To most people, Malcolm Thomas was a nobody. Just another black man trying to make an honest living in America; another face in the crowd. A face no one looked twice at when he wandered around in restricted areas like he was supposed to be there. A face that went unnoticed when important people were having important conversations in places they really shouldn't. A face that wasn't memorable enough for, say, a security guard to recall a week or two later when he was being grilled about the article that showed up online talking about things he was paid to make sure people didn't know about.
Yes, his generic, "NPC" qualities suited him just fine. Because while he was a complete unknown in real life, his alter ego was an internet legend.
Though he went by the name "WhatsInTheBox", often shortened to just "Boxy" or "Box-kun", he was perhaps better known as "The Master of the Hit Piece". Even without the damning evidence that accompanied his articles, he had a way with words that could have a person looking at their own mother sideways with just a couple sentences. Fortunately, his targets were always of the less wholesome variety.
Where those who could be considered his "peers" went after the low-hanging fruit of companies and people that were already universally despised, or the political rivals of whomever was paying them at the time, Boxy preyed on corporations that loved to present a squeaky-clean image, or did everything they could to stay out of the public eye. And because his "victims" were soulless corporations that victimized the public, the internet rallied around him and shielded him the worst of the backlash.
That was one of several reasons Malcolm had avoided poking at one particular company. THE Company, really.
Once the pinnacle of the dystopian Corpo nightmare novelists had been warning the world about for a thousand years, JCJenson's deeds in the last two decades had made them all but unassailable in the public eye. Among those deeds were things that made Malcolm's job both easier and...arguably less dangerous. Add in the fact that their CEO had, for all intents and purposes, publicly endorsed him on multiple occasions, even looking in their direction as Boxy felt like biting the hand that fed him.
But numbers were down, and it was actually JCJ's fault. In the last year alone he'd been forced to scrap four different projects because JCJ had swooped in and bought out the company seemingly for the express purpose of giving authorities unfettered access for investigations and even outright raids. With the skeletons already dragged out of the closet, all he could do was delete his drafts, dump his evidence off in his storage locker, and move on. And four times now "moving on" meant reaching into the well to pick on someone who hadn't learned their lesson from him, and had avoided being slapped into submission by JCJ's money-dick. As one would imagine, that list was a short one, and readers were far less interested in the latest scandal from an entity they already knew to be scandalous.
Plus, people were trying to take a page out of his own book and put him in the unenviable spot of attempting to prove a negative. Because seriously, how does one prove they AREN'T being paid off? They were enough of a minority that he could still ignore them, but with an audience that he himself had encouraged to be skeptical and vigilant, it was only a matter of time before the spark caught. Hell, he was already feeling a bit of heat from uncomfortably close.
So it was with a heavy heart that Malcolm started digging. And as the days and weeks went by, and connections he never even thought of started to make themselves known, that trepidation was replaced by the familiar rush of his passion taking hold. Because like Boxy always said: To get into the club, you gotta play the game. And it looked like Cynthia Louise Elliott was damn good at it.
Now, after a solid two months of almost nonstop work, Malcolm sat down in front of his laptop, cracked open a wine cooler and started on the final draft for what was feeling like his best work in years.
