Trinity was having a tough time. She was the sole owner and employee of her own internet security company. However, since the pandemic hit, she had been struggling to get any new clients. It was bad enough she had a rocky start, leaving the armed forces under a bad conduct discharge because of her alcoholism.

Thanks to her father, a retired lieutenant colonel who served since Vietnam, he made sure his little girl kept her security clearances and certified ethical hacker license when discharged. He even hooked her up with some military contractors he knew.

But then the layoffs happened, starting with sub-contractors like her. She was barely scraping by. Now the rent forgiveness in her apartment was ending, and she didn’t know how she was going to make ends meet. Being self-employed, she couldn’t claim unemployment. Trinity couldn’t maintain her certified ethical hacker license when it was time to renew it. This is when Trinity drank away her savings.

One night, her father stopped by to check up on her when Trinity was deep in the bottle, and she got into a big argument that didn’t end well.

After this is when she got mixed up with Marcos Manzanedo, a small-time crime boss who had been expanding his underage pimping business into online TikTok videos during the pandemic. He was the landlord of the apartment complex she was renting, which explained why it was affordable despite being in a more middle-class area of the city.

Trinity was nearly out of savings and had lost her credentials as a creditable hacker. After hearing about Manzandeo’s plans to expand into crypto and online ransom extortion, she took him up on his offer. Trinity knew she could use her skills from her time in the military to help him with his schemes. She didn’t see this as any different from some of the shady hacking she did for the military. Stuff they never told Congress about. It was true; Trinity was a disillusioned patriot, seeing nothing but elite corruption pulling the strings of the U.S. government. She used booze to cope with all the shit, and Manzandeo was willing to keep her well stocked in that department.

“Mr. Manzandeo, I’ll take the job. I shouldn’t, but I really owe no loyalty to our country for the stuff it made me do. Fuck it all. Just fuck it all.” Trinity said in a drunken stupor.

It would be a month later that Trinity’s father would visit her apartment again, after her cell phone number said it was disconnected, and she didn’t return any of his previous voice mails. There was a new family living there. His daughter was gone. He used his old contacts only to discover they couldn’t say anything about it. He did not know if she was alive or dead. She had disappeared, leaving him with the last memory of a drunken argument. All he could do was file a missing person’s report.