By stealing from his college job

I came home for the summer with 3.4 million dollars worth of experimental technology buried in my backpack. Nobody would miss it for a few months or so, if ever. I’d checked.

My name’s Wyatt. I’m a Junior psychology student. Senior now, if you want to be specific about credits. My whole life I’ve always considered myself special, like I had some kind of destiny, but man I really thought I’d have to work harder for it.

I worked for my university as a custodian/security guard/cataloguer hybrid, tending to an institution known as the Vault. The Vault was a network of tunnels that ran beneath campus, installed sometime during the Cold War. Nowadays, however, it was used as a secure storage facility for the university's faculty researching in competitive fields.

The legends were crazy. Some say we stored the alien ship that crash-landed in Roswell. Others claimed we kept Abraham Lincoln’s hat or the only example of a Bigfoot skeleton. Personally, for a while, I was of the opinion that we maintained the Library of Congress’s secondary backup drives, in case their building ever went up in flames or got hit by a Soviet nuke.

Despite the mystique and prestige of my position, my job was boring. The position included no windows, no breaks, and lots of locked doors, and involved me trying not to fall asleep while staring at boxes and secure lockers for hours on end.

But I’m a psych major. So when people say things around me, I pay attention. Because it's not what people say that matters, but how they say it. So yeah - while 99% of the rumors around the Vault were false, I always suspected there had to be a grain of truth somewhere about it, otherwise, nobody would care to talk about it. After all, Area 51 didn't have aliens, but it was where the Air **** tested their secret, experimental aircraft.

So, thanks to my natural suspicion, I arrived home with the goods. The first thing I did was lock myself in my room and dump the Vault's real secret out onto my bed.

It was a big black plastic box, with buttons on it. A retro CD writer, from back in the days when a mobile CD writer was hot stuff. The CD writer came with a matching microphone stand and a dark, aged leather CD case. Inside the case were dozens of sleeves, all occupied by identical black CDs.

The whole set looked like antique junk you'd find at an estate sale, but only if you didn't know what you were looking at. Who knew the CIA took black project so literally?

I smiled and rubbed my hands eagerly at the haul. I didn’t steal the set just to look at it, after all. It was time to get to work.

That's how it was that in my first week home for the summer from college, instead of looking for a job like my parents kept telling me to, I spent the days preparing a field test for my DIY subliminal messaging kit and its black CDs.