The concert hall was disappointing as usual, an old shabby place made out of concrete and ugly steel bars in the middle of nowhere south of Hamburg. But anyway Hugo loved live concerts. In the three-dimensional Mesh versions, you could take a view from each angle, always experience perfect sound and see the masterfully designed virtual architecture of the venue. But the connection to the band was missing.

These days you usually got two or three tickets to virtual concerts of the tour together with your live ticket. Today, he went there alone. But his girlfriend Adele and his colleague R00t (he didn't even know her real name) were there, too. Both plugged in from home and connected through their immersives.

Hugo was a freelance operator and designer. He created and maintained places in the Mesh, usually for companies. R00t was his developer. She was responsible for the core software parts. They met each day. But they had never seen each other in real life.

The gig had been awesome as expected. But he went home in time, no more excursions into after-concert clubs today. His home was in what the city knew as the left pylon. The pylons had been a hotel project that didn't work out as expected. The rooms and floors were built into the remains of the once famous, huge Köhlbrand-Bridge in the harbour.

The original project had been very ambitious - several storeys of an exclusive hotel built into the two massive pylons and connected via gondolas. However, the contractor company got bankrupt and left the construction site unfinished.

But the squatter community was strong at that time and so the venue got inhabited illegally. The infrastructure was excellent as soon as some geeks added some DIY effort and maintenance. Nobody asked questions as long as the ownership was not clear.

Around 20 people lived on Hugo's side. But that day when he came home, he saw someone leaving through the elevator, someone he didn't recognize. It was suspicious. When he entered his flat and noticed that he had been robbed, the shock therefore was not as heavy as one would think. Hugo had expected something like that already.

Zizkov was a rather strange place to live these days. But Hana liked the atmosphere, which spanned between the cosy, old and worn down artist houses and the rotten monster of concrete, the tower that once was used for TV transmission. She bet that no one in Prague even knew anymore what a TV was. She also only knew it from her stubborn grandparents who refused to use the Mesh.

She was sitting in the Bar Bukowski, her living room, the nicest place on earth. Her lenses were in AR mode so she could breathe its atmosphere while thinking about her complicated second life as R00t.

R00t, the hacker was not complicated at all. What gave her a headache was her relationship with two people at the same time. She loved B055, but she also worked with him every day, so she couldn't tell him. But she also loved Adele, his girlfriend. And she never met anyone of them in real life. A triangle of tragedies. If everything could be as easy and clear as coding, she thought.

Hugo immediately looked through his things. What had been missing? What did that guy steal? All he possessed, everything of value was virtual. The Mesh was his home. This flat was just a necessity.

So he started cleaning up the mess. The single room was not very big, so it was easy for the thief to mess up literally everything. Hugo folded his clothes that were lying on the floor. He put back the three physical books he possessed - among them his only piece of sentimental value. "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", a gift from his mother. Then he put the tin plates and metal cups back into the kitchen corner.

Nothing was broken, nothing was missing. So what was this all about? At least one thing was clear. He had to invest some bucks into security equipment. First thing tomorrow.

He sat on his chair and finally plugged into the mesh. In his home space on his virtual desk, a light was blinking on the old, virtual fifties office telephone. A message. From local. The thief must have planted it.

"She's gone. They have her. What should I do? This is so fucked up. What's going on?" B055 had a complete breakdown. He had called Hana into their office space in the Mesh and didn't stop talking nonsense since she had arrived. She still couldn't understand a word. He needed a slap in his digital face.

She opened the console and typed. Then a noise was induced into B055's ears. After a short gesture of horror, his voice stopped and he started breathing heavily.

"B055, hey", she adressed him. "What is going on? Talk slowly and in full sentences!"

After some more seconds of breathing, he finally started. "Someone has kidnapped Adele. They broke into my flat and left me a message."

Now Hana broke down as well, but she had to keep the rollercoaster on the inside.

"Who are they? What do they want?", she asked.

"I don't know who. They come back with more. They left me the coordinates of a message box. Adele is off the grid, R00t. She's not traceable and I can't reach her."

"Glad you have found our message", a distorted voice said with a noticeable ironic undertone. "We have your girlfriend. You know that. Hugo Niemann, you will do something for us. You will raid the crypto vault of Credit Cayman. We know what you're capable of."

"That is what they sent me", said B055 to R00t in their virtual home base after he had calmed down a bit and came back from visiting and looting the given coordinates. "They also gave me some additional instructions in an encrypted attachment. Probably the first picking test."

"We're not criminals", answered R00t in a slight panic. "At least not that type. But Adele, she's in danger and I'm sure they'll finish her if we involve the cops."

"We can't go to the cops. That would be the end of our work and my home in the Pylons. We have to do it."

"You're right. I'm frightened, but I'm also pissed. Hugo, we have to do something. We're better than this."

"What do you have in mind?" asked B055 finally.

B055 once showed her the place in the 3D map of Prague. "I'd go there", he said pointing at the ugliest piece of brutalism architecture that her otherwise beautiful home city had to offer. It was the abandoned, rotten TV tower. Now she came here to think from time to time. And there was a lot to process now.

She thought of the heist. Why them? How should they do it? She also had to think of beautiful Adele. Was she safe? And she had to think of B055, who was no boss at all. She now found out about his real name, Hugo Niemann. Well, it didn't make things less complicated in her head.

"Focus", she thought while sitting in the wind on a concrete plateau 100m above the red roofs. She went through the heist, every step, looked up things through her AR, created small programs, helper dæmons and illegal bridges to quantum computing arrays.

Then she saw something in the virtual blueprints. She found their way out of this mess. Now there was one question left: Should she tell B055?

The day of the heist. B055 and R00t prepared themselves. They chose flies as their Avatars. R00t once came up with that mod. Actually, avatars have to be at least 1 unit in height, about 1 meter in real life, but she found a creative way around this rule. For today's purpose, a little piece of nothing that could defy virtual gravity was a perfect fit.

Security in the Mesh is a two-fold topic. There are the virtual mechanics in place, a set of rules that define the physics of the system. A wall simply can't be passed easily and all objects have a protocoled relation between each other. A user can't mess up with those things that easily on the code level for example. This first aspects provides a significant level of security already. Important stuff, however, is additionally secured by crypto, the very valuable assets were encrypted on quantum computing level.

The Credit Cayman vault had both. But as flies, most of the mechanical obstacles, entrance, elevators, door locks, were not really an obstacle. All the others were a task for R00t's AI, that she called Kit. R00t Kit, a funny pun only she and a handful of really old hackers understood.

Only minutes later they surpassed the physical security layers and stood in front of the safe, back in their normal avatars.

The safe was a different beast. It couldn't be cracked with programming skills. That was the task of B055, the Operator. Hugo did not only know most of the security systems by heart, he also had an intuition for the situation and he had a bespoke toolkit from R00t. So he went to work.

There was a scanner that searched the whole vault for intrusive objects, but it took minutes to complete, so they had a window.

The first five levels of crypto security. That was an only mildly complicated part, simple enough for a digital lockpicker expert. He established a bypass connection to one of the quantum computing arrays that R00t organized for him and within seconds, these front doors were unlocked.

But there was more. For two virtu-physical locks, he could use a tool similar to an endoscope for digital rooms. He looked directly into the mechanics and solved yet another of the riddles within seconds.

Finally the detector traps. Even being a fly didn't help with that problem. They had to find the target and replace it before the scan completed. It took awfully long. The scanner would soon detect them. Hugo's clock showed 30 seconds when they opened the door to the inner chamber.

B055 had moved like a robot. This was his world, the crunch time. Twenty seconds left on the clock. The time was counting down in his heads-up display. For some of the data artefacts, he used ejectors that could transfer the raw data. But some of them had to be extracted as a whole, the complete virtual objects. The problem: This would be discovered within minutes by the securities at Credit Cayman.

In parallel R00t therefore had to take care of covering their traces. She scrambled transmissions and dynamically switched VPN chains.

And on top, she planted the evidence, their counter heist. It would be a digital bomb that was supposed to detonate six hours later. She placed data packages, that contained backtraces to their imposed clients, in carefully selected areas of the virtual vault. A risky manoeuvre. That's why she didn't tell B055.

Five seconds left.

"Allright, let's go", he said and finished the last step. Then they activated Houdini, the Software that made Avatars disappear.

B055 and R00t needed over three hours in their virtual lab to sort out and prepare the loot from the heist. Some of the data packets contained encrypted inclusions they had to crack first. Some others were still covered in their virtual objects. Paranoid shit.

But finally, they could put their delivery together. They still had no idea what it was. The data didn't make any sense to them. It was no crypto money. That's the only thing they knew. Finally, B055 pushed the button and sent off the data to the classic email account the kidnappers gave them.

Time was ticking while they waited. R00t's virtual bomb that placed the evidence was time-based and supposed to detonate in some minutes. After that, they might have had another hour until the bank got hold of their kidnappers. She repeatedly looked at the countdown on her watch. Time passed. The bomb went off and R00t's stood still for a while. It didn't work, did it?

A minute later, B055 received a simple message with a green checkmark emoji from an unknown number. Another five minutes later, he heard from Adele.

Three weeks had passed since the heist. Although the first call with Hugo and Adele was heartwarming and tears were flowing, Hana felt a change. They barely had gigs together in that time and they met in their real Avatars. At the same time, they were closer and more distant to each other. Hana decided that it was time to do something. She took the train to Hamburg.

She crushed somewhere in the pylons in one of the abandoned rooms near Hugo's place. On the second night, she sat in a bar with him.

"Adele did not take it so well", he started the conversation. "Last week, we broke up."

Hana was devastated. "Why didn't you tell me? Should I go and talk to her?"

"I think, you should give her some time."

They didn't say much more that night, just sitting in front of their cocktails and staring at the opposite wall.

But Hana had to try. On the next morning, she visited Adele and had a long talk. Adele wasn't used to that kind of crazyness. She wasn't made for risky actions on the verge of legality. She wasn't made for their life.

In that moment, also Hana recognized that it takes a while to heal the wounds and took the next train back to Prague.