The city buzzed like a dying circuit board.
Ren Takami sat in a cramped room on the fifth floor of a decaying apartment block. The hum of neon lights bled through his window, casting soft blue lines across his cluttered desk. Ramen cups. Soldering tools. A half-dead houseplant. All witnesses to a life running on low power mode.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard. Not for a school essay. Not for a job app. He was writing a Python script to bypass a paywall on an online course — another skill to download into his brain. Another crack in the cage.
# escape.pywhile life == "loop":learn(quietly)build(silently)disconnect()
The code ran. The course unlocked. Simple. Silent. Satisfying.
He leaned back, headphones slipping down around his neck. A lo-fi beat crawled through the room like a memory trying to breathe. The city outside didn’t care. Everyone was sleeping, grinding, or pretending. Ren was awake.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
Not woke. Awake.
He stared at the ceiling. The paint was cracked, like old thoughts. His parents wanted him to get a degree. His boss wanted him to smile more at work. The world wanted him to fall in line. But Ren had logged out a long time ago.
Not that anyone knew. Offline, he was quiet. Polite. Maybe forgettable. But online?
Online he was CipherZero.
He'd been learning for almost a year now. Coding, encryption, digital forensics. Not to become a criminal. Not to scam or hack for cash. He wanted something harder to reach:
Freedom.
Not influencer freedom. Not "work from your laptop on a beach" freedom. Real freedom. The kind where you don’t owe your time, your data, or your soul to anyone.
Tonight, he wasn’t just breaking a paywall.
He was breaking the lie that he couldn’t build something of his own.
And someone, somewhere, was watching.
In a far-off data center, a flag blinked red.
UNKNOWN USER ACTIVITY DETECTEDACCESS POINT: UNREGISTEREDHANDLE: CIPHERZERO
The Watchtower had noticed.
// Note from CipherZero:
This story is just beginning. If you’re watching from the shadows, drop a thought. Updates incoming.