It doesn't begin the way everyone thought it did. His story. It didn't start when he was a child or when he was first introduced to code. It didn't begin with a stranger barging into his life and the chase that spanned years after. It started one day, when he quite accidentally slipped, and the world changed.
The world switched to binary.
He stared at the screen, black and white, begging him to say something. Then his fingers touched the keyboard and there was no turning back. It engulfed him.
The first time he did it purposely was at a library. What other way was he less likely to get caught? At home, he'd already tried the library frame and it proved flimsy.
He sidled up to a computer and sat down. A card that wasn't his, wasn't anyone's, appeared on the desk and the numbers flew by. He looked over the library accounts and made a few notes that went to the proper authorities, or to anti-corruption groups in the area, depending which was more useful. He glanced over the city funds and realized there was no helping that system. He revised the system at city hall so it ran 200% the usual capacity. Then he tapped the frame and erased the last ten minutes of footage and blacking out five more, before scooting off.
It was his first time hacking into anything, and as he boarded the tube, he wondered if this would be the last.
It wasn't the last, not by a long shot. But that would come later. The next time would be when he was drunk out of his wits and angry at the idiot that tortured him incessantly as he walked to the metro. Words were fine, absolutely fine. But the man resorted to throwing things and outright hazing. He would have been fine then too, but one step too far was hurting little, old ladies. If that little, old lady happened to run an orphanage for poor, homeless children, then that was worse. So much worse. He wasn't homeless; no, he was very well off in that aspect. He was angry. He was so angry.
The man's Facebook details didn't go public. He didn't find his personal information leaked or his credit score irredeemably destroyed. He didn't end up indebted to the mob. He wasn't on any nation's hit list. He wasn't subject to all his electronic devices, including his shiny new laptop, being totally smashed. He was the one to come home and find his porn stash missing and a note saying that worse would come if he didn't start being a nicer bloke.
The damage came back to him in full force a few days later but that little old lady was never hurt again.
The third time was child's play. He'd finally bothered to take an actual course in coding and found that the standard system was positively stupid. Then, he came out with a bachelor's in computer science, all via the net and under six months, of course. He had a double major to attend to in the first place. He pondered if a triple master's was even a possibility, realizing he was well on his way. He created a new name and new face, and found out.
He slept very little; there was no need when his body took to caffeine like an old friend. He spent a few minutes on the digital course work and a few hours on his real course work. And, after it all, he realized he'd come so far from the boy who stumbled on the liquid binary. It took him less than fifteen minutes to go back to that old city library's frame and re-design their search system into a streamlined code, on the fly. He slipped in and out of nation security networks like it was a walk in the metaphorical, digital park. That's when the possibility of more occurred to him.
For the very first time, it occurred to him to use code for anything other than walks in the park.
The first he touched was America. He'd hear rumors and watch a handful of spy movies, so the CIA seemed like a worthy opponent.
He was so wrong. The firewalls fell under his fingers, crumbling into fine dust. He reached out, trying to find a challenge. He looked for any tricks, anything that could surprise him. There were none. He tracked anyone looking for his signal. There were none. He thought that the big and bad wasn't all that it cracked up to be. The inventors of Microsoft and Apple had nothing on his simple, little code.
It didn't inflate his ego, merely infuriated him. He sent a mass email to everyone in the technology division. By the time they rabbited on, he'd stripped out of his pajamas and taken a shower. By the time they'd figured out that it had come from their boss's computer, when it really hadn't, he'd gone and stepped out for Chinese. By the time he came back, they'd given up and trawled on with their afternoons. He'd been a little disappointed in them, especially by a few he thought had potential to be great sparring partners.
He sent them a video of cute kittens for the effort.
Canada: There were files meant only for the eyes of Canadians.
Russia: That was a sodding joke. The mafias were more advanced.
Iraq: Just because.
France: There was a delightful amount of porn on their servers. He replaced it all with internet memes and viral videos. Their prime minister was understandably confused when he logged in the next morning and found a few server's worth of evidence against him sitting in his inbox. It'd already been passed around the internet by that point. You can't say he didn't harbor the old dislike of the French. You could also blame that French girl who stepped on him in her stilettos.
India: There had to be a reason why even Bollywood was afraid of making movies involving their government. He found there was a small challenge there. It fell all the same. He was a little surprised at how organized they were and how quickly the home team caught on to him. He evaded them, leaving the signal blinking from a higher-up's computer. The thing wasn't even on McAffee.
Liechtenstein: Absolutely adorable. He spammed their technologies office with checks taken from the money skimmed off their budget. It took them a few days to find that account and retrieve the totality of their funds. He was never more proud of the little nation with an impossible name.
Australia: He had to get creative. Don't judge Aussies by their quiet exterior and poisonous snakes. Well, maybe the poisonous snakes. And the spiders. And the platypus. Just don't' judge.
Then he tackled China. Well, so to say, China tackled him. He was tapping away on someone else's computer when a bunch of ads appeared. He didn't know mandarin at the time, never bothered to learn a language that he would never use. He used Russian on a regular basis, chatting with one of his professors. Every time he closed one, another popped up. How amusing.
He wiped the floor with that company not five minutes later. Then, he took on the Chinese government.
There wasn't much to look at, standard stuff. He did lead them on a merry chase, of which his brother would be very proud. The man was very good at disappearing and letting his brother help him disappear. China's prodigies showed so much potential. He resolved to learn the language as he signed off his refurbished laptop.
The next day, he listened to a woman patiently explain pronunciation of Chinese vowels in his ear, while on the tube. A month after that, he order dim sum in impeccable Chinese and kept the waitress charmed with daily chit chat throughout the meal. His date was impressed too, but unimpressive. He never bothered to call back.
Japan, he thought, would be his Waterloo. He'd been popping in and out of international security systems and leaving little pieces of advice, but it had to end sometime.
Still, it wasn't a frown that graced his features when he discovered someone on the other end fighting back, a brilliant mind that was like his own. His opponent was standardized, trained, but knew dirty tricks and wasn't afraid. He'd thought it like a Sudoku puzzles whose number's faded according to a logarithm every time a new one was added. He'd made an app like that, though not Sudoku (that was his personal baby), and enjoyed the money pouring into his bank. He'd taken Japanese lessons from the moment he decided to try Japan. She, seeing as his opponent had been so kind as to give away gender, coded messages into the stream. They bounced back and forth, him telling her stupid flower jokes and her telling him that she would catch him. They debated the pros and cons of HTML and CSS. It appeared that she was twenty-seven, engaged, and scouted out of high school. She loved her job and would be happy if he left the mainframe unscathed. By that point, he'd taken to deflecting her attempts but was nonetheless charmed by her bluntness. He did as she asked and left the trail to die at an internet café that closed in Akihabara a few months before.
A few days later, he looked up the young woman. Her name was Kimiko and she had the darkest eyes he had never seen on a woman. When he sent her a friend request on Facebook, after a complex set of actions that made it look like an accident, they struck up a friendship.
He still spoke to her about his troubles sometimes, even though she died in a car accident a few months after their first Facebook chat. It was a comfort that there was someone else in the world that understood the feeling of loneliness.
The Japanese government did send out a distress signal to allied nations, unofficially.
They pieced it together bit by bit.
Missing links and defeated offices tolled like church bells. The cartels, rings, triads, mafia, mobs, everyone he had ever shoved under a government's nose were thrown into the light, bound and gagged.
They compared notes.
Forgotten pieces that he'd never forgotten surfaced on their main frames. He watched as they tried to create a systemic code and pattern out of his work. He figured that they were idiots. There was no rationality. He was as rational as Picasso and Kandinsky.
They got lost.
He expected them to. At that time, he wondered if he should retire. It'd been years in his head. He couldn't remember why, for the life of him, why the calendar told him it was only three years since he touched that library keyboard. Three years since he struck out on his own. He didn't even have his two, formal, masters yet; that was coming up in a few months.
It felt like a lifetime.
The day the letter came in the mail, a few days after that the settled into a real normal, before the computers, and realized he'd changed one of his majors to engineering and another to art history somewhere along the way, he wasn't surprised. His course work was good, even if he didn't remember his life before that. His other degrees were piling up somewhere. He's sure he stuck them in with his tax returns and stocks information.
He'd replied immediately and took the internship with a new joy. He had a name, not the one that he used breaking into mundane, national secrets. It was his real one and he liked that people didn't use that one either. They referred to each other by official nickname.
His life could be broken into parts.
There was the life that was before he lost himself, the child that loved the world and had so much to offer. It was the child that loved words like ericaceous and nihilarian and excelled at using every word in the English dictionary.
Then there was the time he lost himself, the dark ages. He didn't remember much of that time. He just remembered feeling very old at the end of it. He'd woken from that three years in the future with only a passing knowledge of what had happened in the meanwhile. He'd recalled every lecture he'd attended, but found spoke to the woman at his regular Chinese take-out about foreign policy in perfect Cantonese and knew the Syrian government's internal works in a way that seemed perversely wrong. He felt lost in his skin, a child again. He threw out the leather jackets, printed t-shirts, and skinny jeans. Really, when had he gotten those? He bought some cardigans and chinos. Those were much more comfortable.
Then there was the internship, the best time of his life. He meticulously put together ideas and how to make them work. He created in ways that cast everyone's eyes on him and away again. They were afraid, but he didn't notice. He was too busy creating.
He took the title given quietly; all the while, he pondered to himself why was it that he had a mug with that same name from the dark ages. Perhaps he was shooting for that all along. Then, 007 came. He didn't know what to make of that. It felt like another black hole, but this time he was conscious going in. Silva was the darkness that etched into his soul. Why did the man think him such a clever boy? He'd done a bit but nothing to get a genius like Silva to think him clever. Though, that was retrospection. He'd thought himself a worthy opponent when the laptop was presented. He couldn't remember why a small part of him was quiet that time around. He just wished that voice was talking.
He settled into his seat, soft music played in the background, Debussy and Grieg. He wondered why his computer was loaded with the stuff. He'd been more a Beethoven and Mozart person in his childhood anyway.
He heard a steady rhythm of footsteps echo through his bunker. He wouldn't, couldn't think of it as an office. It was built a bunker and was a bunker again. This time it protected from new threats, not atomic bombs. Those steps were for his benefit, he knew, the owner could be as quiet as he liked despite his loud methods. Really, craters as a calling card? It was a bit much.
The door to his little cave cracked open and he knew the face looking at him. There was the pair of ice blue eyes and platinum blonde hair. The agent was old, an antique compared with everything else. But wasn't that what he was there for? To be MI6's Peter and drag the agency, kicking and screaming, into the new age. The agent lifted and eyebrow, catching on that he didn't have the audience's utter attention. He smirked, wild and dangerous, and something from the dark ages burned.
"Q."
The Quartermaster met his eyes.
"007."
Not my best work. It was supposed to be a detailed descent into madness. What am I even doing anymore?