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Chapter One: Slow to Anger
Louis was the last one on Earth who would have ever considered becoming a vigilante. He was not violent, never had been... but he was smart; scary smart, and capable of delivering brutal physical pain if the recipient truly deserved it. Louis was careful, too -he had already proved it, the time he caught The Hacker. The Hacker was an isolated incident, one that Louis was ashamed of, too, in a way. Not that The Hacker would ever forget Louis (or rather, his own distorted image of Louis) anyway. In fact Louis would be shocked if the hacker ever had any desire to hack again. Louis wanted to forget The Hacker. He just wanted to get on with his life.
People didn't really know how to deal with Louis. He was quiet but confident, maybe a little too quiet for his coworkers' taste. They were a group of clowns, Louis thought. Their humor was not funny; they were a selfish lot, with a tendency toward backstabbing as well. Louis would sit at his desk and watch the comedy of errors each day, unintentionally keeping track of everyone using his own personal rating system. The boss, Mike, liked Louis; his work was always organized and complete, and he never caused any of the 'stupes headaches' -as he called them- like the others did. Mike had tried to confide in Louis on several occasions, but Louis seemed like a tough nut to crack. Mike suspected that Louis had some sort of deep mental problem, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.
Friday was worse than usual in the office. Dale was absent, so Louis didn't have anyone to talk to even if he wanted to talk. The others were just too obnoxious on Fridays; they wanted to get out of there and go to lunch; and after lunch, they couldn't wait to get to the bar down the street. Louis had stopped at The Continental once -in the beginning, a Friday of course, and found it way too annoying to ever go back. That was when he started secretly assigning points to everyone he met. Points were bad. Louis was beginning to notice that people earned a lot of points on Fridays. On this particular Friday, a plan began to develop in the dark place in Louis' mind. He shook it off and sunk deeper into his computer program to make the day go by faster.
University of Phoenix online classes were really annoying. Louis needed to finish his Master's in Computer Science, and however hokey the UOP seemed, the degree was what he needed to move on to the next leg of his career and more income. Additionally, it didn't hurt that he never had to attend a physical campus, or that the company was paying half. After stopping off for groceries late on Friday afternoon, Louis worked out for an hour on his private balcony before showering and hitting the books. He started the music on the computer he had dedicated to .mp3 files, the one with the big speakers; this was going to be a long weekend on line, so he started by setting it to random play.
Not too many students can work full time and take three simultaneous degree courses, but since Louis had put his social life on hold and had this humonguos memory thing going on, it really wasn't that tough. He didn't like being a loner in the city, but here nobody really bothered him very much -as they had back home, where everybody knew him. Here he was like a bee in the hive, an ant in the hill, the perpetual stranger on his secret mission. Louis had a silent way of letting people know that he was too busy for their nonsense. At the same time, people wanted to know him but easily forgot him. Louis was Normal Norman when he wanted to be. This phase of Louis' career plan would not last much longer; finally, he was nearly finished with his last semester and then a final thesis and summary class after that.
This weekend, Louis would grind through the final three weeks of material for all three courses, effectively making attendance a formality (and somewhat of an annoyance). What Louis really hated about UOP was the team format of the classes. Many instructors would just kick back and let the teams implode. Louis wanted to hurt some of his team members and instructors sometimes. They were idiots. They were racking up points, and he knew who they were. Louis would tell himself that they would be out of his life soon, that their online personas were not real, that they were like him; but once in a while, when the dark part of his mind got restless, he would find himself doing a little creative detective work. He knew where they lived. He looked at their homes on Google Earth. And then he would focus again, cross out the completed sections of each syllabus systematically and enrich the details of his plans.
Louis was developing a habit of learning things about people he worked with or met, things that you don't normally think someone is researching about you. Louis would have made a fine detective. He could have been a security programmer, an electronics surveillance technician, martial arts instructor or even a boxer. In fact Louis was becoming more of a virtual James Bond than he ever meant to become. But with his lack of any social life and his dedication to finishing school and his upcoming thesis, all of his distractions and entertainment (if you could call it that) took the form of clandestine research with no apparent purpose. Louis was the type of guy that always knew way more about you than you about him; but you could never see it on his face, ever. Maybe it came from his poker days in college (at UNLV), where he learned to play people like marionettes at the tables; he was great at it, but Louis considered gambling stupid. He never did lose the habit of studying people, however.
Between periods of studying and writing his thesis and secret survellance (and research), Louis would read about philosophy and religions on the internet. He would occasionally log into Pogo to play chess, and he actually met a few interesting people there. He didn't trust them though, and he needed to remain anonymous because, well, you just never know. Louis could not afford to let his guard down, lest anyone might learn things about him that would become inconvenient later. Another thing that Louis would read about was movies. In order to avoid spending time on bad movies, he crafted a list of proven thrillers on a wish list and would rent a DVD periodically. This probably added to his dark side; because Louis would get totally absorbed in dark characters, his journey into the human psyche was becoming a bit twisted.
Chapter Two: The Hacker
When you have read enough spy books and seen enough thrillers that they all start to run together in a common theme, you tend to move on to new venues, new subjects and genres. Then, after tiring of non-fiction, studies and technical journals, you come back. You come back because the thriller, if well written, trumps any documentary with regard to excitement. But somehow it's not the same. You easily and instinctively think like the hero, but more clearly; if you were in his place, you could actually do better because you read so many of these same, so-called unique works and you've been effectively trained by an army of ex-CIA operatives, analysts and authors. This is the place in which Louis had found himself a year earlier, bored by everything. And then The Hacker presented himself. It was not good timing on the part of The Hacker.
Senior year in Las Vegas had been mostly good for Louis; for his age, 23, he was incredibly informed and mature. He preferred 70's music to any other, really for a number of reasons. He sometimes imagined himself a reincarnated U.S. soldier killed in action in Vietnam; he had read Orwell's "1984" at the age of eleven with headphones on, blasting Deep Purple's "Machine Head" the whole time (which initiated a distaste for politics). He rapidly worked his way through Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, Steven Coonts and Dale Brown. Louis was born in 1984, and he got a lot of his cultural preferences from his boyhood neighbor, Russ, who was not only three years older than Louis but had an older brother who was infatuated with the 70's. So by 1990 he had read all the old 'Doc Savage' and 'Dune' series' as well as collected every Doors album ever recorded- not to mention the tons of other paperbacks and rock tracks he had now devoured like a young lion. His taste ran the entire spectrum from science fiction to history to spy books, but the music was always 70's. When all of his colleagues at UNLV were busting imaginary caps with long-dead Tupac, Louis still heard the 70's and 80's in his head. Remember, many bands in the 80's were basically programmed during the 70's.
...to be continued