I studied the message on the screen carefully.

A no win situation. If I succeed, I lose my best friend in the world. If I fail, I lose the career I strove for my entire life. How to keep them both. There had to be a way. Or maybe there was a better path. 

The instructions were clear, fail or succeed. But can I betray him? Or should I confide in him and pull the double cross?

With this set of goals, the company lost any loyalty I had. They showed the ruthless underside of profit at any cost. They wanted me to use my hacking skills to take out an innocent competitor by implanting a virus into his solution for a problem which irked the programming world for over a hundred years.

The Company wanted it. The other half of their instructions was to steal the raw uncompiled code before implantation.

No to both ideas. I was switching sides.

My boss couldn't know it until I did a few things first.

Secure my financials by moving and destroying all traces of where things went before hand. They deposited to the same bank account for over a decade. No more.

As I started the process of making myself disappear, I used the ghost phone I never thought I'd need. Paulo would not answer, but instead start his own disappearance. His program would be the first thing to move.

My ghost phone rang. Only one person had the number and a sigh of relief escaped me.

"Algernon, thank you."

"Let's take them down."

"Armageddon?"

"Yes."

The phone went dead.

The soft clicking of my keyboard kept me company for the next hours.

The news on the biggest streaming service the next morning was grim.

The Company announced a huge data loss. Their entire Sequel system with all backups was gone. They could not recover.

Pledging to find out who did it they vowed to bring the culprit to justice. Hard to do when I no longer existed.

The ghost phone rang again.

"You saw?"

"I did. Success."

"Deserved it too. Now what?"

"Destroy our systems, take our go bags, and meet at our predetermined destination. Life starts over now."

"See you there."

The losses would be immense, but not unrecoverable. Seven years wouldn't be too long to wait. Our new identities inherited the estates of the old. Hopefully, the memory of this disaster would be long forgotten by then.

But then again... beware the hacker. I would be a fool not to watch our backs.