Chapter 1

I spent twenty years doing IT for Cisco. After I retired, I spent seven years fixing my neighbors’ computers for free.

I never charged a single cent. I even paid out of my own pocket for replacement parts dozens of times.

But then, because I refused to recover her son’s hard drive data for free, the woman downstairs, Linda Miller, reported me to the Bureau of Consumer Affairs. She claimed I was running an unlicensed repair business.

I was fined three thousand dollars and ordered to cease and desist. I didn’t argue. I paid the fine and locked my toolkit that same night.

Four days later, her son’s old laptop hard drive completely bit the dust. It contained all the code for his first freelance contract―a thirty-thousand-dollar project due the day after tomorrow.

The local data recovery centers quoted him thirty-five hundred dollars with a two-week turnaround. She had personally sabotaged the only person in the city who could have saved that data in three days.

1.

My name is Artie Chen. I’ve lived in this apartment complex for nine years.

I spent twenty years in IT operations at Cisco―servers, networking, data recovery―I’ve handled it all. I retired at fifty-three, but I couldn’t sit still, so I started helping neighbors with their tech issues.

It started with setting up a router for Harvey across the hall. Soon, the whole building knew. Routers, blue screens of death, OS reinstalls, data migration, WiFi drops―there was a steady stream of work for seven years.

I never took a dime for it.

I replaced dozens of ethernet connectors and restored countless systems. I even bought three used hard drives with my own money for an elderly couple who were struggling. Harvey told me I was a sucker. I told him I just needed to stay busy.

Last Friday afternoon, Linda Miller stopped me in the lobby.

“Artie! My WiFi is down again. Come take a look.”

Linda lives on the fifth floor. She’s forty-three and works as a cashier at the grocery store. Her husband ran off ten years ago, leaving her to raise her son, Leo, alone. Leo is twenty-five and writes code for freelance projects at home.

I grabbed my toolkit and headed down. The WiFi issue was simple―the router plug was loose. I pushed it back in, and the lights blinked to life.

As I was leaving, I noticed Leo’s laptop on the coffee table. It was an old Asus from five years ago. The exhaust vent was hot enough to fry an egg, and the fan was screaming like a jet engine about to stall.

I reached over and ran a quick drive diagnostic tool. When the SMART data popped up, my stomach dropped.

Reallocated Sector Count: 426.

C4 Reallocation Event Count: 189.

“Leo,” I called out toward his room. “How long have you been using this drive?”

Leo walked out, his glasses reflecting the glow of his monitors. “Five years, maybe? Why, Mr. Chen?”

“Your reallocated sectors are over four hundred. The drive is barely hanging on by using its spare sectors. Once those are gone, your data is toast. Where are your project files?”

“C drive. On the desktop.”

I glanced at his screen. The “Project Polaris” folder was over fourteen gigabytes, sitting right there on the desktop. No backup partition, no cloud sync icons, not even an external drive. Windows Backup was disabled.

“You don’t have a backup?”

“Nah. The computer has always been fine.”

My blood pressure spiked. “The SMART status is screaming at you. C4 is at one-eighty-nine. This thing could die any second. Move your project to an external drive or the cloud right now. Tomorrow at the latest.”

Leo pushed up his glasses. “Got it, Mr. Chen. I’ll do it later.”

“Don’t do it later,” I said, looking him dead in the eye. “The hardware won’t wait for you.”

Linda came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands. “Artie, quit scaring the boy.”

“Oh, Leo, ignore him. Artie’s been in IT so long he thinks every computer is a ticking time bomb.”

I was about to leave when I saw the USB port on the side of the laptop. There was a small black thumb drive plugged in, its casing worn white.

I had given that to Leo three years ago.

It was a 32GB Kingston. I had unboxed it myself and plugged it in for him.

“Are you still using that thumb drive?”

Leo glanced at it. “Oh, that. It’s been plugged in forever. I haven’t touched it.”

I pulled it out and plugged it into my diagnostic tablet. The drive read fine, but the auto-backup software had zero logs. History: Empty. Last backup: Never.

That drive had been sitting there for three years, and he hadn’t used it once. I shoved it back into his laptop.

“Right now, this instant,” I said, enunciating every word. “Copy that project folder to this thumb drive. Right-click, copy, paste. It takes three seconds. Then turn on Windows Backup.”

Leo scratched his head. “Sure, I’ll get to it after I finish this module.”

I didn’t say another word. After twenty years in tech, I knew the scariest thing wasn’t a system crash―it was a user who thought they were smarter than the system.

Linda saw me to the door. As I stepped into the hall, she muttered, “If anything actually happens, you can just come fix it then, Artie.”

I paused for a second. I didn’t look back.