Darknet.  This means almost nothing to people, but to hackers, criminals, and psychopaths it is a way of life and business.  The darknet is what makes up 96% of what is on the internet, and the other 4% is what is known as the surface web.  The surface web is what everyone can access on a day to day basis like checking e-mails or Facebook, but not everyone can access the darknet.  Only people that know of tor browser and .onion black sites can access them, and even then, it is extremely dangerous and should not be taken as a joke.  It’s all fun and games to mess around on and see some classified government files or get access to games that aren’t even being announced by the designers, but experienced hackers are just waiting to catch a little script kiddie wondering around on the darknet and steal everything they own and everything their family owns, or worse, steal the kiddie themselves and sell them on the slave trade. 
Cody and I knew all of this, of course, and took necessary precautions to ensure that we were safe.  We did all of our work at Cody’s house because my parents weren’t too keen on me using technology.  We set our job computers, as we called them, on a separate power grid to prevent hackers from hacking into any technology in Cody’s house.  Our job, as we called it, was hacking into big corporations and then telling them the flaws in their security.  This required us to go through the darknet and find the hidden backdoors of the corporation.  Sometimes we would find things that didn’t have anything to do with the corporations, but most of the time, it was just some mafia’s trade site or something like that.  Most of the time we would just send a DDoS attack to overload their server and shut it down, or we anonymously sent the address to the FBI and they would shut it down, we would get a fairly substantial reward for this.  But that's not why I’m writing this, Cody and I have discovered something huge, something that would change our lives for ever.
My name is Evan, and I’m 17 years old, I go to highschool like any other teenager.  My best friend is named Dakota, but everyone (including me) calls him Cody.  One Friday, Cody and I went to school like any other day.  When lunch rolled around, we were getting ready to go to my house to eat, but we were stopped by a girl named Lacy Akimoto.  She was originally from Japan, but came to the U.S. because of her parents work, and she became an instant super star with the entire school.  Cody had a huge obsession with this girl.  I don't know if it was because she was foreign or what, because she was totally out of his league, but I guess she knew of Cody since she liked to talk to him every now and again.  Most of the time when she did talk to him, it was to ask him for help with her laptop, since she broke it a lot.  If I had the money her dad had to buy her the kind of things she had, I would never have to worry about computer components again. 
Anyways I got off track again, Lacy was asking Cody for help with her laptop, no surprise, tuning back into their conversation.  “Do I have a virus?” she asked.
“It’s hard to tell now, I could get a definite answer if I had my equipment, but I would have to take it to my house, I can fix it over lunch and get it back to you by 5th period”
Cody was lying he had no equipment, if she did have a virus he could just run bios and figure it out fairly quickly, but he wanted a reason for her to talk to him tomorrow no doubt.  Surprisingly Lacy was ok with it, and responded “That’s fine can you get it to me asap, if my dad finds out I broke another one he might not get me a new one” she said. 
“Oh yea I’ll have it running like new before your dad suspects a thing.” Cody said with one of the biggest smiles I think I have ever seen his face put on.
I had to interrupt before she got creeped out, “Well that’s fine and everything but if we want time to eat we better get going” I said motioning cody towards the door.
“Ok bye Cody and uh..”
“Evan, we have like 4 classes together..”
“Oh yeeeaaa, Evan, bye”
Finally getting out of that nightmare of a conversation, Cody and I went to my house, the entire time he babbled on about Lacy.  I finally was fed up with it and decided to break the news to him.  “You know she’s just using you right?” 
“What are you crazy she totally digs me” he replied as he pulled into my driveway.  My parents were both away at work, so they wouldn’t bother us, my parents were very anti-technology after the FBI came to them asking about an attempted hack on their network.  I did because Cody dared me too, he didn’t think I’d actually get access into the network.  The feds didn’t get much out of my parents, they left and never came back. 
Cody liked to eat lunch at my place because the wifi was faster and my house was closer to his, we both kept our pc’s at his place because of the FBI incident, and we also took extra precautions at Cody’s place to make sure the pc’s were unhackable.  Later, we made sandwiches and sat down to take a look at Lacy’s laptop.  It was a new hp flip which definitely cost a pretty penny.  “What do you think is wrong with it” I asked
“I don’t know it’s hard to say with these new systems, sometimes the hardware and software doesn’t communicate too well.”
“You know you could have just told her to go to her previous ios software and fixed the problem, that way we could be grinding at WOW right now instead of wasting your time on this girl,”  I said hoping he’d say you know what you're right I’ll give up my useless efforts and come help you beat the goblin king, but what he said was not what I hoped or expected.  “Yea I know but do you honestly think she would know how to do that, besides I have a different reason for doing this, do you know what her dad does for a living?” Cody said.
“No,” I replied curious.
“Exactly no one does not even Mrs. Brown who knows everything about everyone” He said.  I didn’t really like where this was going.
“Cody hacking without permission is illegal, remember we said only to do it legally after the FBI incident.”
“I know but it’s killing me, and besides we basically have permission when we’re his daughter.” The gleam in his eye when he said this made me want to punch him but he couldn’t do this without my help and I didn’t want him to get caught and sued by the dad of the girl of his dreams, besides her dad can’t be like the leader of the Yakuza or something, right? 
Our plan was to go onto her bank site and see if she shared a bank account with her family, and sure enough she did and wow I knew her family was rich, but since I couldn’t count the number of zeros on some of the withdrawls her father made, I fell in love with her too.  Cody thought the same thing but said it with a whistle and said, “Look at some of the names on here, I’m going to google one.” 
The results were terrifying, the checks were made out to big Japanese corporations.  He was paying off the companies for the Yakuza so they could smuggle cargo through their company.  We scoured over everything we could but our lunch was over and we were going to be late to 5th period.  While we were packing up getting ready to head out Lacy’s laptop screen all of a sudden went black then a message popped up saying if you tell my daughter I will end you, and that was it.  We went into full panic mode we had no clue how he did it, but we had a pretty good idea of who it was.  Frantically running to the car and speeding to school.  In the car I began screaming, “how’d he do that, he must have an entire team of hackers working for him, what were we thinking!” 
“If we just do as he said we’ll be fine, right?”
“Yea, right”  With that little amount of confidence we went to class.  We couldn’t stop looking at the clock, we were going to give Lacy her laptop back after class.  As soon as the bell rung we hopped up grabbed are stuff and took off to find Lacy.  On the way out the door something caught my eye, I turned and looked to the entrance and seen four huge men in black suits, I locked eyes with one and he smiled and and began speaking to the others and pointing to us.  I took off running and grabbed Cody.  He fought it at first and said, “I know your freaked out but were fine.”
“Oh yea then look behind us!”  The color drained from his face when he seen the for men and with a voice I had never heard come out of Cody before he said, “We need to find Lacy.”
We took off to her locker and luckily she was still there gathering her things, but she was about to leave when Cody yelled,  “Lacy!”  We ran up panting and pulling out her laptop and giving it to her before we had even stopped running.  “Here you go, it’s all fixed, now we gotta go, bye!” Cody said not stopping, he ran into a man and fell onto his butt.  “Oh sorry, I didn’t see you there.”  When he looked up he almost fainted, it was one of the men chasing us, Lacy came up and said “Sorry, daddy, this is Cody, he’s the one I told you fixed my laptop.”
“Oh really,” the man said, I thought I was going to pee myself when he said, “How would you guys like a job, I need people that are good with computers to help me catch some people that have been hacking into my company” with the biggest smiles on our faces, tears almost in our eyes, we said, “Sure!”