Okay, so, apparently I didn't have the whole story before. I had thought I was being arrested because SHIELD knew that I was the hacker. Well it turns out I was only being arrested because they thought I was the hacker. There were actually five hundred other people that Fury thought was the hacker. These people were it – these guys were the best of the best that I aspired to be. My infiltration into SHIELD had been a success less because of skill and more of cunning and brute force. Granted, it took some amount of skill; but the people I was pooled with now were gods. Literally and figuratively.

Loki was apparently a real thing too. I desperately wished for him to be a fantastic actor; but there was no other explanation for the chills that you could get from his presence before even seeing him, or the freakish way he seemed to look right through you from a mile away. To be fair that could just be me and my self-fulfilling prophecy; I thought the actor to be scary so therefore he was – but everyone reacted the same way.

Luckily, I didn't meet the guy one-on-one. After being released from my mobile prison, I'd been escorted into the penitentiary grounds along with everyone else and paraded past the Avengers, Fury, Loki, and what looked like a bajillion guards. They had overlooked us filing in from a platform up above, judging us silently. I kept my head bowed and focused on the heels of the person in front of me that I was chained to. I felt like I was being sentenced to death.

"Hey," someone in front of me hissed as we passed through the doors and out of the eyesight of Avengers and company.
I lifted my eyes up but remained silent.
"Heeeyyy." He whispered again hoarsely.
Nope. I was going to be a good little hacker and hope Fury didn't pick me to be the guilty one.
"C'mon, don't be such a pus-"
"Shaddup!" One of the sideline guards came up and shoved him roughly on the shoulder. It was a dick move; the whole line was jerked sideways as well because we were all chained together. Blabbermouth straightened and glared weakly at the offensive guard before he continued on his way without another word, while the people around us grumbled sullenly.
Making friends on day one already.

We were broken up by gender on the way deeper into the penitentiary and escorted to the showers… still chained. It was the most embarrassing thing I've ever experienced. Everyone kept their eyes glued to the floor and made as little noise as possible, like they hoped they could cease to exist by not making a sound. After that ordeal we were given a grey prison uniform and thrust a tower of linen to make our beds with. Again we were shuffled forward and taken to our cells; which apparently was not segregated by gender. It was sort of a mish mash of whatever; men with men, women with women, women with men. It didn't seem entirely safe, but then again there were cameras everywhere. Any intolerable behavior could be cracked down upon instantly by any one of the guards positioned nearby.

The atmosphere remained one of pained silence. Most people will still red in the ears from the shower and it seemed a fair few were unimpressed with their bunkmates as well. It was two to cell, and I had been hooked up to a short- blond haired late twenty-something year old woman. We nodded a greeting and managed to forge some kind of symbiotic relationship by helping each other tuck the sheets onto the beds. They were just an inch too short and came untucked on one side when you pulled the other side under. It seemed so far that that was how most things operated in this facility; workable… but annoyingly not quite. The water had been lukewarm, the uniform sleeves bunched awkwardly under the arms; one of the stair steps had been just a centimeter taller than the rest and literally everyone tripped on it. It was a relief when they called lights out and the world was enveloped in complete darkness. Finally, SHIELD got something right.
'Torres', she murmured breathlessly when the lights were fully off.
'Cambell', I'd muttered back, picking one from the thousands of surnames that I'd stolen.

~~~~~~~01100101 01011000 01100101 00100000~~~~~~~

The SHIELD prison was practically a tribute to the Avengers ability to work together. The layout of the facility had been Banner's idea, the routine and positioning of the guards had been Clint's; while the near two hundred and fifty undercover agents posing as hackers had been Natasha's idea. Tony and Banner had worked together to create the security system, and Thor had done a wonderful job of making sure Loki didn't do anything stupid. Loki had spent most of his time assisting Fury with locating the potentials and had the last minute brilliant idea to make the facility, for lack of a better word, functionally infuriating. Fury had planned their day to day routines - and that included waking everyone up at four in the morning.

The banging on the doors was loud enough to wake the dead. Torres jerked awake with a curse while I arose slowly and fully rested while the rest of the world griped about the ungodly hour. According to my seven yearlong routine I had just slept through work, and it felt amazing.
"Get dressed!" A guard shouted and continuously banged on the doors down the hall. "Breakfast is in ten!"
"Uh…" I muttered and glanced over to my cellmate.

She got up, stretched, and turned her back on me to get dressed. We quickly climbed into our fabulous prison onsies with just enough time to thrust on our shoes before we were escorted down into what looked like an auditorium – stage and all. Judging by the folded rolly-tables on the edges of the wall, it probably also doubled up as the cafeteria. The tables should… probably be down if we're going to eat.

There were quite a few guards positioned all along the walls, as well us up above on the catwalks. It looked like the second level of the cafeteria was off-limits to us, but there were guards glaring down at us from up there as well. We waited ten minutes before the shuffling stopped and Fury suddenly showed up on stage. It was like the PSA all over again, except this time it was Fury in the background and Loki giving the speech.

The god of mischief had strutted up and completely ignored the microphone, instead opting for looking over us with a grin that was about as genuine as he was compassionate. The room collectively held its breath as he held his position in the front of the room for a minute. "Welcome," he finally spoke and made a small sweeping motion, "to your new home."
There were multiple soft hissing noises from somewhere in the crowd, like they were trying to hold back from shouting. Loki simply smiled and focused on some poor soul and continued his speech.
"This is your new home." He repeated to them firmly, "and this is your new family." He looked up from whatever person he'd been terrorizing and focused again on the room in general. "You'll eat together, you'll sleep together, you'll live together – and," he grinned impishly, "if you're all very unlucky; you're going to die together."

This time there was an outcry from somewhere in the room, and one of the chained lines lurched forward as somebody tried to move towards the front. A couple armed guards wrestled the line back into place, and came back dragging a shrieking girl out of the room. The rest of us descended into hushed mutterings that ended up being quite loud when all combined. Loki shot out a glare out and the room fell back into silence.
"Anything else?" he asked softly. There was nothing else.
"I'll make this simple for you. I am you're warden." He stalked to another side of the stage, "I will be your keeper, your judge, your jury, your jailer, and if necessary;" he glanced over a couple of lines, "your executioner."

There was more hissing and a couple of unintelligible renunciations about that being unconstitutional. "I decide when you are innocent," he said over the rising din, "and only I will release you. You have…" he looked at an imaginary watch on his wrist, "one year to prove to me you are not the one I'm looking for. If you haven't done that by then…" he cocked his head and smiled widely. "Well. Let's hope you won't have to find out."

"This is illegal!" A voice finally called from the back of the room. "You can't jus-mmph!" Again a line was jostled and someone was dragged out.
He watched them go with a vague smile. "Madness," he murmured, "will not be tolerated. But please," he swept his gaze over the entire room like he was looking for someone. "Enjoy your stay," He said softly, seemingly disappointed that whoever he was seeking was not about to wave their arms to grab his attention.

~~~~~~~01100101 01011000 01100101 00100000~~~~~~~

My idea to come up with a fool-proof escape plan before I had arrived had failed miserably. I did, however, have a vague glimmer of hope after we toured the facility when breakfast and Loki's speech were through. It had to do with SHIELD's security itself - not so much the guards as the thousands of cameras and other electronics they possessed. It blew my mind that SHIELD would use a computer system to lock up a computer manipulator; all these cameras and keycard and retina access doors had to lead back to a mainframe. Unless that mainframe wasn't in the facility at all; but that would just making controlling it slower – not halt it all together. Or I could be a good prisoner and leave the stuff be and hope that Loki didn't ID me as the hacker. But one full year? I could easily accidentally let something slip in that time that might alert them.

I just wanted a peek at what they were doing. They had to have all our files stashed away somewhere – it was just a matter of getting to them. I needed an unobtrusive glimpse into what they were thinking so that I could adjust my behavior accordingly. I wasn't going to destroy their systems, just take quick-see. I needed a computer though. Or a laptop. Hell, even a smartphone if I was that desperate.
I am that desperate.

My idea had been a tiny epiphany when I saw Mr. Stark enter a code to get into some restricted area. We were broken up into groups and were busy touring the facility; we had just left the gym and climbed up to the second level to check out the laundry room when I saw him. He'd been fussing with his phone and punching in a continuous string of numbers before the door clicked open. The guy was known for his suits - but the stuff that they ran on (and I don't mean that… circle energy thing in his chest) was easily the best AI ever made. His systems - Jarvis or something – if that was installed here it would make my life miserable. But this is a SHIELD prison. It was pivotal to my plan that this facility and its technology was being run by SHIELDs systems and not Mr. Starks. I doubted that he'd let Fury touch his stuff what with his ego, but there was always that chance this was all his. I mean, why else would he be here?

Let me explain a thing though; Fury's antivirus and the systems had never done anything wrong. It's an A+ program run by a great team and an equally clever server. My platform was on equal footing with their antivirus – maybe even subpar. My trump card was the way that it was installed, recognized, and deleted. See, that's the thing with trojan type viruses – once you have just one on your computer, even if you delete it, your computer will be continuously attacked. It opens up vulnerabilities; it'll pull one tiny string out from your sweater and no matter how many times you restitch it or knit it back together again there will always be at least one thread that can be pulled on to make a bigger hole.

My program - I'd named it ServOS - its acronym was essentially a description of its entire existence; a super encrypted rootkit that verses the installed operating systems on the computer that it was sent to. Well, it wasn't by definition a rootkit. ServOS was actually a dropper – a program that installs malware directly, and the rootkit was the malware that it installed. SedvOS sounded weird though.

Here's the kicker; ServOS was meant to be deleted by their team. It wouldn't run if it was clicked open manually because I didn't want it to. The antivirus needed to attack it so that my bug would collide with their boot and in a whirl of code and exception-making processes, shut itself down. Essentially, all computer programs run on a sort of "if-then" type process; and my "ifs" were supposed to confuse their "thens" and force them to shut down.

Remember Mark and Amanda? That was a separate entity that they had. Those zombie computers and bots distracted the antivirus for a short time so that ServOS could install uninterrupted and steal SHIELDs stuff for a second. That was one of the main problems with ServOS though. It was a really freaking huge file. Even if the computers antivirus didn't detect it installing, the users would most definitely notice the sudden decrease in computer function and investigate. Some of the employees had a vague notion of where to check when the performance decreased and looked at which programs were using the most CPU. Since ServOS installed over the internet, the CPU generally showed large usage by Chrome or whatever. Then they'd get nervous if they didn't have Chrome open and they'd sometimes disconnect from the internet. Of course, by then I'd already created the trapdoor and it didn't matter if I had wifi or not; but sometimes people would interfere juuuuust right.

After that if Servy used up too much CPU it'd just show up as a legit operating program like service host. Svchost doesnt use much CPU... unless it's ServOS in disguise - but SHIELD didn't know that. When ServOS was finally found because one of the bots got lost and accidentally uncovered its hiding place, the antivirus attacked it, got confused, and forced the entire operation to shut down. When the systems shut down for a few milliseconds, ServOS was deleted because the server reverted to a previous state when it was clean.

That was the drop. Its backup was infected with ServOS's rootkit, and the rootkit reinstalled ServOS as DontOpen .exe. The difference between the two programs was that ServOS was the trojan door, and DontOpen was helpful moving company that packaged all your stuff and took it out the door and into the moving van.
Or my computer.
Or… classified information.
But, you're wondering why I'm telling you this story again. It's because you need to understand the nature of ServOS. Of trojans. Of DontOpen .exe.
They never fully leave the system.

But I intended to.

A/N: Okay, I can *safely* say that that is the end of the prologue. CUE THE EXPLOSIONS!
Thanks for reading :)

A/N.2: sorry about the update, I just realized that some words were cut off from the end paragraph. Apparently you can't type .exe after a file name for some reason? Or you have to put a space between the period and the name. :)