Greetings, fellow technically-minded circumventors of law and society. My name is... an absurd jumble of syllables for which I harbor no attachment, so call me Jalor. Mine is a long tale, primarily because I cannot bring myself to tell a short one. I am and always have been verbose to the point of being sesquipedalian.
Some of the younger readers might recognize my 'name' as the host of various servers for pirated online multiplayer games. Those were indeed my handiwork, and indubitably did far more to help the youth than the school computers they were before I repurposed them. They said I had a Pathological Aversion to Authority; the school brought in a psychologist all the way from New London to diagnose me. I asked him to explain in detail what each word meant; I already knew, but I liked to hear his funny accent. I also remember trying to explain to him that cops were just grown-up playground bullies, and that seizing Cardamine was a natural progression from stealing other kids' toys.
Indeed, I was an interesting kid. So interesting, in fact, that Ageira offered me an internship with a shot at later becoming a programmer. An offer that I accepted, for I was still idealistic enough to think I would be solving problems there. That, and the manipulative corporate scumbags sent the prettiest girl in the entire frakking branch to recruit interns. It's almost as though they expected to be trying to convince bashful, awkward, lonely adolescent males to join.
At first Ageira didn't seem to be unpleasant. Sure, I spent 16 hours a day doing mindless drudgery, but don't all interns face a body of work as vast and vacuous as space itself? Sure, I worked in cubicle hell and wasn't even allowed to listen to music with a headset, but Ageira's low-level employees (myself included) jump at every possible excuse to let loose and I sold warez and Cardamine on the side to afford the nightlife. Sure, we didn't get any chance to eat during our workday, but... well, there's nothing I can even pretend is an upside to that. Whenever I got ravenous or indignant enough to be distracted, I would ravage the computer network with bitter and often sophomoric humor. I found it cruelly ironic when nobody attempted to revert my changes to the employee database, where I changed my job description to 'code monkey' and my home address to that of the Central Park Zoo.
For two years I toiled for my capitalist slave-drivers and conducted numerous experiments regarding the effects on the human body and mind of Cardamine in conjunction with Sidewinder Fangs. But then a member of the board came across some rather scandalous video footage of himself at one of my better we-actually-finished-a-project celebrations. My employment was always balanced on the proverbial razor's edge in a proverbial earthquake of misconduct, so it was only natural that he send the blame in my direction. Suing me for slander and legally questioning my mental health, on the other hand, was like overclocking a computer to run a word processor.
The lawsuit would have stripped me of all my savings and possessions, but I owned nothing legally and used my meager paycheck only to pay rent and utilities; I could live with that. Unfortunately for me, diagnoses of mental illness can land someone in an institution regardless of how funny the psychologist sounded when he said 'schedule'. Bribery most likely took place, and probably only screwed me over more completely. Joining the Hackers had never even occurred to me before, but now defection was the obvious choice. I still had no way off Manhattan, and the pigs were paying a visit the next morning to take me to the padded cell I would die in if I stayed here. The only option left, said that irrational and yet domminant part of my mind, was to celebrate my last night of freedom.
I woke up early the next morning - the Cardamine must have won the battle with the alcohol - and found myself in a room neither my own. My first thought was that they had already taken me to the asylum following my blacking out, but I soon realized that there wouldn't be a sleeping girl next to me if that were the case. I avoided waking her and searched in vain for my trousers and Cardamine inhaler, but through sheer dumb luck I instead found my salvation; a Starflyer starter chip! I wrote "IOU one Starflea" on her bathroom mirror in lipstick and took to the skies, setting my course first for Detroit Munitions (Angry Flashlights Incorporated, as planetside workers call it).
To my great relief, the employee entrance had a corridor that led directly to the laundry room. Smooth talker though I may be, nobody would sell weapons to a man without pants. My keycard didn't work on the doors at first, but eight lines of code later it started working again. I outfitted the little pile of flying junk with the few bits of hardware I'd been involved in the development of, stripped the verification package, and set out to make some friends in low places.
I already knew of Rochester, the Junker settlement in the debris fields near Manhattan, and listening to police chatter gave me the rough location of Buffalo, the Liberty Rogue fortress in the Badlands. The Junkers are a more welcoming bunch, but I needed to slip into the good graces of the Rogues to ever have a hope of becoming a Lane Hacker. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so I began hunting Xenos and cops; the Xenos wouldn't be missed by anyone, and my opinion of cops is slightly worse than an aerospace engineer's opinion of space dust. Even in the Starflea (Cyrano's Nose, I had christened it) I easily outflew the buffoons. Countless hours playing dogfight-sim video games translate into the real cockpit, it seems. Killing cops tends to draw the attentions of the Bounty Hunters' Guild, but their so-called pilots are cowardly profitteers incapable of holding their own against even a single Cardamine-enhanced opponent.
Once word of my exploits reached the Rogues, I navigated the Badlands (unpleasant) and exchanged my faithful little pile of slag for a sleek, fine-tuned, certified preowned (read: used) Dagger (read: flying phallus). I set course for Magellan to find that naturally, at the very moment when I was ready to depart, police activity is higher than ever because of some report of a terrorist gunship wreaking havoc. Interestngly enough, the competence of a herd of swine is inversely proportional to the number of swine in said herd. Despite my taunting every vessel I passed, only a lone piglet decided to scan my hold, and upon seeing the Cardamine he fired a cruise disruptor and missed. I didn't even need to come up with a snarky one-liner - missing with a guided missile speaks for itself.
Upon arrival in the Magellan system, I followed Outcast and later Hacker patrols until I located Mactan Base. None on the base had yet heard of me, so I joined up with the Hacker Paco.Pistols and flew several search-and-destroy missions with him, later completing some on my own and with the recently inducted Trainee LH~Sundancer. For the most part, we fought Bounty Hunters, although I did take out an LSF wing as well. Very little of interest happened while I ran these missions, excepting an embarrasing incident involving autopilot and binary asteroids which took place in full view of Mactan. In spite of that humiliation, I successfully acquired a Lane Hacker IFF and ID. Evidently, the only step which remains is final approval of this application.
Before I conclude this missive, I must say I've never in my life had as much difficulty or fun hacking as I have trying to get into these secure channels. And were I religious, spiritual, or superstitious in the slightest I would pray to every demiurge I could think to conjure that the Lane Hackers control some location wih a better bar than the one on Mactan.
