Your Adversary Doesn't Necessarily Follow the Law

It always felt as if an eye was upon me, even if I had the notion that I had blinded all eyes who would threaten me with their gaze. I walked into the kitchen and looked out the window. There was a truck, and for a moment the notion that there was someone threatening to me, or someone that was looking at me entered my mind. It was, of course, not inconceivable that they would be looking at me for benign purposes, but in my mind it was all for nefarious reasons for that briefest of minutes.

I selected something to eat: fistfuls of Cheerios. I knew that these were empty carbs, mostly, but I just needed a lump in my stomach. I stood there in the kitchen grazing from the box until even I couldn't bear to think of myself as eating so many Cheerios.

"Protein...I need protein," I said, then thought of the meal replacement powder I had stacked in the corner of the room. I walked over, picked up a container, then went to the counter and emptied a scoop into a glass. I poured water from the faucet, filled the glass, then took out a butter knife and mixed the powder with the water like a dream into reality.

Having mixed it, I gulped it down in one go, then scraped the remnants off of the bottom of the glass with the end of my butter knife. Then, for the moment, I felt like I had taken care of my nourishment.

Not knowing what to expect, I checked an email account. No one had sent any emails, but I had been spammed with error messages from a misconfigured control panel. I would have to address this problem in a bit. I connected to both of my VPSes, my connection obscured by TOR, and then updated my servers' software. I culled my logs, leaving no mention to any intruder who would check them, although I did not have a distinctive login name. I made a few edits to one of my webpages' code, adding some visual flair and some links that I wanted there, and fixed an error in the RSS feed.

It was a typical day, one of self-imposed secrecy and paranoia. I just needed something to do; the days wore together haphazardly, slipping into each other like waves on a shoreline. Each moment of creation seemed distinctive and held the attention, but when viewed over the course of days and weeks, they all glommed together into an indistinct muddle.

"You'll be in big trouble if you're ever caught," said Crystalbrain.

"Will I be caught?" I asked Crystalbrain.

"Do you really want the answer to that question?" Crystalbrain asked.

"I suppose I do not. Do you even have the answer to that question?" I responded.

"I'm not going to tell you if I do," Crystalbrain said.

"Am I breaking the law?" I asked.

"No, you seem to have been scrupulous in following the law," said Crystalbrain.

"So, what's the problem?" I asked.

"Your adversary doesn't necessarily follow the law," Crystalbrain said, taking (once again) a huge hit of crack.

"Are you my adversary?" I asked, frowning.

"I'm not going to really say. It would give away all the fun," Crystalbrain said.

"I'm going to assume that you would have just said "no" if you were not on some level my adversary," I said.

"You can assume that if you want. It just makes the game more fun," said Crystalbrain.

"I've suspected for quite some time that this is all a big game to you," I said.

"You have no idea," said Crystalbrain.

He continued, "You have no idea."