Forty Thousand Sleepers

The setting

Late autumn to winter, 2024

The story unfolds between the freezing lakeside town of Point Breeze, New York, on the shore of Lake Erie, and the sun-drenched, diesel-and-sponge-scented docks of Tarpon Springs, Florida. It is the direct runway into The Rebel Hackers of Point Breeze, ending exactly one week before Book One begins.

The premise

A routine forty-thousand-dollar audit

The teenage Rb Hackers crew — working out of a modest lakefront cottage holding fifty-two web-enabled machines — takes on what they believe is a straightforward, lucrative security audit. They are hired by Halcyon Health to test its wildly popular consumer sleep tracker, the Lull band: a grey fabric forehead strip worn by millions of adolescents to monitor their sleep cycles.

The discovery

Two hundred and ten megabytes of one night

While testing, Johnny “Shorty” Peralta notices that his own overnight sleep file runs to a staggering 210 megabytes, where standard sleep-cycle logging needs only a few kilobytes.

Investigating, the crew finds that Halcyon Health is covertly harvesting and centralising the raw, continuous, uncompressed EEG waveforms straight from its users’ skulls. The neural telemetry of exactly 40,106 children sits in an unsecured cloud bucket, in flat violation of the company’s own privacy policy.

Recruiting MIKONOS

The fifth desk

Knowing the law does not protect raw electrical signals, Jonas Cartwright understands they must prove that a brainwave is as uniquely identifiable as an iris scan. To crack the signal-physics equation he tracks the elusive open-source mathematician MIKONOS — who turns out to be Demetrious “Meeko” Komenakis, a quiet sponge fisherman — to Tarpon Springs.

Jonas wins him over by revealing his own secret vulnerability: he wants to use neural reconstruction mathematics to map his consciousness out of a body paralysed at the C4 vertebra. Meeko joins them, taking the fifth desk in the Point Breeze cottage.

The proof of the waveform

Sixty-one revolutions a minute

After weeks of grueling mathematical modelling, the crew reconstructs physical environments from raw EEG data alone. In Johnny’s file they extract a low-frequency hum at 61 RPM and identify it as the steel wind pump turning outside his bedroom window.

Then comes the blind test, on an anonymous user’s file. The machine reconstructs a scene: a doorway with the hall light on, and a parent sitting silently on the edge of an adolescent’s bed, for eleven minutes, in the dark.

The waveform is a person.

The fall, and the sacrifice

4.1 terabytes, already sold

The triumph shatters when they discover Halcyon has already sold a duplicate of the entire 4.1-terabyte dataset to the military subcontractor Seatech Special Projects, to stave off bankruptcy.

To obtain evidence of the transfer, Johnny runs a midnight read-only intrusion. To shield his friends from federal computer fraud charges, he deliberately routes the session log through his own home IP address, absorbing the whole of the legal exposure himself.

The secret retained

What Meeko chose not to say

The crew makes a covenant to destroy the reconstruction software. But Jonas — driven by his ache to escape his paralysis — secretly copies the entire dataset, codenamed SPONGE, into a hidden archive.

Meeko catches him at it in the dead of night, and chooses to say absolutely nothing. That single silence sets the whole trilogy in motion.