Chapter 6 “The Hand over the Ledge”
Chapter 6
“The Hand over the Ledge”
September 6, 2026.
Matt squinted at the flickering LED display. Pale pulses reflected in his lenses as the room stayed dark around him. He loosened the tripod head, nudged the camera a fraction of a degree, tightened it again. The symbols slid down the LED strip, one after another. This time, the red recording light was on.
He stepped back. Let his breath out slowly.
That camera was the second best decision he’d made in months. The first? Deciding not to trust a single piece of his old life with what he was building.
~ Ѡ ~
Three days earlier, the fluorescent lights in a grimy electronics shop buzzed overhead. Plastic wrap crinkled up above as a gust of air wormed itself down the dimly lit alley. The air brought with it a spice of sewer air, adding to that of heated solder and wire. Matt stacked a motherboard, liquid cooling unit, and a matte-black tower case on the counter.
The clerk, a bald, tired teen of a man sporting a hoodie that said “Rootkit and Chill”, rang it all up without so much as a blink.
“Mining rig?” he asked, barely looking up.
“Something like that,” Matt mumbled in response before tapping his card, then left before the receipt printed.
~ Ѡ ~
Back home, a single bulb lit the table. Matt bolted parts together. Fed cables through narrow gaps then closed the workstation up.
Just as he was about to turn to the rest, he paused. Reopened panels he’d just closed. Pulled out the Ethernet card on the old rig, then closed the panel back again.
“Isolate it. Cage it. No ins, no outs.” Matt lisped to himself with each movement of hand and limb.He unplugged the router. Pulled the Ethernet cable free. Set his phone face-down on the far side of the room.
Chewing on sore gums, he sat back on his heels and looked over the set-up with another frown. Recalling the mass of texts and symbols cascading down the LED display on the coffee maker, something clicked in his mind.
Form and function!
He’d needed software. The good stuff. Serious stuff. Stuff that told the alien entity across the void that he was serious about talking.
And security!
Getting back up, he released another groan. Not from the scream of protest his knees sent, but from knowing his cash reserves were so over the red it may as well have been purple.
~ Ѡ ~
He found Dax’s thread by accident. Full Offline Encryption and Info Hygiene for Solo Ops.
The profile picture was a CRT monitor with a knife duct-taped to it.
“What’s the project?”
“Classified,”Matt typed back. “Need airtight ops. No traceables. Languages, OCRs, symbol recognition, maybe some legacy AI training suites.”
“Government surveillance or academic paranoia?”
“Neither. Something in-between.”
There was a pause. Then,“Friday. 10am. Birch & Alley. Leave your phone. Nothing electronic.”
~ Ѡ ~
Two days later, Matt was leaning against a rack of antique ham radios in Dax’s basement-slash-bunker. The place smelled of canned beans and ozone. Stacks of Faraday bags, vacuum-sealed laptops, and coils of copper wire lined the walls. A short man in tactical cargo pants and mirrored glasses sat across from him, sliding an old ThinkPad across the table with the demeanor of an English man betraying his country to North Koreans.
“Wiped. Rebuilt the kernel. OS is air-gapped. Comes with a sandboxed AI suite I modded for high-complexity symbol patterning. Doesn’t phone home to anyone but you.”
Matt raised an eyebrow.
Dax shrugged. “I like people who don’t ask dumb questions. `sides, you ain’t building a drone swarm. And its not like you’re planning to hack the Fed.” He paused for a bit, side-eyeing Matt across his table. Then added, “Those are more expensive.”
Matt ignored the invitation and smiled instead. “It’s not that I’m being paranoid. Just that whole bit about not dialing anywhere else…”
The man’s massive heave resembled Atlas shifting weighs from one shoulder to the other. “Anything you don’t build yourself will have ears on them. What you do next is build a cage where you set your station up.”
“Cage?”Matt asked before he could stop himself. Somehow though, Dax caught the light in Matt’s eyes and nodded back.
“Yeah. Faraday’ll keep most of the ears and eyes out. You need to transfer anything outside, you do it all manually. Letter by letter. Got it?”
~ Ѡ ~
September 26, 2026.
In the weeks that followed, Matt became a ghost among online forums and real-world hardware stores. He was short with users, but that was quickly forgiven when they realized he always paid in cash.
What he was looking for was the hardcore stuff. Stuff that demonstrated intelligence on his end. That mean algorithms. Tools that didn’t just interpret data, but anticipated the shape of thought behind it.
Matt knew he would have to get some customizable translation software. Shopping around for those led to image-to-text-to-image conversion kits he couldn’t find, or used open-source where he could.
With a wince as he hounded a sub-Reddit that advised he acquire tactile recognition devices, he went back out for second-hand Braille pads and pressure-sensors. That wince turned into a groan as he realized those two were kinda useless to his needs.
After boxing the to up, he got smarter.
The OCT engines, frequency analyzers, cipher wheels, cryptographic apps induced labor pains as his wallet bled out more. Those doubled as he went for a ridiculous pair of augmented reality glasses with open-source overlay mods.
At a thrift store, he stacked books on glyphs, dead languages, symbolic logic. The weight felt familiar in his hands.
~ Ѡ ~
October 4th, 2026.
Matt lingered over the dark screen of his phone, then swallowed and unlocked it. His thumb moved slowly through the contact list until it stopped on Dax.
The two had settled into a rhythm: encrypted messages, rare in-person meetups, and tool drops. Even so, the thread was spare; short messages and no pleasantries. Nothing that lingered longer than it needed to.
That made Matt ‘trust’ the man more. Not for what might have been feigned discretion. But that he didn’t ask questions Matt preferred were never engaged.
Pausing for a while before connecting the call, Matt considered their past exchanges. Last night’s request scrolled past Matt’s memory: thermal-resistant USBs, microservers, kill-switches. The heavy-set man simply provided with no follow-ups or questions questions.
That night, Matt flipped to the back of a wrinkled notebook and wrote a single line, “Dax = future ally. If this works.”
~ Ѡ ~
Each week brought a new need, a new puzzle, a new box by the roller shutter doors. Some went ignored as strategies changed. Most were torn open within minutes.
$ 213, 564.
Grim faced with his laptop’s night light making him look jaundiced and older, Matt stared at a spreadsheet late into the night. Before him were columns of red numbers so long he had to punch the [↓] a couple of times.
Feeling the weight of the world bearing down on his shoulders even more, Matt turned to his phone. Then instantly regretted it. There, missed calls stacked up beneath familiar names. He turned the phone face-down and turned back to his computer. For a moment, his hands paused over the keyboard as inspiration failed. Then it turned into a hover before he pulled them back. Heaving a heavy breath, he moved to shut the file without saving.
Somehow, the action leached some of the tension from his face. Matt laughed once, the sound rough and brief even as some color came back to his face despite the night lights.
“Shame,” he said out loud into the void, testing the word as he grabbed his phone and got up.
He repeated it, pacing between coils of cable and empty cans.The word followed him around the room, a rhythm he didn’t bother to break. Matt stopped, scrolled names on his ‘Family’ list, and nodded once to himself.
~ Ѡ ~
Matt tapped the encrypted chat open again.
“Got time to talk signal shielding and EM interference?” The typing indicator appeared, vanished, then returned. A reply came after a beat.
“For what, a mining rig? Finally gave in to crypto?”
Matt watched the cursor blink. His thumb hovered, retreated, hovered again. He could read the doubt in the other’s reply. And, while the cursor blinked for several seconds, struggled over whether to send a lie back.
Then decided not to.
“Yeah. Something like that.”
~ Ѡ ~
Later that week, Matt stood alone in a warehouse that answered his footsteps with echoes. Like the old warehouse, this one was also a drafty, concrete box on the outskirts of the city, cold enough to see his breath in the morning, quiet enough to hear his thoughts turning over like engine pistons.
The space felt unfinished in a deliberate way.A mattress lay rolled in a corner. A kettle. A dead fridge. Coiled wires crossed the floor in uneven lines. Everything he owned fit inside the room without effort.
A Ping on his phone made Matt turn towards the main entrance to the warehouse. Then he keyed in the passcode to unlock it.
When the steel door rattled open, Dax Volter entered without a word, surveying the room as if casing a shelter before fallout. The short, stout man wore his usual attire: boots built for terrain, jeans with stitched pockets, and a jacket armored with Velcro patches and cynicism.
Matt watched as the man circled the suspended platform and nodded as his gaze followed the frame upward.
“Bitcoin miner?” Dax said finally, eyebrows frowning before rising behind his lightly tinted goggles.
“Supposed to be the cover,” Matt muttered, not quite meeting his eyes.
Dax nodded once more.
~ Ѡ ~
They got to work.
Chalk lines crept across the concrete. Arrows overlapped. Notes were crossed out and redrawn. Conversations could best be described as ‘brief’.
“No aluminum,” Dax said, dragging a line through the sketch. “Copper braid. Tight weave.”
Sparks lit the dark as Matt welded bar to bar, the frame growing denser with each pass. Steel crossed steel until the structure looked almost solid.
“Not bad,” Dax said, watching Matt fit copper sheets into place.
“Read a lot,” Matt said, wiping soot from his cheek.
Dax grunted.
Then, casting a speculative gaze towards Matt, finally invited, “Feels heavy for Bitcoin.”
Matt didn’t answer. The torch flared again. Dax watched the cage take shape, interest sharpening behind the lenses.
~ Ѡ ~
That night, they ate cold soup straight from the cans and drank tea that had long since gone tepid. Dax sat on a crate, chewing on the plastic fork-knife as he flipped through a printout of signal attenuation charts Matt had compiled.
“You ever wonder if it’s worth it?” Dax asked, eyes still on the page. “Spending all this effort keeping out ghosts?”
Matt watched the surface of his tea tremble as Dax turned a page. “I’m not worried about the ghosts.”
“Government?” Dax grunted.
Matt’s mouth twitched. “Worse. Ignorance.”
Dax looked up, surprised despite himself.
Matt could read the confusion on the stocky man’s face. And the answer the other man came up with.
Dax’s gaze drifted back to the cage, tracing the lattice of steel and copper. He imagined the work it would take to replicate it elsewhere. The thought lingered longer than he expected, making him exhale hard through his nose.
“Good thing you changed course,” he said. “Those early blueprints were atrocious.”
Matt looked up sharply at that. Those blueprints had been tightly locked away and recessed in his old laptop! His ‘secure’ laptop!
Dax caught the look and nodded. “That one’s for free. Trust, but verify.”
Matt narrowed his eyes, then looked back down at his coffee while glowering.
~ Ѡ ~
By the time Dax packed up, signal traps lined the walls. Reflective mesh hung from the ceiling. The suspended cube Matt called his “office” felt sealed off from the rest of the world.
Dax paused at the door and offered a rare handshake before stepping into the cold.
“I didn’t mean to pry,” Dax said. “People get curious. Just remember, allies aren’t friends. They’re just people sharing foxholes while waiting it out.”
He held Matt’s gaze. “Sharing foxholes keeps you sane. Believe me.”
The heavy-set man retained his grip on Matt’s hand while his voice tightened.
“But never command posts. Keep those private and to yourself. Understand?”
Matt nodded.
The steel door slammed shut. Matt turned back toward the coffee machine. It sat where it had for days, mute and matte, its surface giving nothing back.
Matt let out a long breath. Relief mixed with something sharper. Once more alone, he closed his eyes as the room’s silence slid over him like a shroud.
