News anchors rarely agreed on anything, especially not in the era of polarized headlines and manufactured outrage—but when it came to Henry Vale, they spoke with one voice.

  

  “The Digital Age’s Last Line of Defense.”

  “The Firewall we Didn’t Know we Needed.”

  “Director Vale Cracks Another Code, Jails Four More Scammers.”

  “Cybercrime’s Worst Nightmare is Wearing a Badge.”

  Henry Vale wasn't just the head of the state's cybercrime unit. He was a living legend, a hero of the virtual world, the nightmare of scummy scammers and corrupt cyber criminals. His photo, stern but composed, regularly graced cybersecurity conferences, law enforcement roundtables, and the occasional coffee mug in Albert’s room.

  Albert's school had even framed a large portrait of his father's face in the auditorium, to forever serve as a role model and source of motivation for the youth, as well as a deterrent; don't even think about going down the dark route in the virtual world, Henry Vale would sniff you out before you could say 'encrypted cheese cracker'.

  Albert Vale, ever the hyperactive teenager, was just about to finish his last year of high school. No more seeing his father's face (twice) every morning. Unless the university he applied to had the same idea as his school principal had. Not that he minded, though. Albert was used to seeing the portrait framed high up on the auditorium hall, and all the attention that came with it.

  For an extroverted teenager, Albert's career choice sure as heck was a perfect juxtaposition of his character; watching his father work since a young age, he was well aware of the long, sleepless nights and lonely hours as his father kept tracking down scammers like a lone cyber wolf. Maybe some peace and quiet were what he needed right now. It would bring a fresh change to his life. Perhaps he'd make the college library his new home.

  Another thing Albert was well used to by now was the dashing tales of his father's cyber heroics. He knew the stories by heart. He'd grown up on them—every victory every takedown, every online sting operation narrated like bedtime tales by news anchors and his father alike. He'd watched dozens of hacker takedowns take place in his own house.

  His earliest memory wasn’t a birthday party or a scraped knee. It was sitting cross-legged on the living room carpet, watching as his dad, fresh from a raid, decrypted a hidden message on a corrupted SSD like a magician revealing the final trick of the night.

  He was everything Albert had ever aspired to be, the perfect role model, as perfect as a father could get, Albert thought. Cool-headed, calm, always with a composed demeanor regardless of the situation he was in, and brilliant beyond belief. There was a quiet charisma about Henry—an aura of someone who had stared into the void that was the digital abyss and forced it to blink first.

  Today, just like any other morning, Albert tuned in to the daily news while munching on waffles and milk. He admired his father the way other teens his age revered pop stars, actors, and famous streamers. A short segment on the morning news showed Henry exiting a federal building surrounded by reporters. A voiceover summarized his latest triumph—an international sting operation that unmasked an online child exploitation ring operating out of six different countries.

  Albert put down his glass—which was empty of milk now—and with a milk mustache he absentmindedly chewed on his last piece of waffle.

  "Albert, wipe your face, you don't want to go to school looking like the neighbor's cat after sneaking into the pantry and drinking all the milk. How many times do I have to tell you this?"

  "Sorry mom, will do. I'm just watching today's news segment."

  "What's the old man done this time? Stopped an international hacker organization that siphoned funds to North Korea?"

  "Something similar. He's talking to a bunch of reporters as we speak, and the text across the screen says he just stopped a notorious online child smuggling ring operating out of seven different countries," Albert excitedly told his mom.

  "Ah, just another normal day for dear Henry. Nothing could surprise me anymore. If they told us he'd just stopped an alien invasion, I'd believe it without question."

  "I know right!" Albert exclaimed.

  "Anyways, off you go, you don't want to be late for your last high school exam," his mom gently chided.

  As he was walking to school on his daily route for what would be his final time, Jamie, his best friend, suddenly jumped out in front of him, and after a brief greeting, the two resumed their way to school.

  "Saw the news just now, your dad's a beast, man!"

  “He’s not a beast,” Albert said without looking up. “He’s a firewall.”

  Jamie snorted. “Here's to another Albert classic. You're not a corny joker, you're the whole corn field!”

  Albert let the remark slide. He was quite proud of his jokes. They were a Vale original. According to him, anyways. The rest of his classmates just cringed every time they'd hear them.

  As expected, Albert passed his last exam with flying colors. It was a computer science exam. For Albert, that was like breathing. It came to him naturally. By the time he was 13, he could already decrypt encoded messages, even if rudely awoken from sleep at 2 AM. The exam was just a stepping stone for him; he had his sights set on w summer hackathon where the brightest minds in the cyber security world convened. His team was the only one comprised of a high school graduate.

  The Red Viper Hackathon is an elite international cybersecurity competition hosted each summer by the Quantum Shield Alliance—a shadowy tech consortium with ties to both national security and private defense contractors. Despite being “just” 18, Albert makes it in after his online code name Luke Skywalker is recognized by one of the sponsors—someone who’s been tracking the cyber-gaming underground.

  Each team is given a “Cyber Fort” challenge—break into a secure digital vault while defending your own system from intrusion. Most competitors are college seniors or young professionals. Albert is the only high schooler, and his team of three includes:

  - Minerva Cho, a hardware prodigy and reverse engineering expert.

  - Ryan Patel, a crypto algorithm savant who’s never lost a Capture-the-Flag game online.

  Albert handles intrusion and anomaly detection—defense as offense.

  The team had whizzed through the preliminaries and now, after beating most of the teams and sending them home, they were now about to enter the finals. The announcer shouted through a megaphone that Specter Maze: Break the Ghost, Dodge the Bait was about to start, and this task was unlike any other the team had faced.

  It’s not just a fortress—it’s a living digital environment, a gamified simulation hosted on a decentralized neural net. The vault has a self-mutating AI that generates fake vulnerabilities (“ghost ports”) to lure intruders into traps. Anyone who triggers a trap loses access for 10 minutes, a brutal penalty in a 2-hour challenge.

  Teams scramble. Many fall for honeypots that look like open ports or outdated Apache servers.

  Albert sits silently for the first twenty minutes, observing patterns. Where others see randomness, he sees intent—a recurring anomaly in the way certain logs behave under time compression.

  He mutters to his teammates:

  “This AI was trained on human behavior—but not mine. Watch this.”

  He launches a fake attack on a ghost port—but stops midway. The AI registers it as a trap-spring. It closes nearby vulnerabilities. That’s when Albert uses a delayed injection to bounce a fragment of code through the trapdoor system itself—a zero-click Trojan inside the ghost logic engine.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  In essence, he makes the AI start doubting its own patterns. He floods it with contradicting simulations—so many that it slows, then stalls. In a minute, it crashes one of its own security daemons. The first team to find the real vault wins bonus points.

  Albert’s screen lights up.

  

  “Vault location isolated,” he says coolly. “Initiating breach.”

  Ryan let out a low whistle. “Dude. You just made the AI flinch.”

  Minerva's fingers flew across her keyboard as she parsed Albert’s injected payload and adjusted the decoding parameters. “I’m piggybacking off your daemon crash to reroute its audit trail. Just keep it confused for another sixty seconds.”

  Across the darkened arena, the other teams were visibly scrambling. You could see the tension in their hunched shoulders, hear the rapid staccato of furious keystrokes. The simulated environment had become erratic. Trap alerts were firing without provocation. Security logs were contradicting themselves. One team—Team Aegis from MIT—had already been flagged twice for false positives and locked out. Another team from Singapore was stuck in a decoy loop, chasing a fake vault that regenerated every ten seconds.

  Only Team Jedi Order stayed calm.

  Albert leaned in, eyes narrow behind his wireframe glasses. “Minerva, redirect the packet flow into the tertiary channel—they’ve started rerouting through a ghost socket. Ryan, scramble a dummy key with a reversed hash function and feed it into the bait layer. Make it look like we’re still falling for it.”

  “On it,” Ryan replied, grinning.

  Thirty seconds to breach.

  Just then, something strange flickered across Minerva’s screen.

  “Uh… guys?”

  Albert snapped his head over. A foreign process had appeared on her machine—unrelated to the AI. A real-world intrusion.

  “Someone’s trying to hit us,” she said. “This isn’t part of the simulation.”

  Albert’s face turned ice cold. He keyed into his terminal, pulling up a diagnostic scan.

  “…HydraSeed.” His voice was flat. “An old exploit—barely even used anymore. Most pros abandoned it years ago.”

  “Then who—?”

  “Someone desperate. And sloppy.”

  The hack wasn’t coming from the game environment—it was routed through a parallel relay, using the arena’s local mesh network. It wasn’t an AI attack. It was a player.

  One of the rival teams was actively sabotaging them.

  Albert didn’t hesitate. He spun a new console window open, typed a blistering string of commands, and isolated the attacking IP. His fingers blurred like he was playing a piano solo at 200 BPM.

  “What are you doing?” Ryan asked.

  “Giving them exactly what they want,” Albert muttered.

  He set up a containment bubble—an artificial sub-environment that mimicked a breached system. Then, using a custom-built tool he’d named Ghostlight, he injected a line of self-mirroring code into the trap.

  On the attacker’s end, it would look like they’d succeeded in planting a backdoor—except it wasn’t real. It was a fake environment that looped them endlessly through harmless operations while feeding Albert live telemetry of their keystrokes.

  “They’ll think they got in,” Albert said, voice razor-sharp. “But they’re just playing with themselves.”

  Minerva blinked. “…I hate how good that is.”

  Ten seconds to breach.

  The AI’s core logic began collapsing under its own contradictory routines. It had begun “gaslighting” itself, marking its own code as unreliable. The ghost ports blinked out like dying fireflies. The real vault—hidden deep beneath layers of probabilistic encryption—finally surfaced.

  A final passkey prompt appeared on Albert’s terminal.

  He typed one phrase:

  “I am the ghost in your shell.”

  A soft chime rang out. Their monitor flashed gold.

  Albert grinned like the Cheshire Cat, a look of disbelief on his face. The organizers played them all like fools this whole time. The secret code was not just a pun, but an anime reference to boot. The old coots certainly knew what the new generations liked.

  TEAM JEDI ORDER: VAULT BREACHED — TIME: 1:57:03

  They had beaten the clock with just under three minutes remaining.

  The arena fell silent.

  Then, slowly, applause erupted—first scattered, then rising. Some competitors were stunned into silence. A few were visibly furious. One, near the back, looked sick.

  The judge at the far end stood up and spoke into the mic.

  “Ladies and gentlemen… we have our champions.”

  Later, while the others were celebrating, Albert received a flash drive in a plain envelope.

  No return address. No markings.

  Only a post-it on the side:

  

  For when the ghosts come looking:

  There's nothing sadder than a puppet without a ghost, especially the kind with red blood running through them.

  ``You talk about redefining my identity. I want a guarantee that I can still be myself.'' (Puppet Master) ``There isn't one. Why would you wish to? All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.''

  Albert pocketed it, not saying a word.

  But somewhere deep in the Quantum Shield’s observation room, two men watched the replay footage.

  “That injection,” one said. “That wasn’t just a trick. It was a message.”

  “Yeah,” the other muttered. “And I think we finally found the Vale kid.”

  Oblivious to their keen stares on him and his teammates, Albert left the venue and headed home. A long shower and a warm meal was what he needed right now.

  The Vale household was a curious mix of high-tech paranoia and old-school warmth. Firewalls stronger than Fort Knox, motion detectors, camera recorders, thermal cameras, retina scanners, two-factor everything—even the fridge required biometric access, the whole nine yards. In stark contrast to this digital fortress—quite literally—the smell of fresh coffee, the warm light of the kitchen, and the pictures on the hallway wall made it feel like home.

  Henry was already seated at the living room table when Albert came downstairs, typing away on a laptop that looked a little too advanced to be legal for civilians. Henry had even tailored a custom-made operating system that was a blend of Unix and GnomeOS, with security that very few systems could compete with. According to Henry, the only operating system that could give him a run for his money when it came to security was Kali Linux.

  And this was the same operating system he had installed onto his laptop. The only one of its kind. Well, it used to be. Now, every computer of the higher ups at the FBI runs this system. Henry finally caved in to their request to kit their computers with his top-secret OS. It was the money that finally sealed the deal. I mean, who could resist a whopping $40,000,000 just for rewriting hard drives to contain his custom made OS?

  Albert was staring intently at his father's screen, eyes glued to it like it was some sort of movie action scene.

  “You slept through the interview,” Henry said without looking up.

  “I caught the rerun,” Albert replied. “Nice suit.”

  Henry paused, then chuckled. “Thanks. It was tailored by the FBI’s image department.”

  They shared a quiet smile—one of those father-son exchanges that needed no explanation.

  “So,” Albert said, pouring himself some juice, “how close are you to cracking the NullSpectre case?”

  Henry raised an eyebrow. “You been snooping through classified databases again?”

  Albert shrugged, his grin growing. “Just your laptop's logs. You should lock your tabs before you go to bed, Dad. OpSec 101.”

  “You little cyber weasel.”

  “I learned from the best.”

  NullSpectre. The name haunted forums and floated through cyber limbo, cluttering up encrypted group chats like a ghost in the machine. A faceless entity, or maybe even a group—no one could say for sure. The only leads—if they could be called that—the people in the industry had were mere rumors. They were behind everything from government data leaks to massive crypto laundering operations. They had no face, no signature, no clear motive. Just chaos and corruption, left in their wake.

  And for the best part of the past two years, whenever he wasn't cracking down on scammers or small-fry hackers—which wasn't often, mind you—he would spend his time chasing the tiniest of traces left by NullSpectre with utmost care and precision. Compared to NullSpectre, every hacker was small fry. That’s the terrifying thing—no one even knew if it was one person or a dozen. Just whispers, wreckage, and rumors.

  Publicly, the trail was cold. Colder than a frozen trek across the tundra. Privately, Albert knew better. He could tell from the sleepless nights, the hollowed eyes, the way his father lingered over code fragments and anonymous logs for hours without blinking.

  “Doesn’t it ever get to you?” Albert asked one evening as they sat on the porch, the sun dipping below the horizon.

  “What?” Henry asked, sipping from his coffee mug—one that read I read your private messages for a living.

  “Knowing how much evil is out there. How deep it goes. And knowing… you’re just one guy.”

  Henry paused, the lines on his face softening. “It used to. But I stopped thinking about it like a war. It’s not about winning. It’s about keeping the doors locked long enough for the next generation to get smarter.”

  Albert smiled. “Next generation, huh?”

  “I have high hopes.”

  Later that night, as the world dimmed and the house grew eerily silent, Albert stared at the glowing code on his laptop screen. The time for admiring was long gone. Now, he had to practice. He had some of the biggest shoes in the world to fill, and not too much time to fill them.

  His father may have been the nation's firewall, but even the Great Wall of China weathered away with age. A new dawn was soon approaching, and not just for the good guys. And Albert wanted to be at the forefront of the battle against the Dark Side, as he liked to call the world of cybercrime.

  He paused, smiling as he logged out of the white-hat hacker forum named Light Side. Another day over, another job well done for Luke Skywalker—Albert's online alias—this being his sixth consecutive win against an amateur hacker group that went by the name Cold Night.

  He didn't know it yet, but the ghosts his father chased were soon to cross paths with his own. It was high time for Albert to write his own script. He had a digital castle to build, and Rome wasn't built in a day.