The real miracle was that GameShack employed tens of thousands of tech-savvy twenty-somethings and no one had ever hacked the system just for fun.
Or maybe they had. Customer Service Reps whiling away the hours in empty stores might have left their initials in the code somewhere. It would be amusing to look for them.
Maybe some other time when she wasn’t hacking the whole damn internet.
Tristan hugged her against his side as he removed the external hard drive with the Anonymity Plus program from her old backpack and plugged the cable into a port.
The program downloaded into the computer.
Colleen watched because any budding computer scientist should watch a master at work when they get a chance.
Anonymity Plus uploaded into GameShack’s servers, assembled itself, and from there spread through the World Wide Web like turning on a Christmas light display.
Like the universe, the visible part of the internet is only ten percent of the whole, and that’s what the upload through GameShack’s platform infected.
The other ninety percent is all dark matter or dark web, undetectable until you are in it.
They needed to scour her likeness, video, and information from that part of the internet, too.
Tristan logged into his virtual private network that made them look like they were in Singapore or Malawi depending on the type of inquiry one sent, and then he uploaded the Anonymity Plus program through his sneaky dark web back roads and set it free.
The entire upload finished in under ten minutes.
Tristan whispered, “Let’s go.”
“Just let me check something,” Colleen said.
“Come on.”
“No, wait. There was something weird.”
“Colleen, we’re breaking and entering.Let’s go.”
“No, it’ll only take a sec.” She clicked back to the administrator dashboard and selected the link to take her to the CurieCoin central exchange, where she opened the central depository. She pointed to the enormous, nearly incomprehensible sum of CurieCoin that was stashed in its virtual vault. “That’s weird, right?”
“Yeah, that’s a lot of CurieCoin. Come on.Let’s go.”
“You said that GameShack’s entire valuation as a company was worth sixty billion dollars,” she whispered. “I just did the ballpark math in my head. Those CurieCoins that are sitting in the equivalent of a savings account are worth a wholelotmore than that.”
Tristan paused and frowned. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and snapped a picture of the screen. “We can figure out what it means later.Come on.”
They started to sneak out the back way, but Colleen ran back to the computer. With a few keystrokes, she cleared the browser history.
Tristan held the door, and she ran by him, muttering, “I’m not going to make that rookie mistake again.”
When they were outside in the sultry summer night, Colleen relocked the door and activated the security system.
In the dark of two o’clock in the morning, she drove carefully, coming to a complete stop at every intersection and accelerating smoothly to precisely the speed limit.
They didn’t need to be pulled over on their way home from criming.
Tristan was staring at his phone as she drove, the light from the screen shining upward on his jaw and brow line in her dark car. “You’re right. Something is off with GameShack.”
They chatted as they drove home and parked, still swimming through the elation of having gotten away with their caper.
As they came around the corner of the apartment building, Colleen looked up to the balcony where her apartment door was.
Light glowed behind the living room’s horizontal blinds. “I thought we turned off the lights before we left.”
