I've been living my whole life in a computer. Think about what that could mean. Obviously, being a physical being I cannot physically live inside it, especially given how small the models seem to get. No, I'm talking about the emotional and mental level of living. My whole life I was an outcast. My family never wanted me, I never had friends, and I was pretty much alone from day one. It was me against everyone else, and the computer was my safe haven.

Maybe I should introduce myself. My name is Tom Fisher. I'm 20 years old, and I'm a computer hacker. I live in my own apartment that my only real life friend's dad owns. He gives me free rent out of the kindness of his heart. He knows I can't pay. No one will hire me. I always get to the interview stage but my lack of people skills always blows it for me. I've tried to get people skills, but it's just not my world. It's not the same as the safe confines of the internet.

The little money I do get is from the dangerous life of being a hacker. I've stolen boatloads of information over the past 5 years, and sold it for whatever I can. It's never been an easy life, but it's the only life I have. I try to avoid hacking when possible, doing only enough to get by. As such, the authorities have never persued me. They know it's me. They just don't care since they know I have no other life style. They've given up on me, like so many other people.

The internet is the only place that'll take me. They don't hate me for the most part. They don't curse my existence. They don't wish for me to die. The internet is the only place I can reasonably survive. I'm plugged in at all times. My friend sometimes drop by to keep me company. Boy do I need that, without his interaction I might have ended up offing myself long ago. In school I was picked on ceaselessly. All the gazes and jeers... I just couldn't take it. I'm so glad those years are over.

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It was a Monday, and there was nothing to do. No one to talk to. All the kids were at school, and all work was just starting up. I decided to toy with the computer as I usually did. It's a common routine for me. Wake up every day, play around with the computer, and find out more about it. It's not a normal computer by the way. It's actually some kind of super computer. I can't really explain it, but I can explain how I came into possession of it.

Now it was Mid October... five years ago.

I was fifteen. Still in high school. I went to school like everyone else, and left like everyone else. I went home to my family, who by the way, hated my guts. Every day was the same. I'd walk in the door, be ignored till dinner time, eat, go back upstairs, and occasionally have them beat me down emotionally. They never supported me. I wanted to do something laid back and easy with my life, but they kept pushing for me to go and do a physical job. How the hell am I supposed to do that? I have no muscle. I have back issues. I can't handle physical work.

This was my daily routine. Until this day.

I got on the bus like normal, and it left the school like normal. Everything was normal about this day. We left the school and drove on the broken down roads which three people got into an accident on earlier this year. I didn't know it then, but in the near future, this road would become my salvation.

Anyway, it was a normal day. But I was dropped off somewhere that wasn't my house. I was told to get off at this address by the bus driver. So I did. It was an apartment complex. Abandoned by the looks of it. Why was I being told to get off here? Before I could question, the bus was gone. With no other choice I walked in the front door. And all was black.

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A light came on. Three men of hispanic heritage were standing around me. I opened my mouth to ask what was going on, but then I realized my mouth was covered with tape. I also realized I was tied to a chair. How in the hell did this happen? The middle man came over and ripped off the tape on my mouth.

"Hey ese, you look kinda smart. How about you help us out with a little theft, eh?" he whispered in a terrible Mexican accent.

I nodded, not knowing what I had gotten myself into. I just wanted to be agreeable. It was my best option to live. He untied me and took my hand. We walked, as the two other men followed. There would be no chance of an escape.

"My name is Roberto." said the middle man, "The guy with the bat is Jesse, and the guy with the wrench is Henry. Hopefully we don't have to kill you and you can remember our names a little while longer."

We arrived in a dark room and Jesse turned on the lights. I saw it for the first time in my life. A computer with so much processing power, it made every other machine I touched look like a pencil sharpner.

"Sit." Henry told me as Roberto pushed me down into the chair. "Now turn it on."

How did these three get their hands on something like this? Rather than ask questions, I obeyed. Start up was instantaneous, and I was in awe of the power in front of me. If I was going to die, I could at least die happy. As I fiddled around for a bit with the interface, learning different things about it, I noticed one of the men had left. I think it was Henry? Couldn't really tell.

"So what do you want me to do?" I asked, and I instantly regretted it, as Roberto threw a very hard punch against my weak jaw. I opened more things on the computer, and saw what it was they wanted. I pointed at it on the screen hoping for a positive response.

"Yes, that. We need you to go get that for us."

They were asking me to hack for the first time in my life.

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The data they wanted were of little note. So little I forgot exactly what it was they wanted. Surely this would never come back to bite me in the ass. It was just a little money from a local business that never made it off the ground.

I still had no idea how to hack, but I sure as hell wasn't going to tell them that. I pushed every button I found trying to see what I had at my disposal. There was a lot in the lines of disablers and crackers. Thousands of programs in a folder labled tools. These weren't your word processing applications either...

I opened a few and ran it on something called test.exe. I stumbled through the test, but I was getting the basics of password cracking and passing firewalls.

Then it became clear to me. The only way out of this mess would be to commit my first robbery. I would become a criminal to save my life. The moral implications didn't matter at the time. I wanted to live, despite how poor my life was.

It took a couple minutes but I managed to successfully steal the info they wanted. They were pleased, and told me to get lost. I ran off without a second thought about what had just happened. As I ran out of the building I became a little sad my run with that computer was done. It was such a rush that I almost wanted to stay with it. However, I knew instinctively that my life was far more important.

I got home and went to my room. Parents didn't notice.

I turned on the TV and checked the news. The very same men I had just helped were plastered all over the news. Apparently the guy who went missing really was Henry. He was shot three times in the chest... He must have been trying to buy us time and fought off the cops for as long as he could. He was reported as alive though, so the shots mustn't have hit any vitals. Then there was Jesse who had willingly surrendured to the police. Roberto escaped from the crime scene. The cops gave a standard report... and I was afraid for my life when they uttered the next line...

"We found a computer with a fourth set of fingerprints. Someone else was in on it."


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What Would Leggy Do?