Four servers in Europe fried. Two servers in China reformatted themselves six times. One server in Iran, and another in America rewrote their entire memory with a random series of ones and zeros. The trail back to me was effectively severed with no way to retrieve the data. Three more mouse clicks, and my carefully crafted machines were reduced to useless scraps of wires, plastic and fried silicon. The ‘abandoned’ building I was using burned down from ‘homeless campfire’ that got out of control. Most of my wrecked computer system had been divided up and thrown in random dumpsters around the city. The hard drives and memory sticks were burned in a bonfire out in the desert along with all my personal identification. After making sure that there would be no way to get any information from the burning pile of rubble, I got in the van and started driving West. I arrived in Las Vegas four days later.
5-years later:
“Honey? Can you give me a hand here? The computer is acting up again.” I called out to my beautiful wife Linda.
“Seriously, Mark? How is it possible that a twenty-five-year-old man is so clueless about computers? What would you do without me?” She said as she gave me a quick kiss on the top of my head. A couple of quick clicks and keystrokes, and I was back to checking my e-mail. “Dinner will be ready in about half an hour.”
“Thanks, Honey.” I replied as I watched her walk back into the kitchen. It had been two years since Linda and I had gotten married. I still couldn’t believe how lucky I was.
After leaving my previous life, I had recreated myself. I was working as a truck driver for a local lumber yard. We were a union yard, so the pay was decent. I had very carefully retrieved a couple hundred thousand dollars from one of my off-shore accounts and bought a nice, modest three-bedroom house on about an acre of property. I put up a steel building next to the house to use as a shop and storage. I also added a hidden room to rebuild and upgrade my computer system. It was a small walk in storage room, but it had a false floor that would raise up to access a set of stairs leading underground, if you didn’t know how to open it up, it looked just like a regular concrete floor. I had decided that I would back off from going after dealers and cartels for a while. I had enough money tucked away if I needed it, and it was prudent to disappear and let things cool off. Still I didn’t want to lose my skills and I needed to keep up on the newer technology. The shop was for my hobby of building up older muscle cars. The wife was completely not interested in that, so she never came into my shop. This also gave me the time and privacy to get online and play a bit without her suspecting anything.
You may be wondering why I am hiding that from her. The truth is that she knows me as a simple truck driver and shade tree mechanic that is almost clueless about computers. Obviously, when I met her and we began dating, I couldn’t just come out and introduce myself as a hacker called Ghost in the computer underground. First off, the feds were looking for me. I had committed a few cybercrimes, and they also wanted to lock me in a room and use my skills for their own purposes. Second, there were several very bad criminal organizations that had me on their target list If they caught me, my end would be very ugly and extremely painful. How long would our relationship have lasted after that? Do you even need to ask? There were a couple more matters after we were married. First, it was for her own protection. If she didn’t know, they couldn’t use her for any information. Second, this ensured that she didn’t accidently let any information slip on accident. Nope. Better that she only knows the man she married.
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