The great work was finished and the Masterpiece started running. There were no seismic shifts, no astral storms, no second comings, no solar flares. No signs from the heavens that the universe had changed. But on one datacore of Newark Station, one particular account started to gradually fill up with credits. Honest-to-goodness, IC-certified credits.
Ji was just past his twenty-five birthday, sitting at his console at the Manhattan headquarters of Armitage Software. He had been awake for three days straight, completing the Masterpiece, making sure that all the encryption keys were in order and all the upload logs of Newark's servers were deleted completely. There was no sign that a part of IC's servers weren't particularly theirs anymore. The Masterpiece was comparing credit bitlock encryption keys and if it matched, the money was Reilly's. Not like any of the rich sobs would notice anyway, he thought.
He was a rather typical kid of his day, seemed so at least. The typical teenage fascination with rebellion and anarchy stopped a few years before, when he had realised there was no point. After all, seeing how his parents had been busy losing their shirts to never ending loans, he had promised himself he would not ever end up like them. He dropped out of college and soon founded Armitage Software - a small company headquartered in the Great City of Manhattan. He wrote open-source Neural Net applications and software for starships by day and worked on his little pet project Masterpiece by night.
Armitage was a small company, on the verge of being unprofitable, but still they managed to keep themselves afloat and find funding from benevolent investors who provided money and top-of-the-shop hardware. Those investors, of course, weren't real - that was the work of Ji. He faked transfers from the Masterpiece account and Armitage kept running. After a while, the software company became something more than a business, it became a society. Still maintaining a facade of an open-source software developer by writing applications and Neural Net toys, they also broke into corporations' servers and maintained back doors in as many of them as possible. When they'd have enough, they'd siphon all the credits they could and run away as fast as possible.
But that was not to be. Soon, IC started noticing that there was something wrong with their books. Ageira was contracted to fix the problem and soon they discovered the Masterpiece. The datacore was compromised, but the encryption keys and bounces through hundreds of other nodes made it impossible to trace back to Armitage. Ji, to cover up his failure, started siphoning credits of the other accounts to patch the hole in the company's budget.
That was discovered quickly and Ageira soon deployed their state-of-the-art set of security programs, collectively named Hadrian's Wall. The techniques Armitage used to siphon off credits were gone and the company almost instantly declared bankruptcy. What was worse was that the calls made to siphon credits could now be traced back to Armitage. Ji realised that he had lost everything. He spent last of his credits to back up the best of his software and get himself out of Manhattan, to the most backwater of stations where nobody could find him - Dawson Base.