Naomi spends her childhood learning as much, as quickly, as she can. Her parents are ecstatic when her attention turns towards computing -- their field. She gets books, her own hardware from a very young age, excited conversations about so-and-so language, and hours and hours left alone, tinkering.
She makes her first calculator when she is six and doesn't stop -- except in frustration when she encounters access restrictions.
A conversation from the dinner table. Naomi shows her mother an application, across which angry letters spell: "ACCESS DENIED."
This doesn't make sense to Naomi. If they were trying to prevent access to bad people, then the bad people would want to find out their secrets more. She wants to, too, so, so badly -- but her mother has been consumed by her work again. Naomi, ignored, goes back to her machine.
She finds the source. It's easier than she expected. Better. Thrilling. She picks up an interest in cryptography and computer security. She practices.
When she meets people who share her instincts she feels a breath of fresh air. In one corner of the internet they call themselves "Spiders".Their mission is to expose corporate secrets. There are now too many avenues for a firm to hide money -- the rich being so astronomically rich, and the poor being such a good excuse to hold a charity ball or two. Everyone agrees that the people at the top are corrupt, that income and class mobility is impossible, and that people will do the jobs their parents did until those jobs disappear and they die in the slums. Not everyone agrees on where the money goes.
"I swear." One of the more influential members' pet topics is their Illuminati theory. "I've looked at some of the financials for this one. Billions of dollars go to departments with black-box budget items that haven't been properly audited in decades. No one knows where this money is going and every 'investigation' turns up clean. There have to be spies in the government or something. I'm even seeing stuff for massive large-scale fake IDs."
The evidence mounts. Others start to come around. Maybe it's not the Illuminati, but there is something tying many of the major corps together. Including the shipping company Naomi's parents work for. Mr. Illuminati Theory thinks that one in particular is running drugs, or sex trafficking, or both. She's never thought to steal their passwords before, or to try to get at their secure computers at work. But to think that even they could be part of something like this ...
The information she finds confirms some of the spiders' theories, but not all of them. And before the actual investigation starts, the one that would prove once and for all that they are involved in massive criminal activity, Naomi finds that she did her job too well -- the backdoor virus spread so thoroughly that the firm collapsed under the scandal and mounting costs of fixing it.
Six months later, another dinner conversation. Naomi's parents tell her they've found a new job. The firms they've picked are infected. She tells them not to take the jobs. They condescend at her until she storms off. Ignored, as usual.
Naomi can't use the same strategy twice. Not for both of them, it would be so suspicious. She wants to, though. Not least because she knows what she'll find.
For days, she seethes.
