Bound God

Chapter 2: The Coin God

**The Coin God**

Quit, or don't quit.

It had been a serious question at four in the afternoon, and it was still a serious question at one in the morning, with the window unit rattling and a towel around his waist.

Adrian Banks came up the stairs with his bag on one shoulder and his shirt still smelling like the bar. Adrian Banks was the name on his lease and on his contract. On the boards he was Coin. He let himself into the kind of apartment a landlord rents to a graduate student with no co-signer and no questions — one bedroom, third floor, walk-up. The hot water ran on a schedule that belonged to the building and not to him, so he took it cold, and came back to the desk with the AC turned all the way over.

The first file he opened, before his mail, before anything else, was the one he had written to himself four months ago. Three lines.

*Money. Sleep. Out.*

He looked at it a while. One of the three was technically available tonight, if he went to bed in the next twenty minutes.

He didn't. He had been late to nearly everything he had promised anybody in the last fifteen hours, which was starting to look less like a bad week and more like a personality.

He pulled the browser up.

Unsafe had been printing for eleven years, and its forum was the only part of the internet he considered load-bearing. Half the researchers in the field had accounts. So did a fair number of the people the researchers wrote papers about. The board had one rule that mattered: technical content only. Everything else came down within the hour. That made most nights boring, and boring was correct, because intrusion was boring too — hours of numbers and a chair you didn't get out of. He came for the papers, the tool releases, the threads where somebody posted a proof of concept and somebody else took it apart in four sentences.

Tonight the front page was garbage.

New thread: WHERE IS THE COIN GOD

New thread: coin god vs AK, does ANYONE actually know how that went

New thread: the coin god could beat the entire federal government and i would not blink, not once

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

It was his own fault. He had gone after a bigger name in public, on a board where everyone could watch the packets go by, and it had not even resolved — there was no result to report. But the whole forum had watched a nobody from nowhere take a swing, and now nobody could find the tool releases, because the tool releases were buried under his own name.

He refreshed. The mods had cleaned some of it. The worst of them had logged back in and posted again.

He opened his messages and typed to Sundown, who ran the board from an office two states away and edited the magazine from the same chair.

Coin: No warnings. Ban them the second they post.

Sundown: ...that's cold-blooded, you know that?

Coin: You don't clean a board by asking nicely.

Sundown: ...good. I was starting to think you'd gone soft on me.

Coin sat back. That had felt good. That had felt like the correct thing to say.

Three minutes later he went back to the front page and found a sticky post at the top of the board, highlighted in red.

**the coin god says: anybody who posts that garbage gets banned on sight. —Sundown**

Under it was a screenshot. The whole conversation. Four lines, his handle, his words, and his very good sentence about the board, sitting at the top of the largest security forum in the world in red.

Coin put his face down on the desk. The tower case met his forehead.

The replies were already past sixty.

*op is unhinged*

*do not let this man anywhere near a panel*

*the coin god has spoken, so it is written*

Sundown had pinned it for the week. Coin considered messaging him again, thought about it for a long time, and decided that anything he typed this week was going to end up on a front page, so he would type nothing. His spam problem had just gotten worse, and it had gotten worse because he had asked a friend for help.

Nobody remembered who had started calling him the Coin God. It had come from nowhere and gone everywhere and he had never been able to find the first post. He suspected a kid in a physics program in Ohio and was never going to ask, because asking would make it official.

He hated it, for reasons that did nobody any credit.

For two years now there had been people on that board, and on three others, who wrote to him the way you write to a man you'd like to look at. He wasn't one. He was twenty-five, with eleven hours of work in him on a good day, a bad haircut, and a personal grooming philosophy best summarized as *later*.

The haircut was Clipper's fault. He had shaved his own head down to the scalp on a whim, a roommate had laughed at him for a month, and the lesson he took from it was not *don't shave it* but *don't bother* — so for the better part of a year he had let it grow the way anything grew when he left it alone, which is to say everywhere. Clipper worked the fourth-floor bench at Troy and had opinions about faces. One evening the guys held Coin down across a locker-room bench, and Clipper took the whole mess off with shears and shaped what was left into the exact haircut America was selling every nineteen-year-old that summer: mid-length, side-swept, careful. Then he handed over the mirror, and in the mirror was a young man who sold phones at a mall kiosk.

The floor laughed until the racks shook. Coin laughed too, and then he looked up and caught Wade at the end of the row with his coffee, and Wade's mouth twitched once, and that was the only time in two years Coin had seen the owner of the company find anything funny.

Out in the world he kept his shoulders down and his eyes half shut and his answers as short as he could get them, and most people wrote him off inside a minute. Alone at a keyboard his face changed. Nobody on the internet had ever seen it, and they had named it anyway.

The handle wasn't deep. His last name was Banks and there was nothing in his accounts, and in his first week on the job a colleague had said both facts in the same sentence and it stuck. People assumed it meant something. Strangers had sent him three paragraphs about what it meant. He had never corrected one of them, because correcting people took a conversation, and he had a budget for those.

He also wasn't going to stand up in the middle of that board and announce that he was different from everybody in it. He knew what the work was. He had done jobs he wouldn't tell his mother about and jobs he wouldn't tell anyone about, and he wasn't the only one, and he wasn't close to the worst one. The people in that room did real damage to real systems, and that didn't make them rotten all the way through — he had watched two of them find their line and refuse to cross it, and he remembered it. It didn't make him clean either. It made him a person who had drawn a line somewhere and checked it more often than most.

His forum inbox had one unopened message in it.

Since the afternoon, according to the timestamp. No subject line. He opened it and there was an address, a port, a password, and one line of English.

*Seven o'clock, your time.*

He read it four times.

Nobody on the boards knew what his time was. Nobody knew what state he lived in, or what he did for money, or why he kept the hours he kept. Error had picked a number and picked the right one.

Seven o'clock was the one hour of his day that was already spoken for. At seven he was on the top floor of Troy Systems with half a badge and a desk, inside their network, with their monitoring on him, and a man who walked the rows whenever he felt like it. Seven was the hour he could not be anywhere else in his own name.

He did the arithmetic anyway — the bar, the kid, the lab, the rent due in eleven days — and it came out where it was always going to come out.

Then he got up and went, and he was late, and somebody was still on the other end when he arrived.

He went in through a box he already owned.

That was the whole trick and it wasn't much of one: a machine in a cage in the same country, taken six weeks back for a job that had fallen apart, untouched since, logging nothing. He could have routed through three continents. He didn't. Error already knew what country he was in, so the extra hops bought him nothing, and every hop was one more machine that might belong to somebody else by now. Laziness — and the other thing, which was that he intended to keep breathing.

He did it in the proper order. Connect. Confirm it was still his. Wait for the handshake. Open a tunnel. Write the route down in his own notes, because his memory was excellent and his memory had also, twice, been wrong.

One-stop service. Satisfaction guaranteed.

He landed on the address and pulled his hands back off the keys, and that was the part nobody trained you for — the ten seconds after you're inside, when the other guy's box goes quiet and you find out what you've actually walked into.

Then:

Error: Hello. I'm Error.

Coin looked at it.

He had come in braced. He'd been braced since the message, sitting forward, ready for anything from a challenge to a trap, and what he got was a hello and a name.

Coin: Thank you for contacting us. Your message is very important to all of us here.

He typed it with one finger, the way you fill in a form, and sent it, and waited.

Error: I came to tell you one thing.

Error: AK was picked up three hours ago.

Coin's hands came off the desk.

He pressed his fingers into his eyebrow and shut his eyes and kept them shut, and the numbers came up behind them on their own — the board's ranking, built out of the lists, out of whatever an agency somewhere had put out with a name attached to it. Error sat at seventeen. AK sat at twenty-one. Coin's name was on none of those lists; he had checked. It was a stupid scoreboard and everybody used it.

Three hours ago the name at twenty-one had stopped existing in public, and Coin had a piece of his traffic from last night sitting in a folder on a machine four feet away.

Coin: I pulled his packets last night. How do you know.

Error: I had you figured for a fed. You're not. That's something.

Error: I can't stay on this box. It's probably watched. I'll find you.

Then nothing. The session closed from the other end — properly, no crash, no alarm — and Coin sat there with the cursor blinking in an empty window.

There wasn't a character for it. He typed a period and sent it.

Then he went back in.

Not to talk. He opened the box up properly this time — enumerated the services, found the version he already knew was there, walked in through it without leaving anything behind, read only, wrote nothing. He wanted one answer and the answer was on that machine.

The scan came back.

Eleven processes on that box were listening for traffic. Eight of them he expected; hosts run some of that by default and half of it is for billing. Three he didn't. He read the names twice, once with his eyes and once out loud, and then he took his hands off the keyboard and sat back and the back of his neck went cold.

SPECTRO.

It didn't break anything. It didn't want passwords or keys, and it wasn't there to hold the machine hostage. It copied. It sat on the wire and kept a second copy of everything that crossed it, and what had crossed it was a conversation that had ended minutes earlier between a man named Error and a man named Coin.

He pulled the cable.

He backed out of the tunnel, killed the box in his notes, and lost a resource he had spent six weeks acquiring. Then he came back the long way, on three machines he had never used and would never use again — one in a state he had no business in, one in a country he had to look up, one in a hotel. He landed on his own connection, in his own chair, with his hands still up in the air, and let his heart finish.

Then he started asking questions in order, because that was how you got anywhere.

Had SPECTRO been there already?

If it had, then somebody had put a collection program on an ordinary rented box and left it running for no reason he could name. If it had gone on afterward — and it could only have gone on after somebody knew where the two of them were meeting — then whoever installed it had read Error's mail, or his mail, or the board's.

Which came down to two possibilities and he didn't like either. Either Error had walked him into a room with a camera in it, or Unsafe had a hole in it the size of a person.

Sitting there, he noticed that he wanted it to be Error.

He went to Unsafe, because he was going to go to Unsafe. The news was already moving. It started on the aggregators he read for work, the ones that scraped advisories and bulletins into a feed, and by the time he looked up it had jumped from there to the parts of the internet that didn't care about security at all.

*A well-known hacker, arrested, no details, no statement, no name from anybody official.*

The board lit up under him. Somebody had started a thread and it was at four hundred replies and climbing, and by the fourth page the arguing had started, which is what that board did best: whether he'd been burned, whether he'd been sold, whether the people sniffing at the wires had simply had a good week.

Coin read for an hour. He didn't post.

At Troy the floor had been empty for hours. The racks ticked red and green down the far wall; the air ran cold the way it did all night, because it was set for the machines and for nobody in the room; and the only lit desk on the floor was the last one.

Sebastian Wade sat at it with his fingers laced together on the desk, reading.

Not the window he was paid to read. The other one. There was no logo at the top of it and no header and nothing on the page that explained what the page was for; it carried a single word, and the word was *illuminati*. He had never described it to anyone and did not intend to, and nobody had ever asked him. He read the page, and then he read it again.

The phone buzzed against the desktop, face down. He turned it over. No number and no name. *Private*, the screen said, which was what that screen said for every call that came in on that line. He picked it up.

The voice did not identify itself, and there was no need for it to. It described the shape of a thing that had happened within the last day — without emphasis, without any apparent interest in how it had happened — and it wanted to know what he intended to do about it. It never raised its voice. Wade listened to all of it and paid attention to two things it did not say aloud: who was in a position to be giving him this instruction at all, and how many hours had gone by before anyone on the other end had been allowed near a telephone. Somebody was in a hurry. Of everything the call had contained, that was the part that carried weight.

"I'll find out," he said.

Nobody thanked anybody. The line went dead.

He set the phone back down on its face and looked at the page that did not explain itself.