He was not a good fit for the job. He was different from everyone else in the company. When they were tall, he was short. But on days when they were short, he stood out like a redwood. He had the wrong name, no one could pronounce it. But then he couldn’t pronounce their names. He was doomed.
He first figured out that the match was not good when they sent him to a part of the world where bombings were a daily affair. The airline lost his luggage, and when he went to the shopping center to buy pants, a shirt, and underwear, nothing fit. The next day the shopping center was bombed. But he was already in the air, on his way to Dubai, to a conference. He didn’t see the wondrous sights of Dubai because traffic was gridlocked. So he presented his paper in frigid air in a no name hotel wearing ill fitting clothes that had barely escaped being blown up. It was not a good trip.
His product, a black box, was used to hack into websites, both in his own country and overseas. In fact it was produced overseas by a country that then sent it to his country so that it could be sold to the enemies of the country that produced it. Only he thought this was very strange. Once, the producing country sent the box without the outer plastic housing that would conceal the maker’s trademarks. When the box reached the enemy country, having been routed through his company, the enemy country wouldn’t allow it though customs. Only he saw the irony of deception unmasked.
Many of the others in the company, the too talls or too shorts, couldn’t travel to the countries where they were selling the boxes. Most couldn’t get visas. Many were afraid of being caught in the spy game. So they told him to go instead. He pointed out that he owned clothes that had almost been bombed and he didn’t want to get any closer to being bombed. He refused to go back to the country where his clothes had come from. There were three bombings on the day he would have been there.
Enough was enough. He left the company. But enough was not enough for them. They monitored his address, corrupted his files, wouldn’t let go. And so he found himself in the curious position of having the very product he had promoted turned on him, invading his life and family. Life on the run was not fun. They read his email, they read his wife’s email.
He had a long and glorious career in the Valley. Baby blankets for his children that came with a note signed “Bill and Dave”. He was always at the cutting edge of the next big thing. Playing in the sandbox of high technology. He would not be defeated by this technology that had slipped over the edge of patriotism. The world had changed and borders were compromised, he could handle that. This was no longer about the country or even the company, it was about him and his family.
He learned to become a mole, working in stealth mode, under aliases, unknown, sometimes forgotten. He began to use a MAC. A hacker himself.
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