The Cipher Knight

Rain tapped against the small window of Room 2B, the cheapest room in the worst dorm on campus. The heater formed a loud noise every few minutes, and the Wi-Fi was slow unless you hacked it yourself.

This is what Jay did, and Jay Elric wasn’t the cool type. He didn’t play sports, including partying because he didn’t have designer shoes or gym clothes. He religiously wore an old black hoodie and always looked like he hadn’t slept enough. Because most nights, he hadn’t.

Jay is studying cybersecurity major at Silverton Tech, holding on by scholarship money, leftover pizza, and tutoring freshmen in Python and digital forensics. He lives alone, talked to almost no one, and avoided group projects like a virus. The majority of people view him as weird, quiet, or maybe just rude.

But Jay had a secret, and sometimes, he heard voices but not voices like someone going crazy. Real thoughts from other people’s thoughts. Sometimes, a whisper and other times noises people made in their thoughts. It began at the age of thirteen, after a fever that nearly killed him. Since then, he could tune into minds like radio stations. If he focused, he could even send thoughts. He didn’t tell anyone because who would believe him?.

Jay had learned early to fake normal to keep his eyes low and not to react to thoughts that weren’t said aloud. Still, some days, the noise was too much—stress, anger, anxiety pouring from the heads around him like static. And that’s when the trouble usually started.

It was Thursday, and Jay had just left his late-night lab class. The hoodie pulled up and headphones in—though they weren’t playing anything. He used them to block people from talking to him or trying to. As he turned the corner toward the dorm, he felt it before it happened. Three minds behind him they were loud, amused, and bored, which was the worst combination.

Chaz, Nolan, and Ryder.

They were juniors from the athletics program, full of protein powder and empty thoughts. They hated people like Jay who are quiet, strange and too smart. Especially when they knew Jay had hacked into the school’s firewall to fix his tuition glitch last year. Rumor had it, and Jay could break into anything.

"Yo, hoodie boy," Chaz called out.

Jay didn’t turn.

"Still think you’re better than everyone just ‘cause you talk to computers?" Nolan added.

Jay kept walking he didn’t feed it, and he told himself don’t give them what they wanted.

But Ryder jogged ahead and blocked his path, arms crossed. “We asked you a question, freak.”

Jay’s eyes scanned them—lean muscle, smug faces, fake confidence hiding fear. He picked up the edges of their thoughts like broken glass.

“He’s nothing. It's just a rat in a hoodie.”

“I bet he cries when no one’s watching.”

“Would be funny if we trashed his laptop…”

Jay clenched his fists but said nothing. Then Ryder grabbed his backpack.

"Hey!" Jay snapped, spinning back.

“Oh, now he speaks,” Chaz laughed, yanking the pack open. “Let’s see what the genius is hiding.”

Jay’s laptop clattered to the wet pavement and the screen cracked. He froze and panic tightened his chest because that laptop was his life, his tool, and his world.

“Oops,” Ryder said with a smirk.

Jay’s hands burned with anger, not just regular anger—something deeper, sharper, and it was something that wanted out.

Their thoughts spiked with amusement. “He’s not gonna do anything. He never does.”

But this time, something changed.

Jay looked straight at Ryder. Focused.

Stop.

The thought wasn’t spoken. It was sent.

Ryder blinked and stumbled backward, clutching his head. “What the—?”

Jay didn’t move.

Leave. Now.

The message hit them all like a hammer with Nolan gasping, and Chaz looked sick. Their minds twisted with confusion and a sudden, sharp fear they couldn’t explain.

“Let’s go,” Chaz muttered, dragging Ryder away. “Dude’s crazy.”

Jay stood there, rain soaking his hoodie, breath shaky.

He had never responded to bullies like that before, as well as forcing his voice into someone else’s mind with such power, and it scared him a lot. But it worked, then he crouched, picked up his cracked laptop, and walked home without a word. Back in Room 2B, Jay sat on his bed, the old springs creaking beneath him. The laptop still worked barely with the screen having a spiderweb of cracks in the corner, and one key was loose.

He sighed and plugged it in, and the old machine blinked to life, and his custom system loaded. A black window opened, lines of code crawling across like ants on a wall. Jay slipped into his second life: the one where he was Mindfire, an anonymous hacker and digital ghost. The one where he wasn’t bullied and wasn’t powerless.

He opened a folder titled “Dark Streams”, his current project. It was a file dump he’d found last week while bouncing through backdoors in shady pharmaceutical servers. Nothing huge yet just strange transfers, odd location logs, and weird encryption on basic invoices.

But something didn’t feel right where he tapped a few keys and decrypted a line of code. A map appeared followed by then a name, which is Virexon Corp, and Jay’s fingers stopped.

That was a big company that is a tech security firm with branches across the country. They had donated to Silverton Tech last year. He remembered their logo on the banners during the scholarship dinner that he went to previously. So why were their shipments overlapping with known drug-trade hotspots?

Jay zoomed in on one of the coordinates. A warehouse that was empty on paper but, according to the live data, it had power and motion every night.

“What are you hiding…” he whispered.

Then, his screen blinked.

Not glitched. Not flickered. Blanked.

Lines of red text appeared, not from him.

[We see you, Mindfire nice work tonight.]

Jay’s heart jumped because no one was supposed to know that name, no one. Another line blinked into view.

[You’re not alone we’ve been watching, too.]

[ And we think you’re ready.]

And then one final message:

[Do you want to burn the whole system down?]

Jay stared at the screen.

The cursor blinked, waiting.

Rain kept tapping the window.

And somewhere, deep in the back of his mind, the voices whispered…

It begins.