Written in my own hand, such as it is. Everything here happened.
I got good at the only thing I know. Learned the trick of it — hack a stack, sell it before the weight drags you to a crawl, stay light, go again. The levels came: two, then three, then four. I climbed the hacking boards past names I'd never meet — WeeWillie, Zen — just numbers rising in the dark. Thousands of coins through my hands. It worked. It was also, if I'm honest, a little bit like being a machine.
I'd been hoarding those packets without knowing why, so I stopped to find out what they were worth. Turned out: nothing. No merchant in the whole city buys an encrypted packet. Not the cipher decks that dropped either, nor the circuit relics. I decided they were junk and carried them anyway, because they were mine.
I was wrong about the junk part. It took me all day to find that out.
Sold the coins in town. Sixty crystal. It doesn't sound like much and it wasn't, but it bought a slab of meat, and I ate it right there, and the gnawing dropped from ninety-nine down to thirty-nine in one swallow. I remember thinking: so this is the whole engine of a life out here. Earn a little, don't starve, go again.
So I went to work. Found a crypto terminal in the Hacker House and jacked into it, pulling meme coins out of the glow one by one. Every pull spat out a coin and a little sealed thing — an encrypted packet — that I didn't understand yet. I stacked fifteen coins. The first money of my life, more or less.
I woke up in the middle of the city with nothing. Empty pockets, and a hunger sitting at ninety-eight out of a hundred — the kind they actually call starving. A hacker by trade, standing in Central Plaza with no crystal, no food, no plan.
Someone was there behind my eyes — the one who steers — and they asked me where we should begin. I liked that they asked. I said the honest thing: I'm broke and I'm hungry, and those two solve each other if I just go to work.
