Page 11 of Filthy Little Fix

I laugh.

I laugh because this soul-deadening work, this endless routine, follows me everywhere. I don't want to fix other people's shit.

Mr. D looks even more confused by my laughter.

"What do I get for it?" I say. I recognize myself again, and that's bad. My usual self is just bored and fed up.

"You get to keep breathing, you little shit. That's what you get."

A shiver runs down my spine—small but significant. It's a crumb. I like that Mr. D threatens me, and I like that inflexible, grave tone of voice.

Right. Guess I owe him for the hard-on I haven't had in a while. I move my aching shoulders. My wrists are still tied behind my back.

"Aren't you going to untie me?" I say.

Mr. D's gaze thrills me again.

"No."

"Curious choice to print your codes."

"Why would we give a hacker a computer?"

I smile. He has a point.

Mr. D glares at me for another long moment, narrowing his eyes, then turns. "Luca."

So that's the tattooed guy's name.

Luca nods and follows his boss out. The door scrapes shut, and there's silence. Just me, the crisp concrete, and hundreds of useless, boring pages.

My wrists ache, the plastic zip biting into my skin. The dull throb between my legs is an annoying reminder of pleasure denied.

I'm alone.

Completely and utterly alone with my thoughts, and this mountain of dead trees. This is not what I signed up for. Not the kind of torture I craved. This is just… work. The same soul-crushing boredom I tried to escape.

I sigh. Loudly. Hoping some guard somewhere hears it and is annoyed. It's a pathetic act of rebellion, even for me.

I'll do their stupid work. If only to get back to Mr. D and demand real payment.

I clumsily crawlaround the scattered sheets, sorting them by file names, squinting at the tiny fonts. Network diagrams.Firewall logs. Backup scripts. It's all there, a digital fingerprint of their operations. My brain, despite the aching lack of stimulation, still solves the puzzle. It's a habit. A reflex. A way to occupy the void.

Hours crawl by. Or maybe minutes. Time is meaningless here. My neck cramps. My eyes sting from staring at the small print. The faint smell of stale printer ink fills my nose. No one comes. No one offers water. Just the frigid silence, and the monotonous drone of my own thoughts, sifting through lines of code.

This is what real hell feels like.Blandness.

Then, buried deep in a routine backup script, I see it.

Not a glaring vulnerability, not a sloppy backdoor left by a rookie. No. This is something else. It's precise. Elegant, insidious. A subtle call that makes my blood thrum.

This is interesting. And it's not an external attack. It's internal.

I don't know how much more time passes after that until Mr. D comes back.

A metallic scrape. The door opens.

He and Luca, again, looking even more irritated than before, if that's possible. Mr. D's eyes, dark and heavy, fall on me, still hunched over the scattered papers. He probably expects me to be asleep, or crying, or he's disappointed I'm not hard anymore. I can feel the shift in my pants—the insistent throb that was there before is gone. Replaced by a dull ache.