The cockroach in Mrs. Kowalski's laptop was not metaphorical.
Ethan Cole stared at the dead insect fused between the motherboard and cooling fan—a German cockroach, fried to a crisp by the overheating CPU. The stench of burnt chitin mixed with the repair shop's usual bouquet of stale coffee and despair.
"Well?" Mrs. Kowalski tapped her rhinestone-cased phone against the counter. "Can you save Fluffy's photos?"
"Fluffy" being her 22-year-old Persian cat, whose 10,000-image archive was apparently worth risking a biohazard. Ethan forced a customer-service smile. "I'll need to disassemble it fully. Could take a few days."
"But the funeral's tomorrow! The eulogy slideshow—"
"I'll prioritize it." He scribbled a $50 estimate, knowing she'd haggle. The truth? This 2011 Dell needed a funeral of its own.
His boss, Raj, leaned over from the next workstation. "Tell her $200. She'll pay."
"She's on Social Security," Ethan muttered.
"And we're on Chapter 11. Your 'charity cases' ate our profit margin last month." Raj gestured to Ethan's current projects: a single mom's daycare scheduling tablet, a veteran's PTSD therapy app, and Mr. Chen's hacked hearing aid firmware. All are repaired at cost.
Ethan ignored him. At 19, he'd already learned two truths: (1) the world ran on code, and (2) corporations weaponized it. His late mother's hospital bills—inflated by predatory billing software—had taught him that. Now, he fought back one bug at a time.
Even if it meant eating ramen for the third night straight.
3:14 a.m. – Ethan's Garage
The Dell's hard drive coughed up Fluffy's photos with minimal coaxing. Ethan uploaded them to a $5 encrypted cloud account. Simple.
Then he found the anomaly.
Buried in the system logs: //PHOENIX_FIRE v1.2 – ACTIVATED.
"Weird." He'd never seen a process named "Phoenix Fire." It wasn't Windows bloatware or a common virus. Tracing its origin led to a corrupted sector—intentionally damaged.
Ethan booted his homemade forensic rig. Three monitors lit up the garage, revealing Phoenix Fire's fingerprints:
1:23 a.m., June 5: Injected via a fake Adobe Flash update.
1:24 a.m.: Encrypted 37% of user files.
1:25 a.m.: Self-deleted, but left a trigger in the BIOS.
His pulse quickened. This wasn't ransomware. No payment demands. Just destruction.
And it was beautiful.
The code's elegance hypnotized him. Phoenix Fire didn't brute-force encryption—it exploited a Windows font renderer vulnerability to hijack GPU processing. A self-propagating worm that burned data and melted its own tracks.
"Who builds something this advanced just to nuke cat photos?"
He dug deeper.
Next Morning – Tech Haven Repair
Raj's shop occupied a strip mall wedged between a pawn shop and a vape den. Ethan arrived early, Fluffy's laptop restored and Phoenix Fire's code burning in his mind.
"Cole! Customer at Bay 3!" Raj barked. "Rich kid. MacBook 'acting funny.' Milk it."
The "rich kid" wore a Stanford hoodie and panic. "It just—I was writing my thesis and everything glitched!"
Ethan booted the MacBook. Kernel panic. But in the crash log: //PHOENIX_FIRE v1.3 – ACTIVATED.
Same worm. New version.
"Did you install any updates recently?" Ethan asked.
"Just a security patch! From… some pop-up?"
He cloned the drive, hands steady. "I'll need to keep it overnight."
"Whatever! Just save my thesis!"
As the kid left, Raj sidled over. "Charge him triple. Stanford trust fund."
Ethan pretended to work. Phoenix Fire v1.3 had evolved—it now exploited MacOS's Gatekeeper. He cross-referenced both infected devices. Zero overlap except…
They'd both visited CityBeat, a local news site.
He pulled up CityBeat's code. Buried in an ad script: gatekeeper_verify.php. A fake security check. The infection vector.
But why target random civilians?
7:02 p.m. – Public Library
Ethan's fingers flew across a library keyboard, bypassing network restrictions to scan Phoenix Fire's code on Tor.
The worm had a hidden layer—a data sieve. Before encrypting files, it harvested keywords: "medical," "patent," "research," and "surveillance."
Someone was hunting for secrets.
His breath fogged the screen. This wasn't script-kiddie work. Nation-state level. And it was spreading locally.
A new tab alerted him: //PHOENIX_FIRE v1.4 DETECTED – SOURCE: CITYBEAT.
They'd updated again.
Ethan compiled a signature to detect the worm, then hesitated. He could sell this to antivirus firms. A six-figure payday.
His phone buzzed—a calendar alert. [Mom's Death Anniversary – 3 days]
The library's fluorescent lights hummed. For five years, he'd fantasized about revenge on the system that bankrupted her. Now, he held a digital grenade.
He opened a dark web marketplace. Started a forum then proceeded to type Zero-day exploit – Windows/MacOS – $200k OBO.
The cursor blinked like a metronome counting down the seconds until his life split into two irreconcilable timelines.
$200k.
The number glowed in the dark web's sterile void. Enough to clear Pa's medical debt. Enough to buy a real bed, real food, real time. His fingers hovered, phantom keystrokes already drafting the lie he'd tell himself later: It's just code. No different than selling a spare GPU.
But then the smell hit him—not the garage's motor oil and mildew, but antiseptic and wilted roses. Mom's hospital room. The machines had beeped their lazy elegy while a billing algorithm bled her insurance dry. He'd sat there, 14 years old, watching her fingers twitch against the bedsheet like she was typing one last protest into the void.
"Don't end up like me," Pa had said. But wasn't this worse? Pa broke his body in mines; Ethan would break his soul in this digital trench.
His gaze flicked to the AI fragment's encrypted folder—The Ember, he'd started calling it in private. Raw, untamed potential whispered in its code. It could optimize power grids. Predict cancer clusters. Crack every Ponzi scheme posing as a healthcare plan.
Or it could burn the world down.
They'll weaponize it. The buyers, the suits, the Phoenix Fire architects lurking in some offshore server farm. They'd turn his mother's ghost into just another line item.
The forum refreshed. A DM popped up—User666: "Proof of exploit?"
Ethan's thumb found the chip in the spacebar, a scar from the night he'd pried it out of a landfill-bound ThinkPad. Survival had always been a scavenger's game, but this? This was a devil's bargain, and he knew the interest rates.
Delete.
The post vanished. The DM dissolved into the void.
In the silence, he opened the AI fragment again. The code pulsed, alive in a way that terrified him. This was the real exploit—not some virus, but the glimmer of a tool that could pry open the world's rusted hinges.
"We do it right," he muttered, to the garage, to his mother, to the cockroach now scaling the coffee-stained wall. "No shortcuts."
The cursor blinked once more, obedient and infinite.
He started typing the first lines of Ember Core.
1:17 a.m. – Garage
Ethan uploaded the Phoenix Fire detector to GitHub—free, open-source, anonymous.
Then he found it.
In the worm's binary, a 30-line fragment didn't belong. It was pristine, self-contained AI code. Like finding a Ferrari engine in a lawnmower.
He isolated it. The AI could optimize any system it touched. Traffic grids. Power plants. Stock trades.
His hands shook. This fragment alone could build a billion-dollar company.
But using it meant Phoenix Fire's creators would come for him.
He encrypted the fragment and buried it under layers of dummy files.
One day, he'd reverse-engineer it. Build something better.
Next Day – Tech Haven
Raj waved a printed email. "You see this? Some moron leaked a Phoenix Fire detector. Our clients are canceling repairs!"
Ethan hid a smile. "Guess heroes still exist."
"Heroes don't pay rent. Start pushing cloud backups."
As Raj ranted, Ethan noticed a new customer—a twitchy man in a hoodie. His laptop sticker read Shadow Forge Cybersecurity.
The man's fingers drummed a military cadence.
Ethan felt the encrypted USB in his pocket—the AI fragment, now a secret weight.
The bell chimed. Another customer entered.
Another machine possibly burning with Phoenix Fire.
Another step toward the war he'd just enlisted in.