Ji-Sung knows that he and his wife barely fit in. He was recruited for his talents and brought undercover into the USA.

It's not just that they are the only Koreans. It's also that neither he nor Da-Som, his gorgeous wife, was ready, willing, or open to naturism.

With the others, it was a big fuss for months! They even began sleeping in the mountain to avoid any issues. After all, they were in the USA illegally, so what did it change? They couldn't serve as cover anyway.

Well, they got to Da-Som first. Of course they did. She was always socially weaker than he was, not that he would ever admit that to her.

He was a loner; she wanted friends. And slowly, while learning English and making friends, she realized that naturism was a way to be wholesome. To be yourself. To be with others on an equal basis.

And she always liked the sun! He could spend days or weeks indoors, but not her.

So she conceded, and she loved it. Enough to ask to be reassigned to a job at the resort so she wouldn't need to get dressed to get to work.

To Ji-Sung, that was a great betrayal. He ignored her for weeks! Crying himself to sleep.

On her birthday, she came to find him. She didn't put on clothes, and he saw her.

In South Korea, there is an obsession with pale skin, so he only ever saw Da-Som with almost a porcelain white complexion.

That day, after weeks of working under the sun, he saw her glorious tan and fell in love once more.

He celebrated her birthday with her in the house that was supplied for them and in which he barely lived.

Slowly, he tanned too, and soon enough, he realized that he was merely reacting to old programming in his mind that no longer served any purpose.

A sort of "only I can see my wife nude" patriarchy that made him possessive and jealous. Couple that with an inferiority complex about his lack of muscles, and that made him tense, cranky, and, frankly, unproductive.

But that was a while ago. Now, he was Cassian's favorite network security penetration specialist.

That morning, he was invited by Cassian himself. In Korean, which Cassian forced himself to learn to show his commitment to Ji-Sung.

Darian was the project manager today. Ji-Sung didn't know him well, but at least Ji-Sung's boss, Catherine, was present.

Ji-Sung was always sad for her. Single, he once asked her why she wasn't married.

"I am aromantic, Ji-Sung", but he couldn't understand that. He thought she said "a romantic".

He is functional business-wise with English and getting better, but the subtleties? Well, being a loner, he mostly speaks with his wife. In Korean.

"Thank you everyone", says Darian. "A few months ago, we discovered an organization that sold student loan forgiveness packages. They would charge anything between 10% and 20% of the remaining balance and then pay the rest."

"How is that financially possible?" says Catherine.

"It's not. We discovered that they managed to get secure access to the databases managing the loan balance, so they could basically forgive loans without leaving a trace."

"Seriously?" says Catherine.

"Yes. Now, we don't know how they do it, but we recently got into our possession the keys to the servers where their hacking software resides."

Cassian speaks up. "We need Ji-Sung to go in discreetly and figure out not how they do it, but how we can exploit their exploit for our purposes."

"What do we have?" Says Catherine.

"VPN credentials, local IP address, and an SSH key."

Ji-Sung speaks up. "Then easy peasy", he says, an expression he learns and abuses.

"We are afraid the VPN might be honeypotted or something."

Catherine speaks up. "It could be, and we can't know for sure."

Ji-Sung speaks up. "But I can clean up. Even if they get an alarm, once I am in..."

Catherine smiles at him. She knows he is the best.

"So, I have an air-gapped fresh laptop, a USB key with the stolen credentials, and a satellite relay. Is that all you needed?"

"Sure, and our special USB key."

Darian picked up a box and gave it to Ji-Sung.

After initializing Linux, the organization only uses Linux laptops for this purpose. He takes his USB installation key and sets up the various tools he needs. He will not use any auto-installers and instead use specific custom versions of SSH to work.

It also includes the satellite relay drivers, which he coded himself to easily bounce via multiple providers in a multi-hop process, all automated.

Once online, he gets from Darian the credentials. He studies them carefully.

"I see a few root accesses," says Ji-Sung.

"We noticed."

But what Ji-Sung noticed is that Cassian isn't leaving. That's unusual.

He is usually so busy that he will be there for the introduction and leave once the work starts. Not today.

Ji-Sung connects to the VPN, and to his surprise, it works.

If he had better English skills or if he had been asked his opinion, he would have explained that once credentials are compromised, they are usually voided, but in this case, they worked!

He keeps to himself that this is not normal. It's too easy.

Once in, he scans the network and compares the list of IPs with those supplied. Apart from the router, he finds one extra IP and gets the MAC address. It's the VPN device. One he knows.

He dictates the information to Catherine, who notes everything in a paper notebook.

That server is kept for last; time might be of the essence, so he connects to the IP that speaks to him the most, which has a root login.

Once in, he starts digging. It's a Debian; it's slightly out of date, but not by much. It doesn't have Internet access at all, and the home directory is empty. A list of users reveals nothing.

And yet, DF shows plenty of space taken.

Before doing a DU, which may take time, he dives into /opt and finds plenty of weird directories.

Taking no chances, he starts a download and connects to a second root server.

Another Debian, and in opt, different weird directories.

One by one, he starts the downloads until he runs out of root user servers.

The first specific user server connects, but once in, all he finds is a PHP application.

He decides to use Firefox to connect to that IP, and he gets a login prompt. Good.

After digging in the source, he finds a MySQL database login and hooks a tunnel to directly dump the database to his laptop. He does the same for the PHP application, which is based on Laravel 10. A little old, but fine.

Once done, he finds the user table. It's not even complex to quickly insert, in his local version, a skip on the password check and log in to the panel.

When he says he is in, an HDMI cable is plugged in, and soon enough, he is mirroring the application on the projector in the room.

More people are brought in. Not one takes the laptop from him, but Ji-Sung starts getting requests for more exploration, and between them, he connects to other servers and resumes downloading, including a large Python application on the only server in the lot that has an outgoing internet connection.

When he finally has everything downloaded, he doesn't ask permission. He starts hacking the VPN server and erases all traces of his visits, as well as using a little script he wrote that cleans his login and bash logs from each of the servers.

Once done, he just disconnects the connection, copies all the files to a new USB RAID 1 HDD drive array that was brought during the process, and once completed, turns off the laptop, most likely for the last time. It will get shredded into confetti.

He is thanked by Cassian and leaves with Catherine, without the hardware, only his own USB installation key, which had been removed before the connection to the VPN and the insertion of their USB key. It was safe.

"Great work in there, Ji-Sung. You cleaned up; you got everything. It's possible we might not need to connect ever again."

"No worries."

She put her hand on his shoulder.

"I am giving you the rest of the day off. So find your wife and go relax with her in the pool, or in your house, or whatever. "

"Thank you!"

She nodded. This was a major score.