The room had changed over the last few days.
Where there had once been scattered cables and random devices, there were now labeled containers, plastic drawers, and a small metal lockbox tucked beneath the desk. Lucian had reorganized everything with quiet precision. Old routers. Damaged hard drives. Disassembled keyboards. A soldering kit he barely knew how to use but liked having nearby. The air smelled faintly of heated plastic and dust.
On the desk sat nearly a dozen pen drives.
He rolled one between his fingers before tossing it lightly into the air and catching it again. They had been gathered from different places—school labs, forgotten corners of libraries, second-hand electronics shops, one even found near a bus stop. Most had been formatted. Cleaned. Wiped by people who assumed deletion meant disappearance.
Lucian knew better.
A news video played quietly on his monitor. A new tech channel was demonstrating an experiment—recovering fragments from formatted drives using forensic recovery utilities and low-level reconstruction tools. The host spoke confidently about data sectors and trace residues.
Lucian smiled.
He already had something similar installed.
Setting it up had taken hours of frustration. The documentation was scattered across forums, buried in threads filled with jargon and arguments. But it worked.
He plugged in the first drive and opened the recovery interface. Sector scan. Deep mode. Ignore file system structure.
The progress bar crawled forward.
Fragments appeared.
Corrupt video clips. Half-broken spreadsheets. Thumbnail previews of old photos. A few personal documents that wouldn't open properly. He leaned closer to the screen as the software reconstructed clusters from magnetic residue.
Nothing interesting.
He tried the second drive.
More fragments. Random family pictures. Old homework files. A game installer.
He exhaled slowly.
By the fifth drive, the excitement had thinned into mild irritation. He wanted something hidden. Something secret. Instead, he found leftovers of ordinary lives.
When the last drive finished scanning, he leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.
For now, storage was just storage.
A week later, summer ended.
School reopened.
Lucian entered 11th grade without ceremony. The hallways felt the same—crowded, noisy, layered with the smell of deodorant and cheap cologne. Teachers handed out schedules. Students compared electives. Nothing about the building suggested hidden directories or unsecured panels.
But Lucian's routine didn't change.
He returned home each afternoon, dropped his backpack beside the bed, and powered on his machine. The website he frequented—freewrld—was still active. Forums. Tools. Scripts shared by usernames that meant nothing and everything.
He didn't understand most of it.
But he understood enough.
One evening, while scrolling through a thread, he found a simple script. It was described casually: a crawler that mapped exposed directories and misconfigured paths on web servers. Nothing dramatic. Just reconnaissance.
He read the comments beneath it.
"Good for mapping weak configs."
"Basic enumeration tool."
Lucian's pulse quickened.
He copied the script into his editor and adjusted the target field. His fingers hovered for a moment before typing in the school's public website address.
He told himself it was just curiosity.
He ran it.
The terminal flickered with output. It took less than two minutes.
A list appeared.
Hidden directories. Old backups. A staging folder. Three separate admin panels that were not linked anywhere publicly.
Lucian leaned forward, heart beating faster.
Admin panels.
He clicked the first one.
A login screen.
He tried simple combinations.
Admin / admin.
Administrator / 123456.
Schoolname / 0000.
Nothing.
He frowned.
This wasn't like guessing a teacher's password for shared documents. This was different. Structured. Hardened.
He searched freewrld again and found a basic brute-force utility. It cycled through password lists at high speed.
He configured it carefully and let it run against one of the panels.
After several minutes, it stalled.
Rate-limited.
Blocked.
He leaned back, jaw tightening.
They weren't careless.
Scrolling deeper into the forums, he noticed another tool referenced repeatedly. The word stood out.
Worm.
He didn't fully understand it. He had heard the concept before—a self-propagating program capable of moving from one device to another, collecting information as it spread.
The description on the thread was vague. No step-by-step. Just fragments. Discussions about payload structures and persistence techniques.
Lucian's chest felt warm.
He opened the documentation anyway.
Most of it went over his head.
He minimized the window and opened an online chat platform he occasionally used. A username blinked online.
Onetwo.
Lucian typed.
Lucian:
You ever worked with worms?
A pause.
Onetwo: Why?
Lucian: Just reading about them.
Another pause.
Onetwo: That's not beginner stuff.
Lucian: I know.
Onetwo: You planning something?
Lucian stared at the screen. He didn't type immediately.
Lucian: Just curious how they work.
A longer pause.
Onetwo: They replicate. Exploit weak points. Move laterally across networks. Usually illegal everywhere.
Lucian: illegal how?
Onetwo: Very.
Lucian smirked slightly at the bluntness.
Lucian: Hypothetically.
Onetwo: Hypothetically, if you deploy one on a network without permission, you're looking at serious consequences. It's not a toy.
Lucian's fingers hovered.
Lucian: But technically, it's just code, right?
Onetwo:Code with intent.
The words lingered.
They talked for nearly an hour. Not arguing. Not accusing. Just exchanging information. Onetwo explained basic principles—propagation vectors, credential harvesting, network scanning modules—without giving specific instructions. High-level. Conceptual.
Lucian never mentioned the school.
He didn't need to.
After closing the chat, he sat in the dark for several minutes. Fear sat in his stomach like cold metal. But layered over it was something else.
Excitement.
A heat that rose through his chest and into his throat.
What if it worked?
He could access everything. Passwords. Emails. Internal communications. Maybe even the server logs. He imagined seeing the entire system laid bare in front of him.
He told himself it would only run for one day.
Just to see.
Then terminate.
That was all.
The next project became clear.
He returned to freewrld and downloaded the prebuilt worm referenced in the forum. It was functional but generic. Too obvious. Too noisy.
Lucian wanted something cleaner.
He began modifying it.
At school, he walked beside Adam as if nothing had changed.
They moved through hallways discussing trivial things—homework, basketball practice, which senior had started dating someone new.
"You see Mia's new haircut?" Adam asked one afternoon, nudging him.
Lucian blinked. "What?"
"Mia. From chemistry."
"Oh. Yeah. It's fine."
Adam squinted at him. "You've been spaced out lately."
"Just tired."
"From what? We barely have homework."
Lucian shrugged. "Stuff at home."
Adam laughed. "If it's a girl, just say that."
Lucian forced a small smile.
If only it were that simple.
Every night, he returned to his desk. Lines of code blurred together. He adjusted segments he barely understood, testing how the worm behaved in isolated environments.
Sometimes it crashed instantly. Sometimes it looped endlessly. Once it froze his own system and forced him to wipe everything and start again.
Weeks passed,
September slipped into October.
His grades remained stable. He answered questions in class. He laughed when appropriate. He played along in conversations about upcoming exams.
But inside, his attention was elsewhere.
Back home, he stared at the terminal as it spat out errors. He rewrote portions. Simplified parts. Removed obvious signatures. Tried different approaches to credential capture routines without fully grasping the deeper mechanics.
There were no tutorials explaining exactly what he wanted. Only books that described similar systems in abstract language. Case studies. Old incidents. Defensive analyses.
He had to reverse-engineer understanding from fragments.
One month became two.
October ended.
November began,
Adam caught him one day after school.
"You're coming to the game Friday, right?"
Lucian hesitated. "Maybe."
"Maybe?" Adam frowned. "You never miss."
"I've got something to finish."
Adam stared at him. "You're not building a bomb or something, are you?"
Lucian laughed too quickly. "Relax."
But that night, staring at his screen, he felt closer than ever.
The modified worm no longer crashed immediately. It established a test connection between two virtual machines and replicated without corrupting itself. It collected sample credentials from a controlled environment and transmitted them quietly.
Not perfect.
But stable.
He refined the propagation trigger.
Adjusted timing intervals. Reduced visible network noise.
On the last week of November, he ran the full simulation again.
This time, it didn't stall.
It moved.
It gathered.
It returned.
Lucian sat motionless as lines of output scrolled across the screen. His heartbeat thudded in his ears.
After three months of trial and error, of broken builds and late nights, it finally functioned the way he imagined.
He leaned back slowly, eyes locked on the monitor.
It was complete.
And for the first time, the fear felt smaller than the thrill.
To be continued~