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While Henry was out teaching Gwen how to drive, the little girl staying at home wasn't idle either.
After a year of wits and wills clashing, Skye had long since given up on thoughts of running away unless she was absolutely certain of success. Every time she got caught and dragged back, she'd end up getting her face scrubbed clean afterward. For a kid with sensitive skin, that kind of treatment was unbearable.
These days, she was completely absorbed in surfing the internet and occasionally doing things that weren't exactly legal.
For example, breaking into other people's websites.
However, Skye wasn't interested in defacing pages or altering content. Most of the time, she just wanted to read articles that were restricted to members or hidden behind access permissions.
For anything that wasn't a daily necessity, she had to earn pocket money through chores around the house before buying it herself. Naturally, online resources had to be obtained through skillful freeloading. Why bother registering accounts or paying for access?
That lesson, too, had come from the internet.
The online world of this era had very little concept of paying for digital content. Free resources that violated intellectual property rights were everywhere.
But the saying "the cheapest thing often ends up costing the most" still applied.
More than once, Skye thought she had found free resources, only to discover that the downloaded archive was packed with viruses and worms.
Other times, signing up for a website would result in her email inbox filling up with all sorts of bizarre spam.
Viruses that immediately crippled a computer naturally became top-priority targets for removal.
But less obvious malware and Trojan programs were just as infuriating because they consumed system resources.
For a girl whose computer had been assembled from parts scavenged from junkyards, someone stealing even one percent of her machine's performance felt like a blood feud.
Skye didn't know who her biological parents were, but her refusal to let anyone take advantage of her—even a little—drove her to teach herself how to fight back against hackers.
At the same time, she gradually built up a solid foundation in basic cybersecurity principles.
People often said that hacking wasn't a defensive skill—it was an offensive one.
And once a child learned such skills, how could they possibly resist trying them out?
---
Breaking into government websites and internal networks was too risky.
A child raised in the sewers didn't yet possess the courage to challenge public authority.
Instead, the Dark Web—which was beginning to take shape during this era—became Skye's playground.
The Dark Web wasn't entirely a lawless wasteland.
It was also an arena where gray-hat hackers displayed their skills and competed against one another.
Skye honed her abilities there and exchanged knowledge with other users.
The one thing she never did was publicly reveal the target she truly wanted to hack.
The reason wasn't because she wanted to keep someone's secrets.
Nor was it because she didn't want to share a personal target.
Rather, Skye had discovered that every time she publicly revealed the network routes leading to Henry's systems—whether anyone helped her crack them or not—the entire firewall structure and network pathways would be completely different by the next day.
Whether the difficulty actually increased was beyond her current skill level to judge.
But having to map out the entire internal network architecture again already consumed a tremendous amount of time, never mind actually breaking through.
The man certainly wasn't in the habit of writing helpful comments explaining how he'd built everything.
So Skye could only rely on herself.
---
But on days like today, she didn't need hacking skills to get into BB's system.
Instead, while Henry was out of the house, she quietly sneaked into his room and used his computer directly.
Unlike Skye's own room, which looked like a workshop built by an engineering enthusiast, Henry's room contained little more than a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and the computer sitting atop it.
The rest of the space was packed with bookshelves and stacks of books.
BB's charging station was also located there.
According to Henry himself, BB's control system was housed on this computer.
Of course, nobody had ever been able to verify that claim.
The man lied as naturally as he breathed.
Skye powered on the computer.
The first mistake she had ever made on this machine was assuming that the Windows desktop displayed on the screen was Henry's actual operating system.
After painstakingly cracking the password, she had gleefully explored the machine and searched for any embarrassing files he might be hiding.
Only to discover that the spotless operating system—which didn't even contain junk files—was nothing more than a disguise.
Everything she had been interacting with was merely a virtual machine, a fake operating system designed to deceive intruders.
Henry actually used Linux.
That forced Skye to learn an entirely different operating system with a much steeper learning curve.
Worse, he wasn't using any commonly available distribution.
He didn't even use a graphical desktop environment.
Instead, it was a text-only Linux system.
The learning difficulty skyrocketed accordingly.
Fortunately, there were plenty of skilled people online willing to help.
People like CK and TS.
Miss_C was more like a caring older sister. She didn't teach technical skills directly, but she often provided excellent advice and ways of thinking about problems.
Unfortunately, today's login attempt got stuck at the very first hurdle.
Skye tried the password she had cracked previously.
Naturally, it no longer worked.
Which meant she had to crack it all over again.
As she worked, the resentful girl muttered curses under her breath.
"Keep changing your password every day. One of these days you're going to forget it yourself and lock yourself out of your own computer."
The only fortunate thing was that, as long as no outside party interfered, Henry's system architecture remained unchanged.
The methods for finding the new password were the same as before.
It just took time.
To save that time, Skye constantly refined her cracking techniques.
Doing so required mathematics and programming knowledge, so she had pushed herself to learn far beyond her age and grade level.
---
Even after finally obtaining administrator privileges, that didn't mean she could do whatever she wanted inside Henry's system.
As mentioned before, Henry's Linux wasn't based on any publicly available distribution.
That meant he could modify command behavior however he pleased and implement all kinds of user-hostile designs.
For example:
Typing copy might execute a delete command.
Typing dir might shut down the machine.
Rather than painstakingly figuring out how commands worked in Henry's sadistic custom Linux environment, Skye followed Miss_C's advice and designed a tiny operating system of her own.
She embedded it into Henry's computer and treated his hard drives as external storage devices.
Years spent studying hacking had taught her the importance of minimizing traces and cleaning logs.
Partly because every time she left evidence behind, Henry's entire system would mysteriously change before her next visit.
As a result, actions like shutting down or rebooting the machine were absolutely forbidden.
Instead, she used a hot-injection method to temporarily replace the active environment with her own.
Ordinary operating systems couldn't accomplish something like that.
But Henry's machine already relied heavily on virtualization.
That created an opportunity.
Once her custom lightweight disk system successfully embedded itself into Henry's operating environment, Skye could finally begin exploring the machine's contents.
She glanced at the clock.
An entire hour had already passed.
She didn't know how long Henry intended to spend teaching Gwen how to drive, but she knew one thing for certain:
The man always came home before starting dinner.
That meant her time was limited.
Expertly mounting the drives, Skye began searching through the contents.
Although Henry's command structure was bizarre and counterintuitive, his file-naming conventions were surprisingly normal.
Unlike command sets, which were finite, files could theoretically number without limit.
Meaningful names and consistent naming schemes helped organize information.
All Skye had to do was figure out Henry's habits.
That, too, had been Miss_C's advice.
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