She knew who said it, “pwnd.” Damian. Four letters that declared the needful about him. “A good woman would help, right? You—are you a good woman?” This insect, this puny, impotent mite, asking for help. “He couldn’t handle me,” she thought. And, since when is it a woman’s job to rescue a man from his stupidity? Let him rot.
If you or someone you know is needs help because of domestic violence or stalking, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline +1-800-799-7233 or at The Hotline.
Inger is not pwnd. tbh, it’s the other way. Damian is owned by Saito-Gumi. His self-stow-away on their sub cost a lot of money he has to pay back. He will say, though, that he owns Inger. Sheesh.
Good woman? By what words? By a wilting flower that always apologizes and agrees? Some fantasy of a docile kitten in a メイド服. She’s great until your card maxes out.
Serenity
It’s been a quiet week in Buckskin, Nevada, where the dust settles like punctuation and the silence carries more weight than most conversations. The sun’s been generous, the wind stingy, and the only drama worth noting was a jackrabbit outpacing a borrowed Subaru on a back road that doesn’t show up on maps.
Inger’s been keeping to herself, sipping oolong under the cover of the porch she had added to the long side of the old assay cabin. The entrance now opens onto that quiet stretch, where the wind brushes past without asking questions. It’s fall in the Nevada desert—temperatures are tolerable, the wet season still a couple months off, and the silence is generous. The cabin stands alone, the last remnant of a gold mine turned home, rebuilt by her grandfather from the bones of the family house. She’s not hiding. She’s observing. The kind of quiet that doesn’t ask for permission, just waits for the next fool to declare himself a hero.
Damian hasn’t shown his face, Word is he’s somewhere in Norfolk, VA trying to convince Saito-Gumi of his value beyond the cost of his stowaway stunt. He says he owns Inger. She loves him and the wedding is already planned. The desert says otherwise.
No Good Woman
The regular rhythm continues. Up at 6:00am, while the sun is still rising. 剣粋の準備 for a half-hour. Then a run over the hilltop to the old mine shafts and back. After that, breakfast—Japanese omelet, grits with scallions, pickled daikon and Oolong Tea to drink. On cheat days she does bacon from Belmont Butchery and eggs from Ellwood Thompson, and Great Value Instant Grits from Walmart.
Inger fills Damian’s empty space in his imagination. All she needs to do is accept the fact that her destiny lies in his hands. Any good woman would know how good a man he is. Foolish woman, she doesn’t know what she is missing. “Just say yes”, his imaginary avatar of her says.
Men suggest, women approve. Or not. CoPilot named this the sacred veto and went further saying it is sovereign. Most guys, on getting shot down, just move further down their list of possible partners. Damian has declared to God that no one else can have Inger. She is his destiny.
Don’t Bully God
God loves us. That’s not in question. But He’s not a vending machine for comfort or rescue. He made us—crafted us with breath and bone—and like any good father, he doesn’t jump just because we stomp our feet. It’s the kind of love that lets us walk the hard road, knowing we’ve been given everything we need to endure it.
Demanding that God deliver Inger to him isn’t going to go well. Not news to most of us but Damian isn’t most of us. He shall have Inger. He has spoken. Ok, sir.
Something I’ve experienced is that God is faithful. I don’t always like the way he is faithful. But he is faithful. Damian, though, worships at a different altar. He is a devotee of New Age self-actualization. God, for him, is some bearded fat man who is too demanding.
Tech Talk
How is this happening? How is a prisoner in a work camp able to broadcast messages in Japanese to Inger? Damian is brilliant. Bent. But a brilliant electrical engineer. It’s why his prison work is triaging Mikako units returning from service.
He worked out a way to unlock the door network so he could go anywhere he wanted. Stalking Inger became as easy as walking through a door. Also to take control of a Hive node and broadcast full-screen messages to that node. Awesome! Not. The ability to travel anywhere just by walking through a door went viral. EVERYBODY wanted an account.
At scale an unrequited lover’s hunger to walk through a door to his paramour’s spaces went from a small frustration to a global incubus of chaos. Instead of pwnd Inger it is Damian who is pwnd. Now the world has an out-of-control innovation to manage. The door network exploded from less than fifty accounts with just a few destinations to an estimated 4.2 billion accounts and countless destinations. Bad incidents were rare at fifty accounts. With billions of accounts the incident queue exploded to over 400,000.
Security Ish
The first response was to shut it down. The Door Network became a flash in the pan. It was a thing until it wasn’t. That wasn’t it, though. Kestrel, the IT company awarded the contract for this global nightmare, had an incident queue that outstripped their capacity. This was no longer an infrastructure break/fix queue. It was disaster management.
The usual SLA clocks on incidents became impossible in hours. Phone support started logging casualties. The Hive’s promise of seamless transit collapsed into a backlog of grief, reroutes, and legal exposure. One star-crossed lovers shot at a woman turned global horror show.
Damian exploited a legacy routing protocol buried deep in the Hive’s infrastructure—originally designed for emergency override during natural disasters. It bypassed regional safety checks and destination validation, allowing unrestricted access to any node in the Door Network. The flaw was never meant to be public-facing, but Damian scaled it, wrapped it in a UI, and called it liberation. What he unleashed wasn’t freedom—it was entropy. The system couldn’t distinguish between a shortcut and a misroute, and by the time anyone noticed, 420,000 incidents were in the queue. Good job!
Fallout
“No Boundaries! No Limits! I have a RIGHT to use the Door Network the way I want. Nobody can stop me!”—he shouted, while the Hive rerouted infants into flood zones and dropped medics into shopping malls. No need. The size of the disaster did that. Damian self-pwnd. 🤣
The network said “enough”, and the doors stopped opening. Some systems don’t scale well. Nor do they care about the amount of passion a man feels for a woman. We want our infrastructure to be invisible. It should just work. Damian violated that expectation. It will take decades to recover.
That’s it, right? Damian gifts himself a Hive account banning him from using the door network to get around? He has to travel like a mortal, on planes, trains and automobiles? A failure like this is a reason to regroup and try harder. Figure out where he made his mistakes and try again. It’s not game over for him. Instead, it’s game on.
Delulu
Inger called support. Not for the Door Network. For the messages in Japanese that showed up on her screens and wouldn’t go away. As soon as she connected a device it was bricked. Even talking to her Mikako was pointless. It kept repeating, “A good woman would help, right? You—are you a good woman?” Yes. Also a healthy woman who doesn’t play with crazies.
She had one old burner phone that still worked. Once connected to support they found malware disguised as a messaging client. Malware Inger didn’t install. Easy fix. Then a few hours regaining control of her profile.
Who is doing this? She already knew Damian, that homeless dude she spent the night with, sent the “pwnd” message. Blocked him rn. That wasn’t enough. Because Kirin, Inger’s AI, found traces of Damian in the XML. XML in 2125!? Yes.
Checkmate
The ticket for her incident was escalated to Hive administration. Within a few days a patch was pushed out to end that attack vector. The messages stopped. Serenity restored to Buckskin. The regular rhythm resumed.
If you or someone you know is needs help because of domestic violence or stalking, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline +1-800-799-7233 or at The Hotline.