Have you ever stopped and looked back, wondering how on earth you got to where you’re standing? I do it all the time. But I guess that’s what this is for… To put it all down and sort it all out. I’m not good at this stuff. I took the live for the moment thing to heart, so this might be a strange trip. You could always walk away if you wanted to. No? Alright then.
I was born, apparently. I don’t know when, couldn’t give you a date if I tried. I can tell you I was found one fall wandering the Scottish highlands as a child, speaking nothing but an archaic form of Gaelic. They thought maybe I belonged in one of the more remote peasant villages where such a language might still be found, but after extensive searching no parents or relatives came forward. The state doesn’t look too far into such things; they just scratch their head and move on. So that left me a ward of the state, which is neither here nor there. It just is.
I won’t tell you I had a fantastic childhood, or at least not the one spent in modern Scotland and Ireland. I bounced around through foster homes, I wasn’t a bad kid. I just struggled learning another language and interacting with the people around me. They seemed strange, out of place, not normal. It took me a long time realize it was me that wasn’t normal. But we’ll get there eventually, who’s normal anyway. I did learn English, slowly, even though I speak it regularly it still seems foreign in my head. I did pretty well in school, math was easy… science wasn’t so bad. History and language bored the hell out of me. I got by… I didn’t really put any effort into it, I coasted.
It wasn’t until a set of foster parents dumped me in front of their old computer as a babysitter that things started to look up. Given these were the days of green screens and DOS programming, but it made sense to me in a logical, straight forward way. It didn’t make me speak to people physically, it didn’t ask me where I had come from. The affinity was immediate, natural, which is strange all things considered. I’m not going to lie, I still didn’t like school, but at least I was good at something. I mean, aside from sports, I’ve always been exceptionally athletic and fiercely competitive in that regard. But I’m losing track.
So right, school… computers, I guess that’s where the foundations are. I never really had involved foster parents, so they never noticed if I was at “school” for too long or if I didn’t come home in the evening. They didn’t provide anything more than a meal once a day and that’s nothing to live off. So in high school I started making a little money, minor stuff, ripping and burning music for other kids. Sometimes if they paid enough I’d get into the school computer system and change grades. Nothing really criminal, but we all start somewhere.
Suffice to say my foster family wasn’t interested in paying for College, they were just after the paycheck I brought home from the government and once that stopped at what the government declared my 18th birthday, I was out on my own. Literally, I was met with a duffle bag of my stuff and the door and wished good luck. Thankfully I had a little bit of cash stashed for a hotel that night. I had decisions to make and I probably didn’t make them wisely. I was young and dumb and went for the easy money right in front of my face. It was small jobs, crack this website, get this info… whatever was needed.
It was working those late nights in front of a bank of computer monitors in my crummy little apartment that started the memories. Honestly at first I thought they were waking dreams, or even that I’d dozed off entirely. It was strange stuff, like another time entirely. I was dreaming of a marshland and a simple life lived among a sisterhood of women. Of learning to fight, learning to control the elements. To a city kid who barely existed beyond computers it was pretty cool at first, it was like having another life every time I closed my eyes. Pretty cool until dreams and my reality started blending. When I started seeing people who weren’t there or people who weren’t human. When I reached for an electrical outlet and lightning arced to my fingers.
It kind of felt like I was losing my mind. But might as well lose that along with my decency. I made the mistake of cracking a webpage for some less than savory characters and the door was blown wide open. There was any amount of money to be had if you could do the work. And I could do the work. While I was mediocre in school, I excelled at hacking. It might have been the money that motivated me, it might just be a talent I have. I can’t really say either way. But I was in and out of anything you could imagine like a thief in the night, the thrill was unbelievable. The harder I worked the less strange things I saw. Seemed a fair trade off.
You know, every hacker always thinks they won’t get caught. And I mean, if you want to get technical, I wasn’t. I ended up doing a job with a complete putz and his crack job got us both nailed. Let me tell you how boring jail is. I felt like the walls were closing in on me within five minutes. I didn’t have any distractions, didn’t have anything to hold the dream images away. I’m not ashamed to say I jumped at the offer for amnesty in exchange for information. I had to give them everything to go free, names and places, holes I’d worked so hard to punch through different security systems. It’s an easy trade really, freedom for things I could just replicate easily.
This is where the problems come in though. It wasn’t any secret to the underground ties I had that I’d been popped. Work dried up, no one would touch me to save their lives. I had way too much time on my hands but thankfully I’d hidden plenty of cash that the Feds never managed to appropriate. That never solved the problem of time though. It wasn’t but a few days before the images overlapped everything so badly I couldn’t figure what I was seeing and what was really there. If drug addicts felt like that, I can’t understand why they do it. I don’t know exactly what happened to me over the course of several weeks, I don’t know where I went or how I got there. I do know I ended up back in the highlands, remote and alone.
Alone until subconsciously guided footsteps followed the path of an old Cairn and I stepped across worlds. No, I’m not on drugs. Yes, I know what I’m talking about… and really it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not, but this is how my story goes. What you don’t understand is there’s another world that borders this one, they touch in many places, many old places. At one time they were one world but in the time of the Romans magic became a thing of the past, persecuted and hunted. A great magic was worked and divided the worlds, hid the paths, opening them only to those permitted to cross. My big secret is really simple, I’m not from the world you know.
I was born there, in Avalon or Nirvana or Atlantis, depending on whichever course of legends you subscribe to. I was born to two women, goddesses if you will. I think your myths name them Brigid and Cailleach, you couldn’t understand their names if I spoke them in my native tongue. But they knew me the moment I fell through the gateway. Knowing that I wasn’t crazy, that the dreams were memories and my own unique talent at seeing both sides of our world, was an immense relief. Knowing that I have a family was incredible. But while your world chased science and technology, the other side is simple and thrives on talent and magic and as magic has faded on this side, the worlds have fallen farther apart. Time moves so slowly there, minutes can be days.
I did spend time there, to learn, to understand and to acknowledge my family and myself. But I couldn’t stay. Regardless of spending countless human years as a child there, it didn’t feel like home, or maybe I just wasn’t ready. I stayed just long enough to learn my gifts, to control the sight. I stayed long enough for several human years to pass. The Feds had forgotten about me, my contacts counted me dead. It was a relief really, coming back to that sort of peace.
So I’m starting over. I still had money stashed; I still can live in relative comfort. And yes, I can still see both worlds along with a few other little parlor tricks I’m not going to disclose. But what you ask, does a former hacker do with herself? Consulting of course…
