Page 16 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)

Nothing was real anymore, and that drove him insane.

You didn’t own anything. Everything was a subscription.

You couldn’t do anything without the Internet.

You couldn’t even tell if a piece of art was made by a person or a machine.

Relationships were digitized and temporary.

Even buying toilet roll needed an app. If you wanted to watch TV, you needed to pay some corporation ten dollars a month.

Everything felt like it could disappear tomorrow, as though reality was in a state of constant buffering.

The world today was built entirely on ones and zeroes and bad code.

It was a system with no concept of consequence.

No one talked about this hazy reality screwed with your head, probably because few people even stopped to think about it in the first place, and that meant nobody realized just how dangerous it all was.

He understood this because he occupied the space between the real and the unreal, and had done so his entire life. Now he was sitting in the command center of his barren, five-bedroom house, surrounded by the one thing he knew better than anything: the digital world.

Thirteen monitors were arranged in a giant arc, which by his count must have been a world record for an amateur setup.

Not that he was an amateur by any means, but he was what the major players would call a freelancer.

He no longer had a boss and answered to no one, and he was determined to keep it that way until this whole thing ended.

The house he worked out of was just a shell.

It wasn’t in his name, but it was in a name he made up.

A name that had a job on paper but didn’t earn quite enough to pay taxes, and that was enough to keep him invisible from the kind of agencies that went looking for people like him.

He wasn’t even sure he had a name anymore, at least not in any system that mattered.

Then there were the smaller material possessions, which were actually more difficult to obtain than the major things.

A wall of servers hummed in the room downstairs, but they hadn’t been purchased at a store; they had been acquired through a hacked shipping manifest from a port in Long Beach, rerouted, and delivered by a third-party logistics firm that thought it was delivering industrial kitchen equipment to a catering company that didn’t exist. The custom-milled computer parts arrived in packages addressed to dead people.

The fiber optic cable that ran directly to his property, bypassing the local ISP, had been laid by contractors who thought they were working on a government project.

The irony was that, in a way, they were.

He had become a master of the physical world because he understood the digital strings that made it dance.

It was a language he’d been forced to learn after the real world’s systems of justice had proven to be their own kind of illusion.

At the other end of those strings sat the gatekeepers who wrote the code, and who were never held accountable when it broke.

These were the men and women in corporate ivory towers who had decided that the concept of ownership no longer mattered.

They were the ones who took the things people held dear and locked them behind a paywall, thus holding the soul of the universe hostage for a monthly fee.

They were the assholes who scraped every book and painting created by man and fed it all into a plagiarism machine that churned out soulless parodies of real art.

It was a machine that ran on zero foresight and a blind faith that there would never be a reckoning.

Consequence was a line item someone else would have to pay.

And while they preached about connectivity and convenience, they engineered a world of planned obsolescence and digital prisons, all while they hid away in fortresses where the people they screwed couldn’t reach them.

Fortresses with locks and cameras and security chiefs. Fortresses he was about to prove were just as illusory as the products they sold.

He couldn't go after the main villains, of course. If a mega CEO wound up dead in his office, the cops would connect the dots in a day, and the narrative would be simple: a disgruntled Luddite with a vendetta. His message would be lost.

The targets represented something else. They were the people who helped build the walls of the digital prisons but didn’t run in.

And really, what mattered, what was really going to blow people's minds, wasn't the who .

It was the where.

This was the lesson. Not just for the gatekeepers, but for everyone.

Nowhere was safe. No one could hide, not behind a million tons of impenetrable steel, not surrounded by guards and guns.

All of that was just brawn. They were physicals lock waiting for digital keys.

Brain beat brawn every single time. He didn't have to break down their gates.

He didn't even have to pick the lock. He was the key they willingly put in the hole with their own hands.

He was the malicious code they installed on their own systems in the name of convenience and progress.

He was the human Trojan Horse outside the gates, and two people had already let him in.

Tonight, a third would do exactly the same.