My Brother Hacker

Your brother said he tested security for companies. The kind of work that's better off not talked about. It sounded boring and believable, so you never pushed. Two weeks after he disappeared, the police handed his things back to your parents. Among them was a USB stick. You plug it into the home computer. An unfamiliar system installs itself, and a moment later Mentor speaks to you: an AI that teaches you to hack from scratch. How it got onto that stick, you'll understand much later.

You work from a real terminal. A single break-in runs around 15 to 20 commands, from scanning ports to covering your tracks on the way out. Tools run on progress bars. The tension comes from waiting, and from deciding what you are willing to touch. Every action on a target file raises global heat, and heat does not reset.