Chapter 8: Null
I almost didn't go back in.
Not because I was scared. I wasn't. But Mum had made shepherd's pie for dinner and I'd eaten so much that I could barely move. I was lying on the sofa with Biscuit on my chest watching some property show where a couple with a budget of half a million quid were complaining that the kitchen was too small. Mate, my entire flat in my old life was smaller than your kitchen. Shut up.
Mum was in the armchair knitting something. She'd started a scarf for me about three days ago and it was already longer than I was tall. I didn't have the heart to tell her I wasn't really a scarf person.
"You're quiet tonight," she said without looking up.
"I'm just a bit tired." I meant it, mostly. But there was this thing in the back of my head going: does she know? Has she heard me?
"You should go to bed early. You've been staying up late. I can hear you moving around up there."
My stomach dropped a little. "Just can't sleep sometimes. The coma messed up my sleep schedule."
She looked at me over her glasses. "Hmm. If you say so." The way she said it, slow, with that little pause, made it very clear that she was not saying so. She was filing it away. Mums do that. They don't push. They just wait.
"Right. Okay, Mum." I got up off the sofa, nearly squashing Biscuit. "I'm going upstairs. Proper sleep tonight. Promise."
She gave me a look that said yeah, right.
"Okay, Liam. Have a good night." A pause. "And really go to sleep this time, yeah?"
I gave her an awkward smile, one hand behind my head. "Yeah. I will." I went upstairs and closed my door, leaning my back against the wood.
"Pfff." I let out a breath I'd been holding since the living room. "She's onto us, Biscuit."
Biscuit trotted past me and claimed the pillow. Helpful as always.
"Right. Sleep." I looked at my desk. The laptop was sitting there. "As if. Not with these powers. I need to use them, learn them. I don't have to go back to school yet, so this is the time."
I sat down and pulled the laptop toward me. VPN on, Tor running, encrypted partition unlocked. I opened the forum and started scrolling.
I'd spent the last few nights reading about how the economy of this place actually worked. People posted jobs, other people did them, payment in crypto. Some jobs were small, things like testing whether a website had a specific vulnerability and reporting back. Others were bigger. Corporate data, private servers, financial records.
I wasn't looking for big. I was looking for first.
I found it about halfway down the second page. A post from a user called RedWire, three hours old, twelve replies already.
The job was straightforward. A mid-sized tech company based in Germany had a client database that someone wanted access to. Not the whole thing, just a specific set of records. The post didn't say why and nobody in the replies asked. That wasn't how things worked here. You did the job, you got paid, and you didn't ask questions you didn't want the answers to.
The bounty was 0.4 Bitcoin. At today's rate, that was a couple of hundred quid. Not life-changing money. But that wasn't the point.
I opened a new tab and started looking at the company. Their website was corporate and clean. Software solutions for logistics companies. About two hundred employees according to LinkedIn. Offices in Berlin and Munich. Nothing special.
I turned on System Insight.
The website was the front door. Behind it I could see the whole building. Their web server was hosted on AWS, standard setup, nothing unusual. But the company also ran their own internal servers for email and their client database. Those were connected to the main network through a VPN, and the VPN had a configuration that was almost right. Almost. There was a gap in how it handled authentication tokens. Not a big gap. The kind of thing that would pass a security audit nine times out of ten. But I could see it like a door left slightly open.
"Found you," I whispered.
I sat there for a minute, just looking at it. My hands were on the keyboard but I wasn't typing. My leg was bouncing under the desk.
This was it. The first real one. Everything before this had been reading, learning, building. And I was nervous. Properly nervous. Which was stupid because I was sitting in my bedroom in my mum's house and the worst thing that could happen was I'd close the laptop and pretend it never happened. But still. My mouth was dry and my heart was doing that thing where you can feel it in your throat.
"Come on," I muttered. "Stop being a baby."
I went in through the authentication gap.
It took me about fifteen minutes to get from the web server to the internal network. Fifteen minutes that felt like two hours. Every step I kept expecting something to go wrong. An alarm, a block, a connection drop. But nothing happened. System Insight showed me the path and I followed it.
Once I was inside, the whole thing lit up. Every server, every connection, every user account. The client database was on a separate machine, but it was connected to the same network and the access controls were weak. A service account with elevated privileges that hadn't had its password changed in over a year. I used that to get into the database server.
The records were right there. Thousands of entries. Client names, contracts, contact details, financial data. I found the specific set that the bounty was asking for and started pulling them.
And that's when my stomach flipped.
One of the log files on the database server had been accessed four minutes ago. Not by me.
I stopped. Looked closer with System Insight. There was another active session on the internal network. Someone else was in here. Right now. Using a different entry point, a different method, but they were in the same system, looking at the same data.
For about three seconds I just sat there with my hands frozen over the keyboard.
"What the..." I leaned closer to the screen. Someone else was here. In the same system. At the same time. And I had no idea.
I could feel my pulse in my fingertips.
Okay. Okay. Think. Don't panic.
I looked at their session. Their connection was routed through enough layers that even System Insight couldn't trace it back to a person. But I could see what they were doing. They were in the same database, pulling the same records. And they were fast. Whoever this was knew exactly what they were doing.
I checked the timestamps. They'd started downloading three minutes before I even got to the database. Three minutes ahead of me.
For a second I thought about racing them. Grabbing the data faster, getting out first. But even as I thought it I knew it was stupid. Two people pulling the same data at the same time would create noise. More noise meant more chance of someone on the company's side noticing. And I did not want to be sitting inside someone else's network when their security team woke up.
"Shit." I grabbed what I could. Not all of it, but enough to prove I'd been there. Then I cleaned up. Closed the service account session, cleared my traces from the logs, removed anything that showed I'd been in the system. Thorough but fast. Two minutes.
Then I got out.
I pulled my hands off the keyboard and put them on my face. Just sat there for a second, breathing into my palms. "Pfff." I dragged my hands down my cheeks and stared at the screen. Biscuit had rolled over at some point and was lying on his back with all four legs in the air. Completely unbothered. Must be nice.
I went back to the forum and refreshed the bounty page.
Claimed. Two minutes ago. A user called Spectre had posted proof of completion. RedWire had confirmed. Job done.
Two minutes ago. While I was still inside.
I stared at the screen. Then I laughed. Not because it was funny, but because what else was I going to do? I'd just done my first real hack, got beaten to the finish line by someone, and I was sitting in my mum's house at two in the morning in my pyjamas.
"Brilliant," I said to the screen. "Absolutely fucking brilliant."
And then it hit me. Even if I had won, even if I'd been faster, even if I'd submitted the proof first... I didn't have a crypto wallet. I had no way of getting paid.
I looked over at Biscuit. "Mate. I just hacked a German company and I don't even have a place to put the money."
Biscuit didn't even twitch.
"Professional. Real professional, Liam."
That one actually made me properly laugh. The kind where you have to cover your mouth because your mum's asleep down the hall and you can't explain why you're cackling at two AM.
I spent the next hour sorting that out. Set up three separate wallets on different chains, connected them through a mixing service that made transactions nearly impossible to trace. System Insight helped me see where the weak points were in the mixing service and I adjusted around them. By the time I was done, the money side was as invisible as the rest of my setup.
I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling. The house was dead quiet. Just Biscuit snoring and the boiler ticking downstairs.
So. First job. Didn't get it. Got beaten by someone faster and more experienced. Forgot to set up a way to actually get paid. Not exactly a legendary start.
But I'd been inside. I'd done it. I'd hacked into a real company's real network and pulled real data and got out clean. Nobody knew I'd been there. I think. I hope. On the internet you're never really sure, are you? No alarms, no traces, nothing obvious. And the other hacker, Spectre, they didn't know who I was either. They just knew someone else had been in the system at the same time. That was it.
Not bad for a first go. Not good either. But not bad.
I closed the bounty page and sat there looking at the forum. All these usernames. All these people doing jobs, building reputations, making names for themselves. And I was just nobody. No username, no history, no posts. A ghost who hadn't even registered yet.
That needed to change.
I clicked on the registration page. Username field. The cursor blinked at me.
I'd been thinking about this since the first time I opened this forum. What I'd call myself. It had to mean something. Not something edgy for the sake of it, not something trying too hard. Something that said what I was.
I thought about what I'd built over the past few days. Layer after layer designed to do one thing: make me invisible. And System Insight, which let me see everything while nobody could see me. I could look at any system in the world and understand it completely, and when people looked for me, they'd find absolutely nothing.
In programming, null means nothing. An empty value. A variable that exists in the code, takes up space, is real, but when you look at it, there's nothing there.
That was me.
I typed it in.
Null.
Four letters. I stared at them for a while. The cursor blinked after the second L. The room was dark. Biscuit was snoring. Somewhere down the street a car door slammed.
I hit enter.
The forum loaded my profile. No posts. No reputation. No history. Just a name on a dark background.
Null.
I closed the laptop. The screen went dark and the room went with it. I sat there for a second in the silence. Not thinking about the hack. Not the wallet. The name.
Because that was the moment it became real. Not Liam sitting in his room reading about hacking. Not Liam practising on his own network. This was someone new. Someone who didn't exist five minutes ago but was going to exist for a very long time.
I got into bed. Biscuit shifted and pressed his back against my leg like he always did.
Tomorrow, Null would take his first job.
But right now, Liam needed to sleep.