Ethan Cross was a name spoken in hushed tones across hacker forums, whispered in corridors of power, and scribbled in intelligence files that few eyes ever saw. It wasn’t the name he was born with, nor the one he’d always carry, but it was the name that defined him in the digital underworld and beyond.

Born in a crumbling industrial town in the Midwest, Ethan had been a loner from the start. His parents were distant figures, more concerned with their collapsing marriage than their son’s obsessive tinkering with old computers scavenged from junkyards. It was on those ancient machines that Ethan first learned to code, teaching himself from outdated manuals and trial-and-error experiments that left circuits smoking and screens flickering.

By fourteen, he’d built his first custom rig. By sixteen, he’d broken into his high school’s network to change his grades—not to cheat, but to test his limits. The thrill of seeing “Access Granted” on his screen was intoxicating, and it wasn’t long before his ambitions grew beyond teenage pranks. He delved into the dark web, honing his skills in forums where anonymity was king, and trust was a rare currency.

His first major exploit came at eighteen. Ethan breached a multinational corporation’s firewalls, not for profit, but to expose their environmental violations. The fallout was immediate and catastrophic for the company—and for Ethan. A knock at the door turned into a federal raid, and the young hacker found himself facing a lengthy prison sentence.

But Ethan was too talented to be left to rot in a cell. A shadowy figure from a three-letter agency offered him a deal: work for them, or face the full force of the law. Reluctantly, Ethan agreed, trading his freedom for a life in the murky world of sanctioned cyber warfare.

Years passed, and Ethan became a ghost in the machine, pulling strings and breaking systems on behalf of a government he neither trusted nor respected. The work wore on him, chipping away at his idealism and leaving him a shell of the young man who once thought he could change the world with a keyboard.

Now, at thirty-five, Ethan was a freelancer, offering his skills to the highest bidder—so long as the work didn’t cross his carefully constructed moral lines. The call from Langston had stirred memories he’d rather forget, dragging him back into a game he’d sworn to leave behind.

Sitting in his workshop that evening, Ethan stared at the folder Langston had left. The images and dossiers felt like a doorway to his past, a portal back to the chaos he’d spent years escaping. But something about the mission nagged at him—a sense of unfinished business, or perhaps a faint glimmer of purpose.

“One last time,” he muttered to himself, opening the folder again. The lines he’d sworn never to cross blurred ever so slightly, and the ghost of the idealistic hacker he once was whispered in his ear: Do it, for the right reasons.

Ethan closed his laptop and began to prepare. This time, the stakes felt personal, even if he couldn’t yet explain why.

[Index]

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