Mines don't produce gold—they produce the corpses of ambition.
Montana, where the air was dry, the mountains silent, and the electricity cheap.
When Elena Carter arrived at dawn, the mist still clung to the ground. Dressed in a black leather jacket, she carried a backpack holding two Raspberry Pi devices and an old ASUS laptop.
Like a lone wolf from another realm, she stepped onto the cracked concrete outside the mining facility.
She stood before the roaring complex of machines, eyeing the warning sign at the entrance:
Unauthorized personnel prohibited. Violators assume all consequences.
She smiled. This time, she would let the "unauthorized" rule the entire game.
The mine's owner was Ray Carlson: military veteran, former NSA security consultant, and an early Bitcoin miner who now controlled Montana's largest private mining operation, Blackrock Mining Pool. No one knew how much money he had, only that he trusted no banks—just cold wallets.
Elena, armed with knowledge from her "past life," had contacted his right-hand man through the dark web—Andrew Gold, a tech junkie obsessed with cyberpunk and chain-vaping.
They met at a rundown local bar. Andrew eyed her, blowing a plume of vapor toward the ceiling.
"You claim you can boost Blackrock's mining efficiency by 30% in 96 hours?"
Elena pulled an SD card from her bag and slapped it onto the table.
"30%? I can make you mine more coins with less power—and slip under the regulatory AI's algorithm scrutiny. The IRS will never see your real energy consumption."
Andrew raised an eyebrow.
What's your name?
"E.C."
He paused, then smirked.
E.C.?
The one they say hacked the Federal Reserve's testnet from Satoshi Nakamoto's chatroom?
She offered no confirmation, just sipped her cocktail.
"Just one question—what do you want?" He stared at her, eyes like ice.
"I don't want your coins. I want the cold wallet address under your boss's name that expired three years ago—and full data access privileges."
Andrew studied her for a moment, then muttered:
"You're insane."
She smiled : "Correct, this cocktail's called a Bloody Mary, not 'Friendly Collaboration."
48 hours later, Blackrock Mining Pool core control room
Elena stood between massive fans and cooling units, the roar of mining rigs drowning all else. As she watched lines of code scroll across the screen, she imagined them panting—like dying wild dogs, awaiting their master's command.
She connected the Raspberry Pi devices to the local network and activated GhostNet-v2.0—a self-learning algorithm model she had been perfecting until a week before her death, designed to dynamically adjust mining paths, cooling frequencies, and redundant computing power.
Next, she pulled out the old laptop, opened a black terminal interface, and typed a string of characters:
OpenChannel:3FzB4kXX3r2gTLn5GnT9xw...
This was the abandoned cold wallet address from three years ago, linked to an illegal mining fund account her former employer had secretly established using misappropriated defense research funds.
She knew reactivating this address would dirty the pristine reputations of Cyber City's "clean white hats."
Five hours later, abnormal fluctuations rippled through the mining facility.
Bitcoin prices began swinging erratically across multiple exchanges. The reactivated cold wallet address flagged as active, drawing attention from surveillance nodes.
But she was prepared—GhostNet had masked the operational nodes with randomized IP addresses from 30 countries, each request cloaked by triple-layered onion routing.
Ray Carlson finally stormed into the control room, face flushed with rage.
"Who authorized you to touch my rigs?"
Elena calmly turned and tapped open the data dashboard:
"In the last 24 hours, your profits rose by 17%, energy consumption dropped 12%, and cooling efficiency optimized by 9% across every miner. If I were your enemy, you'd already be hollowed out."
Ray fell silent. She pressed on:
"I don't want to hollow you out. I want you to let me borrow a gap."
"What gap?"
"A gap to Cyber City's underground vault."
She knew that during the Web3 frenzy, several Cyber City tech giants had secretly funneled funds into a "shadow mining pool" for money laundering, bleaching dirty money by simulating abandoned wallets.
Ray's mining facility was a "blind node" in this chain. Her plan was to use this node to drag their "incriminating Bitcoin" out of the blockchain, then synchronously expose the on-chain transaction trails the night these tech moguls went public on Nasdaq.
"Who are you targeting?" Ray asked.
She stared at the familiar hexadecimal signature on the screen, her voice cold enough to freeze the entire data center.
"Those who embedded my algorithms into their surveillance networks, then claimed it was 'automated data judgment'—no human accountability."
Ray stayed silent. He wasn't a moralist, but he knew this woman was more like an AI-driven nuclear warhead than a person.
2:00 AM. The data transfer began.
Elena sat before the mainframe as GhostNet pushed to its limits, extracting evidence by retrieving historical hash paths buried deep within the "shadow mining pool".
Suddenly, an alert flashed on the screen:
INTRUSION DETECTED: Reverse Traceback Attempted...
Someone was tracing her actions on-chain.
She activated the counter-trace module, deploying AI-generated "digital identity decoys" while fragmenting the data and uploading it through five nodes to a dark web data vault.
Sweat dripped from her forehead, yet a faint smirk tugged at her lips.
"The harder you try to erase my traces, the filthier your hands prove to be."
4:00 AM. Operation complete.
GhostNet initiated its self-destruct protocol, scrubbing all traces. She shut down the laptop and stood. The mining rigs still roared around her, but to her ears, they now sounded like the drums of victory.
Ray leaned against the doorway, lighting a cigarette.
"You won. But you didn't take a single coin."
She walked up to him, eyes fixed on the dawn breaking outside the window.
"I don't need coins. I need what they owe me."
"Like what?"
She slung her backpack over her shoulder and said coldly:
"An apology. A reputation. And fear."
She strode out of the mining facility. Dawn was breaking.
An autonomous cargo truck idled by the roadside, waiting. She leaped onto its roof and gazed at the horizon.
Inside the backpack, GhostNet had left behind a fragment of code—a backbone module for her "cloud server initiative" to be embedded at the next node.
She knew the true enemies hadn't yet seen the "hooks" she'd planted, but soon their systems would become infected with her "digital toxin", spreading through their networks like poisoned blood vessels.
This wasn't the end.
It was Patient Zero of the outbreak.