zero day
Dan exhaled a thick cloud of vapor, he watched it get sucked into the intake of the A/C unit above his rig. The temperature of the shed was kept at precisely 20 degrees Celsius. Always. It needed to be that cold to keep his servers from overheating, but that meant that he had to wear a hoodie in the middle of July.
He took a long gulp of Pepsi Max and set the bottle down on his desk, aligning it perfectly with the three empty ones that were already there.
On the center monitor, lines of code were lighting up the black screen, NASA’s JPL engineers had quite good firewalls, but Dan was bored. He had just watched The Martian, and he just really needed to know if the manned mission to Mars was actually happening in 2030. Ever since his freshman year when he realized he could spoof the high school vending machines for free soda, he viewed cybersecurity as a crossword puzzle. Sneaking around classified government servers was his way of proving to himself that he was capable. He leaned back in his chair, looking around. The shed was massive. It was used by his father to store the collection of vintage motorcycles before he decided to move them to a secure garage in the city. Now, it was Dan’s cave.
“Sparky, dim the lights,” Dan whispered.He had thrown out the commercial Alexa garbage years ago, too easy for outside agencies to tap into, and coded his own closed-loop voice assistant. The LED strips in the ceiling shifted to a low and relaxing purple.
He glanced at the time on his computer: 3:14 AM. His eyes were red and burning. He hit a few keys to scrub his digital footprint from the servers, and shut the computer down. Usually, he would just crash on the little bed in the corner of the shed, but tonight he wanted a real mattress.
He locked the heavy door of the shed behind him, crossed the dark and quiet lawn, and unlocked the backdoor of the main house with a quick tap on his phone screen.
As he crept upstairs to his childhood bedroom, he paused at the top of the landing. Down the hall, his father’s home office was sealed tight behind a heavy-duty deadbolt. It was an industrial lock that looked completely out of place in their quiet, suburban and highly digitalized home.
Dan stared at the lock, the itch of curiosity was creeping into his brain. His parents were rich. Not just comfortable, but wealthy. Yet, they never seemed to actually work. They always claimed they lived off a massive legal settlement from years ago, but Dan had spent dozens of hours digging through court databases, tax records, and offshore registries. He had never found a single trace of that lawsuit. No dockets. No payouts. Nothing. It was like his parents’ financial history had been wiped clean by someone who was just as good at computers as he was.
He rubbed his tired eyes, shaking his head. The weed was making him paranoid again. He walked into his room, collapsed onto his bed without taking off his clothes, and let the exhaustion pull him under.
