One: A warm, stuffy afternoon

My work mates yawned one after the other. The warm, stuffy afternoon made it difficult to concentrate on work. Soon, I found myself yawning along with them while I typed reports up as fast as my fingers would go.

To be honest, there were more than reports being typed into my computer. Besides my usual work, I was also surfing the 'net for inspiration, writing an algorithm into a little program to collect information for me so that I didn't have to scour the internet, and surreptitiously tweaking our company's firewall behind IT's back because I was bored. Also, I was messing with the background coding of someone's online game because I felt the coding was too bulky, causing the game to keep lagging.

The IT company that Boss had hired to look after our computers wasn't very good. Given that most of the IT guys were just-out-of-school technicians, they were all right, however they lacked experience. They did poor maintenance and didn't know how to optimise either our hardware or software. When the occasional bored hacker tried out our security for fun, they were of little help or use.

As for me, I managed our company's computers quietly through our company's shared internal network after I had hacked the admin password off the IT company. I'd gotten the admin password within my first week on this job. Nobody knew. Nobody noticed. Just the way it should be. I was trying to keep a low profile.

After accidentally breaking the internet a few years back, I knew there were still people on the lookout for me. The police didn't know why I had done it and if I told them it was a mistake where I had underestimated my opponent and hadn't quarantined someone's haphazard virus properly, they might not believe me. I wasn't going to make the same mistakes again. Not when I had enemies ready to point fingers and bring up false evidence if I wasn't careful. Those two-faced jerks had higher positions, were more well known and would be considered more trustworthy than a little person like me. I deplored the fact that I had fallen for their trap.

Anyway, I preferred things this way. To be a normal, unnoticeable worker. People would look over or past me and then I could quietly watch from the sidelines. I could observe what other people did when and try to figure out the whys and wherefores of their actions. Not being very confident in social situations, I needed to carefully observe and analyse human behaviour in order to know what was normal behaviour. What was considered acceptable and normal as opposed to what was formal behaviour or informal. My performance reviews always praised my work ethic but pointed out aspects of my speech or behaviour that still needed work.

Trying to be a normal person was such hard work. Even my parents didn't know how much I had struggled trying to understand and learn to react to various social situations. I had never really been much of a talker but I remember in school, the teachers had often asked my parents whether they should have me tested to see if I had some disorder or condition. They thought I might show up somewhere on the mild end of the autism spectrum. Somewhere around the Asperger's level.

Pooh to them.

I begged to differ. Although I hadn't understood what they were talking about at that time, I did understand that they had wanted to stick a label on me. They wanted to widen the rift already present between me and the other kids, and call me 'special'. Once I realised that, I started working very hard to make up for my deficiencies. That was when I first learnt how to 'disappear' under watchful eyes. Blend in and behave like a normal kid to such an extent that they wouldn't remember me. I became a generic kid. A mediocre student so that I would catch nobody's eye and fly under the radar. The fuss when people discovered you were much smarter than their initial impression of you wasn't worth it. I didn't like fusses.

After the internet crashed, I used those same skills to 'disappear' within society. I worked hard to appear just like every other ordinary person. I even studied and honed those skills so that if I was ever being followed or about to be caught, I would know what to do. I practised those skills on my younger brother and whenever I could.

Once, it even led to the amusing situation of a busy restaurant thinking I was one of their workers. Unfortunately, I didn't get paid for the work I did there. Pity. I had to disappear when management noticed there was an extra person floating around in their uniform that wasn't on their books. They'd been all flustered after I'd tipped the owner off that one of their cashiers was stealing from the till, and then left before they realised nobody knew who I was or where I'd come from.

My parents never knew. They didn't notice. They had their own problems - paying off debts, dealing with bullies in their workplace and still trying to sort out their own personal lives and relationships. They'd married young and seemed to be going through the multiple stages of midlife crises.

I didn't want to burden them with even more issues. The bright side was that they had never seen anything wrong with me and had always told those teachers that I was perfect in their eyes. They hadn't fussed when I had opted to go straight into the work force after high school finished rather than do further study. There were plenty of online courses that I could study on my own without needing the formal classroom learning in a university. Having a degree didn't necessarily mean getting a better job or pay.

I surreptitiously changed jobs the moment I realised the virus had brought the internet to a standstill. It had taken some work from a remote computer and with the help of multiple other cybertech professionals before we found the key to killing the virus. After tossing the solution to someone else to disseminate, I had erased all traces of my involvement. I only told my parents that I had left my previous workplace for another with better pay and a better work environment. Which was true. They didn't need to know any of the details. I could deal with all that nonsense myself.