: CouncilOfTheLostGods
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
-
Grey stood frozen in fear and disbelief. He was being petty; there was nothing positive about his joke bearing fruit!
"My targets defenses are far too hardcore to make such a juvenile mistake." He whispered in horror, trying to calm his violently pounding heart, "They're a system admin, for God's sake!"
His target's career job was to stop hackers, and after a week of trying to break their defenses, the teen knew they were good at their job!
That meant if they had a Myriad Online-related password—
"Lost_Apostle might work for Ryker Corp." Grey whispered in horror, "If that's true, my door's getting kicked in no later than tonight!"
—they might work for the company behind the game.
Myriad Online was a revolutionary all-immersive MMORPG galaxy indistinguishable from the real world. A person could enjoy food, feel hot and cold, and even experience sex.
Moreover, the starting planet, Ryker, was eight times the size of Earth, with 43 continents and 57,991 fully developed written languages. The cultures were also as rich as those on Earth.
Its realism and flexibility sparked a revolution, as the corporation claimed it was a cornerstone to saving humanity from the woes of climate change, resource scarcity, and geopolitics.
With simple nutrition production and nerve gear capsules, everyone could live seamlessly in resource-rich worlds without Earth's problems.
Seeing the long-term potential of a [game] becoming the place most humans lived in, investors flooded in, giving it trillions of credits in first-round seed funding. Ryker Corp's GDP was the 5th largest globally, only behind the top four wealthiest [countries]!
So if Grey's target worked for Ryker Corp, his crime went far beyond hacking—it was corporate espionage against a country-sized organization!
A team of thousands was probably already tracking him for breaking into one of the LAN servers to steal the password hash!
"Wait...." He muttered after his heart violently pulsed and his vision blurred, "I wasn't stealing anything.
I was gray hat hacking, searching for security flaws to expose… hoping they'd give me a job and protection for potentially saving them billions."
Grey chuckled with insanity in his eyes, twisting his actions into a common narrative that could give him a potential opportunity. "It's okay to dream."
After a deep breath, he shelled into the computer, taking full remote control.
-
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
ssh lostapostle@185.52.53.222 –p7654
lostapostle@185.52.53.222's password: ********************
…
root@thelostapostle:~#
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
-
"Pwned." Grey chuckled ominously, "Yeah, right. This has to be a honey pot; I'll find nothing and get my door kicked in regardless. Let's start an emulator."
The teen was currently staring at a black box but remoted into their computer to use it remotely like a normal point-and-click computer.
Then he poked around for less than a moment before his vibrant green eyes reflected a file on the screen that chilled him to the bone.
-
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
Confidential - Official Myriad Online Storyline and Finance Testing Guide.xdoc
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
-
Grey dry-swallowed, looking at the guide. If it contained the information it claimed, it was a cheat sheet for quests, character development, and finance information!
"They'll know I accessed it." He cringed, "But, I can memorize the guide in the time it takes a normal person to read two pages. I need to confirm the gray test's value."
The teen had hyperthymesia—Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM)—an extreme memory condition allowing a person to recall almost everything they see for decades.
So after opening the file, he memorized eight pages a second on double pagination as he flipped through the two thousand-page game guide.
Four minutes later, he hit the close icon, opened a text file, and typed a message.
-
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
"Lost Apostle, you know people are trying to steal from you but have the password of an edgy 13-year-old virgin. Do u even professional, bro?
I was one of said people, but I wrote this note instead. You're welcome.
Please consider paying off my parent's debt and protecting me from the syndicate underboss enslaving me as a thank you.
I'm sure your team will have no problem finding me. Unlike you, they're good at their jobs."
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
-
Grey saved the file to their desktop and cut the session, chuckling maniacally. "At least I'm seventeen; let's pray I get tried as a minor."
Two seconds later, a chat window opened on his screen, typing itself live. That told him three things: the hacker was skilled enough to break into a hypervisor, had already done it long before, and he was totally fucked.
-
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
LostApostle: Good morning, GHoSt.
GrayHack: Lost Apostle, my friend! I was just about to contact you. I liked your desktop wallpaper and forgot to ask where I could get it.
LostApostle: Don't waste my time. What criminal syndicate do you work for?
GrayHack: Don't waste my time. I'll never confess to specifics, least of all with an evidence trail.
LostApostle: Don't waste my time, Alyx Grey. We've been watching you.
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
-
Grey's eyes glazed over. "Then why the hell are you asking questions you know the answers to!?"
-
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
GrayHack: I've been working out. Like what you see?
LostApostle: Your muscles are pathetic, but your mind is *usually phenomenal.
GrayHack: I had the same image about you until I saw your password. Enough with the small talk; what does Ryker Corp want from me?
LostApostle: Ryker Corp doesn't want anything from you. We're just messengers.
GrayHack: Apostles?
LostApostle: You could say that.
GrayHack: Then what is it your "god" wants from me?
LostApostle: He wants you to play Myriad Online.
GrayHack: If you've been watching me, you know I can't play your game.
LostApostle: We'll ensure you can play for thirty days. You can raise the credits necessary to buy yourself out of indentured servitude by then.
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
-
Grey stared at the screen in disbelief—he couldn't believe how lucrative the game could be!
-
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
GrayHack: That sounds nice, but I have earning restrictions.
LostApostle: We'll change that. Do you accept?
─┈━═━┈━═━┈━═━┈─
-
Grey gulped, looking at the screen in a surreal haze. The teen put his fingers on the keyboard but heard someone coming down the stairs, making him panic.
He sloppily tapped a few keys with his fingers off their touch typing positions, praying he wrote yes and hit [enter] before the chat window closed.
As if by cue, a ringtone sounded in the hallway instantaneously.
Knock! Knock! Knock!
"Alyx! Get your ass out here!" A man yelled, "No, forget that—I'm coming in!"