The basement apartment in Montreal's Plateau smelled like burnt coffee and regret. Ethan's fingers traced the worn keys of his ThinkPad T420—a machine he'd christened "Jane" after too many lonely nights debugging code. The laptop's fan wheezed like an old smoker, but it had survived three years of packet sniffing, SQL injections, and the occasional breach that kept his rent paid . "Another beautiful day in paradise," he muttered, peeling yesterday's Tim Hortons wrapper off his desk. The IT helpdesk job paid barely enough to cover his shoebox apartment, where blackout curtains kept the world at bay and empty energy drink cans formed aluminum monuments to his insomnia. At twenty-eight, Ethan had learned that legitimate cybersecurity paid peanuts while the gray market paid bills. His handle "Gr4yscale420” had earned respect on forums hidden behind Tor relays—places where reputation was currency and trust was earned through leaked databases and zero-day exploits. He told himself the data scraping was temporary, just until he could afford proper pentesting certifications. The anonymous tips he fed to cybercrime units were his way of keeping the karmic ledger balanced.

Jane's screen flickered as she booted up, displaying desktop wallpaper that hadn't changed since 2003. Ethan absently patted the laptop's chassis—a ritual born from countless late nights when she was his only companion. Though she had been acting oddly… Sentiant as of late. He’d checked the OS, scanned for malware, flashed the BIOS twice and yet everything seemed squeaky clean. He’d just brushed it off as his sleep deprived hallucinations but it did make him see her in a different light.

"Easy, girl. Just need to find that DLL for CipherByte."

His contact on the darknet marketplace had been searching for a legacy library file for weeks. Ethan had promised to dig through his collection of salvaged drives and bootleg software repositories. The box beside his desk contained thirty-seven USB drives, each one a digital archaeological dig waiting to happen.

He grabbed four drives at random—labeled only with cryptic abbreviations like "RU_2021" and "corp_dump_misc"—and began sliding them into Jane's ports. The familiar click of plastic on metal filled the cramped room. One. Two. Three—

A dialog box materialized on screen, stark against his desktop.