Chapter Text
It was contracting work done for a cell of the Elite, an outgrowth trying to creep its influence into Arizona. A shadow of guilt creeps over me.
They were all capes, a few dozen, from something like ten different corporate cape groups. Arizona was a haven for Corporate teams, only beaten out by Utah in the US, but none of them were public. I broke the number one rule of the business, and didn't hesitate in doing so.
That wasn't what bothered me, though, I still did that, for the right price. I'd seen their faces, looked into every bit of their lives. An unknown voyeur, watching their day-to-day from the comfort of my shitty little room in my dad's house. I creeped on them, watched them shop in stores I couldn't imagine ever having the money for, watched family dinners, piano recitals, and even awkward first dates.
I'd seen it all, and during it all, mostly felt nothing. I watched them for months, through webcams, security cameras and their phones. It was like my very own personal soap opera. These people, all as small as I was, and I was intruding. I didn't care then. I wrote up what I saw into reports, itemized and dated down to the minute.
I figured I was being thorough, that my client would appreciate the initiative. My contact didn't.
"You're sick" she said, "unprofessional, unpredictable, unreliable, creepy."
She still paid me, and I think that was the worst part. I stewed on it for weeks, and while I was no stranger to self-flagellation, it got worse for a long while after.
I changed names, wiped all presence of my old cape persona from the Internet and vanished for a few months. I was disgusted with myself, regretful at what I'd done. It had just been so easy, and so interesting to watch. Too tempting. My curiosity really will kill me one day, I'm sure.
Jobs after that were smaller, less invasive. Mostly centered around the internet. Work any hacker could do. It was easy, and frustrating. I could do more, so much more, but I couldn't, or rather shouldn't. It'd be too easy to fall into bad habits.
I found online communities dedicated to something like what I'd done, though. Websites where hacked webcams would stream videos of their unknowing owners. It was mentioned off-handedly in a PHO thread. I remember finding a site, and flicking through a few streams. It was mostly people sleeping in dark rooms, faintly visible and tinted blue by their computer monitor's light.
I was mad, and full of shame. It was trivial to take the site over, took maybe a minute and a half to log in with newly minted admin credentials. I shut the streams off, and forced the site's homepage to redirect to goatsey or something similarly juvenile. The owner stopped hosting it, and the site vanished.
I think that after it was all said and done, I felt worse, really. I was and still am a pathetic hypocrite. The site cropped back up a few months later with a different name, and I took it down again, but I was too miserable to take it down a third time when it next popped up.
I feel sick writing this. I don't think I have anything else to say.
I'm sorry Lisa.