Nik Anderson's Questionnaire

Isn't 'Where do you live?' one of those questions that kids aren't supposed to answer?

Nah, I'm just fucking with you, I'll answer. I live in Chicago, and I live there because it's where my parents live. Sure, with my resources I could probably split before I turn 18 and be alright on my own, but why would I want to do that? Chicago's nice, anyway. I mean, any big city is pretty great for a tech nerd, but there's plenty of stuff to do here.

We've got a nice enough place. The apartment isn't anything too special, we don't live up in a penthouse suite or anything like that. Can you even imagine that? But it's comfortable and safe, and we all have a little bit of space for ourselves, and that's enough for me. For now.

Well, I get a bit of an allowance from my parents for helping out around the apartment. Like a lot of teenagers. But there's also the money I get from bug bounties, when I feel like it's worth collecting for a vulnerability instead of keeping it to myself. Most of them don't pay out a ton, but it adds up.

I don't really spend it on much. Little things that I need but don't want to go to my parents for. Video games and upgrades for my computer. New tech, provided it isn't a pile of privacy violating garbage, which a lot of it is these days.

Ah, here we go. The big question.

So, information wants to be free, yeah? We can agree on that? If not, doesn't matter, because this is my answer, not yours. Useful information naturally finds its way to the public eventually. New technologies, improved skills, trade secrets. None of it can be kept secret forever, because people are bad at keeping secrets in the long term. Incidentally, that's also one way you can be sure that a lot of conspiracy theories are bunk. There's no way that many people could keep a secret that huge for that long. But anyway, information wants to be free. But powerful people don't want it to be, so there's a conflict there. And I want to give the information a little helping paw.

How far would I go? Certainly, I'll happily break into any network to get their secrets. That's kinda my thing. Killing for it? I don't know about that. Conflict is inevitable, I did just mention the powerful people I'm up against, but at the same time... Information doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from people. Killing someone destroys the information they hold too. Consider it an absolute worst case scenario. I don't like the idea of it, but if it's a matter of self-defense, well, I'll do what I have to.

I certainly don't want to die for this. I want to enjoy the library I hope to create. But the project is so much bigger than me, so if I have to risk it...I might.

That's pretty easy. Inadequately supervised time on the Internet. People say it's dangerous for kids, and they're not wrong, but it's also how I got my skills. They'll teach you some programming in schools, but they don't teach you how to hack, how to look for vulnerabilities everywhere you go, or how to work people to get them to do what you want. To learn those, you have to fall in with the right kind of wrong crowd.

I'm not trying to romanticize it, I know things could've gone a lot worse for me than they did. But they didn't, and I got to learn some pretty useful skills. Skills that I can now supercharge thanks to the Contract.

Well, obviously, there's my parents. Angela and Roger, though obviously I never call them that, they're just mom and dad to me. I'm a lot closer to mom than I am to dad, but they're both pretty cool. For parents.

There's also my little brother, Aaron. He's kinda the best. He's eight years younger than me, and even though he doesn't really get the whole hacking thing, he's still always happy to listen to me talk about computers and tech stuff. And in turn, I'm happy to listen to him talk about legos or soccer or the games he's into this week. He's got way more friends IRL than I did at his age, and I couldn't be prouder of him.

And I guess I have to give a shoutout to Loki, too. Loki1337, but everyone calls him Loki. He's my best friend online, though I'm aware I probably shouldn't trust a hacker who named himself after the most famous trickster god. Everything he's aid seems to check out, though. He's around my age, we swap tips and tricks when we aren't just chatting about school and games and whatever else. He's pretty good, but I don't think his goals are anywhere near as ambitious as mine.

Was? Heh. My childhood has been pretty good by any objective measure. I've already introduced my parents. My mom is an accountant, and my dad is an electrical engineer. They're both nice and supportive and all that stuff, though my mom ends up doing a lot more with my brother and me than my dad does. Though he does like to talk electronics with me. I guess maybe that's where I got some of my tech interests from.

Of course I go to school! But whether or not I fit in depends on how you define fitting in. I get along with the band kids and the goths and the other computer geeks, but we all sorta more or less voluntarily keep apart from the more popular cliques. Of course, some of the so-called popular kids are computer geeks too, and they'll come hang out and talk shop with us from time to time. And some of the kids in the band are pretty popular outside of it too. Does that mean I fit in? I dunno. I don't feel like I do, but I don't really care whether or not I do either. I know who my friends are, and that's enough.

Mmmm...not really?

I've had a few crushes, but that's not quite the same thing, is it? One was on a straight boy, so that was doomed from the start. I've had a couple on some girls in my classes, but I don't really know them that well because we hang out in completely different groups, so I haven't told them about it. And honestly I'm not sure that I really want to. Because, like, I think they're cute, but we don't talk much or have much in common besides school, so there doesn't seem to be all that much to work with, you know?

And then there's the one girl I met recently. She's cute and we share a lot of interests, but...I dunno! We'll see.