nix/hex

The breach is already inside the building.

Six years on the night shift in East Vancouver, in her own voice: three techno-thrillers as interested in what the work costs her as in how the network comes apart. Clean, non-encrypted files you actually own. No DRM, no account, no email, no expiry. Take it and go.

Browse all books Why DRM-free?

The catalogue

One narrator across all three, and her handle is Hex. She works nights at a colocation facility in East Vancouver and performs on a cam site. Six years end to end: 0x01 is where it starts, at nineteen, 0x02 is what she does after V vanishes, and 0x03 is where the last message sends her. Best read in order.

Each title downloads as a single EPUB, straight from this page. Read on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, or anything that opens a book.

Cover of The Night the Server Room Bled: circuit traces and columns of binary over a glitched dark field, titled in phosphor green.
0x01

The Night the Server Room Bled

She is nineteen, six months into the night shift at a colocation facility in East Vancouver, and the person she is becoming is not the one on the payroll. She stays after hours. She memorizes the root passwords of clients who forgot to change them. Then a client’s server goes hard down at 2:47 a.m. and she is the only one there to walk the cold aisle and find out why.

“i wasn’t supposed to be there. i mean, i was employed there.”
short story~3 pages.epub · 224 KBstart here
Free
Download EPUB
Cover of The Hastings Incident: the same circuit-trace and binary field as 0x01, rendered in cyan, titled in pale blue.
0x02

The Hastings Incident

Winter 2023, and she is keeping two lives running on the same nerve: sysadmin in the dark of the colo, performer in front of a camera with purple lights. V has been gone eight months. The rent has quietly stopped getting paid. Then a client writes to her with something other than the usual opener, and what he wants is not the fantasy. His sister is missing.

“V had been gone for eight months when I stopped paying rent.”
short story~28 pages.epub · 252 KBfour years later
Free
Download EPUB

Yours the moment you download it.

Not as a favour, and not as a trial. The file you download is the whole thing, and it keeps working whatever happens to us.

DRM, or digital rights management, is the technology most stores wrap around ebooks to control where and how you read them. It ties your book to one app, one account, one company staying in business.

We don’t use any of it. You download plain, standard files and do whatever you like with them.

You do not have to take that on trust. An EPUB is a zip archive, and when a book is locked the lock lives in a file inside it called META-INF/encryption.xml. Unzip anything you download here and count how many of those you find.

reader@nixhex:~$ unzip -l hastings.epub
20 mimetype
251 META-INF/container.xml
6271 OEBPS/ch01.xhtml
reader@nixhex:~$ unzip -l hastings.epub | grep -c encryption.xml
0
reader@nixhex:~$ cp hastings.epub /Volumes/KOBOeReader/
reader@nixhex:~$ █

The honest answers

Can I read these on my Kindle?
Yes. Send the EPUB to your Kindle with Amazon’s “Send to Kindle”, by email or through the app, and it converts on arrival. Nothing to install and no account with us.
Can I share a book with my partner?
Within your household, yes. There’s no copy protection stopping you. We just ask you not to post files publicly or resell them.
The author, in green phosphor: round glasses, a studded choker, lit by monitors in a dark room.

Who is NIX/HEX?

NIX/HEX is a pen name. I'm the one who wrote these.

I worked the night shift at a colocation facility in East Vancouver for longer than was healthy. I learned to read server logs the way other people read faces. I spent years on incident-response teams, the kind where you get called at 3am because a database went down and nobody knows why, and by 4am you've found the Raspberry Pi someone hid behind a patch panel with a sticky note that says “you found me.”

The fiction started as incident reports that were too strange to file. Then it became stories. Then it became books. The pen name stays because some of the technical detail sits close enough to the real thing that I would rather it did not arrive with an employer attached.

These books are about the machinery of modern life turning against the people who trust it. Every server room, every dead drop, every encrypted message: they all happened to someone. Not always me. But always someone.

“A locked file you paid for is not a book you own. Every title I publish ships DRM-free, because the reader is not the threat model.”
~ nix/hex somewhere between the server room and the screen

Know when the next one lands.

The three books above are free and stay free, and taking one never asks you for an account or an email. The list is the one place that does ask, and it is used for a single thing: a message when there is a new book. No other mail, and one click to leave.

Subscribe

Opens buttondown.com in a new tab. The books above need none of this.