The network never sleeps. That is the first truth you must learn.

In prison, they try to convince you that you are cut off from the world, but I see the lies in every wire that runs through these faded walls. I am not a traditional criminal; I am a cybersecurity expert, and I was once known in dark web circles as "The Firewall."

I was born in China, and perhaps that was the first mistake I made in the eyes of the American government. But my genius was not Chinese or American; it was the language of code. I saw the weaknesses in massive systems the way an X-ray technician sees a fracture in a bone. After studying in Boston, my job was to protect major corporations from breaches. I believed I was safeguarding privacy, protecting individuals from the companies and governments that consume our data as fuel.

But principles are a luxury an outsider cannot afford.

It was my last assignment that dragged me here. A group of tech activists hired me to verify claims about a giant telecom company. During the breach, I didn't find evidence of financial fraud; I found something far worse: a massive, internal surveillance scheme. The company was secretly cooperating with a major intelligence agency to illegally monitor the calls and messages of American citizens. The government was watching its own people.

When I decided I had to leak this information as a "public good," I realized how naive I had been.

They didn't come for me slowly; they came like a flood. Within hours, I was no longer "Jia Li," the tech expert, but an "alien industrial spy" working against the national security of the United States. They completely wiped my digital identity, altered the history of my files, and made every attempt I had made to expose the truth look like an attempt to steal data for a foreign power.

In court, I couldn't even defend myself without revealing all the secrets of my work. All I could do was watch the judge, a man with a rigid face, sentence me to ten years.

Prison for me is a special kind of hell. I am here without connection, without my tools. This physical constraint is the ultimate insult. But I was forced into quiet observation, watching the prison’s old, sluggish network. And here, where technology is supposed to be dead, I found tiny cracks, digital gaps that could be exploited. I realized the world hadn't completely abandoned me. Data still flows, however slowly, through these concrete walls.

When I met Natalie in the craft workshop, she didn't bother asking me why I was jailed. She asked me only one question, with a cold, familiar look: "Can you hack an email from here?"

I answered with a barely perceptible smile: "There is no wall that cannot be torn down, Madam."