He Smirked, Called Me “The Family’s IT Girl,”

twenty-three when they pulled me out of Signals and parked me in a basement at Fort Meade because I beat a red-team colonel during an internal exercise so badly he accused me of cheating. I hadn’t cheated. He’d reused a lazy packet signature from a paper he’d published three years earlier. I noticed. He didn’t like that.

A month later I sat across from continue reading …