Boris Petrov was not a hero. He was thirty-eight years old, possessed a mild astigmatism that required him to wear thick, wire-rimmed glasses, and had spent the last fifteen years of his life writing backend financial routing code in a series of increasingly bleak office buildings. He had a wife named Elena who taught primary school mathematics, a twelve-year-old daughter who desperately wanted a horse, and a profound, bone-deep desire to remain entirely unnoticed by the world.
He worked o