Henry hunched over onto his rickety desk, unstable, the whole of his figure framed by the faint, dim light issuing out of his battered, well-used laptop. His clothes too were worn and frayed at the edges, reflecting a lot about the many ills he struggled with in life, while the chair he sat on creaked ominously every time he shifted weight.
It was quite a relic from another era, it seemed, and it strained and hissed along incessantly, rather like some ancient mechanical affair doing its level best to match up to his many demands and expectations. The dust stuck to its surface and never let go, building up into what was almost a patina; yet, the warmth, light but there, exuded from its bottom-a dead giveaway that it was in an almost perennial fight against overheating, never really running at a constant temperature.
It was still in the morning, and the sun had just risen; Henry had risen less than twenty minutes earlier, yet all within this short period, his attention was overcome with Call of Duty, no doubt one of his favorite first-shooter games. Though he had gotten a rather late start as a gamer-only a month into this exciting new hobby he was into-he seemed hopelessly hooked and enthralled with this virtual world. It was not only the thrill of the game that was exciting and presented itself as a source of fascination for him and kept him hooked but also the precious escape, though very transient and temporary, from his otherwise humdrum and routine reality.
Of course, being a hotel receptionist was not exactly a career high of thrills and great experiences. The daily grind from 9 to 5 gave him stability and security but very little kick. According to Henry, during weekdays, he was fully consumed by grumpy guests wanting the world and tons of stupid paperwork that were tedious and thus really drained all the life out of him at the end of the day. But weekends were something else entirely-they were his divine haven, this small window of freedom and respite from this never-ending cycle of drudgery which gave him license to really let loose and indulge in things he liked to do. But not everything that seemed bright was gold, so to say.
The matter at hand was not entirely his ancient, obsolete "potato PC," which did lag mercilessly, making it near impossible to play the game effectively, let alone whenever some sort of enemy would pop up somewhere abruptly on the screen. Henry himself constituted a bigger problem than his equipment did. To put it bluntly, he really sucked at this game in general. The guy's aim was just nothing short of terrible, which kept on making him miss targets that were perfectly well within his reach. His reflexes were rather sluggish, preventing him from reacting in time. His decision-making was highly questionable at the very least, and he got himself into many situations that put him at a disadvantage. Even when enemies would be perfectly still, standing right in the center of his crosshair and not having a single clue about his presence ready to get attacked, he still managed to miss each and every shot fired at them.
The morning didn't break the streak he had been going through lately-a sour scowl, the feeling of discontent firmly set upon his face, he rage-quit another frustrating match, fingers flying across the keyboard in a very physical manner onto the keys for Alt + F4 with a sense of violence and anger. It was the skills, or rather the blatant lack thereof, which had brought him naught but relentless mockery from those around him.
The teammates found themselves compelled to belittle him for the constant poor performances, their trash talk slicing a little too deep into his psyche than he'd like to acknowledge or admit. But it wasn't the harsh, cutting words that made him feel this way; it was the brutal, honest truth hiding behind them.
And putting the cherry on top, quitting would not go as smoothly or easily as one would think. Already operating on the very brink of functionality and usability, his laptop suddenly just froze right in the middle of his attempt to quit the game. The game he had been playing stubbornly lingered on the screen, almost as if in a way to mock him in its own little world. Just after a few seconds, the hated blue screen of death ominously replaced his heart's dismay, hitting him like a digital slap in the face he had never seen.
It was at this frustrating moment that Henry's fists were full of anger, flowing stronger with every second. The overwhelming compulsion struck to smash the accursed machine into a thousand pieces the fresh memory of his meager paycheck still lingered in his mind and kept his hand from acting on that impulse. Replacement simply wasn't in the cards just yet. The screen went black as the laptop started its reboot process at a pace that was slow, as could be expected.
Henry stared off into space as constant thoughts of incompetence and overwhelming frustration rattled around his brain. Was he really this bad at what he was trying to do, or was it simply that the game was unfair in the way it had been laid out? The bitterness swirled around his belly until a thought finally arose, one both desperate and elation-inducing.
He had opened his Chrome web browser and sat, collecting his thoughts for a second, before he started punching in a search term that would drastically alter his life: Call of duty aim hacks.
Henry was certainly no stranger to the gaming world when it came to cheaters; he had watched hundreds of videos on YouTube of players enraged and dejected by the appearance of hackers in lobbies during matches, who trod ruthlessly over the game with unnatural accuracy and godlike reflexes so that it just felt like a bit of a millstone hanging around their necks. A small but noticeable slice of envy did not leave his heart unscathed as he pictured himself in those people's shoes-or rather, seated in front of those computers-and actually getting into an affair.
After clicking through several forums and skimming a lot of shady download links, a few other aimbot programs caught his attention. He reached a state of thrill the moment he started downloading the very first one he had seen, but that thrill was so short-lived; it just dissipated. His antivirus labeled the downloaded file as malware within a second, which was quite depressing. Henry, however, got undeterred but persistent with his mission, digging deeper and letting his curiosity build up into a strong will to succeed.
The more he looked into them, the more it seemed he was uncovering just how much information was out there on this shadowy, usually camouflaged world of cheaters. Most free hacks in this domain were either outdated or virus-infected, or easily detectable by those sophisticated anti-cheat systems meant to keep such dubious activities at bay. Only the good hacks meaning, the ones that actually worked properly and performed the intended job-were accessible through pricey subscriptions, well beyond Henry's means at this juncture of life.
The frustration mounted until Henry really felt he was merely wasting his time. Yet, amidst all the ocean of information he waded through, one revelation came to him like a bolt of lightning on a summer evening-instant, powerful, and bright.
"These guys make dough," Henry muttered under his breath, his eyes perusing intently a website selling cheats for outrageous prices, which almost could not be true. The thought hit him suddenly and caught him across his groin with full strength. Hack creators were not really cheaters but entrepreneurs who had figured out the secret of making money on gamblers' wishes. It was selling to literally thousands of hopeless players, just like him, and earning greedy profits that diminished his month's wage and brought it into discredit.
Henry leaned back in his chair, disbelieving yet at the same time intrigued, his mind working over the possibilities-insane, utterly off the wall-but the proposition was so deliciously resistant to being let go of, its pull almost magnetic and beyond resistance. Why try to better himself when he could sell out to the failure that he'd created? The concept of utter role the fact that he could acquire any knowledge necessary to create cheats like these and completely turn his situation around-was just tantalizing. No longer would he have to scrape and struggle just to try and make the rent each month, no more clunky laptops holding him back, no more hellish mocking from teammates. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, Henry finally saw a glimmer of hope on the horizon.
A crooked smile curled upwards on his face, showing something much more inside, not just being most dominant in this hot game of Call of Duty, as all this was in the past, but way bigger outside all that was fundamentally about trying to escape the relentless grind of day-to-day life, the teases that came at him from all the other kids without cease, and the maiming weight of poverty that lay on him daily. For this reason, Henry would do whatever it took; come what may.