My phone vibrated twice. The payload was secure, but our server was actively burning to the ground.
The heat off the asphalt makes the horizon look like it is vibrating. I am sweating through my shirt, holding a three-foot latex weather balloon by the neck. It is July in Moose Creek, Ontario. The air feels heavy. It feels like breathing through a wet towel.
"Tape the sensor," I say.
Mark is kneeling on the pavement. He is holding a roll of silver duct tape. His glasses keep slipping down his nose. "I am taping it. You need to hold the payload steady. If the altimeter shifts, the whole launch is garbage."
"I am holding it steady," I say. "Just tape the edge."
We are in the parking lot behind the abandoned strip mall. It is our launch site. The Stratosphere Club. That is what we call ourselves. It is just me, Mark, and Kelly. I dropped out of the meteorology program at the university down south six months ago. I came back home. Now I launch balloons to track micro-climates. It is better than sitting in a lecture hall listening to a professor read off a PowerPoint.
Kelly is sitting on the hood of her rusted Honda Civic. She has her laptop open on her knees. The screen brightness is turned all the way up to fight the sun glare.
"We have a problem," Kelly says.
"Not right now," I say. "I am losing my grip on the nozzle."
"No, Jada. We actually have a problem. Someone just joined the Discord server."
I shift my weight. The balloon tugs upward. The helium wants to go. "Who cares? We left the invite link public on the town forum. Maybe someone wants to watch the telemetry feed."
"His username is AeroChad," Kelly says. She stares at the screen. "He just dropped a file in the general chat. It is a two-megabyte PDF."
"A PDF?" Mark asks. He rips a piece of tape with his teeth. "Who drops a PDF in a general chat?"
"Hold the balloon," I say to Mark.
Mark grabs the thick neck of the latex. I wipe my sweaty hands on my jeans and walk over to Kelly's car. I lean over her shoulder. The heat coming off the laptop fan hits my stomach.
I look at the screen. The Discord interface is dark gray. There is a new message from a user with a default avatar.
"Read it," I say.
Kelly highlights the text. "He says: I have reviewed your flight trajectories from the past three weeks. Your math is mathematically offensive. The wind shear calculations are completely wrong. I have attached a corrected model. Hand over admin rights to the server so I can fix your telemetry channels before you embarrass yourselves again."
My stomach drops. It is a sharp, physical pull. It feels like missing a step on a staircase. I stare at the words. Mathematically offensive.
"Is he joking?" I ask.
"He does not sound like he is joking," Kelly says. "He is typing again."
Another message pops up. "He says: You are using amateur pressure gradients. I demand you halt today's launch until I verify your payload weight."
I laugh. It is a dry, short sound. "Ban him."
"I can't," Kelly says. "You are the only one with admin privileges. You never gave them to me."
I pull my phone out of my pocket. The screen is cracked in the top left corner. I open the app. The server is going crazy. Notifications are stacking up. AeroChad is spamming the channel with graphs. He is pulling weather data from the national registry and overlaying it with red circles.
"I will just talk to him," I say. "Maybe he is just intense. Some weather nerds are just intense."
I type with my thumbs. "Hey man. Thanks for the input. We are just a local club. We are launching right now. We will look at your PDF later."
I hit send.
Three seconds pass.
The notification sound goes off. It is a sharp ping.
"Did he reply?" Mark asks from the pavement. He is struggling with the balloon.
"Yeah," I say. I read the message. "He says: A local club of idiots. Your refusal to acknowledge basic atmospheric physics is a danger to local airspace. I am escalating this."
"Escalating what?" Kelly asks. "We are launching a glorified party balloon with a thermometer attached to it. What is there to escalate?"
"I don't know," I say. "I am banning him."
I tap his username. I hit the ban button. The user disappears from the list. The chat goes quiet.
"Done," I say. "Let's launch."
I walk back over to Mark. We secure the styrofoam payload box to the bottom of the balloon. We check the knot. We turn on the GPS tracker. The little green light blinks.
"Three, two, one," Mark says.
We let go. The balloon shoots up. It catches the summer wind and arcs toward the east. We stand there and watch it get smaller. It looks like a white dot against the bright blue sky.
"Looks good," I say.
My phone vibrates.
Then it vibrates again.
Then it starts vibrating continuously, a long, angry buzz against my palm.
I look down. It is Facebook. The Moose Creek Community Board. It is a public group. Everyone in town is in it. My mom, the mayor, the guy who runs the hardware store.
"Kelly," I say. "Look at the community board."
Kelly switches tabs on her laptop. She gasps.
AeroChad has found the Facebook group. He is posting under the name Chad Victor. He has created a thread. The title is in all caps.
"THE STRATOSPHERE CLUB IS A FRAUD."
He has tagged me. He has tagged Mark. He has tagged Kelly. He has uploaded screenshots of our Discord. He has drawn red lines pointing to my messages.
"He is posting paragraphs," Kelly says. Her voice is shaking. "He is saying we are a hazard. He is saying I don't know how to code the telemetry. He told me to get a tutor."
I scroll down. The thread is huge. Thirty posts. He is replying to himself. He is using massive blocks of text. He is using words like technocratic and geospatial. He is targeting Kelly specifically. He is calling her incompetent.
"He is insane," Mark says. He is looking over my shoulder.
My chest feels tight. The heat of the parking lot feels suffocating. It is not just the sun anymore. It is the sudden, violent intrusion. He took a simple interaction and turned it into global war.
"He is making alt accounts," Kelly says. "Someone named SkyWatcher99 just joined the Discord. And someone named WeatherKing. They are all him. They are flooding the chat."
I watch the screen. The text is scrolling faster than I can read. It is cognitive static. It is a wall of jargon and insults. He is dominating the space. He is trying to own our hobby.
"Turn off the server," I say.
"I can't," Kelly says. "He is running a script. He is bypassing the invite link."
I grab my phone. I try to delete the Facebook posts. I can't. I am not an admin on the community board. The older people in town are starting to comment. They are confused. They are asking if our balloon is going to crash into their roofs.
"This is bad," Mark says.
"I know," I say.
I look up at the sky. The balloon is gone. Our data is transmitting, but our digital home is completely destroyed.
I am sitting on the wooden steps of my sister's front porch. The wood is splintered and hot. Edie is standing above me. She is wearing blue scrubs. She just got off a twelve-hour shift at the psychiatric ward at the regional hospital. She is holding a glass of iced coffee. The condensation is dripping onto the toe of my sneaker.
"Read it to me again," Edie says.
I hold up my phone. The screen is smeared with fingerprints. "He says: The female members of this organization are structurally incapable of understanding the barometric fluctuations. I am prepared to take legal action if they do not cease operations."
Edie takes a sip of her coffee. The ice clinks against the glass. "He is splitting."
"Splitting what?" I ask.
"It is a psychiatric term," Edie says. She sits down next to me. The porch groans. "It is classic narcissistic splitting. Black and white thinking. You challenged him. You said 'thanks for the input' instead of bowing down to his PDF. So, to his ego, you went from being a potential audience to being an absolute enemy. There is no middle ground. You are all bad. He is all good."
"He is ruining my life," I say.
"He is ruining your Tuesday," Edie corrects me. "Look at his behavior. The massive paragraphs. The demands for admin rights. The targeting of you and Kelly. It is textbook Main Character Syndrome. He needs the stage. He needs the Reward Loop. Every time you reply, every time you ban an alt account, you are giving him a hit of dopamine. You are proving he exists. You are proving he is powerful."
"So what do I do?" I ask. "Just let him spam the town Facebook group? The mayor's wife just commented asking if we are terrorists."
Edie laughs. It is loud and sharp. "No. You cut off his supply. But you also need to understand how he is getting in. If he is bypassing your server blocks, he is using a dynamic IP routing through the local node. Moose Creek only has one main ISP. The infrastructure here is garbage. The relay boxes are physically out in the woods."
I stare at her. "You want me to go into the woods?"
"I want you to map his route," Edie says. "If you understand the physical network, you can block him at the root level. Turn the digital problem into a physical problem. You guys are weather nerds. Go map the environment."
I call Mark and Kelly. Forty minutes later, we are standing at the edge of the dense pine forest behind the old water tower. The humidity is at ninety percent. The air smells like wet dirt and pine needles. The mosquitoes are already swarming.
Kelly is wearing shorts. She is slapping her legs. "This is a terrible idea. We are going to get Lyme disease."
"We need to find the ISP relay box," I say. I am holding a printed map of the town's utility lines. "Edie said there are four nodes. If we can plug a diagnostic tool into the main switch, we can see the packet routing. We can see where Chad is bouncing his signal from."
"This is highly illegal," Mark says. He is carrying a heavy backpack full of cables.
"It is a gray area," I say. "Walk."
We push through the brush. The branches scrape against my arms. The ground is soft and muddy from the rain last week. My shoes sink into the dirt. I wipe sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. The heat is oppressive. It feels like walking through soup.
"He posted another thread while we were driving here," Kelly says. She is looking at her phone as she walks. She trips over a tree root and stumbles.
"Put the phone away," I say.
"I can't," Kelly says. "He is so annoying. He is saying our telemetry data is a hoax. He is saying we are faking the numbers to get grant money. We don't even get grant money! We fund this with my tips from the diner."
"Stop reading it," Mark says. "You are feeding the loop."
We hike for thirty minutes. The trees get thicker. The sunlight cuts through the canopy in harsh, bright lines. Dust motes float in the air. Finally, we see it. A large, rusted metal box sitting on a concrete pad. It is surrounded by tall weeds. A faded sticker on the side says MOOSE CREEK TELECOM.
"Utility Box Four," I say.
We walk up to it. The metal is hot to the touch. The padlock on the front is broken. It looks like it was smashed with a rock years ago.
"Quality security," Mark says. He pulls the door open. The hinges scream.
Inside, there is a mess of wires and blinking lights. It smells like hot plastic and dead bugs. Mark takes off his backpack. He pulls out a rugged laptop and a tangle of ethernet cables. He plugs a blue cable into an empty diagnostic port on the switchboard.
"Booting up," Mark says. He balances the laptop on his knee.
Kelly and I stand behind him. The mosquitoes are biting my neck. I slap them away. My skin is covered in a thin layer of grime.
"Run the trace," I say.
Mark types furiously. The screen fills with green text. IP addresses scroll past. "I am filtering for the traffic hitting our Discord server. It is a lot of noise. The whole town uses this node."
"Filter by packet size," Kelly says. "He is dropping massive PDFs. Look for anomalies in the data stream."
Mark hits a few keys. The scrolling stops. He points to a specific IP address. "There. Look at that. That is a massive data transfer. It is looping. He is using a VPN, but the entry point is static. He is bouncing off a server in Toronto, but his origin is fixed. He is relentless. He is sending a ping every two seconds."
"Can we block it?" I ask.
"Not from here," Mark says. "If I block it here, I take down half the town's internet. We have to block it on our end. But now we have his true origin IP. We know exactly who he is digitally."
"That does not stop him from making new accounts," Kelly says. "He has the energy of a sociopath. He will just keep coming."
I look at the blinking lights inside the rusted box. I think about what Edie said. He needs the stage. He needs the reward loop.
"We do not block him," I say.
Mark looks up at me. His glasses reflect the screen. "What?"
"If we block him, he will just escalate again. He will start calling our houses. He will start harassing us in real life," I say. "We need to trap him. We need to give him a stage that leads nowhere."
"A honeypot," Kelly says. Her eyes widen.
"Exactly," I say. "We build a fake server. We fill it with the worst, most incorrect atmospheric math we can invent. We make it look like our private admin channel. We let him hack into it. And we let him spend the rest of his life correcting us."
We are sitting in my basement. It is midnight. The only light comes from three computer monitors and a single desk lamp. The air conditioner is broken. We have a box fan blowing warm air across the room. The floor is covered in empty energy drink cans.
My eyes are burning. I rub them with my palms.
"How does this look?" Kelly asks.
She turns her monitor toward me. She has coded a replica of our Discord server. It looks identical. The same fonts, the same color hex codes, the same channel names. But this server is entirely isolated. It is hosted on a virtual machine running on an old desktop tower sitting under my desk.
"It looks perfect," I say.
"Now we need the bait," Mark says. He cracks open another energy drink. The aluminum pops loud in the quiet room. "We need data that will drive him absolutely insane."
I pull my keyboard toward me. I open a spreadsheet. "Okay. Let's build the fake telemetry feed. We need to make it look like we are launching a massive, highly illegal balloon tomorrow morning. And we need the math to be aggressively wrong, but confident."
"Make the barometric pressure inverted," Kelly suggests. "Tell the system that pressure increases as altitude increases."
I laugh. It is a tired, manic sound. "That is brilliant. That violates the basic laws of physics. He will lose his mind."
I type the formulas into the spreadsheet. I set the variables. As altitude goes up, pressure goes up.
"What about the wind shear?" Mark asks.
"Let's say the jet stream is flowing backwards," I say. "East to west. At ten thousand feet. And let's claim we are using a heavy payload. Fifty pounds. Completely unregulated."
"He is going to have an aneurysm," Kelly says.
We spend the next two hours populating the fake server. We write fake chat logs between the three of us. We use theatrical, dramatic language to make it seem like a secret conspiracy.
"I am formally declaring a state of emergency on the payload," I type under my own username in the fake chat.
"We must proceed with the inverted pressure launch," Kelly types from her laptop. "The town will not survive if we do not gather this data."
"It is so stupid," Mark says. He is giggling. The sleep deprivation is hitting us.
"It is stupid, but it is exactly what a narcissist thinks people talk like behind closed doors," I say. "He thinks he is in a movie. We are giving him the script."
We finish the setup. We have a fully functioning, completely isolated honeypot server. It is full of fake, infuriating data.
"How do we get him in?" Kelly asks.
"We leave the door open," Mark says. "I am going to drop a backdoor link into the town Facebook group. I will disguise it as a secure file transfer protocol for the 'real' club members. He is actively scraping the group. He will find it in five minutes."
Mark copies the link. He posts it on the community board from a burner account.
We sit back. We watch the server log monitor. The screen is black with a blinking white cursor.
The box fan rattles in the corner. A car drives by outside.
Ten minutes pass. Nothing.
"Maybe he went to sleep," Kelly says.
"Evil does not sleep," Mark says.
Suddenly, the screen flashes. A line of green text appears.
CONNECTION ESTABLISHED. IP ORIGIN CONFIRMED.
"He is in," I whisper.
My heart beats faster. It is a strange thrill. We are hunting a digital ghost.
We watch the logs. AeroChad has bypassed the fake firewall. He has entered the honeypot. He is in the general channel.
We wait.
Three minutes later, the first message drops.
"He says: You absolute fools. I have found your secret operation. I am reading your wind shear data and I am physically ill. East to west? You are defying the Coriolis effect."
I cover my mouth to stop from laughing out loud.
"Look at the typing indicator," Kelly says.
On the fake server, the little pencil icon is moving. AEROCHAD IS TYPING.
He types for five minutes straight. He drops a massive paragraph explaining why inverted pressure is impossible. He cites four different textbooks. He demands we halt the fake launch immediately.
"Do we reply?" Mark asks.
"No," I say. "We use the bot. Kelly, activate the auto-responder."
Kelly hits a key. She programmed a simple script. Every time he posts a message longer than fifty words, the bot replies from my account with a single, pre-written phrase.
The bot fires. "Jada: Thanks for the input. We are proceeding with the east-to-west trajectory."
We watch the screen.
AeroChad's response is immediate. It is a wall of text. He is furious. The bot's dismissal has triggered his high-conflict engine. He starts dumping data tables. He starts uploading new, massive PDFs.
"He is hooked," I say.
"Look at the packet size," Mark says. "He is uploading a fifty-page document. He must have had this pre-written or he is generating it right now. He is completely consumed."
We watch him type. The indicator blinks and blinks. He is trapped in the loop. He is trying to dominate a room that does not exist. He is screaming at a wall of code.
"Let him burn himself out," I say. "He is locked in the honeypot. Now we secure the real house."
I turn to my main laptop. I open the real Stratosphere Club server. I go into the backend settings. I take the origin IP address Mark found in the woods. I input a hard block. I block his MAC address. I block the entire subnet he is operating from.
"Real server is locked," I say.
"Now for the real world," Kelly says.
We implement the Grey Rock protocol. Edie explained it to me. To defeat a narcissist, you become the most boring, uninteresting object in the world. A gray rock. You offer no emotional response. You offer no drama.
I open Facebook. I delete the main club page. I delete my public posts about the weather balloons. I set my personal profile to strictly private. Mark and Kelly do the same. We wipe our digital footprint from the local community board.
If AeroChad looks away from the honeypot, he will find nothing. No target. No reaction. No audience.
"It is done," I say. I lean back in my chair. My back aches.
Mark looks at the honeypot monitor. AeroChad is still typing. He is on page twelve of a manifesto about atmospheric drag.
"He is going to be there for days," Mark says.
"Let him," I say. "We have a real launch to do tomorrow."
The morning sun is blinding. It is 7:00 AM. The air is already thick, but there is a slight breeze coming off the lake. We are back in the parking lot behind the strip mall. The asphalt is cool, but it will be boiling in an hour.
We have the big balloon today. The high-altitude rig. It is eight feet wide. It takes two massive tanks of helium to fill it.
Mark is operating the regulator. The gas hisses loudly as it fills the thick latex. The balloon swells. It looks like a giant white pearl against the gravel.
Kelly is sitting on the trunk of her Civic. Her laptop is open.
"Status?" I ask.
I am holding the payload box. It is heavier today. We have a high-definition camera, dual altimeters, and a radio transmitter.
Kelly checks the screen. "The real server is quiet. Telemetry channels are green. No unauthorized pings. The firewall is holding."
"And the honeypot?" Mark asks over the hiss of the gas.
Kelly switches tabs. A smile breaks across her face. "He is still there. He has been typing for thirty hours straight. He just uploaded a document called 'The Definitive Failure of the Stratosphere Club: A Mathematical Proof.' It is seventy-two pages long. He is arguing with the auto-responder bot about the Coriolis effect."
I shake my head. It is sad, in a way. A guy sitting in a dark room somewhere, pouring all his energy into a fake digital box, desperate for someone to tell him he is smart. He is fighting a war against an enemy that walked away yesterday.
"Gas is off," Mark says. He twists the valve on the tank. The hissing stops. The sudden silence in the parking lot is heavy.
Mark ties off the neck of the balloon. It pulls hard against his hands. It wants the sky.
I bring the payload over. We attach the nylon lines. We check the knots. I pull my phone out. I open the real Discord server. It is just the three of us in the channel. Peaceful. Quiet.
"Tracker is on," I say. The green light blinks on the styrofoam box.
"Camera is rolling," Kelly says.
We step back. Mark is holding the balloon by the base.
"Ready?" Mark asks.
"Let it go," I say.
Mark opens his hands. The balloon shoots upward. It is fast. It clears the roof of the abandoned strip mall in seconds. It catches the upper breeze and drifts east, climbing higher and higher.
We stand there with our heads tilted back. We watch it until it is just a speck. Then we watch it until it disappears completely into the blue.
I look down at my phone. The real telemetry data starts rolling in. Altitude: 1,000 feet. Pressure dropping normally. Temperature cooling. Clean, beautiful numbers.
I look over at Kelly's laptop. On the other screen, in the isolated virtual machine, AeroChad is still typing his angry manifesto to nobody.
I take a deep breath. The summer air feels a little lighter. I put my phone in my pocket. I don't need to look at the screen anymore. The data is safe. The sky is clear. We are just a local club, launching balloons into the atmosphere, totally unbothered by the static below.
“We are just a local club, launching balloons into the atmosphere, totally unbothered by the static below.”
