The study of how hackers got caught took three weeks. Cipher worked through the cases methodically, building a database not of techniques but of failures. The Silk Road. Anonymous. LulzSec. The Russian botnet operators who got sloppy. The Chinese APT members who reused infrastructure. The ransomware gangs who could not resist bragging. Every case was a lesson in what not to do.
Ross Ulbricht's mistake was almost embarrassing in retrospect. He had posted on a forum asking for coding help, looking for an expert in a specific type of database architecture. Nothing illegal about the question itself. But he had posted it from an account tied to his real email address. Years before he created the Silk Road, before he became Dread Pirate Roberts, before he built an empire. One post. One connection. And when the FBI finally identified him, they traced the whole thing backward through that single thread.
The lesson was not that Ulbricht was stupid. He was clearly brilliant in many ways. The lesson was that human memory was fallible. You could be perfectly careful for months or years, and then one day you would forget that you had done something careless three years ago. The investigators would find it. They had time and resources and the ability to search through archives of everything that had ever been posted to the internet. One mistake was enough.
Sabu from Anonymous had been different. His operational security was actually quite good for a while. He used Tor, he compartmentalized his activities, he was cautious about not revealing personal information. But he had a family. Children. The FBI found him through other means that Cipher did not fully understand from the public records, and once they had him, they threatened him with losing his kids. He flipped immediately. Gave up everyone. The entire Anonymous network collapsed because one person had a pressure point that could be exploited.
The lesson there was about leverage. Everyone had something they cared about more than they cared about staying silent. Family, freedom, money, ideology. Find the thing someone valued most and threaten to take it away, and you could break almost anyone. The solution was to have nothing that could be threatened. No family to leverage. No romantic partners to coerce. No public reputation to destroy. Nothing.
Cipher had read about sensory deprivation studies once. Put a person in a tank of water at body temperature in complete darkness and silence, and within hours their mind started to break down. Hallucinations. Panic. The inability to maintain a coherent sense of self. Humans were not built for isolation. Social connection was not a luxury but a requirement for psychological stability.
What Cipher was planning was a form of voluntary sensory deprivation, except instead of hours it would last years. Maybe decades. Maybe forever. Moving between cities, never staying long enough to form real connections. Working remotely, interacting with people only through screens and text. Living in apartments that could be abandoned in minutes. No possessions that could not be replaced. No relationships that could not be severed.
This would damage something. Cipher understood that. You could not live like that without it changing you in fundamental ways. But the alternative was worse. The alternative was being like Manning or Assange or Snowden. Imprisoned or trapped or exiled. Having done something important and then spending the rest of your life paying the price while the systems you tried to change continued operating exactly as before.
Better to be free and isolated than imprisoned and destroyed. Better to succeed and disappear than to fail publicly and become a cautionary tale.
The decision was made. Now came implementation.
Cipher's background made some of this easier. Ten years in cybersecurity meant ten years of moving between jobs and cities. Berlin for a year working at a mid-sized security firm that mostly did penetration testing for German corporations. Tel Aviv for eight months at a startup that was building some kind of authentication system that never quite worked and eventually got acquired for parts. Singapore for ten months doing contract work for banks that needed their systems audited. Back to Berlin. Then London for a year. Then Warsaw for six months. Then Prague.
The pattern was already established. Cipher was already someone who moved frequently, who worked remotely, who did not maintain long-term connections. Turning that into something more deliberate, more extreme, would not look unusual from the outside. Just another contractor who liked to travel. Just another digital nomad doing the thing that thousands of people were doing in the 2020s, working from laptops in cafes, living out of backpacks, chasing good weather and cheap rent.
Hidden among thousands of similar people. That was the key. Not invisible. Invisible was suspicious. But unremarkable. One face in a crowd of faces. One laptop in a cafe full of laptops. One transaction in millions of daily transactions. The kind of person that security cameras recorded and then immediately forgot.
The language skills helped. Cipher had always been good with languages in the way that some people were good with music. English was native. Russian had been learned from online communities and a brief relationship with someone from Moscow years ago. German came from living in Berlin. Polish was picked up during the months in Warsaw. Mandarin from Chinese hacking forums and some contract work in Shanghai that had not lasted long but had taught enough to get by. Spanish was self-taught and not very good yet but improving. Irish was conversational, learned deliberately to support the passport story, enough to handle basic conversations and not sound like a complete fraud.
Being able to speak to people in their own languages made blending in easier. Made interactions more natural. Reduced the friction that came from being obviously foreign. In Shenzhen or Guangzhou, speaking Mandarin meant being treated like an overseas Chinese buyer instead of a clueless tourist. In Berlin, German meant not being immediately identified as an expat. In Warsaw, Polish meant the landlord asked fewer questions.
The Irish passport was the foundation of everything else. EU citizenship meant freedom of movement across twenty seven countries. No visa requirements. No border questions about why you were there or how long you were staying. You could live in Poland for six months, then move to Czech Republic, then Germany, then back to Poland. Legal. Normal. Unremarkable.
For non-EU countries, the Irish passport still opened doors. Serbia was visa-free for ninety days. Albania for a year. Georgia for a year. Montenegro, Bosnia, all the Balkans were accessible without paperwork. Even outside Europe, most countries either had visa-free access or easy visa-on-arrival for Irish citizens. The passport was a tool for movement. Movement was survival.
But before any of that mattered, before the cities and the movement and the years of running, there was hardware to acquire. The laptop that would be used to build SPECTRE had to be untraceable. Retail laptops came with serial numbers registered to manufacturers, warranty cards, often with components that had unique identifiers. Intel processors had something called the Management Engine, a secondary processor that ran below the operating system and could theoretically be accessed remotely. Nothing could be trusted that came from normal supply chains.
So the components would be sourced separately, from different places, assembled by hand. This was not unusual for people who built custom computers. Enthusiasts did it all the time. But they bought their parts from normal retailers, ordered them online, had them shipped to their homes. That created a trail. Credit card transactions. Shipping addresses. Records.
Cipher's approach would be different. Cash only. Different cities. Different vendors. Never buying more than one or two components from any single source. Spreading the purchases across weeks so that no one could connect them. And doing it in a place where foreigners buying electronics components were common enough to not be memorable.
China made the most sense. Shenzhen alone had electronics markets that served millions of customers every year. Hundreds of vendors selling every component imaginable. A steady flow of foreign buyers sourcing parts for factories or resale or personal projects. One more person buying a motherboard would be lost in the noise.
The trip would require planning. Cipher was currently in Prague on a six month lease that had another three months remaining. The cover story would be simple. Taking a break to travel in Asia. Thailand was popular with digital nomads. Cheap living, good weather, decent internet. Going to Chiang Mai for a few months was the kind of thing people in Cipher's position did all the time.
From Thailand, side trips to China would be easy. Shenzhen was a short flight from Bangkok. Guangzhou even closer. Beijing accessible. Chengdu on the other side of the country but still reachable. Four cities, four separate trips, four sets of components. Spread across three weeks. Then back to Thailand, then on to the next city. Georgia maybe. Tbilisi had a good digital nomad scene and was cheap and had a one year visa-free policy for EU citizens.
The planning took another week. Cipher researched flights, hostels, the specific electronics markets in each Chinese city. Made notes about which vendors sold which components based on reviews and forum posts. Memorized locations so that nothing would need to be written down or searched for on a phone while actually there. The appearance had to be of someone who knew what they were looking for. Not lost. Not confused. Just another buyer making routine purchases.
Two weeks after the decision was made, Cipher bought a plane ticket to Bangkok. One way. Paid with a credit card because paying cash for international flights was more suspicious than using normal payment methods. The ticket was in the name on the Irish passport. Tomasz Kowalski. Not Cipher's birth name but the legal name that appeared on the documentation. The identity that would be maintained for normal activities while the ghost was being built in parallel.
The flight left from Prague on a Tuesday morning in April. Cipher packed light. One backpack with clothes and toiletries and a legitimate laptop for normal work. The legitimate laptop was a MacBook, a few years old, purchased normally, used for video calls with clients and writing reports and all the boring work that paid the bills. Nothing suspicious on it. Nothing encrypted that would raise questions. Just a normal contractor's normal computer.
The flight was long. Prague to Istanbul, then Istanbul to Bangkok. Cipher slept through most of it. Ate the terrible airline food without tasting it. Thought about component specifications and assembly procedures and whether this was really going to work or whether it was all going to collapse in some way that had not been anticipated.
Doubts were natural. Cipher acknowledged them and set them aside. The decision was made. Second-guessing now served no purpose. Either this would work or it would not. Either the operational security would hold or it would not. Either Cipher would be good enough and careful enough and disciplined enough, or it would all end badly. No way to know except to proceed.
Bangkok was hot and humid in a way that Prague never was. The hostel in the Sukhumvit district was cheap and anonymous, the kind of place where backpackers stayed for a few nights before moving on to islands or temples or wherever they were going. Cipher checked in, paid cash for a week, went to the room and slept for twelve hours straight.
The next week was spent establishing a presence. Working from cafes, doing legitimate contract work, being visible as someone who was in Thailand for normal reasons. Video calls with clients where the background showed a generic hostel room. Messages sent from a Thai IP address. Normal behavior. Nothing suspicious.
Then the first trip to China. A flight to Shenzhen on a Friday morning. Landed at noon. Took the metro to a hostel near Huaqianbei, the electronics district. The hostel was full of people doing exactly what Cipher was pretending to do. Tech buyers sourcing components. Engineers visiting factories. The electronics industry was Shenzhen's reason for existing. One more foreign face was invisible.
Huaqianbei was overwhelming the first time you saw it. Not one market but dozens, spread across multiple city blocks. Buildings ten stories tall, each floor divided into hundreds of small stalls, each stall selling some specific category of components. Resistors. Capacitors. Integrated circuits. Displays. Batteries. Everything you could possibly need to build anything electronic, and a lot of things you did not know you needed until you saw them.
The crowds were constant. Thousands of people moving through narrow aisles, negotiating in Mandarin and English and various Chinese dialects. Vendors calling out to potential customers. The smell of solder and new plastic and the particular electric smell that came from electronics being tested. The sound of bargaining and machines and the background hum of a place that operated at maximum capacity every day.
Cipher spent the first hour just walking, getting oriented, identifying which buildings sold which components. The motherboard would come from a vendor on the third floor of the SEG Plaza. Cipher had identified this vendor from online research. They sold a range of motherboards, mostly for embedded systems and custom builds. The kind of vendor that served small manufacturers and individual buyers.
The approach was casual. Browsing. Looking at several options. Asking questions in Mandarin that was good enough to discuss technical specifications but accented enough to make clear this was a foreigner. The vendor was a woman in her forties who had probably been selling motherboards for twenty years and had seen every type of customer imaginable.
The negotiation was brief. Cipher pointed to a specific model. Asked the price. The vendor quoted high, expecting to bargain. Cipher countered lower. They met in the middle. The transaction took five minutes. Cash paid. No receipt. The vendor wrapped the motherboard in bubble wrap and put it in a plain bag. Cipher left the building and walked three blocks before stopping.
The motherboard went into the backpack, wrapped in clothing for protection. Then Cipher went back to a different building, different floor, different vendor entirely. This one sold processors. The same casual browsing. The same brief negotiation. Cash paid. Another component acquired.
Two components in one day was enough. More would risk being remembered. Cipher spent the rest of the day being a tourist. Walked around the city. Ate street food. Took photos with a cheap camera like any other traveler. Flew back to Bangkok the next morning.
The second trip was to Guangzhou, a week later. Guangzhou was close to Shenzhen but different enough that sourcing components there would not create an obvious pattern if anyone ever tried to connect the purchases. The Gangding Computer City was smaller than Huaqianbei but still substantial. Cipher bought a display panel from one vendor, a storage drive from another. Different days. Different approaches. Cash transactions that disappeared into the thousands of daily sales.
Beijing was the third city. The flight from Bangkok was longer. The electronics markets in Zhongguancun were more spread out, less concentrated than Shenzhen. This worked in Cipher's favor. Bought RAM from a vendor near the university district. Bought a keyboard assembly from a repair shop that salvaged laptop parts. The repair shop owner asked what Cipher was building. Generic custom project, Cipher said in Mandarin. The owner nodded, not caring enough to ask more.
Chengdu was the final trip. The Taisheng Road market was more oriented toward local customers than international buyers. Cipher was more conspicuous here but also more memorable as just another foreigner doing something technical. Battery purchased from one vendor. Touchpad from another. Miscellaneous cables and connectors from a third. By the end of the afternoon, Cipher had everything needed for two complete laptop builds.
The components traveled back to Bangkok in pieces, distributed across multiple trips, carried in different bags. A motherboard wrapped in a towel in a backpack. A processor in a small box inside a toiletry kit. The display panel was the largest and most difficult to transport, but it fit in a padded laptop sleeve designed for fifteen inch computers. Customs did not care. These were obviously used electronics components, obviously for personal use. No one looked twice.
Back in Bangkok, Cipher spread the components across the hostel room floor and checked each one carefully. No damage from transport. No obvious defects. Everything looked good. The parts were packed more carefully now, wrapped in antistatic bags that had been purchased from a different vendor, then placed in a small rolling suitcase that was checked baggage for the next flight.
The next destination was Tbilisi, Georgia. Not directly from Bangkok. That would create too clear a pattern. First a flight to Istanbul, three days there being a tourist, then on to Tbilisi. Breaking the trail. Making it harder to trace backward if anyone ever tried.
Tbilisi was perfect for what came next. The city had become popular with digital nomads over the past few years. Good internet, very cheap cost of living, a one year visa-free policy for many nationalities including EU citizens. English was spoken enough to get by. The food was excellent. The wine was cheap. And most importantly for Cipher's purposes, there was a small but active maker community with workshop spaces that could be rented by the hour or day.
Cipher found an apartment in the Vera district, paid three months rent in advance in cash, moved in with the single backpack and the rolling suitcase full of components. The apartment was small and generic and perfect. Two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom with a shower that worked most of the time. Furniture that looked like it had been purchased from IKEA in 2005 and never updated. A landlord who spoke no English and accepted cash and asked no questions beyond confirming that Cipher was not planning to have loud parties or damage the property.
The maker space was in the Fabrika complex, a former sewing factory that had been converted into a hipster hub of cafes and coworking spaces and creative studios. The workshop area had basic tools. Soldering irons. Multimeters. Oscilloscopes. Workbenches with good lighting. You paid a daily rate and got access to everything. The space was used mostly by students and artists working on electronics projects. One more person building computers fit right in.
Cipher spent the first week just doing reconnaissance. Visiting the space at different times. Seeing who else was around. Learning the patterns. The mornings were quiet. The evenings were busier. Late night was almost empty except for one or two serious hobbyists who seemed to live there. Cipher started coming in late morning, staying until mid-afternoon. Became a familiar face without becoming notable. Just another regular.
The assembly took three weeks. Not because it was technically difficult. Cipher had built computers before, understood how the components fit together. But this assembly required more than just connecting parts. Every piece needed to be modified. Every potential tracking mechanism needed to be eliminated. Every vulnerability needed to be closed.
The motherboard came first. Cipher examined it under magnification, identifying the traces that led to the Bluetooth module. These traces were cut with a precision knife, then verified dead with a multimeter. The solder pads where the module would normally connect were scraped clean. No way to accidentally reconnect it. No way for the hardware to suddenly become active if some software tried to enable it.
The webcam was simpler. The laptop display panel had a webcam assembly built in, a small module at the top of the screen. Cipher disconnected the cable, removed the module entirely, then covered the lens area with black epoxy. Redundant perhaps. But redundancy was the point. Software could be overridden. Hardware destruction was permanent.
The microphone array was more complex. Modern laptops had multiple microphones for noise cancellation. This motherboard had four. Cipher found each one, traced the connections, cut the circuit paths. Then, for good measure, used a small drill bit to puncture each microphone membrane. The holes were tiny but definitive. No sound would be captured. No conversation could be recorded.
The WiFi card replacement took the most time. The card that came with the motherboard was standard, would have worked fine for normal purposes. But it had a fixed MAC address, a unique identifier. Cipher removed it and installed an Atheros card that supported MAC address randomization at the firmware level. This required custom driver installation later, but it was worth it. Every time the laptop connected to a network, it would present a different MAC address. A different identity. Untraceable across sessions.
The BIOS replacement was the deepest modification. Most laptops came with proprietary BIOS from the motherboard manufacturer. Closed source. Unknown contents. Potentially containing backdoors or tracking features or remote access capabilities that normal users would never know about. Cipher spent two days researching how to flash this specific motherboard with Libreboot, an open source BIOS replacement.
The process was delicate. Required an external programmer, a small device that connected to specific pins on the motherboard and could write directly to the BIOS chip. One mistake and the motherboard would be bricked, useless. Cipher read the documentation three times. Watched tutorial videos. Practiced on the pin connections without actually flashing anything. Then committed.
The flash took twenty minutes. Cipher sat watching the progress bar, knowing that if it failed there was no recovery, the motherboard would be garbage and weeks of work would be lost. But the bar reached one hundred percent. The programmer beeped. Verification passed. The motherboard now ran Libreboot. Every line of code in the BIOS was open source, auditable, containing no secrets.
The Intel Management Engine was still present in the hardware, a secondary processor embedded in the chipset itself that could not be physically removed. But Libreboot included a tool called me_cleaner that neutered it. Disabled most of its functionality. Reduced it from an active threat to an inert piece of silicon. Not perfect. Security researchers had found ways to work with neutered ME. But good enough. The perfect was the enemy of the good, and this was very good.
The storage drive was encrypted before any data was written to it. Cipher set up LUKS, Linux Unified Key Setup, which provided full disk encryption. Everything on the drive would be scrambled, unreadable without the decryption key. The key itself was protected by a passphrase that Cipher had generated using physical dice.
Diceware was a simple concept. You rolled five dice, read the numbers as a five digit number, looked up that number in a word list, got a word. Repeated this process until you had enough words to make a strong passphrase. The randomness came from the dice, from physics, not from any computer algorithm that could theoretically be predicted or backdoored. True randomness.
Cipher generated a passphrase that was eighty words long. Each word carefully recorded, then memorized through spaced repetition. Every day for two weeks, Cipher would practice typing the passphrase until it became muscle memory. The fingers knew the sequence without the conscious mind having to recall it. This was important. If ever questioned, if ever under duress, Cipher could claim to have forgotten the passphrase. But in normal circumstances, accessing the encrypted drive was automatic.
Once memorized, the written copy was burned. The ashes flushed down a toilet in a cafe three blocks from the apartment. No backup existed. No recovery key. If Cipher forgot the passphrase, the data was gone forever. That was acceptable. That was the point.
The second laptop was built in parallel. Identical to the first. Every modification duplicated. Two machines, both untraceable, both ready for use. Redundancy in case one failed. Having a backup meant not being paralyzed if something went wrong with the primary system.
Testing took another week. Cipher set up a small network in the apartment. A router with custom firmware that logged everything. Connected the laptop and monitored traffic. Verified that nothing leaked outside of Tor. Checked that the MAC address randomization worked. Tested the RAM wipe on shutdown by pulling the power plug and then examining memory dumps. The laptop forgot everything as designed.
The operating system was Tails, loaded from a USB drive. Tails was designed for activists and journalists who needed operational security. It routed all traffic through Tor automatically. It ran entirely in RAM. It had tools for encryption and secure communication built in. And most importantly, it was amnesic. Every shutdown was a fresh start.
Cipher customized the Tails build. Removed some components that were not needed. Added scripts that made the RAM wipe more thorough. Configured it to randomize more identifying features. The result was a Tails installation that was more paranoid than the default, more thorough about eliminating traces.
By the end of May, two months after leaving Prague, Cipher had two functioning laptops that existed in no database. No serial numbers that led anywhere real. No components that had been purchased together. No warranty registrations. No manufacturer records. Just hardware assembled from parts that had passed through dozens of hands before reaching Cipher's workbench, now configured in ways that made tracking impossible.
The next challenge was learning to use them properly. The technology was only as good as the discipline of the person operating it. Cipher spent another month in Tbilisi developing protocols. Where to use the laptops. How long to stay in any single location. How to vary patterns without creating new patterns. How to be unremarkable.
Public WiFi was essential but dangerous. Coffee shops kept logs. Libraries had cameras. The solution was rotation and randomness. Never the same cafe twice in a row. Never establishing a regular schedule. Never staying longer than ninety minutes. Paying with exact cash, no interaction with staff beyond the transaction. Sitting in positions where cameras could not capture screens or faces clearly. Becoming the person that no one remembered five minutes after they left.
Cipher practiced this in Tbilisi. Would work from a cafe near Rustaveli Avenue one morning, then from a library in Vake the next day, then from a coworking space in Fabrika the day after. Different districts. Different times. Different approaches. After a month, Cipher went back to one of the early cafes and asked the barista casually if they remembered someone matching Cipher's description coming in regularly. The barista looked confused. No, sorry, I do not think so. Many people come here.
Perfect. That was exactly right. Visible but not memorable. Present but not noticed. The ghost was working.
The final piece was the false trail. ViktorTallinn had been posting on security forums for three months now. Building a persona. Asking questions. Answering other people's questions with solid technical knowledge. Establishing a presence as someone competent but not exceptional. Someone who worked as a consultant, traveled between jobs, had opinions about various security tools and techniques.
The posts were made from internet cafes in different cities. Prague before the trip to Asia. Bangkok during the Thailand stay. Tbilisi now. The IP addresses would show someone who moved around, which matched the story. The times of posts were randomized to avoid creating a pattern. The writing style was deliberately inconsistent, sometimes more formal, sometimes more casual, always with small errors that suggested English was not the first language.
If investigators eventually tried to track SPECTRE's creator, ViktorTallinn would be there in the archives. Would look like a plausible suspect. Would lead them toward Eastern Europe, toward someone working as a contractor, toward all the right details. And when they tried to follow the trail further, it would dissolve. The IP addresses would be from internet cafes that did not keep footage long enough. The posting times would not correlate with any specific person's schedule. The identity would be a dead end designed to waste investigator resources.
By June, Cipher was ready. The laptops were built and tested. The protocols were developed and practiced. The false trail was established. The operational security foundation was complete. Nine months remained before deployment. Nine months to build the code that would change everything. Nine months to prepare for what came after.
Cipher looked at the two laptops sitting on the apartment table in Tbilisi. Looked at the components that had traveled from China through Thailand to Georgia, transformed from separate pieces into functional machines. Thought about what these machines would be used to create. Thought about the four hundred ninety seven people who would die because of code that had not yet been written.
The weight of it felt real in a way it had not when this was just an idea. When SPECTRE was just a concept, the deaths were abstract. Theoretical. Now, with the hardware built and the planning complete and the path forward clear, the deaths were inevitable. They would happen. They would have names and faces. And Cipher would carry those names and faces for the rest of life, however long that turned out to be.
But the alternative was worse. The alternative was doing nothing. The alternative was watching more children die in more airstrikes ordered by more governments that operated in darkness and faced no accountability. The utilitarian calculus still held. Some deaths to prevent more deaths. Some blood on your hands to wash blood off the hands of power.
Cipher opened one of the laptops. Booted Tails. Entered the eighty word passphrase from muscle memory. The system came alive. Clean. Fresh. Ready. The screen showed a desktop with basic applications. A text editor. A browser configured for Tor. Tools for encryption and security.
This was where SPECTRE would be born. In this room. On this machine. Over the next months. Code written carefully, layer by layer, component by component, until it became something that could operate autonomously. Something that could hunt secrets. Something that would not stop until it was convinced to stop itself.
Cipher created a new file. Named it spectre_core.py. The Python programming language was the right choice for this. Flexible. Powerful. Well supported for the kind of network operations and data processing that SPECTRE would need. Cipher's fingers rested on the keyboard. Ready to begin.
But not yet. Not tonight. Tonight was for rest. For letting the weight settle. For accepting fully what was about to be built and what it would cost and what it might achieve. Tomorrow the coding would begin. Tomorrow the ghost would start building the weapon.
Tonight, Cipher just sat in the small apartment in Tbilisi and looked at the blank file on the screen and thought about the girl in the photograph from Syria. Thought about her standing in rubble. Thought about the seventeen children who had died in that school. Thought about all the children who would die in all the schools in all the wars unless something changed.
This was the something that would change. This code. This weapon. This ghost's gift to a world that would never know who gave it.
Cipher saved the empty file. Shut down the laptop. Watched the RAM wipe complete. Stood and walked to the window. Outside, Tbilisi continued its evening rhythm. People walking home from work. Restaurants opening for dinner service. The city's lights beginning to glow as darkness fell.
Tomorrow it would begin. But tonight, for one more night, SPECTRE did not exist. The four hundred ninety seven were still alive in a future that had not yet happened. The decision was made but the consequences had not yet unfolded.
Cipher stood at the window for a long time, watching the city, thinking about ghosts and weapons and the price of trying to change a world that did not want to be changed.
Then went to bed and slept dreamlessly, the way someone sleeps before a war begins.