A guy once told me that he had bad luck. I told him it was an app used by billionaires that was causing him all sorts of trouble. I shouldn’t have done that. The people behind that app tortured me for years. Even now. Where I’m a little safer. Feel a bit less afraid? I believe it to be a ploy created by the handlers in order to give me a taste of what I used to have. Just so they can come back and take it all away, to remind me of what it means to lose something. In case I forgot what that felt like, since they took everything.
All because I wouldn’t mind my own business.
But I think that even if I kept my nose out of places. I would have found them anyway. Because according to my mother, I have a penchant for being in the wrong places at the right time. See. When I was 16 or so. I realized that school wasn’t for me. But I had been taught that money is freedom and who doesn’t want to be free. So I figured a way to make money by uncovering when someone was getting cheated. And it all started when I found my neighbor having an affair with somebody’s daughter.
All I was doing was watering the plants like my mom told me to. It was part of my chores. When they stumbled into my yard. The pair were in several states of undress and I have no idea what they were thinking. Like next to the gnomes? Well, my neighbor bribed me of course. I didn’t know it was a bribe then. He didn’t even know that I didn’t know that he even had a wife. If he had known, he’d have saved himself a used piano.
And after that happened, everything clicked. I realized that I could finally answer the question in Mrs. Peterson’s 2nd grade class during Future Me Day. The question was something like: What does the world need? Which triggered the idea in my then teenage brain to figuring out what the world would always have, what would be the thing that I could monetize.
What the world would always have is a sucker calling itself a lollipop.
It usually goes like this. I find a big company. Join its ranks. Rise up. Learn what laws are being broken. And then sell the security risks back to the company. Some would call it blackmail. I guess it was. Listen. I don’t condone it. I’m just telling how it was when it was. Collect the money and be on my merry way. Always be moving. It’s one of my old life rules that transferred over to my new life. Always be moving. Once a company tried to pay me off by promoting me to the CFO. But all that would do was pin me to the crime. It didn’t matter what the annual payday looked like if I couldn’t spend it in prison.
I pulled other gigs too. You wouldn’t believe the espionage behind some of entertainments biggest moments. Like who to snub, or how agreements can include an official favoring during games. Or if things go to the score cards, how it will lean for a bout.
And those are but candle licks.
I’ve seen some bad stuff. Some bad stuff. Stuff that I told myself, if I ever saw. I’d back out. And I did. Several times in fact. Even brought down a hum ding ring once. It got messy and I didn’t get paid. But it was worth it.
As a part of my deal to help prosecute that hum ding ring, I was given access to a number of phones that were confiscated, in order to gain leverage for a different objective. And that’s what I thought it was going to be. Leverage. But instead I stumbled to an invite only app from a well-known billionaire. Stuff that is off the grid, and can only be granted access from a handler to another’s.
It was within a high profile phone that I was looking through, when I found the app.
From a typical home screen, the app is unassuming. The logo changes from user to user, and so do the words beneath it. The common color schematics have been muted greys and blues. My version of the app was named Ripple. Upfront it looks like an uninteresting app. It could easily be mistaken as a utility that’s bundled with the operating system.
That is until it loads. And again. Even getting to the menu, which is often designed to mimic a filter app or some kind of health tracker. If they’ve done their due diligence, and all the buttons work. It will generally stop most people from digging further. But it’s like walking into a paper skyscraper. Something is off, even if it does look solid. And within a few clicks, experience tells me that this is a DD.
They’re rare in the wild. Serving essentially as a front gate for apps. It was once widely used by 8-bit video game developers who needed to jump through different stages of a game from the menu screen.
Most DDs use a rather rudimentary pin style that utilized nested folders. In short. There are 9 numbered links whose orders are invisible to the end user, and within each of those 9 links, there are 9 more links within each one. And 9 more. And more. Necessitating a numbered code that could only be inputted by resetting at the main menu and entering each link in the correct numerical order from screen to screen until the real app is revealed.
After compilers became common in project building, DDs became rather obsolete. Existing as hobby coding or Easter Eggs for fans to find. And they’re mostly harmless.
This DD was hiding an entire ecosystem of dirty money.
I was expecting to find sex requests, but I suppose they have Raya for that. Instead I found contract requests for mundane and seemingly benign tasks that led no where.
But only on the outside.
Instead these small tasks were meant to control the larger picture. Chipping tinyly away at aspects of human life. For instance one of the first jobs I did to test the water was simply show up at a coffee shop, at a specific time, and order a drink. It netted me $150 dollars and a free drink. No harm done right?
Wrong.
Wrong, wrong. Wrong.
I was so wrong.
A man died right outside the shop. He was waiting at the back of the line, leaning against the open door. When he was run over by a loose car. There were a dozen witnesses. And still, the driver got away. What made me realize something was truly afoot, was when several people in and around the store checked their phones about the same time mine went off.
I was taking pictures of the crime when the notification popped up. It was for the money deposited in my account for completing the contract.
And I might have rummaged through the dead man’s wallet and found out his name was Frank, and some basic information. Which allowed me to track down the man’s itinerary several hours before the accident. And everyone that I spoke to along Frank’s day, seemed to have the impression that he was running late. It wasn’t until I questioned a co-worker when it started coming together.
I had snuck into the Frank’s office building as an employee. And was striking up conversations randomly. I tried a bunch of different tactics to get people to talk. But it was the coffee gag that got me a piece of the puzzle.
The pot was empty for the fifth time this hour. I had been dumping it. And was in the middle of a brew coming down when this guy about 6’1, medium built, 40 or 45, is standing nervously behind me.
I clicked my tongue hoping to get enough of his attention, “They ought to keep four or five of these pots filled here.” I tapped the side of my watch. “With what they’re paying us. It’s the least they could do.” I let out a sigh. “Makes me wonder if their mismanagement is what got Frank killed…” The man behind me suddenly stopped fidgeting. So I continued, “…heard he was held up yesterday because of that meeting.”
“There was a meeting,” his voice sudden.
“Yeah. Kept us all in over some budget thing.”
“What budget thing? I’m on the budgeting board. I didn’t hear about any meeting.”
“The budget thing,” I told him. “You didn’t get the memo?”
“I didn’t see anything on MS Teams. What meetin-“
“Man. You should have been there.” I clapped a hand on his back. “They had Frank all riled up. And darn near dragged that thing on. I bet if Frank got out of there on time. He wouldn’t have gotten run over. Bad luck, I say.”
“Oh God.”
I still remember that look he gave me. I almost felt bad for lying to him back then.
“I thought I killed him.”
“What?”
“I,” the man stuttered, “I thought it was me.” He shakes his head and slams his phone on the table. “They didn’t give out any bonuses last year-“
“Yeah. I know. Those cheap bastards. I was going to fix my car with that money.”
“-and my partner. Lost his job. And, and I thought that I’d make a little extra cash. Find a side hustle.”
“Mmm.”
“So I asked around. If y-you know. Anyone knows anything. And.” He stared at me. “It was just some app. Asking me to do a bunch of nothing. And that morning. A contract popped up asking me to give Frank all sorts of papers. Send over calls. Referrals. Stuff like that. Keep him busy any time he looked open. For no reason, all morning. But after I heard what happened. I figured. It must have been me. I took up too much of his time. And he died because of me. But, it was management. Oh thank God.”
After that. I thought it was going to be easy sailing. Now that I knew what I was looking for in order to exploit the system. Find a way to utilize that against the handlers. But it was dead ends all the way. There was that time I had to go around in a business suit, talking about mergers quietly on my phone as I moved through some budding building that looked promising. The JACO thing. I still can’t believe that one turned up empty witnesses. Nantucket was a bust. And the janitor stint didn’t give me any new leads.
I did contracts for months and found nothing. In fact. I was about ready to give up when I told that poor sap about to blow his head off on the roof. That the red flowers I took to the bar weren’t actually for his wife. And that I had no clue what was going on. Only that I had been hired to be there at that time and place. With red flowers. Likely for him to see.
That was the worst offense in my playbook. A play I had told myself to avoid, because of how it has backfired before in the past. Never sell your hand to the weaker party. It is a sure way to invite defeat. See the hum dim ring was sold to a governing body. This was just saving some average guy that probably pissed off some rich prick.
The handlers came for me.
Hard.
I was erasing my tracks behind me in order to go home after talking that guy off the roof. Thinking I was done with the app because I deleted it. My operations were in the millions that year. And I could afford to lose a few hundred hours. Some times these things don’t pan out. Cut my losses and move on. I had been psyching myself up to let it go. Nothing a few empty drinks wouldn’t solve. When my tire rolled off the rim.
It was wet. The sun was gone. And the switchback passes up the mountain was filled with trees. Some had recently broken down from the storm. And one was ready to skewer me alive when I lost control. I snapped the guardrail like a pretzel stick. The car left the ground. And for a second the entire world became pitch black. Before it came for me. Hundreds of branches as I plunged into the forest. A tree trunk the size of my chest came cracking through the windshield. It broke the passenger seat in half and tattooed the steel frame.
When they found me, my horn was barely a whisper. It had been conveniently broken in a way where it was depleted. And I wouldn’t have made it. If I hadn’t been resuscitated. When I came to. I asked around. And a nurse caught the EMT who was first on the scene. But when I thanked the EMT for resuscitating me, she said that sure I was banged up. That I had been flung from my vehicle but was already breathing when she arrived.
To this day I can’t decide if someone wasn’t meant to kill me, had to save their own skin by rescuing me. Or if they were always supposed to save me. So the handlers could keep torturing me. I prefer the former, but I know the latter to be true.
And it went like this for awhile.
What looked like bad luck. Was actually an invisible set of strings being pulled by those trying to teach me a lesson. If only I didn’t know better.
Overnight they drained my accounts.
I was locked out of about everything. Even my phone. And to this day. My dog is still missing. I found her collar one night on the kitchen counter. Folded in a way only a human could. The door was wide open. And all of the security tapes were wiped clean.
A few days later, forensics dusted some prints off a homicide in another state. They said those prints were mine. And I was to be extradited. Of course I made a run for it. Hid at my sister’s for a bit. But it didn’t matter where I went. They would come for me. Eventually, I found myself deep in the woods. And I saw a dark figure standing amongst the trees. I thought to myself. That this was finally it. They were going to kill me. But then I heard a phone vibrating. A screen light up. Before it left me alone in the dark.
I wouldn’t be stranded for long. Even though I kept moving. For a group of armed and armored enforcers came and took me that same night. Plucked me out of the river, nearly drowning me. And I don’t know where they took me.
But it was unlike any prison. Public or private. That I had ever seen.
The people captured there called it Mt. Pontenego.
It was as much torture as it was experimentation. A guy in a white lab coat would come in my cell everyday and eat his lunch in front of me while I was being starved.
I tried fighting against my restraints at first, but as my body grew weaker, I could only cry as the smell of food wafted into my open mouth as I laid on the ground. And it was after one of those times that he had been done beating me. When I asked him, “What are you planning to do with me.”
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you holding me,” I yelled at him. Coughing so much it felt as if my lungs were folding in my chest. “Why are you starving me?”
He didn’t answer me. But for the next several months. He would be starving me to the point of death. And then feeding me. Starve me. Then FEED ME. STARVE ME. FEED ME. STARVE ME. FEED ME. Edging me closer and closer to the point of death that, “Even if there is food in your mouth. You will die hungry.”
The problem was. He never let me die.
I had lost all track of time, and the day they stopped giving me water regularly.
The man told me a story.
“When I was 8 years old. My father deprived me of water. It was because I wet the bed. The first day he only took away my drinking at night. But it was not enough. I would still fail him. The next day he would take it away from me an hour earlier. Still, I would wet the bed. The next day, an hour even earlier. And another. And when the hours shrunk into an hour, and then minutes. Until the night he knew the precise minute I would wet myself after consuming 500 milliliters of water. He finally told me that he was proud of what he accomplished.”
The man set an empty glass in front of me and left.
Being without water is slow and painful. My skin became dry to the touch. Pieces would flake off without being rubbed. Eventually cracking whenever I moved. I ate those pieces. My eyeballs would stick. Distorting my vision. Along with it, the perception of time, as everything seemed to judder. The fluid in my brain thinned. It didn’t recover even when I was finally given a drink to prolong my suffering. In fact, it has never returned to normal.
I became so dehydrated that eventually I began wondering if I could melt the glass in my mouth. It looked so clear and crispy. If I had been able to reach it. I wasn’t. But I know for a fact that if I had been able to reach it, I would have tried to swallow that glass whole. I was that thirsty.
And I was kept on that verge for time without, until everything became meaningless.
Then almost like a joke. I was dragged, gagged, and bagged. Waking up in a bowling alley, in some city I’ve never laid eyes on. Not a handler in sight and the smell of crusty shoes in my nose. And I had never been so happy in my life for it. To be done with the app used by billionaires.
Except, I ask myself I if I ever really escaped. Because everyday since they let me go. I’ve been afraid to do anything. Accomplish anything. Because if I secure anything. They’ll just come back and take it from me. To remind me of what loss is, if anything. But if I have nothing. Then I can be free from everything.