SPECTRE

1| USER NOT FOUND

Nice to meet you.

The name's *******, also known as SPECTRE. After all, I am merely a ghost — a spectre — in the World Wide Web, impossible to see or catch.

Of course, until one day, I finally hacked beyond my limits and found out something that could kill.

I erased all traces of my existence, and now operate in the darkness where no light can reach, slipping into the strongest firewalls, cracking the hardest passwords and finding the most secure information.

I guess you could say I'm an outlaw.

But who can call me that if the law doesn't even know that I exist?

Anonymity comes with its advantages.

A hacker needs to learn how to find them, and exploit them.

When I was small, I was never noticed. Me, having a tragic backstory? Ha! I don't have a backstory.

Now I don't exist. I am nobody. No one knows me.

And I'm fine with that.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Cyborgs, I thought as I pulled the hood over my head, cyborgs everywhere.

In today's society, nearly everybody is at least part cyborg. Amazing prey for hackers. They replace their hands with cybernetic implants and fill all their personal information in it. They don't know how easy it would be for hackers like me to reach inside and take everything, find everything, and know everything about them.

I wasn't stupid. I wasn't cyborg. I knew the risks and I will not be so stupid as to make part of myself technology, filling all my information inside a flimsy, insecure firewall — that can be hacked in a second for someone with skill.

I don't even need to touch the machinery to do it. Before I erased my former identity out of existence, I had myself... upgraded, you can say, by much older neurosurgeon friend of mine. Now, I can hack with just a swipe of my finger, from hundreds of metres away, thanks to my 'upgrade'.

This sounds ridiculously like the really popular 21st century game's character. What was she called?

Oh, right. Sombra, from Overwatch.

To be honest, she was the entire reason I became a hacker, though the game was out more than two centuries ago. She was just too cool.

Thanks to her, I'm now Spectre.

With no regrets.

I take a leap off the top of the building, towards the next, and swing onto a ledge, pulling myself up.

I have the city patrol drones' pattern memorised. Their pattern changes every day, but always with the same conditions, so it's easy to find it.

A fatal mistake for anyone that tried to find a loophole in their seemingly perfectly random patrol sequence.

The next family I'm 'staying' at is a family with all the members and their current and potential connections having full ocular and auditory implants, which means they will never see or hear me if I hack them. As long as I stay out of their touching range, I should be fine for a few days.

I hang on the ledge for a second, then 'draw out' the code from the sensory-and-visual holographic window. As the code is loading, I wait somewhat nervously, my fingers moments away from slipping. After what seemed like a lifetime, the hologlass glitches for a few seconds, which is more than enough for me to swing into the house.

Quickly, I draw out more holos of codes from the door and add my virus into it. It would take a while to work with so much tech around, so I had to be careful while it was loading.

As soon as anyone touches the door, they will be instantly hacked with a virus that erases all signs of my DNA signature from their cybernetic parts. And I know for a fact that all of them will arrive home separately today.

I go into the kitchen. Having infected all the security cameras in the city already with my special signature SPECTRE virus which allows me and everything I want not be detected by any sort of tech infected by it, I have nothing to fear.

After a bite of apple (and obviously erasing all traces of it ever existing from the fridge program), I easily hack into everything in the vicinity with the help of the household computer, infecting all the tech with my undetectable virus in a 500-metre radius. Then, I erased my activity on it, instead replacing that line of code with a looping 'turned off' code that would continue until anyone decided to use the computer.

Done.

Now that I had a place to escape to...

I needed to find...a friend.