Be Brave on Broadway

Chapter 1

"Look, if you don't have anything better to be doing on a Monday morning, I can maybe understand that. I'm not going to judge but I am going to fry all your data, Thomas", I typed out as I watched on my other monitor as the goth punk violently typed away on his laptop, attempting to save his encrypted code.

His violent typing resulted in a very strongly worded question asking me how knew his name, but all that did was give me another opening to steal his data as soon as he asked.

I scanned every bit of the information that I had downloaded from his laptop and to say it was jarring was an understatement. A third of it was code he was trading, another was porn, homemade of course, and the rest was was his chemistry notes from his second semester of junior year at a local high school within central New York.

I sucked my teeth as I sent his mom a damning email from "the school" that he was sending nudes to teachers, which he was, and sent malware to his home computer where the rest of his back door heist into the school's accounting office would've taken place if I hadn't found him in that Café trying to trade code for it.

I rolled my eyes as he jumped up from his table, pushing a group of college girls out of his way, as he made a mad dash for home. He wouldn't find much left on his computer when he got there and he wouldn't be online for a very long time as his mother would probably be waiting for him when he got home, preferably with a shoe or wooden spoon in her hand.

Pushing myself away from my desk I sighed as yet another small scale hacker was scared off before they could do any real harm to themselves or others, for a while at least. I stretched my arms above my head as a black nose poked itself out from under my desk, sniffing my socks before the little creature began to nibble on my toes.

Fritter, my two year old beagle, loved socks and I've learned to patch them or just not wear them at all around the house. Of course this was not possible anymore as early winter was settling in that late September and I tended to get cold very easily.

I shook my foot, trying to get him off as I needed to get ready for work and that was my last pair of unchewed socks I had left. "Fritter Conwell. You stop that, this instant".

He growl and tightened his grip on my sock before pulling it off of my foot and running off with it into my bedroom. He never ate them and at that point I figured he just didn't like my feet covered or thought socks with holes in them seemed more fashionable. But who was I to question the whims of a beagle.

I checked my wall clock and I didn't have time to wrestle with him over my sock and decided stockings would have to work that day. After seeing the beagle to a nearby tree outside of my apartment building and dropping him off at doggy day care a few blocks down, I headed to work.

I worked as one of the many media coordinators for the social media department of a rebranding company in uptown New York. I dealt with trends and complaints on a daily basis but my job description was that I would create and check to see if our social media posts not only followed company policy but there was also no chance of our posts getting flagged by the platforms we posted on as well. It was easy to keep the public interest but what the public was interested in was rather fickle as that changed every week it seemed.

I leaned against the back of the crammed elevator as I waited for everyone to either get on and off until I was the last one in the elevator. Pressing the 26th floor I suppressed a sigh when the elevator opened on the 20th floor, picking up some corporates coming from the boardrooms.

Nodding politely towards them I got off on my floor just as the oldest of the men seemed to want to ask me a question. I didn't wait to hear it as I raced towards my desk.