1

Friday afternoon. The house smells like Emma’s coffee and Jake’s art project glue. I sit at the kitchen table, watching Sophie practice piano through the living room doorway.

Emma finds me staring at nothing.

“How was the trip?” she asks.

“Fine. Finance project.”

The twins burst through the front door, backpacks flying. Sophie needs help with fractions.

“Dad!” Sophie runs over. “Did you bring us anything?”

I reach into my laptop bag, pull out Chicago Architecture Foundation bookmarks. Purchased at O’Hare.

“Cool!” Jake examines his. “The Willis Tower is 1,729 feet tall.”

-----

After dinner, I sit in my study with the game prototype. The pieces haven’t moved since I left for Chicago.

My phone buzzes. Text message.

“How was the homecoming?”

Unknown number.

I don’t respond.

Another text: “Family dinners taste different when seasoned with guilt.”

I stare at the screen.

He knows I’m home. Knows I’m sitting here. Knows exactly how I feel.

I turn off the phone.

Outside, Riverside settles into evening. Porch lights, television glow, families finishing their days.

2

Saturday morning. I stand at the kitchen window, watching the empty intersection. Coffee grows cold in my hands.

Emma takes the twins to soccer practice. House quiet except for the dishwasher cycling.

I sit at the kitchen table, pull out a pen, draw a single line across a napkin.

Every choice leads deeper in.

Refuse assignments - Rachel disappears. Family becomes targets.

Complete assignments - more complicit. More valuable. More dangerous to eliminate.

Investigate the handler - surveillance catches everything.

Run - where? With what resources they don’t control?

Confess - to whom? I’m a guilty party.

I draw another line. Parallel to the first.

Every solution creates new problems.

Find Rachel - endanger her.

Protect family - abandon Rachel.

Gather intelligence - reveal my intentions.

Stay compliant - become irreplaceable.

Become irreplaceable - become expendable.

The lines intersect nowhere.

I fold the napkin, throw it away.

-----

Sunday afternoon. Jake sets up the chess board while Emma reads medical journals.

“Your move, Dad.”

I stare at the pieces. Standard opening, established patterns, clear rules. But what if the board itself was wrong? What if you were playing chess while someone else was playing a different game entirely?

“Dad?”

I move a pawn.

“Mrs. Martinez says the key to chess is seeing moves your opponent can’t see,” Jake says. “But what if they can see moves you can’t see?”

“Then you’re not playing the same game.”

Jake looks puzzled. “How can you play different games on the same board?”

I study his face. Eleven years old, worried about homework and chess club rankings. Problems with solutions.

“You can’t,” I say. “That’s the problem.”

-----

That night, I sit in my study with the game prototype.

I arrange the pieces in their starting positions. Players with different objectives, different rules, different win conditions.

I move the blue tokens according to standard game logic. Predictable, rational, following established patterns.

Then I move the red pieces according to different rules. Rules I don’t fully understand. Rules that seem to change based on blue’s responses.

Every scenario ends the same way. Blue thinks it’s playing strategy. Red knows it’s playing psychology.

Blue follows the rules. Red writes the rules.

Blue tries to win. Red has already won.

I sweep the pieces off the board.

Outside, Riverside sleeps. Porch lights dim, houses dark, families dreaming of tomorrow’s routines.

While I sit here understanding that some games can’t be won.

Only survived.

3

Monday morning. Emma leaves for the hospital, twins to school. I’m finishing coffee when the encrypted phone buzzes.

“New assignment. Check email.”

Same corporate letterhead. Travel documents to Washington. Meeting with Meridian Analytics, Thursday 3 PM. “Consultation on employee stress assessment.”

A business card falls out of the envelope.

Dr. Jennifer Kim, PhD. Behavioral Psychology. Department of Government Efficiency.

-----

I read the assignment details. “Assessment of junior analyst, recent graduate, high security clearance.”

Attached: news article. Supreme Court ruling. DOGE access to Social Security records.

I set the papers down.

My coffee tastes like metal.

-----

That evening, I sit in the study, staring at Dr. Kim’s business card.

Twenty-four years old. Stanford PhD. Access to millions of Americans’ personal data. Social Security numbers, medical records, financial information, family court documents, children’s school records.

I search for more details. Her dissertation: “Algorithmic Solutions to Government Inefficiency.” Recent conference presentation: “Technology as Democratic Reform.”

A true believer.

I pull out a calculator. Social Security numbers sell for fifty dollars each on the black market. Medical records, more. Complete personal profiles…

The numbers grow quickly into the billions.

But how could someone extract that data from government systems?

Through someone young. Someone with access. Someone who believes she’s revolutionizing democracy through technology.

Someone who thinks cutting costs through data analysis serves the greater good.

My hands are sweating.

Outside, Riverside settles into evening. Families finishing dinner, kids doing homework.

While I hold instructions to target someone who has no idea what her access is really worth.

Or what it could cost her to lose it.

4

Tuesday morning. I sit in the library, laptop open, researching Dr. Jennifer Kim.

Stanford PhD, behavioral psychology. Dissertation on algorithmic solutions to government inefficiency. Recent conference: “Technology as Democratic Reform.” No social media presence.

Parents are both professors. Berkeley faculty. Comfortable background. No gambling debts, no expensive habits, no medical emergencies.

Clean credit report. Student loans, manageable. Modest apartment in Arlington. Four-year-old Honda.

Published papers on streamlining government through analytics. Op-eds about using technology to eliminate waste. A believer in disruption through efficiency.

The kind of naive idealism that makes people cross lines for pure motives.

I close the laptop.

-----

Wednesday evening. Emma finds me in the study, staring at blank notebook pages.

“Research going well?” she asks.

“Fine.”

She studies my face. “You look tired.”

“Long day.”

She nods, doesn’t push.

-----

Thursday morning. Flight to Washington. I sit in 14B, reviewing my notes.

Dr. Jennifer Kim appears to be exactly what she seems. Young idealist who thinks technology can save democracy. No financial pressure, no personal scandals.

But intellectual arrogance. Conviction that efficiency serves the greater good. Faith that data analysis transcends political corruption.

Someone who might share sensitive information if convinced it exposed government waste. If persuaded it served transparency. If told it protected vulnerable populations from bureaucratic negligence.

The plane descends toward Reagan National. Through the window, Washington spreads below.

Where Dr. Jennifer Kim sits at her desk, analyzing data to revolutionize government, unaware that someone wants to turn her idealism into the largest privacy breach in American history.

And hoping, for the first time in months, that pure motives might be harder to corrupt than simple greed.

I don’t want to win.

5

Thursday, 11:47 PM. I’m in the hotel room, reviewing my notes on Dr. Kim, when my personal phone buzzes.

Text message. Unknown number.

A photograph.

Sophie’s piano recital. Last month. I recognize the school auditorium, the stage lighting, her blue dress. She’s mid-performance, fingers on the keys, completely focused.

But the angle is wrong. Not from the audience. From backstage. Behind the curtain.

Someone was there. Someone was watching.

Another photo arrives. Jake’s chess club meeting. This week. The classroom at Riverside Elementary. Kids hunched over boards, Mrs. Martinez explaining endgame strategies.

The photo is taken from outside the window. At night. After hours.

When the building should have been locked.

A third photo. Emma leaving the hospital. Yesterday morning. Walking to her car in the parking garage. Alone. Vulnerable.

The timestamp shows 6:23 AM. Before her first surgery. Her routine I thought only our family knew.

My hands shake.

The phone buzzes again. Text message.

“Sweet dreams.”

I stare at the photos. My children. My wife. Going about their lives while someone watches from the shadows. Someone close enough to touch them.

I turn off the phone.

Outside the hotel window, Washington sleeps. But I understand now that sleep is a luxury I can’t afford.

That while I’ve been analyzing and planning and thinking I could find a way out, someone has been reminding me there is no way out.

Only deeper in

6

I stared at the three monitors displaying the chaos in real-time. Left screen: Trump’s Truth Social feed, a steady stream of invective against his former ally. Center: X, where Musk’s posts grew increasingly erratic by the hour. Right: internal DOGE communications, complete meltdown as staffers chose sides or quietly updated their résumés.

The coffee had gone cold hours ago. Outside my Arlington hotel, the city hummed with its usual rhythms, oblivious to the collapse happening in digital space. But I saw it clearly—the system eating itself alive, creating exactly the opening I’d been waiting for.

And hating myself for it.

This is what you trained for, I reminded myself. The chaos. The distraction. The moment when security becomes suggestions and everyone’s too busy fighting to watch the actual assets.

The Social Security Administration’s master database. Two hundred million active records. Names, numbers, addresses, benefit amounts, medical flags. The kind of dataset that could disappear in the noise of Trump and Musk’s public immolation, blamed on either side’s retaliation or lost entirely in the shuffle of accusations.

My contact at DOGE—Sarah, the true believer turned disillusioned insider—had made it clear in our encrypted exchange. The office was hemorrhaging staff. Half supported Trump, half backed Musk, and the remainder just wanted out before the inevitable congressional investigations began. Access controls were relaxed as people grabbed what they could and fled.

No coercion required. Chaos is always an opportunity.

“Security’s a joke right now,” Sarah had typed. “Everyone’s either gone or going. Perfect storm.”

Perfect storm. I almost laughed at the phrase. Sarah thought she was describing an opportunity for whistleblowing, a chance to expose how DOGE had really operated behind the efficiency theater. She had no idea she was describing something else entirely.

The plan was elegant in its simplicity. During a “security audit”—ostensibly checking what data might have been compromised during the DOGE meltdown—I could copy the entire SSA database. The audit would be buried in the noise of Trump-Musk recriminations. Any data breach would be assumed to be part of their mutual warfare.

I pulled up the technical specifications. The database architecture was surprisingly robust—clearly built by people who understood the value of what they were protecting. But robust systems still depended on human operators, and right now those operators were either choosing sides in a billionaire slap fight or polishing their exit strategies.

I could be in and out in six hours. The extraction would look like a routine backup. The investigation would focus on the wrong questions—who was loyal to whom, which side was sabotaging the other—while the real breach went unnoticed.

My fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to confirm the operation.

But I found myself thinking about my daughter’s school picture, the one tucked into the corner of my monitor frame. Eight years old, gap-toothed smile, completely trusting that the adults in her world would keep her safe. Her Social Security number was in that database somewhere. Along with every other child’s. Every retiree’s. Every person who’d ever trusted the system to protect their most basic information.

Two hundred million people who had no idea that their entire digital identity could disappear into the black market while the country argued about Twitter posts and rocket ships.

But the grip is iron-clad. The thought surfaced unbidden. Failure isn’t an option. Not for someone like you. Not with what they know.

I closed my eyes, feeling the familiar weight of inevitability. I’d been here before—caught between what I wanted to do and what I had to do, between my conscience and my survival. The choice had been made long before Trump and Musk decided to destroy each other. This was just the method, not the decision.

I opened my laptop and began typing the operation plan. Clean extraction. Minimal footprint. Perfect cover story. Professional competence applied to professional betrayal.

The chaos on my screens continued—billionaires destroying each other while the actual work happened in silence.