This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
Monica Castellanos lived in a van parked in an Atlanta campground. It was a pretty nice van, mind you—a fully electric Mercedes Sprinter stocked with a memory foam mattress, sink, electric stovetop, convection oven, toilet, refrigerator, shower, rooftop solar panels, a 32 GB server, top-of-the-line computer rig with 16 GB of RAM, high-speed router, triple-stack rack system of industrial batteries, and a miniature Ukrainian electronic warfare drone in a deployable pod strapped to the roof. Her home also had a military-grade security system to protect all those very expensive things in her very nice van.
Monica was currently spinning slow circles in a fire engine red gaming chair. Her shoulder-length braids swung lazily as she stopped her momentum with a foot before spinning the chair the opposite direction. She had a high forehead, thin face, and piercing ash-brown eyes.
She hadn’t always lived in anything nearly as nice as her van. Monica was born to Afro-Dominican parents who moved the family from the Caribbean to Boston’s Jamaica Plains neighborhood when she was 11. Monica didn’t know English at the time, but she sure as shit knew she hated Boston.
Her fellow Dominican neighbors—some as dark as her—called her “la Negra,” which, depending on the tone in which it was uttered, could either be an affectionate nickname or an insulting pejorative. In her highly colorized Latino neighborhood, it was often the latter.
The Townie white kids in her middle school were flabbergasted by this dark, Spanish-speaking new girl. She was Black… but Latin… so they just split the difference and christened her a portmanteau of their parents’ favorite racial slurs. Also, they knew Monica was poor because she wore a hodgepodge of thrifted and borrowed sweaters and scarves during New England’s brutal winters rather than the North Face and Canada Goose down jackets then in vogue. This led them to start a long-lived rumor that she was homeless and scavenged dumpsters for food.
Meanwhile, her African American classmates were just as lost when trying to place her. She didn’t know any of their slang, preferred Daddy Yankee over Lil Wayne, and spoke with a crazy accent whenever she wasn’t going on in Spanish with the Guatemalan kids. They wound up largely ignoring her.
Middle school is a hormonal and sociological gauntlet for even the most well-adjusted teenagers. For Monica, it was absolute hell, not just because of the bigotry and bullying, but also because she was so lonely. Her isolation eventually bred a stoic, seething, unswerving determination. She would outperform all her classmates. She would earn better grades and make more money, even if she barely had a working grasp of the language and culture they had been born into.
It took Monica six months to fully master English but, once that was done, schooling came easy, especially math and science. She wasn’t invited to anyone’s birthdays or sleepovers, so she spent every night, every weekend studying. By the time she entered eighth grade, her GPA never fell below 4.0 again.
But she went further still. Monica would zoom through her assigned reading and schoolwork weeks before they were due. Then, she’d delve into Wikipedia, online articles, free ebooks, and undergraduate MOOCs on the topics she found most interesting. She’d also lurk in online fora, soaking in the insights, snark, memes, and culture of the internet’s deepest recesses. She learned about Pepe the Frog. She learned about Laser Cat. She learned about the “This is Fine” meme, which inexorably led her to learn about climate change.
Monica was incensed. Adults had been killing the planet for centuries and subsequent generations would be left holding the bag. They were all irrevocably fucked. She needed to shake people out of their complacency. So, with the zeal of the newly converted, she proselytized to anyone who’d listen. This did not win her many additional friends at school or in the neighborhood. She began correcting her teachers’ narrow-minded assumptions about sea level rise in the classroom, but they ignored her. Kids crossed the street to avoid her. This was when Monica absorbed the first mantra that would guide her interpersonal relations for the rest of her life: people were stupid.
Her peers had, however, taken notice of her newfound classroom outspokenness and, though they still wouldn’t invite her to their parties, they would pay her to write their reports. This led to the revelation of Monica’s second mantra: she loved making money.
She quickly found her perfect market fit: targeting the dumbest, wealthiest students in her school. In the hallway, they’d call her heinous insults, but at night, they’d beg her over text to do their homework. She put real thought into her labor, ensuring that, though technically correct, she still injected enough of her clients’ innate inarticulation into their reports to fool their teachers into thinking they had completed the assignments.
Soon, Monica began charging a premium, allowing her to purchase the fancy jackets, snow boots, and pants that were previously the exclusive purview of her most privileged colleagues. That was the end of the dumpster rumor. She earned enough money to replace her parents’ malfunctioning appliances and threadbare clothes. Exhausted from working multiple service sector shifts, they accepted her explanation that she had earned the funds from tutoring.
Then, in sophomore year of high school, the damnedest thing happened: she grew legs and breasts. Suddenly, hordes of boys that called her names now desperately wanted to take her to prom. She preferred pummeling their sisters on the field hockey pitch.
Monica tried a couple of dalliances and enjoyed the companionship and romance but was repelled by anything sexual. At first, she chalked it up to her Caribbean Catholic guilt, but that didn’t feel right. Then she considered the possibility that she was gay and tried dating girls, but every time they went in for a kiss or touched her sensually, she recoiled.
Monica was despondent. Now she was gaining a reputation for being a tease and a prude. Maybe she was sabotaging herself. Maybe there was something fundamentally wrong with her. As always, she turned to the internet for guidance, where she stumbled upon r/sexuality. A deep sense of relief washed over her when she finally learned the name for what she was, how she felt or didn’t feel. She was asexual.
Monica coasted through the rest of high school without a core group of friends. She discovered her passion for coding, which was helped by the fact that tech was booming, and she wanted to make real money. When she won a full scholarship to MIT, she became convinced that, finally, her life would begin! Finally, she’d be surrounded by likeminded weirdos!
Only it didn’t and she wasn’t. She still lived at home, only now she took the Orange and then Red Line to school. As a computer science major, she remained the outsider—almost always the only Black person, Latina, or woman in the room, much less all three at the same time. The dumb racist comments had been swapped for dumb microaggressions and ubiquitous male insecurity.
Plus, Monica was bored. She was lightyears ahead of her peers, having worked through their most challenging exercises in high school. Her professors felt ancient, out of touch with the latest techniques. So, she started taking on clients from the hundreds of startups that germinated in Harvard and Kendall Square like weeds. By her sophomore year, she was pulling in six figures and had paid off her parents’ mortgage. When she realized she could double her income by coding full time, Monica dropped out of college.
Cynthia became a white hat hacker, which scratched her itch for scrutinizing and infiltrating hardened systems. She enjoyed probing, flagging, and patching her clients’ digital security protocols before the real bad guy hackers could exploit them. She loved the money and freedom to set her schedule even more. The bounties she collected allowed her to buy her own live-in van and finally escape Boston to see the rest of the world. She saw Rocky Mountain forest fires choke LA’s skyline. She saw Louisiana bateaux swallowed by the sea. She saw flash floods sweep away Appalachian hamlets. She saw Category 5 hurricanes plunge hundreds of miles inland. And everywhere, absolutely everywhere, she saw stupid people pretending none of it was happening. This rekindled her teenaged anger and galvanized her desire to do something tangible and impactful.
Monica wasn’t one for marching or letter writing. She wanted to act. Her long experience as a coder segued seamlessly into moonlighting as the eco-hacker who eventually became bluebunny. The nom de guerre didn’t really refer to anything of substance, as she just liked the alliteration, but she loved reading the breathless Reddit sleuths and conspiracy theorists who tried to decipher its hidden meanings and Deep State connection to the Illuminati.
She began with splashy but petty and relatively innocuous stunts like defacing PepsiCo’s public website or cracking Monsanto’s social media accounts to post a thread apologizing for poisoning America’s waterways. As she plumbed the depths of the dark web’s abyssal plain, she streamlined her process and simply tweaked existing viruses, worms, and other high-powered malware to suit her needs. A student of history, she also learned from intelligence agencies’ most successful tactics.
Most notably, she scored her greatest coup by pulling an Olympic Games—the CIA program that destroyed Iran’s first centrifugal nuclear arms program. All that entailed was downloading keyloggers and other malware onto USB flash drives, sprinkling them in parking lots, and waiting to see who would take one into their office and plug it directly into a workstation, giving Monica visibility into their entire operations with almost no effort. That’s how she gained access to the IT systems of four of the country’s largest fossil fuel companies along with the congressional and gubernatorial offices of their worst enablers—including that of Rhonda Santos.
She’d gained quite a reputation in certain niche climate and hacker circles. People began ascribing her actions to spectacular but completely unrelated events. Sure, she was responsible for the Exxon intranet break-in, but she had nothing to do with the Conquest of the Seas’ leftward Atlantic cruise. That was simply an onboard malfunction. She certainly wished it had been her work, though.
Monica poured steaming coffee into her favorite mug that sported a reproduction of El Greco’s famously macabre “Saturn Devouring His Children” along with text reading “Don’t Talk to Me Until I’ve Had My Son.” She casually turned to her news feed when she almost spilled the entire mug on herself. At the very top of her feed, and reproduced in every other major news outlet, was an Atlantic article with a byline ascribed to Cynthia Burgos.
Monica laughed and laughed and laughed until her van’s aluminum siding rang. Incredible! That crazy bitch had done it! She had put the pieces together and fucked over Santos! Maybe it was time for a little road trip. She poured the coffee into a thermos, migrated to the driver’s seat, and directed her home toward I-75. It’d take her 11 hours to get to Miami.
Back on South Beach, Carlos Adab also saw the headline and decided to send Cynthia a text. It went unread for three days, which disappointed him more than he expected.
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