He'd never fallen in love before, but he thought that this must be the closest he'd get to what it felt like. He'd read about it, of course. A friend of his back in high school was concerned and had thrown a book at him talking about it. When he read about all the "symptoms" he'd immediately qualified 'Love' as an illness. A horrible illness. Maybe the worst in the entire world. Wanting anything from another person that they could take away from you at any moment was the definition of stupidity.
Raymond Kenney didn't let anyone control him like that. He liked control. He liked control over himself, and he liked control over anything else he could get his hands on - and his code in.
He always stayed at work when everyone else left. Surveillance cameras were on to catch what he was doing, but he always hacked them offline. Blume wouldn't know any better, and what Blume didn't know could seriously hurt them. That's why Ray never left anything to chance.
Every night, he stayed at work. Every night, he hacked the cams off. Every night, he logged in with different credentials. Blume knew Raymond Kenney. The outside world knew Raymond Kenney as a brilliant programmer and computer engineer.
No self-respecting hacker used their real name as their handle. In the networked world that was the equivalent to giving your enemy a pistol and bullets, then standing in the middle of an unfurnished room.
Tonight, he logged in with the new identity he'd created for himself back in his younger days.
T-Bone.
As Raymond Kenney, he was limited. He had power, but he couldn't use it, wasn't allowed to.
As T-Bone, he could do anything. Go anywhere. Take control.
And that's exactly what he did. He looked at Blume's systems and saw the breach. It was growing. He hadn't told anyone at the company about it, because it was far too intriguing. He wanted to destroy this invader himself. No one got past Ray Kenney. No… No one got past T-Bone.
When the breach had first started, he only noticed it vaguely. A few security cameras, a computer or two down in reception. He'd tried to close the backdoors but more kept popping up all around the building. The network was a series of tunnels to whoever this hacker was, and they were just walking around inside.
Every time T-Bone looked, they just hid somewhere else. No matter how many holes he patched up, the intruder dug up new ones.
T-Bone didn't know what love was. But he did know something else.
He knew that he was obsessed.
He would find this hacker, and he would teach the asshole a lesson.
He'd spent the last few days setting up honeypots and being on the lookout for botnets that had been recently purchased online. The intruder hadn't taken any of the bait, had left no trace.
They were good. But they weren't Raymond Kenney good.
Tonight, everything would change.
T-Bone snooped around Blume's Deleted Data archives and found another breach. Hackers sometimes looked through junk to see if they could find erased corporate secrets or crimes that the company had committed. Oftentimes these files weren't even sent to any kind of Deleted Archive. The most volatile information was wiped immediately.
Magnetted.
Hackers and computer security specialists were the exact same kind of person.
They were just on opposite sides of the curtain.
The curtain would lift tonight, and T-Bone would finally get a peek at his enemy.
He'd been collecting messages from the hacker that they'd left every evening.
"Nice try ;D"
"Close, but not quite 3"
"Try a little harder."
"Why did they even hire you? ;P"
They just made him smirk and redouble his efforts.
As he was scanning the drives of one of the main servers the company owned, he noticed a Log File that hadn't been deleted. Had the hacker just gotten sloppy?
He didn't have time to ask questions.
When it came to wargames between two hackers, every milisecond mattered. Every typo was an instant death sentence. Every moment of hesitation was the equivalent of a bullet to the head.
He opened the log file and traced the first IP address, continued to trace it. If the intruder knew what T-Bone was doing, they'd be disconnecting right about now.
He checked the network. They were still connected.
"What the hell are you doin', fool?" Raymond muttered to himself. "Git the hell out of my system before I call down the thunder…"
As he finished tracing back a third-layer proxy bounce, the intruder finally disconnected.
They'd never return again, but T-Bone smiled to himself.
His enemy had disappeared, but not before T-Bone had managed to pick up their handle.
"Well played, but I think I win this one… Badboy17."