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Agent Carter

Sam (Samantha) Carter didn’t believe in fate.

Fate was for people who thought life owed them something. Sam knew better. If you wanted something, you took it. No one handed you a damn thing.

She sat hunched over her laptop in the dim glow of her tiny London flat, fingers flying across the keyboard as streams of code flickered across the screen. The air smelled like burnt coffee and electrical heat, and somewhere outside, the distant hum of sirens echoed through the city.

Victoria Park was just a few blocks away, but Sam didn’t care much for scenery. She had moved here for one reason: it was the perfect place to disappear.

A knock at the door.

She didn’t move.

No one ever knocked.

Her heart kicked into overdrive, her brain already running worst-case scenarios.

It could be nothing. A neighbour. A lost delivery driver.

Or it could be everything.

Her mind flashed back to the last time someone had knocked on her door unannounced. Fourteen years old. A social worker, telling her that her mother had passed away from an overdose.

From then on it was just her and her deadbeat alcoholic father, who only got worse as a result of her mother’s death.

Sam shook the memory away. That was a different life.

She exhaled slowly, flicked a glance at the screen, still running penetration tests on a client’s network, then pushed back from her desk and moved to the peephole.

Nothing.

She waited. Whoever it was, they were gone.

Still, she felt the creeping unease that never quite left her.She returned to her desk, rolling her shoulders, trying to ease the tension that had become a permanent fixture in her body. She didn’t do well with people. Never had. The internet was where she felt safe, behind a screen, in control.

The real world?

It was messy. Unpredictable. Full of people who wanted things from you.

She had learned that the hard way. Sam Carter didn’t belong anywhere.

She grew up on a council estate, where the walls were thin, the air smelled of fried onions, sweat, cheap larger and damp, where the neighbours shouted through the walls instead of knocking. It was one of those places where opportunity wasn’t just scarce, it was an inside joke.

School had been a disaster. She wasn’t stupid, not by any means, but exams were like a foreign language, during school she had to use a separate room just to be able to focus, maybe it was the noise, maybe it was the life she had then, but she couldn’t focus. Structured tests, arbitrary deadlines, none of it made sense to her. She hated being told how to think, how what things to learn, what she needed to be good at.

At fifteen, she walked out of school for the last time and never looked back.

Her first job was McDonald’s. Minimum wage. Daily grease burns. She spent most of her time working on the drive through, it was quite and nicely contained in her box, when she wasn’t doing that, she did dive, which was just washing up the equipment at the back, another isolated task.

Life had been a constant suffocating feeling that this was all it was ever going to be. But freedom was freedom.

She scraped by, renting a cramped flat with some equally skint friends, drinking cheap vodka and pretending she wasn’t drowning, she didn’t even like drinking, but it was learnt behaviour as a coping mechanism, no matter how disastrous the consequences she had witnessed.

Then, she found coding; or maybe it had found her.

She had always been drawn to computers. Even as a kid, she’d taken apart old machines, cracked passwords, bypassed firewalls, just to see if she could. She had hacked the exam boards systems to change her grades at just fourteen.

But it wasn’t until she was out of that house, out from under her dad’s constant screaming, that she realised how good she was at it.
At first, it was just a way to make extra money.

Some dodgy gigs. Small-time security work. Finding vulnerabilities in corporate networks. Then came the big leagues.

A major insurance company hired her to work in cybersecurity a proper job, with a salary and benefits and an office with those shitty motivational posters on the walls something about; “looking after the company will look after the colleagues”, bullshit.

Pay reviews, 1 to 1’s, meetings, endless meetings, she lasted eighteen months, she still doesn’t know how!

It wasn’t the work. It was the bureaucracy of it. The red tape. The way the system moved at a snail’s pace while the life moved at light speed.

So, she walked away. That’s when she found her calling; white-hat hacking.

Sam considered applying for GCHQ or MI5, she had seen an advert online, there was something appealing about it, she thought calling herself “Agent Carter”, like the Marvel TV character, had a certain ring to it but it would have just been more bureaucracy, which is exactly what she was trying to escape.

Finding security flaws. Exploiting them before the bad guys could. Some companies paid out massive bounties for vulnerabilities, and soon, Sam was earning more in a month than she had in a year at the insurance firm.

It gave her something she had never had before.

Control.

Now, at twenty-six, Carter was one of the best. She had no boss, no office, no rules. But she had enemies. Plenty of them. And lately, she had started to feel like someone was watching. Carter never liked being told who she was supposed to be. Not as a kid. Not as a teenager. And definitely not now.

People had a way of deciding things for you before you even had a say. They looked at where you were born, what you looked like, the way you talked and slotted you neatly into a box.

And Sam? She never fit into any box.

All she knew was that she didn’t fit with the girls who talked about wedding plans at fifteen or the boys who thought “you got a nice arse” was a compliment. But give her a computer, and suddenly the world made sense. There was logic in code, in breaking things apart and putting them back together. It was the first time she felt in control of something.

No one cared if you were good at computers in a place like hers. Not when your mum was too drunk to stand up by noon. Not when your dad came home just to remind you that you were a mistake.

Sam had learned early on that walls weren’t thick enough to keep out the sound of a drunk parent.

The first time her mum passed out with a cigarette still burning, Sam was nine.

She had woken to the sharp tang of smoke, her bedsheets reeking of nicotine. She ran into the living room, heart pounding, to find her mother slumped on the sofa, one arm dangling off the side, a half-smoked cigarette still burning into the carpet. A blackened hole had formed beneath it, the smell of scorched polyester making Sam’s stomach churn.

She stamped it out with her foot before it could spread.

Her mother hadn’t even stirred.

She just muttered something incoherent, turned over, and went back to sleep.

Sam had spent the rest of that night sitting by the door, her backpack stuffed with clothes, a can of Coke, and a stolen five-pound note. She wanted to leave. She should have left.

But she didn’t know where to go.

For then, for a while, she stayed.

By thirteen, she had given up hoping things would get better. By fifteen, she had stopped coming home at all. And at sixteen she left, and never looked back.

She had always struggled with people. She didn’t trust easily; not after her mother’s death, not after the way her dad cared more about the bottom of a bottle than her.

But that didn’t mean she hadn’t tried. Her first love was Jake. She was seventeen, he was nineteen, and he worked at the petrol station next to McDonald’s. He was soft-spoken, always smelled like petrol and screen wash, and had a laugh that made you want to lean in closer. He was safe. Kind. And for a while, she thought maybe this was what normal people had.

But love didn’t fix people. Jake wanted things Sam didn’t. A house. A car. A baby. "One day, we could have a real life," he’d said one night, lying in bed beside her, tracing circles on her skin. "Proper jobs, a couple of kids. Just… normal, you know?" Normal. That word had always made her stomach twist.

She knew then, even if she didn’t say it, that she was never going to be someone’s wife. Never going to be the woman who bought matching curtains or spent weekends at B&Q picking out paint swatches.

She tried, for a while. She really did. But the moment Jake got down on one knee, she knew she couldn’t do it. She broke up with him the next day.

And after that, she stopped trying to be what people wanted.

She found her real love when she was twenty. Not a person. Hacking.

She had always been good with computers. But the first time she bypassed a firewall, the first time she broke into a system just to see if she could, it was like a part of her clicked into place.

And now she had never felt more alone.

She tried dating again. A few women. A couple of men.

But people always wanted more than she could give. She wasn’t good at being open. She wasn’t soft or easy or safe. She had slept with people who wanted to be saved. She had dated people who thought they could save her.

But she had never loved anyone the way she loved the rush of the chase.

And that was why, at twenty-six, she lived alone, with a VPN on every device, a burner phone under her bed, and a knife in her bedside drawer…

Just in case.