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Prologue Raya St Claire, aged 15
Some kids play in the dirt, making mud cakes and riding their bikes around the quiet neighborhoods of their homes. They swim in their backyards and laugh at silly things.
But when I was a kid, I wasn’t into any of those things.
I was into computers.
I don’t know where the sudden fascination with computers came, but I just know that when my father brought home my very first ever laptop, I was completely and utterly enthralled by it. I couldn’t get enough of it. When I was supposed to be outside, playing with other kids, I was in my bedroom instead, memorizing every single key and every single component on my laptop.
And when there wasn’t anything new to discover on the laptop, I started with something bigger.
I have started to learn hacking and everything there was to know about it.
People might see zeros and ones as just numbers, but I saw it as something way fascinating.
Those zeros and ones can lead to something bigger.
They can lead to a much bigger world, and hell if it didn’t take me on a damn adventure.
When I was fifteen, I could hack into any database my heart desired.
Anytime. Anywhere. Whenever I wanted to.
By fifteen years old, I was already a professional at it.
I started hacking into people’s bank accounts, taking just enough money for them not to notice. ‘Pretty pennies’, as people call them. But soon, those same ‘pretty pennies’ started to get more each and every time. It started to become an obsession. I don’t know if it was an unhealthy one at the time, but it was an obsession nonetheless. An obsession I couldn’t quite get enough og, because the more I stole money, the more I wanted.
I started to steal from the types of people who play golf when they’re supposed to work… from the people who drink champagne in their little offices—more specifically the type of people who wouldn’t notice that a couple of hundred dollars disappeared from their already-loaded accounts.
I was rich by fifteen years old, soon to be sixteen.
My parents never questioned where I got the money from.
They only assumed that I worked late hours washing cars and cleaning up people’s yards for extra income, but little did they know that their little girl was a criminal, a money-obsessed, hacking-enthralled criminal.
