Chapter 2. Dear Brother

(from Letter I. The Aftermath)

It's time I told you everything. Writing letters feels archaic, I know. Today people publish their thoughts online, in blogs or long posts, each trying to control their own narrative. Maybe it would be simpler to just sit together one evening and talk, let words fall where they may, even if they come out tangled and raw. But I don't have that courage yet. Writing keeps the distance I still need between myself, the story, and you. It's the same instinct that once made me hide behind screens: staying close enough to speak, yet never quite exposed.

Fourteen years have passed since Libya. Fourteen years since that message arrived and the machinery of my second life ground to a halt. In that time, I've moved through different cities, different countries, different versions of silence. But in each place, I've built the same room. Not intentionally at first—or maybe entirely intentionally, the way addicts recreate the conditions of their habit even when they swear they've quit.

The room I'm writing from now isn't the original, but it might as well be. Three walls painted deep red, almost black, absorbing more than they reflect. A white ceiling that looks higher than it is, offering the illusion of breath above the compression. The blinds stay closed. Books climb every wall, accumulated volumes with no organizing principle, philosophy next to technical manuals next to novels I'll never finish. Each spine is a promise of understanding deferred.

I've built versions of this room in every place I've lived since Libya. Different walls, different machines, but the same essential architecture. Dark enough to focus, isolated enough to forget. The first one was in the house I bought with my wife, before everything fractured. I painted those walls myself: three coats, each one darker than the last, until the color achieved the density I needed. The white ceiling above felt like a concession to the possibility of escape, a reminder that somewhere above all this compression, air still existed.

Each time I move, I tell myself the new room is just workspace, just practical. But I know better. The room is a template, a configuration file for a life lived at a remove. It's not about aesthetics—it's about absorption, about creating a space where light can't intrude and reflection is minimized. You've seen these rooms when you visited, though you never asked why I kept them this way. You'd glance at the closed blinds, the stacked books, the screens glowing in the dark, and I'd see something flicker across your face: concern, maybe, or just confusion about how someone lives like this by choice.

Now, fourteen years later, I understand what these rooms always were: not places to work, but places to hide. Not from the world, but from the question the world kept asking, "who are you?" and the answer I didn't want to give.

After Libya, after I learned what my tunnel had done, I couldn't touch a terminal for weeks. The keyboard felt like a crime scene, every blinking cursor an accusation. But I kept the screens on—their faint glow was the only light I could stand.

During those months, I tried to convince myself I could return to normal. I went through the motions of my day job: conference calls, security audits, reports written in daylight language. The legitimate work that paid the bills and asked no moral questions. But the second life, the one lived in encrypted channels and anonymous connections, had ended. I knew it even before I admitted it.

The paralysis wasn't dramatic. I didn't collapse or break down. I just stopped. Stopped checking secure channels, stopped monitoring the networks I'd built, stopped responding to the encrypted messages that still arrived like ghosts knocking on a door that would never open again. Each ignored message was a small death, a connection I was letting die because I no longer trusted my own hands.

I filled my days differently then. I'd drive out to the woods with a photographer friend, someone who understood silence without needing to explain it. We'd walk for hours without speaking, and in that quiet I felt something closer to peace than I'd known in years. The trees didn't need packets, didn't route signals, didn't fail anyone. They just grew, died, and fed the next generation. There was a mercy in that simplicity—a rhythm that predated networks, predated betrayal.

Sometimes we'd sit on a fallen log and he'd take pictures of light filtering through branches, of moss claiming dead wood, of ordinary decay that looked like purpose when framed correctly. I envied his ability to find meaning in slow processes, in things that didn't require electricity to exist. My whole life had been measured in milliseconds. His camera measured in stops of light, in the patient wait for the right moment.

But even in the woods, I could feel the phantom hum. The ghost vibration of machines that were no longer running. My hands would twitch toward keyboards that weren't there. At night, I'd dream of scrolling logs, of commands half-typed and abandoned, of connections that wouldn't close no matter how many times I issued the kill command. The body remembers its addictions long after the mind declares them over.

Then came the grief, quieter than Libya but deeper in its own way. My mother died. Then my uncle, the man who stood in for our father through the years that mattered most. Loss has a particular weight when you've spent your life at a distance. I hadn't been present the way I should have been. I'd been too busy routing packets across continents to notice the people whose signals were fading in rooms I could have reached by car.

Grief demands inventory. It makes you count what you've done with the time you had, what you've hidden, what you owe. I found myself thinking about all the conversations I'd avoided, the explanations I'd never given, the parts of myself I'd kept encrypted even from the people who loved me.

My mother never knew what I really did. She knew I traveled, that I worked with computers, that I kept strange hours. She worried, the way mothers do, but she never asked the questions that would have required me to lie directly to her face. I let her assume I was just another consultant burning out on corporate contracts. It was easier than the truth.

My uncle might have understood. He was practical, unsentimental, the kind of man who believed that problems existed to be solved and that method mattered more than morality. But I never told him either. I never told anyone.

When they died, I realized I'd spent decades building an architecture of concealment so thorough that no one actually knew me. Not my wife, not my family, not even you. Especially not you.

You're a doctor. You spend your days in the kind of light I've avoided most of my life. You fix what's visible, what can be diagnosed and treated. I learned to manipulate what isn't, what lives in the space between systems. We came from the same place and built such different lives. You created doors; I created hidden ports. You learned to help people face-to-face; I learned to help them, or harm them, from behind screens.

We've lived at a distance for years. Different cities, different lives, sporadic phone calls about surface things. You knew I worked in security. You probably assumed the rest was ordinary. And I let you assume that, because explaining would have required admitting what I'd become.

But after Libya, after the woods, after the funerals, something shifted. The silence that had protected me started to feel like a different kind of betrayal. Not of others this time, but of the person I'd been before the machines took over. The fifteen-year-old who first found a gap in a school network and felt the thrill of understanding how systems really worked. Before that thrill turned into hunger. Before hunger turned into need.

The decision to write didn't come all at once. It started four or five years ago, as an itch I couldn't name. I'd open a blank document and stare at the cursor, that old familiar blink, and feel something rising that was neither code nor confession. I told myself I might write articles, maybe blog posts—sanitized stories with the serial numbers filed off, safe enough to share with strangers.

But every attempt felt hollow, performative. I was writing around the truth, not toward it. The stories came out clean and educational, little parables about security and ethics that made me sound like someone who'd always known the difference. They were lies by omission. They erased everything that mattered: the hunger, the rationalizations, the slow erosion of boundaries I'd once thought were permanent.

Then things shifted. Recent changes in my professional life, nothing to do with hacking, just the ordinary machinery of career and circumstance, created a kind of opening. Time I hadn't had before. Space to think without the pressure of the next contract, the next crisis, the next reason to avoid looking back.

And beneath that, the grief I mentioned. The realization that I'd spent my life hiding from the people who deserved to know me. That I'd let my mother die without ever explaining why I lived the way I did. That I'd let my uncle be buried with a version of me he'd constructed from fragments and assumptions.

That's when I understood: I wasn't writing to strangers. I was writing to you.

Not because you asked for this. Not because you need to know. But because you're the only person left who knew me before. Before the machines, before the aliases, before I learned that power hums so steadily you can mistake it for purpose. You're the proof that another life was possible, that we started in the same place and I chose the darker room.

If I can explain it to you, how it happened, why it happened, where the first crack appeared, maybe I can finally understand it myself.

But here's the problem: I thought Libya was the beginning of the end. The moment when everything I'd built revealed itself as a machine for causing harm. The job that finally proved I'd crossed a line I could never uncross.

Except that's not quite true, is it?

Libya was the loudest failure, the one I couldn't ignore or rationalize. But it wasn't the first time my work had consequences I didn't predict. It wasn't the first time I'd told myself a story about curiosity and skill while ignoring what my actions actually meant.

I started asking myself: when did it really begin? When did I first learn to mistake hunger for curiosity, access for understanding, silence for permission? When did the thrill of solving puzzles stop being about learning and start being about power?

I can't answer that question by looking at Libya alone. Libya was the collapse, but collapses have histories. Systems don't fail all at once—they accumulate small errors, tiny corruptions, silent degradations that seem harmless until the day they cascade into catastrophe.

So I need to go back. Further back than Libya, back to jobs I once thought were clean. To moments when I told myself I was just exploring, just learning, just proving what was possible. To the times when I drew a line and promised myself I'd never cross it, then woke up months later to find I'd crossed it so smoothly I couldn't remember when.

I need to show you one of those jobs. Not the first. I don't think there is a first, not really. But an early one. A formative one. A job I've thought about more than any other except Libya, because it seemed so elegant at the time. So victimless. So pure.

Let me take you back thirteen years before Libya, to 1998. To a winter evening when a modem sang its metallic song and a billing system revealed itself like a map with soft leaks. To two months I spent watching, learning, waiting for the moment when the system would trust me enough to let me in.

I want you to see that job the way I saw it then: as technical exercise, as art, as the simple pleasure of solving a puzzle no one else had solved. As proof that I was smart enough, patient enough, careful enough to navigate systems others couldn't see.

And then I want you to see it the way I see it now, from this red room, fourteen years after Libya and a lifetime after innocence: as the clearest evidence that I'd already learned to lie to myself. That I'd already built the habits of justification that would eventually lead me to build a tunnel in the Libyan desert and tell myself it was rescue.

That telecom job in 1998. It wasn't different from Libya. It was the same pattern in smaller scale, the same hunger dressed in prettier syntax. I just didn't have the honesty to see it yet.

So let me show you how it began. How patient reconnaissance felt like virtue. How two months of watching felt like discipline rather than obsession. How the moment of access felt like victory instead of violation.

Let me show you the person I was becoming, before I understood what that person was capable of.

If you're reading this, then the line is still alive. And maybe there's still time to understand what traveled through it.

from Letter I. The Aftermath.
Next chapter will be published next week.