Something new. A short story. Catharsis?

Love is the only force in the world that can make one man fly, while at the same time bring another to his knees. How true, I thought as I read that particular quote someone left in a random corner of the web. And as always, it is wasted on those who know not its worth..or its terrible price, continued the unknown author. Yet another footnote in the vast graffiti strewn land that is cyberspace. Grim though. Definitely unlike the billions of sappy love quotes available online. Or maybe I have a peculiar affinity for it, since this quote at least, does not promise a happy ending. Happy endings...a weak smile disturbs my face. How long has it been since I last entertained the thought that they exist outside of movies with Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan or Steve Martin and whimsical novels written by blonde writers with names like Kinsella or Fielding?

My fingers dance across the keyboards, searching, always searching. The kind of work I do, it costs me valuable time and money should my fingers not dance. The web is a wild, wild place, full of surprises, unreachable sites, dropped packets, someone's gambling debts, surfing habits, untold mountains of personal information. And it's my job to hunt down these stray bits and bytes..tag them, process them and return them to their rightful owners. Or destroy them. I'm a hunter of sorts. Only instead of a forest, I hunt in the vast reaches of cyberspace. It's a solitary job, since the stakes are high, and no-one trusts anyone anymore. That's another thing that's at a premium right now. Trust. Made the mistake of letting my guard down, trusting..just once. But usually, once is enough, and not everyone is able to come back. Didn't always use to be like this, though. Once upon a time, things were..simpler.

I started in the early 90s. The net was hardly news then, except for a handful of research scientists and geeks. Way back then, you're lucky if you had a consistent 14.4k dialup connection. My dad was into the whole computer thing. Got one when I was 10. I was on the chat channels, fingers moving like spiders, typing, typing. I discovered amateur hacking after that. Phreaking, cracking, the works. Didn't really catch my attention, though. The net was too full of kids trying to show off. School came and went, then college. I did pretty well, I guess. Nothing too attention grabbing. I was never in trouble though. Always made sure of that. This was during the whole Net boom of 2000. Yup, many companies made it or and broke it those few months. I lucked out, caught a ride with a little known dotcom that soon blossomed into ComDyn. They own pretty much everything nowadays, from airlines to software houses. 9 out of 10 PCs manufactured come with DyNaMOS. Crazy name for an OS, I know. But they got this really talented kid called Gates. Slightly autistic, so he never found out how badly they screwed him. I heard some old timers say he used to bug the librarian to allow him to put back books every fuckin summer. Never had the pleasure of meeting him though. We coders used to make up all sorts of weird stories about him..looking back, I know he didn't know what he was capable of. But still, time distorts the further away you move.

End of Part one. Part two coming soon.