Have you ever felt like a recurring character in other people's lives?

My life would make a great Saturday morning cartoon. Well, if they still made Saturday morning cartoons that weren't about catching all the latest consumer fetishes from overseas.

Can you tell that I'm jaded?

For me everyday life is a lot like a fully immersive and interactive game of GTA combined will all the "charm" of the average JRPG village. Except that I'm not allowed to borrow/destroy property. Nor wantonly kill people, even if I think they deserve it.

I do fight monsters, make some $$$, gain EXP and even LVL up from time-to-time.

Actually, I'm a freelance IT technician and spend most of my time battling the invasion artificial life forms which infect our global communication networks on a regular basis.

You probably think of these things in terms of buzzwords like "crackers" and "malware" or even "viruses."

But from the front line these words hardly convey the depths on the cunning opponents I face on a regular basis. Tracking often cloaked cybernetic foes requires intimate knowledge of the terrain, usually some version of a popular PC operating system.

Intimate training with a wide range of hardware, software and wetware tools (some a little harder to come by than others) is an absolute necessity.

All required for waging war against the machines. You name it, I've exterminated it; robots, androids, cyborgs, mecha, rogue artificial intelligence... All of these so-called fantastical things are much more visceral than anybody ever suspects.

"Looks like a case of Toolbaritis, ma'am."

Of course, these could also just be the stories I tell myself whilst waiting for yet another progress bar to load or memory scan to run...

TBC

For just 99¢ you can check out my first eNovella: 419. Based on an actual encounter with a lethal artificial intelligence that made Bioshock's SHODAN look like a kitten in comparison!

For me it is like trying to simultaneously flush a cat down the toilet whilst making a bed that already has a content dog sleeping on it. What is writing a novel like for you?