by Kelly Brumbaugh

Created on: July 01, 2008

This is a story about a twenty-two year old computer genius who gets involved with solving a mystery. After graduating from college she got a job maintaining the computer network for a large company and while there she stumbles across a mysterious email detailing the death of somebody. Using her hacker skills (some dirt will be dug up about her hacking while in school) she traces the email back to her boss. Burdened with the knowledge that her boss may have been involved in a murder, she has to decide whether to involve herself or let it go for the sake of her own safety. After spending some time pondering this she decides to do a little more digging to find out if the email was merely a joke or something more sinister. She carefully sneaks her way into her boss' office and hacks his computer to find more evidence and she does find it. Still unsure about what to do she saves a copy of the incriminating emails to a flash drive and gets the hell out of dodge before anyone catches her. After a couple sleepless nights and uncomfortable conversations at work she decides to go to the police with the information but just before she leaves she gets an email warning her to be careful who she messes with. She tries her hardest to find out where the message came from but it is to no avail. Fearing that her boss discovered her excursion into his office she changes her mind about going to the police and instead makes another copy of the info and puts it in her safe. The other she keeps stored in a flash drive that is kept on her person at all times. The next day she notices that someone is following her she calls her ex-boyfriend who just happens to be a police detective. He broke up with her while she was in college after finding out that she did some mercenary hacking in return for money to pay for her tuition. He of course tells her to hand over the flash drive immediately and allow him to arrange for police protection but she is afraid that doing so would only put her in greater danger. Instead she proposes that they pretend to rekindle their relationship in order for him to see the data and be close enough to protect her if need be. Although he is extremely reluctant to do this he agrees and the two of them meet up in a public place and act like a couple so that the tail the protagonist has on her sees them. Their charade holds up for nearly two weeks with the protagonist attempting to use her hacker skills to gain more evidence. Her ex makes it an official investigation but keeps it as secretive as possible so as not to attract attention from the suspects. During those two weeks the former couple get reacquainted and the protagonist tells her ex that she deeply regrets breaking the law to keep herself in school and wouldn't do it if she could go back in time. In return, her ex tells her that he understood how much she wanted to go to college and escape the life of poverty she had grown up in. That night ends with the two of them sleeping together.

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