Chapter 2.

Tank grudgingly sat up in his bed and glared moodily at his window. It didn't matter what he did, or how he covered his window, the sun always managed to find a way to hit him directly in his left eye at roughly 8:13 every morning. The window is currently covered with aluminum foil, a shade, a set of blinds, and a heavy black curtain. Somehow, the sun found a gap at the seam of the foil, bounced a ray off a framed autographed photo of Christopher Walken on the wall, which reflected the ray directly into Tank's left eye. And it sat there until he woke up. And every morning he'd finish off the bottle of water he opened the night before, and spend the first five waking minutes glaring moodily at the window and cursing quietly to himself. He ran a hand through his short, bristly red hair and stumbled through the series of empty plastic water bottles to the door of his bedroom, stretching his rail thin frame and working the creaks out as he moved. His feet shuffled grudgingly as he made his way through his apartment to the back porch.

The porch was the selling point on this apartment. The apartment itself was cramped, over-priced, and the sort of salmon color that you can only get away with in Florida. The complex was built at the edge of one of the last few untouched stretches of real estate in the Tampa area, overlooking a man made lake which touched the shores of a God made forest. And every morning Tank would sit on this porch, light a cigarette, and watch the smoke swirl around the sun as it shyly peeks over the trees, like a dog that knows it did something wrong. It was during these moments that Tank always found a way to forgive the sun for waking him up so mind-blearingly early when he really didn't need or want to be.

Tank was a pirate. Professionally. Not the swashbuckling, mutineering, looting, plundering, bucanneers that Johnny Depp has managed to repopularize, but the sort of pirate that hacks computer programs, movies, and music and manages to make a living off of it. His parents are not proud of this and tell all their friends that he's in real estate. What his family fails to understand is that he does all this legally, consulted by fairly large corporations to test their copyright protection, and manages to make a little money on the side as a benefit. And he gets to work at his own pace, usually stretching projects out for fairly longish periods to give these software companies a bit of an ego boost, thinking they've come up with a real doozie of a copyright solution. In reality, Tank could hack through just about any program they sent him in under a day.

He stood up from his chair on the porch, yawned as he slid the glass door open, and ambled to the kitchen to get a cold taco and a can of Pepsi to start his day off. As he walked to his computer, he clicked on the television in time to catch the tail end of a news story about some form of theft and the beginning of the weather. He chuckled to himself. It's summer in central Florida. Anyone who's lived in the Tampa area for at least a year could tell you what the weather's going to be like in the summer. Hot and humid in the morning, thunder storms in the afternoon and evening, with slight chance of hurricane towards the end of the week. He didn't need to see the weather. Tank immediately switched on the DVD player and popped in a copy of Brewster's Millions.

As the sounds of Richard Pryor floated through the apartment, Tank sat at his near by computer desk, listened to the soft hum of his system booting, and gave one more stretch. A picture of Angelina Jolie from Hackers greeted him as the computer finally woke up.

"Good morning, gorgeous," he said, as he did every morning. "What have we got for today?"

He clicked his e-mail short cut and waited a few seconds for all the messages to file into his inbox. This isn't to say that Tank is popular, or even that overloaded with work. He did the math in his head one morning and figured out that a full ninety-eight percent of the mail he recieved was garbage. This morning he filtered through the multiple offers for college degrees, get rich quick real estate plans that didn't require college degrees, get laid quick escort services, offers to strengthen his manly prowess (presumably for the escort service), webcam girls, and the joke emails he keeps recieving from a little old lady in Boston who thinks he's her grandchild, despite his messages politely telling her otherwise.

After narrowing the field down to the crucial two percent, he lit a cigarette and got down to business.

From: Yancy, William
PlayRight Digital Entertainment

Hello Tank! It's been a full week since we gave you that new copyright system, and we haven't heard anything back from you. I assume this time we may have finally stumped you! We'd like your feedback as soon as you get a chance. We're looking to implement this on our next DVD projects.

Tank sighed and put his standard response:

This is a tough one. I'll have to get back to you.

He went through three more of the same sort of messages from different companies until he came to one from Sunshine Systems, which caught his eye.

From: Gable, Carla
Sunshine Systems

Tank. We need the program back. We have to end the contract. Due to corporate policy, I can't go into details. We will honor the pay we owe you for the time spent working on our project, and will keep you in mind for future needs.

This was puzzling. It was also the first time since he started this sort of operation that Tank had lost a client. The situation concerned him pretty deeply too, as Sunshine Systems was not only lucrative business for him, but being local made their checks easier to cash.

Tank's mind began to swirl with self-doubt and conflict. Did he do something wrong? Did they find someone else that would work cheaper? Had Sunshine Systems been bought out? Taken over? Did they just scrap the project they'd hired him for?

At that moment, Richard Pryor shouted in front of a large crowd on the television.

"What are you gonna vote!?"

"None of the above!"