As Coal Tiger, he was admitted to chat rooms that would otherwise have been sealed shut against him. In those chats, computer experts who worked for the black marketeers using the darknet got together to—among other things—brag. Hackers loved to brag, though they typically hid behind obfuscatory walls, false identities, and location rerouters. They were by nature and necessity an exceptionally paranoid bunch. One error and they could invite their own competition inside their online Fortresses of Solitude.

There were several hundred of these chat rooms, though most were poseurs who wanted to be seen as top-level black hats without actually having the chops. But the key players—a group of less than a hundred worldwide—were the kings of the matrix. Most of their chat rooms were located on Tor or I2P, premier darknets for black market vendors selling or brokering large quantities of drugs, weapons, all manner of physical and cryptocurrencies, unlicensed pharmaceuticals, hijacked credit card information, passwords, weapons of every kind, old Soviet-era military technology, and slaves. Sex trafficking was huge on the darknet, and because the sites could not be found via any kind of standard search engine, the flow of business was seldom interrupted. The hackers remained aloof and apart, like an extended family of trickster gods—Loki, Coyote, raven spirits, Wakdjunga, Anansi, and others.

Bug had variations on his darknet identities. He was Coal Tiger and the Fisher King; he was BigBadBoi and Punji. And others. Identities he created, cultivated, and left on the net, touching them up every now and then to keep them fresh and active. Some of his online avatars were actually repurposed from hackers the DMS and RTI had taken down.

It was as the Fisher King, though, that he went on a buying spree.

He put feelers out that he was looking for cybernetic implants, neuro chips, and cutting-edge eugeroics for wakefulness. Bug was very careful reaching out, making sure he did it from obscure angles and never—never, ever—appearing too eager or too desperate. He found that the B and B approach worked best. Bitching and Bargaining. Complaining about the sale price for something and then haggling like a carpet merchant. Eagerness was either the sign of a rookie or, most often on the darknet, an indication that he was a cop of some kind.

It took weeks to get into the right position, and each day, he’d repeat the same ritual of ultra-caffeination and sugar rush, which brought him to that elevated state of hyperawareness and quickness of thought. The trick was to intersperse the sugars with proteins and fats so that he didn’t crash.