Isaac Hargrave was invisible.
Not in the literal sense, but in the way that people who always sat in the corner of the room seemed to blend into the background. At twenty-four, Isaac was the type of person you'd walk past in a crowd without a second glance—wiry, with short, disheveled brown hair and a pair of thick glasses that framed his tired eyes. His world revolved around a small apartment cluttered with technology: multiple monitors, a customized keyboard that clacked like a metronome, and lines of code running endlessly on his screens.
Isaac lived for algorithms, data structures, and the digital wonders that gave him control over a domain that no one else understood. In this domain, he was a king. But beyond the world of code, Isaac was a nobody. An underpaid IT specialist, working for an underwhelming startup in a city too busy to care about a guy like him.
"Another failed prototype," his boss, Jeremy, had said earlier that day, scrapping Isaac's innovative AI software as if it were another meaningless draft. Isaac had spent months working on it. In the end, it was dismissed, ignored, like everything else he ever did.
Isaac walked home that evening, his mind a storm of resentment. He wasn't angry at the rejection—he was used to that by now. It was the lack of acknowledgment that stung. The frustration of knowing that his intellect, his brilliance, was being wasted on people who couldn't even comprehend his ideas.
As he sat in front of his computer that night, surrounded by the hum of servers, Isaac felt something shift inside him. He was tired of being overlooked. Tired of being the quiet genius, while the world rewarded the loud and the mediocre.
His fingers hovered over his keyboard, and then, almost instinctively, he began typing. He didn't know what he was doing at first, but soon the familiar rhythm of coding consumed him. Line after line of code poured out of him, a chaotic dance of numbers and logic, driven by frustration, rage, and something deeper—ambition.
By dawn, Isaac had created something new: an algorithm that could infiltrate systems undetected, a digital ghost. It wasn't just another security bypass or a simple hack. It was a neural network that could evolve on its own, learning from each system it entered, growing smarter with every breach.
And just like that, Isaac Hargrave had become more than a nobody.