Free The Fall by R. J. Pineiro

the sole purpose of accessing data, information.
    Which is far more valuable than money, he thought. Once spent, money was gone, but data could be used again and again to get more money.
    The hacker leaned forward the moment his code broke through, creating a narrow, protected conduit into the heart of the couple-matching algorithm of the dating service.
    â€œThere it is, Bonnie,” he said, staring at the network’s core, beating with activity as nearly a third of its 23,456 registered members, ages eighteen to ninety-three, actively checked their daily matches.
    The cat looked up, stared at him with round hazel eyes and meowed once, before resting her head back on his lap.
    With the precision of a surgeon, the hacker injected a homemade digital potion tailored to alter the company’s crown jewels: its matching algorithm. Designed to connect couples based on common backgrounds, career interests, age groups, degree of sexual and romantic passion, spirituality, education level, and dozens of other attributes, this company claimed that its mathematical algorithm had resulted in over seventy percent of its customers entering long-term relationships, with forty percent of them leading to marriages.
    So let’s change that a little, he thought, as he guided his cyber poison across the network, altering results, creating matches where there shouldn’t be and vice-versa.
    In addition to getting even for his rejection, Art-Z took pleasure in the fact that this Web dating service was owned by a U.S. subsidiary of a Shanghai conglomerate.
    Second to sticking it to The Man, Art-Z loved doing it to the Chinese.
    Bastards think they own the world.
    It only took a few minutes before the e-mails began to pour into the site’s administrators. An eighty-three-year-old widow from Milwaukee was complaining about her last three suggested matches, men in their early twenties who had registered the highest sexual passion preference. One of the e-mails was from one of those men complaining about being matched to the old widow, who was simply looking for elderly companionship. A homosexual man in his early sixties complained about being matched to a dozen different girls, all eighteen and fresh out of high school. A recently divorced thirty-five-year-old mother of three was being matched to six men in their late eighties and four college freshmen. And so it went, until the network administrator took down the site a few minutes later.
    Art-Z grinned and logged off, having had enough fun for the—
    A knock on the door.
    He sat upright and the black cat jumped off his lap, landed on all fours with grace, and vanished in the dark hall leading to the bedroom.
    Art-Z stared at the front door, not expecting company tonight.
    In fact, he never had company and even went through the extra trouble of keeping a P.O. Box for his online purchases to avoid home deliveries.
    He pressed a function key across the top of his keyboard and a window materialized on the lower left side of his screen, linked wirelessly to six Web cams covering every angle of his house.
    A grin formed again under his beard as he magnified Web cam number five, providing a clear view of a woman standing on his front porch, arms crossed, while looking back to the street and then straight at the camera, raising her fine brows.
    Well I’ll be damned.
    Art-Z was very seldom surprised. He had spent most of his adult life making sure that surprises, like the day he was terminated from his one and only job, were the exception to the rule.
    He shut his eyes and opened them wide before staring at the image on the screen once more.
    Incredible, he thought. Tonight was certainly an exception.
    Nearly spilling his coffee as he set it down next to the keyboard, the hacker stood and walked over to the foyer with an energy he hadn’t felt in years, sandals flopping over dusty hardwood floors.
    He paused by the door, then opened it.
    Right there, like a ghost from the past,