June 25th, 11 AM. Boris’ Primary Safehouse
	Boris woke up. He stared at the ceiling fan, its spinning motion almost hypnotizing in his eyes. He was tired, hung over, and bored out of his mind. He had recently scored the jackpot on a contract that had paid him a great bounty. Such contracts do not come without their inherent risks so afterwards, he decided to lay low for a while, feeding slowly off of his now substantial cash reserves. He figured in another week he’d come back to his ‘work’, refreshed and renewed.

	Slowly, he got out of bed, his eyes burning in the natural sunlight that poured in the room. He walked from his bedroom to the kitchen. He grabbed the remote for the TV and turned it on. It was the news.

“Police are still investigating mysterious shooting were the shooter had killed nor injured anyone, save for himself…”

As he started up his coffee he heard one of his computers alert him that he had a message. He walked up to the laptop, opening its lid to see what he’d been sent. The message sent was on an encrypted chat channel ran by the Silver Lining. Boris had set up a botnet using some of the Silver Lining servers and used it for small things like IRC and VPN tunneling. They knew he was there, they just didn't care as he never used it to harm them and never used up enough resources for his presence to matter.

The message was a curiosity to Boris. For one, he’d recently changed his encryption keys and hadn’t notified anyone of the change yet, so getting on his chat should’ve been impossible, unless whoever sent the message brute forced his keys. Secondly, the message was sent by someone he had no record of, someone named Aispi. He didn’t trust new people, especially if his first encounter with him involves them breaking his security measures.

The third curiosity was the message itself. It was all in hex, but from its formatting, he could tell it just needed to be converted to plain text. Once translated, it read as such:

“I need you to compromise a system for me.”
“Meridan’s Eastern Seaboard Servers”
“Be discreet”
“I need several backdoors. We will discuss payment later.”

Despite setting off several major red flags, the message intrigued him and he considered taking this person up on their offer, if for nothing else than to bring an end to the monotony.