Yeah, these were the people whose lives would be changed for the worse if Tristan burned down GameShack.
She gestured toward the stores and whispered, “See what I mean?”
His eyebrows twitched together, and he looked troubled.
She clicked the link to take them into the video game streaming platform, one of the world's largest game streaming systems that rivaled Nvidia GeForce and the Xbox Game Pass. From there, it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to select upload from the administrator dashboard and start hacking.
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 whole lot more 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.”
Tristan said, “We did. And the doorknob is broken.”
28
Break-In
Tristan
The balcony outside Colleen’s apartment was above them. Through the lattice of the steel-pipe railing, they could see the doorknob dangling from its socket, and a chunk was missing from the doorframe where the deadbolt had been broken out.
Tristan grabbed Colleen’s hand and ducked under the cement walkway, and they stole back to the parking lot and got into the car. Colleen drove out of the parking lot and down the street. The streetlights flashed in his eyes as they drove.
“Dammit,” Colleen said. “Probably the Butorins, right?”
“Yeah,” Tristan said, thinking, but his mind trudged with exhaustion from sleeping little for the past few days whilst they were coding, and it was so late at night. He blinked, and the world spun a little.
“Okay,” Colleen said, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, and then she pulled over into a grocery store parking lot. “We have options. I’m a little freaked out that they thought we would be in there and asleep and we almost were, but we’re going to be fine. Just have to sort through our options and decide. We could call Jian and head for the airplane, maybe go to Chicago, or maybe get a hotel room somewhere and go the heck to sleep for a few hours before we make any decisions. Or we have a car. I can just get on I-10 and head for Mexico.”
Tristan nodded, the weight of everything grinding on him. “I can’t keep my eyes open. I don’t think I’m even safe to drive.”
“Well, I’m okay for a few more minutes, but let’s get someplace safe and sleep for a while. I’m not going to last.”
“I can create a burner credit card, and we can book a hotel.”
“Sounds good.” He opened the website for Geneva Trust and logged in. He transferred money to a cryptocurrency wallet and then to a disposable credit card with no name on it to book a room at a hotel on the other side of the university campus, seven miles away. “We don’t even have to go inside the lobby. We just use a bar code on my phone to open the door.”
“Perfect.”
She drove them over to the middle-grade hotel that was nicer than anything in Marengo, Iowa, but not as upscale as the Hilton Garden Inn in Iowa City. They staggered in, locked the door, and collapsed on the bed.
At eight o’clock the following day, after six desperate hours of sleep, Tristan’s phone rang its usual brisk ringtone.
He grabbed it off the nightstand and pressed it to his face. “Yeah?”
“Mr. King, this is Jian. We have a problem.”
He mumbled, “Yeah. I’ll say we have. Somebody broke into Colleen’s apartment whilst we were out in the middle of the night and were waiting for us to come back.”
“Um, no, Mr. King.” Jian’s very nervous tone finally broke through the woozy film around Tristan’s brain. “I mean, I have a problem. He says his name is Sergey, and he’s currently holding a gun to my head.”