You’ve probably never heard of me, and I guess I should be grateful for that. But you probably have heard of Cactus Jack, whose last great hacking mission was the talk of the town for at least a couple of weeks last year, if you followed the right newsfeeds. The dust has settled, and my lawyers tell me I should probably leave it that way, but that doesn't feel quite right to me. So this is my attempt to set the record straight, and explain what really went down.

#

I was still a kid when I first came to Malmö ten years ago—angry, with the feeling I had something to prove.

The anger was the usual teenage stuff, for the most part, but it was mixed up with the outsider thing. A young girl adapting to a new town, a new school, a new language… it’s a lot when you’re fourteen, especially when you’re not exactly a people person to start with. School wasn’t too bad, though, and I didn’t get bullied so much as I got ignored. The place had all the usual social groups: the sporty kids, the well-off kids, the rebels, the nerds. I was an obvious candidate for the nerds, but that’s always the “none of the above” category, and a social group comprising mostly of the kids with minimal social skills isn’t exactly welcoming—though it’s also unlikely to reject you, I guess.

I didn’t worry much about it. I’d always been pretty content in my own company; give me wifi for my terminal and an affordable source of decent boba tea, and I’d stay out of the way. I guess it was an adaptation of sorts. We’d moved a lot when I was little, bumping from country to country as my mom chased contracts. She was a narrative designer, and she’d worked on some of the old-school classics back in the Teens. When she and my dad split up, she asked to go part-time so she could bring her daughter up properly, rather than putting me in daycare for most of the week. But the studio she was with back then was really all-or-nothing—and so she looked for, and found, a part-time position at a different studio, and we did our first move. Just me and her in a car with a trailer full of furniture, driving halfway across the continent to a new apartment, a new town.

That was fine for a few years. I started school, she worked hard. The pandemic years treated her well, as the industry was booming; I spent a couple of years doing school remotely, which may be why I’m not much of one for company. But by the mid-Twenties, things started getting tricky: big studios starting closing, downsizing, consolidating, looking for ways to cut the budget. Mom said that the movie industry had done much the same thing, years before: sacked the writers, rehired them on worse terms at lower rates with less security. LLMs were like catnip for producers in that regard. No serious studio would ever rely on them for everything, but they made it really easy to squeeze narrative designers like my mom, and the other creatives. After a few years, they started coming for the devs, too.

My mom stayed employed because she was one of the best, even though she decided to stay in Europe so as not to disrupt my education too much—but the conditions of her employment became a lot worse, partly because she insisted on staying part-time and keeping a work-from-home clause in order to be around for the parental stuff: driving me to after-school clubs and extra language lessons, taking me to museums and movies and my first concerts. (I still have my BTS Army T-shirt, but it’s been a long time since I was small enough to wear it.) I’ll always love her for that. But contracts that would accomodate that sort of life became rarer, shorter and less generous, so we kept moving every couple of years, until finally we came here, to Malmö. We hadn’t even unpacked before the news dropped: the studio she’d moved to join had been bought up by one of the big conglomerates, which then stripped the studio of its cash reserves and IP, laid off the entire workforce, and closed it down.

Mom was crushed. She’d managed to ride the storm for over a decade, but the strain of it—the endless hunt for the next contract, the reduced compensation, the repeated relocations—had taken its toll. I’d never seen her like that before. She spent the best part of a month in bed; not sick exactly, just totally stripped of motivation. I was old enough to get groceries and cook on either side of getting settled in my new school, but it was a horrible to see her that way. She’d always been so strong, always been there for me, always given everything to her work. It was like someone scooped out her insides and left her empty.

After her month of bed-rot, my mom got up, went out and got a new haircut, and then hit the employment platforms with the same relentless determination she’d always given to games. She looked for anything that a good writer could do, anything other than games—she never really talked about it, and I took that as a sign of how badly they’d broken her heart, because she’d given so much to the industry only to be pushed closer and closer to the margins. Within a few months she was doing content management for some big agency or another; a few months more, and she was managing the other content managers. She’s still with them now, five years later—well paid, secure. She writes for herself in the evenings; detective stories, apparently. I’ve never read them, and she’s never asked me to. I think she likes being able to write without any pressure, without any deadlines, just for her own satisfaction.

But she never talks about her work, like she used to; it’s just a job.

That’s where my anger came from, I guess.

#

I grew up not just playing games but making them, inspired by my mother’s love for her work, her tales of crunch runs and bug-hunts and release parties. I never had her knack for words, but she says she figured I was born to code, given how easily I would work my way around the parental locks on the old iPad she gave me when I was four. Rather than punish me, she asked colleagues to recommend stuff that would challenge me in constructive ways, with the result that I’d probably absorbed most of an undergrad comp-sci syllabus before my age got into double digits. When people asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I told them I was gonna make games, just like my mom.

That always earned a smile, the smile that adults reserve for precocious kids—but as the years passed, the smiles started to get a tinge of sadness to them.

I knew why, too. My mom never tried to squelch my dreams, but I followed the industry news just like any other wannabe dev, and I got to see how the statistics played out at a human scale every time my mom logged off for the day.

I never stopped wanting to make games, but I realised that I’d be wise not to specialise in that direction. As I made my way through high school, I watched the consolidation continue—watched developers disappear and be replaced by “orchestrators”, watched the distro platforms fill with an infinite sea of indistinguishable games. I saw first-party consoles and handhelds become common, and then effectively standard, in a matter of years. The datacenter boom had driven up the price of flops and RAM and made game-ready hardware hideously expensive—so when the big studios started sending out free machines to kids, locked to their content networks, the kids grabbed with both hands. After all, everything else had got expensive, too. As a distraction from the floods and fires and scandals in the newsfeeds, free entertainment in exchange for your behavioural data seemed like a good deal, I guess.

As soon as I finished high school, about three years ago, I started applying for work as a coder—but without qualifications, no one wanted to know. So I signed up for a comp-sci course at the local university, even though I could already do most of it blindfold, just so I’d have some credentials. I was bored by the end of the first week: assignments so simple you could just vibe the solutions with a cheap model and edit the comments a bit to make it look like your own work (which is what most of the other students were doing). So I started sneaking in on lectures for other courses, particularly engineering, just to keep my mind busy—and because I’d started to get curious about the hardware side of things.

That’s where I met Shaz. Pretty much the only other girl in a lecture theatre full of boys, dressed in the razorgoth style that was a thing at the time, she’d be slouched in the back row, hood up, eyes down, hammering notes into her second brain so hard that the lecturers used to complain about the noise of her mechanical keyboard… an uncanny combination of total focus and total DGAF. I was, to be honest, slightly scared of her, and would sit at the far end of the row to maximise the distance. But after a couple of weeks she cornered me in the corridor after a lecture.

“You’re not registered for the electronic engineering modules,” she said. Not a question, just a statement of fact.

I stammered something about how I wasn’t, no, and how I was sorry and I wouldn’t do it again.

“Why not? I’m not registered either. Lecturers don’t care. They’re happy to have people in the room, means they’re less likely to get laid off. You’re comp-sci, right? Why aren’t you there?”

“It’s too easy.”

She laughed. “Not so timid as you look, are you?”

“Guess not,” I said. “What are you registered for?”

“Digital arts. It’s OK, I guess? But the lecturers are about a decade behind the curve on hardware. Figured I’d have to learn it for myself.”

“Starting at the bottom, right?”

“Nah, that’s the problem—had to loop back to the bottom because I started in the middle. Picked up a bunch of tricks at the Toolshed, but hardware’s pretty unforgiving if you don’t understand the underlying principles. You can’t get by with vibes at the silicon and solder layer! So, back to school for me.”

“What’s the Toolshed?” I asked.

#

It’s not the most glamorous origin story, I guess, but that’s how I got inducted into the local art-house maker scene. Not even a formal association, it was named the Toolshed because—so Shaz explained—that was a more romantic label, if rather less accurate, than Annexe Of An Old Logistics Warehouse. The outer edge of the city had a lot of empty commercial space after the bubble burst in ‘28—still does, in fact—and the businesses still clinging on out there often had more space than they had disposable income. That meant that, if you found the right person in the right situation, a couple of dozen weirdos could each chuck them a few hundred kronor in cash per week, and they’d turn a blind eye to the unregistered and uninsured hack-space out back.

The Toolshed changed my life, no doubt about it. It turned out that I wasn’t so much poorly equipped for socialising, I just needed to find people who were into the same stuff as me. Coders, hackers and crackers, musicians, tech-art oddballs like Shaz, but also other artists of all sorts… what united the scene was the incurable urge to make stuff. And that’s what we did—sometimes late into the night and on into the morning if we really got rolling on something. Mom never complained that I started spending a lot of time out of the apartment; she even had my back when I got pipped a few times for missing compulsory lectures at uni. So long as I was doing what made me happy, she said, she didn’t mind. I’d thought at first she’d be freaked out by my Toolshed friends when they came by the apartment, because the way some of them dressed made Shaz look almost normcore, but I think she kinda liked it; they reminded her of old colleagues from the games business, I suppose.

Which makes sense, now I think about it, because there were other frustrated gamedevs at the Toolshed—kids who, like me, had grown up dreaming of a career in the games business, only to watch all the jobs evaporate under the white heat of generative tech and ruthless efficiency by the time they were old enough to work. Like similar groups all over the world, they’d found a good use for those proprietary consoles that the big studios sent out: jailbreaking them at the hardware level, and using them as the basis for weird, one-off entertainments with unique interfaces. The very latest tech would be kludged together with antique oddities found in junk shops or while dumpster-diving outside foreclosed businesses, and housed in the strangest enclosures possible. I remember a fad that ran for a whole winter, in which it seemed everyone was trying to build their machines into old vases and teapots—because why not, you know?

Party nights were usually play-test nights, but also philosophy sessions, when the more art-oriented Toolshedders liked to get drunk or high and argue about the distinction between play and games. Play was open-ended, as I understood it, but games were formalisations of play: play with rules, with externally-imposed conditions of victory and loss which (for some) made them tantamount to fascism. Then the older heads would start bellowing about Godwin’s Law and quoting memes from the old internet, and the art-school theorists would start throwing citations of long-dead French guys at one another… but most of us would be far too busy playing or gaming (or whichever it was), maybe staggering about under the weight of lash-up VR rigs in whatever procedural nightmare dimension Shaz and her collaborators had dreamed up that week, or perhaps trying desperately to solve a screenless puzzle that required the player to re-learn the entire alphabet in the form of chord shapes to be made with the non-dominant hand, as if performing the most complex air-guitar solo ever played. Every week there’d be something new, often built from the wreckage of whatever had been built the week before. Every evening was an adventure, I had friends and fun things to do, and I loved it.

For all the political posturing, most of the Toolshedders were motivated purely by the making itself—most, but not all. I was still angry, though I didn’t really understand it that way at the time, and a big part of the appeal of the various jailbreaks and mods we did was, for me, a vague sense that I was getting one back at the industry that broke my mom’s heart.

And that’s how I fell in with Cactus Jack.

#

Cactus Jack, last of the true crackers: that’s how he always introduced himself, though other members of the Toolshed sometimes described him in less flattering terms, when he wasn’t around to hear them. Jack was quite a bit older than the median membership; I guess in his late thirties, though I never asked. All I know is that to me, still at the tail end of my teens, he seemed almost impossibly old—very much an adult, while somehow lacking the trappings that usually came with that label, which (I realise, in hindsight) included things like a steady job, a family, or even a place to live.

Jack had a sort of legendary status with the next-oldest clade of Toolshedders, who were around a decade younger than him. Jack had been involved—or at least claimed to have been involved—in some fairly major exploits in his youth. He’d regale you for hours, if you let him, about Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, Microsoft’s monopolies and Sony’s rootkits, all this historical stuff about data wanting to be free. For most Toolshedders, computation as monopoly utility was a given, a battle lost so long ago it didn’t mean anything; they had their little tricks and hacks, ways of having fun out at the edges, but they had no expectation of changing “the system”, as Jack would call it.

I’d had no such expectation either, but Jack—perhaps recognising instinctively that I was more malleable than the others, more marked by my mother’s mistreatment— soon convinced me that the big studios deserved more payback than we were ever going to pull off by futzing around with their hardware give-aways, or making off-colour clones of their popular games and passing them around as freeware on what was left of the open internet.

“It’s not about the hardware, kid,” he’d say. “The real monopoly is the data. Always was. That’s how the hyperscalers got like that in the first place, and it’s how they keep everyone in the walled gardens: use people’s data to sell them whatever will keep them just satisfied enough to keep logging in, then make the cost of leaving just high enough that no on can get a serious alternative up and running.” He could go on like this for ages. “Exit, voice and loyalty,” that was one of his favourites. “It’s not even software, it’s politics at the level of code!”

I didn’t understand a lot of it, to tell the truth. It seemed just as opaque as the theory-fights on party-nights, full of fuzzy ambiguities and interpretation—all the stuff from which, for me, code was a refuge. But I picked up on Jack’s anger, just as I think he picked up on mine… and I was too naive, perhaps, to maintain a polite distance from someone who, while not exactly a bad person, was definitely troubled.

Which is why, when he proposed that we raid the servers of one of the biggest game studios and leak all of their datasets and models to the open internet, I said yes.

#

For all the lingering glamour that comes with the term, “hacking” is just like any other sort of programming; the main difference is whether you’ve got permission and authority to do whatever it is you’re trying to do. I’d never thought of myself as a hacker prior to my joining the Garage, and even after I still identified much more strongly with the idea of being an artist.

But I knew all the stuff that a good hacker needs to know: how systems worked, where they were strong and where they were weak, how to switch things on and off, and—crucially—how to clean up behind yourself, so that no one knows you’ve been there in the first place. I’d never given much thought to using these skills in a destructive way, though I guess the media archetypes must have primed me for the possibility. But there’s one excuse I don’t have, which is that I knew from the outset that what Jack was proposing was illegal. I knew it, but I somehow didn’t think it through.

In my defence, though, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think it was easy to overlook that, because so much of what we did at the Toolshed was technically illegal, too. Every proprietary console we broke open had labels telling us that they remained in some respect the property of the companies who’d sent them out: that they were rented rather than owned, and contained trade secrets that we were not entitled to. Likewise the games we ripped off were plastered with legal notices, on the splash screens and in the code comments, to much the same effect: this stuff all belonged to other people, and we weren’t supposed to be messing with it.

But we were messing with it, as were similar groups of weirdos in pretty much every city on the planet, and nothing much ever came of it—presumably because nothing we were doing could ever do much damage to the position of the big firms. We were like kids turning on the fire hydrants in hot weather: sure, you could go out and bust them for it, but why risk making yourself look like the bad guy? Let ‘em have their bit of fun; less effort than clamping down, anyway.

Leaking a big dataset, however, was the sort of thing that could seriously upset the balance of power between the big companies—and I knew that, because Cactus Jack told me so. For him, that was the whole point of the exercise. I guess that for me “the balance of power” was still too abstract an idea to really grasp. What might it have meant, to damage or even take down a company that was more powerful than a lot of nations? I had no idea; I still don’t, really. But it sounded like it might hurt the sort of people who I blamed for hurting my mother, and that sounded good to me.

I’ll not go into the details here; after all, you already know how it turned out, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

Jack lived up to his label by physically working his way into the local branch office of a big studio—quite how, I’m not sure, but he was a champion lock-picker, and I’m pretty sure that a guy who looked like he slept in the paint-shop of an old factory (as he did) would have struggled to social-engineer his way in. He came back with what he believed were the login credentials for one of the studio’s server farms, which he and I would attack from two directions at once. He’d be the distraction, doing the metaphorical equivalent of knocking over vases and treading on the tails of guard-dogs; once he’d drawn the attention of the security systems, I’d slip in by the side door, slurp down the data to a freshly-formatted drive array, cover my tracks and be gone before they even knew what had happened.

I guess he wasn’t prepared for the changes in security systems since his heyday, because he’d barely been logged in for ten seconds before he was spotted and booted from the system. Perhaps he simply wasn’t ever as good as he’d claimed he was, I don’t know. What I do know is that I never even got a chance to start my “run”, as Jack had put it, and that Jack was still arguing with the audience of Toolshedders who’d gathered to watch our act of folly when, less than seven minutes after he’d logged in to the system, a van full of cops turned up outside the factory, kicked in the door, and ran in with guns drawn.

#

Jack didn’t rat me out. In fact, he quite proudly claimed to have single-handedly masterminded the entire operation—as well as a number of other even more spectacular crimes from previous years, possibly entirely fictitious— while the cops were putting the cuffs on him.

I ratted myself out, instead.

#

As you know, I was acquitted: extenuating circumstances, according to my lawyer, but Jack claimed all through the trial that I had nothing to do with it, which made things hard for the prosecution. It has been pointed out that for the jury to take the more unhinged of the two defendants at their word was an odd choice; it feels even more odd to me, and part of my purpose in writing this story has been to set the record straight, even if it doesn’t change the outcome. I didn’t steal anything or do any damage—but I never got the chance. I still believe I would have done it, had the chance arrived, though I wouldn’t do it now.

They threw the book at Jack, but his unpreparedness saved him from the worst: he never got the chance to cause any damage on the servers, and apparently he was slick enough on the physical break-in that there was no evidence on which to build a charge, other than his confession. They put him on remand, but I’m told he’s also getting some support to deal with his issues. I’ve chosen to interpret that in the most positive way I can imagine.

My mom was furious—even more so after I stupidly told her that I’d thought I was doing it for her. She’d known people like Jack in her youth, I think; the games industry was pretty wild west, once upon a time, and that hacker mindset is never far away when you get a bunch of devs in the same room. But she was always a white-hat sort of person herself, and she’d tried to raise her girl to be the same. She’s forgiven me now, I think, but I’m not sure she’ll ever forget it.

These days I’m back at the Toolshed—though the Toolshed had to relocate. The cops decided not to charge any of the rest of the crew, though they made it clear to the people we’d been “renting” from that they had better stop it. So we went legit, found a cheap space in one of those empty office buildings down in Hyllie. We can’t party like we used to, but that’s probably for the best.

I should have my comp-sci degree by summer, though I’m guessing that my reputation as the most inept hacker ever isn’t going to help my employment prospects much. The market’s still flooded anyway: one job for every five qualified coders, they reckon.

I’m not sure what I’ll do. All I know is that I love making things. Maybe my mom had it right all along: you go as far as you can with making a career out of the thing you love, but when you run out of road, you stop running. To be paid for your art is a privilege—but if you keep making things even when no one’s paying you, that’s the mark of the true artist.

SOURCE SCENARIO: THE FEW

In the year 2036, digital games are designed by “orchestrators”—teams of veteran game directors, working with psychologists, monetisation specialists, architects—to keep players engaged as long as possible. The industry is dominated by an oligopoly: a few big corporations which have control over technologies that enhance productivity, enabling them to produce high quality games that bring a positive experience for the player, with fewer developers, and faster than anyone else. Access to these tools is gated, and not every idea makes it to development: only the approved elite teams get the full freedom of expression.

The industry is careful to protect its advantages and retain its client base, and market data on player habits and preferences is a critical resource, jealously guarded and fought over. The tools of creation have progressed to target deep immersion and human-centric design, providing premium quality over technical gimmicks.

Only games that are emotionally resonant get to be released on the first-party platforms of the oligopoly—the standard, proprietary hardware made available to consumers as both key and condition of access to the games. These are provided directly to young people in hope of securing their loyalty to the platform early on.

This enables a fairly effective mainstream market, which moves quickly enough and with sufficient sympathy to keep the majority of player communities onboard and playing—though not everyone is content. The availability of “infinite content” is resulting in a sort of attention fatigue, with some players doomscrolling through an endless sea of options.

Meanwhile, at the edges of the industry, grassroots player/creator groups have formed a loose counterculture that tries to push for better representation and more access to production tools. In response to resource scarcity, hardware restrictions and the publishing monopoly of the first-party platforms, a pirate “creation” scene has sprung up, producing games that don’t serve “the few”; these developers create in their spare time, making up for inefficiency with vision and passion.

Finance and access to platforms are their main obstacles; the jailbreaking of first-party devices is common, as is the building of one-shot custom machines or the maintenance of obsolete computers from an earlier era. There is little real risk in this rebellion—the oligopoly has no fear for its markets—but there is little to be gained, either, at least financially. While some pirates still dream of tearing down the system, most are content to simply make their weird little projects and share them with their friends.