20

NO challenge was too great for Reggie Dymond. That's what he always told himself. There was no way that the problem in front of him would get in the way of getting the job done.

He was smarter than the problem. More determined. Coding this ingenious piece of malware was difficult, but not impossible.

Roman had engineered a brilliant plan, and everyone was doing their part. His was to sit in his chair until his beast was unstoppable. If he could not, then the plan would have failed.

And if it failed, it would be his fault.

As a child, he'd lived in Lesotho, a small landlocked country in South Africa. There, he had lost his entire family in one day.

In the back of his mind, he could still see his father shot through the neck. His mother and sister were slain away from his view. But his father's last breath was only ten meters from him.

Hidden in the tall grass, he was frozen as he watched his father's eyes look at him and then go blank. He was sure he would be caught. But the attack on his village ended as soon as it began, and he watched his father's dead body dragged away.

He had remained hidden through the night, unable to move out of fear. Out of loss. That moment was impossible. Alone. Hungry. Afraid. When he felt it was finally okay to move, he walked aimlessly through his destroyed village. He found food that would have been considered foul any other day. He drank water from the well. He promised himself he would figure out how to make it.

He did make it. He walked to the only other village he had ever been to other than his own. It took him a day, with no food and only a little water. It had also been attacked, but there were still villagers there, with aid workers and help.

He had made it. He missed his family. He never stopped missing them. But he kept going because he knew his father would want him to.

Even though there were people in the village, he was still alone. So he decided to be alone somewhere else. He heard stories of a city, and all that you could do there. Ways to do better. So within a week, once he had collected enough food and water from the aid workers, he journeyed to Johannesburg.

He was only eleven, but somehow he found his way to the city. He was soon hungry again, but there were other children like him. At first, he followed them, doing what they did: begging tourists during the day and sleeping in abandoned shacks at night.

He couldn't remember how long he did this, but this went on for a while. Maybe months. Maybe a year. Eventually, he was caught stealing from a shop. It was one he stole fruit from often, but this time the policeman was near enough to catch him. Instead of jail, the policeman brought him to an orphanage.

There were a few hundred children there, but there was food and a bed for each of them. They even had a school there. Teachers told them that if they learned well, they could achieve anything. So he started learning.

He would learn everything they gave him and would try to find more to study. After a few years, his teachers realized he should go to a better school, so they enrolled him.

Learning separated him from his peers even more. He taught himself english, math, and geography. But his favorite lessons were computers.

They were old and donated models. But it was where he learned BASIC and C. He started learning on his own, to the point that he surpassed what his teachers could offer him. Somehow, he took his skills further, making websites and working as a remote contractor on small projects. He was close to living in the classroom where the only three computers in the orphanage were housed. He didn't make much money, but he gained so much in experience.

He learned all he could about America, and what he would have to do to survive there. He figured out what he needed to do to get into a college, and spent his adolescent years filling in the prerequisites.

While his peers were having fun and growing into the city around them, he stayed in the classroom alone, trying to grow into a country far away.

On his nineteenth birthday, he was accepted to NYU and used the money he made from contractor jobs to get himself to New York and survive. It was an impossible feat, but he achieved it.

At NYU, he met Bryce and Roman. They were wild and funny and treated him like they had been friends forever. They didn't mind that he was quiet and kept to himself. That he was different.

When they found out about his talent for hacking, they opened up his mind to what he could really do. It was a possibility other than making the next website or app. It was more exciting than the potential job opportunities he saw before him.

He wanted to live a life of excitement, using the ability he had. He'd never thought of alternate possibilities before he met them. With them, there were endless impossible moments that he was able to challenge himself with.

This was one of those moments. How to create the perfect malware package, using every technique he knew of - and some that were nothing but theories in the hacker community. It had to be like a worm that needed no assistance to propagate, breaking through all connections and finding its targets.

Roman and Reggie even came up with a name. Jubilee. The more Reggie learned about it, the more it made sense.

For months, he worked with other hackers in the Darknet. Some were skilled, most were not. But there was no way he could have done it on his own. So he split the project up into a hundred tiny components, and farmed the project out to anyone that was willing.

The great thing about hackers was that they were passionate about solving problems through code. So passionate that most of them worked on their components for free. Within just a few months, all the components were complete. He'd been spending every moment since stitching it all together.

He had the framework, and it worked to a certain degree, but it was still flawed. It still needed to be unstoppable. He was close, but not quite there.

He could feel beads of sweat on his forehead as he worked. They only had a few more days to work on Jubilee. A few to make her as good as possible. Everything else was set in motion and it was up to him to do his part.

He thought of how Roman had just lost his father. It was different, but in a small way the same as him losing his own father. From a gunshot or through pressure, it was painful either way. Even though his work would throw the economy in turmoil, it would help the people who needed it the most. Roman's logic was sound. The financial world would figure out a way to fix itself. Reggie wanted to do anything he could to help Roman. To help one of his only friends in the world. That alone was worth it.