It was cold and windy that day, as if the Mother Nature herself was giving the whole city the finger. Scowling, I took a sip from my glass as I stared out of the window. I hated whisky.

That’s when she walked in. A tall blonde in a thick wool coat. She’d been crying. Right away I knew it was going to be a hell of a day.

She said her name was Sam, and she was a pro gamer. The dark folds of her overcoat concealed a mechanical keyboard, so I knew she was legit. She handed over a black box – a gaming rig – and told me she wanted upgrades.

I asked her why she would come to me – a regular private detective – just for an upgrade job. It didn’t make sense. That was when she got so close I could smell her perfume.

She was in with some powerful people, and she was scared, she said. She knew too much and her PC was a target. But she still wanted it to be upgraded. It had to be the best. She might’ve been beautiful on the outside, but in her heart she was just another burned out gamer, chasing raw performance at any cost.

I grimaced as I drained my glass. Why did I keep drinking this stuff?

To this day I’ll never know exactly why I agreed to the job. Maybe it was her doe-eyed look of desperation. Maybe it was the whisky going to my head. Maybe it was the Final Warning letter from the bank burning a hole in my desk drawer.

At the time, it seemed like a simple enough job. Just upgrade the rig with a second GPU and we should be able to hit a benchmark of 11000+? Piece of cake.

Of course, nothing is ever as easy as it seems…