Empathy: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner (Merriam-Webster)

He hadn’t turned his computer off in years. He hadn’t been outside of his room in even longer. He hadn’t slept in weeks. He hadn’t eaten in days. And he wasn’t planning to stop any time soon. Not, at least, until he finished what he had been working on since he was but a child. He had spent his entire life since he was ten years old on a computer, working on the same computer virus he was working on almost forty years after. He dropped out of school, skipped meals and sleep, even ditched the bathroom simply to ensure the progress of his masterpiece. All to exact revenge on the government for killing his parents. Well, they hadn’t been directly murdered, but he knew it was the fault of the government. He had been visiting them, both hospitalized after severe car crash injuries, when their life support suddenly failed, proving fatal for both. The life support his parents had been government-approved technology and developed by the very best. It was also rumoured to have never failed or malfunctioned, meaning either the rumour was mistakenly false or purposely false. He knew the government were to blame and had rashly concluded that the government’s tech was really just a fraud to make money. From his suspicions stemmed a paranoia, which lead him to use only inventions he developed and manufactured with his own hands. Since then, he had been plotting to hack and eliminate every last piece of government-issued technology to prove how weak it really is.

He had been working so hard for the past forty years that he had forgotten his own name. Nor did he remember his birthday, the time, the day, the month, even the year. All he had left of his identity and any connection he had with the rest of the world was the name of the online persona he had created before his parents had even passed. His account username was “Empathy,” which he believed to be a picture book he had greatly enjoyed during his childhood. If he were to look through government databases, Empathy would find that his account had been “inactive” for the past forty years. The reason being that his paranoia had prevented him from visiting any government-patrolled online domains. He had also completely encrypted his account without bothering to remember about it, just like everything else that was not relevant to the virus.

“Stand down! This is the FBI speaking! We are here to arrest you for attempted crimes against government! Open this door immediately, or you may not be taken alive!”

From such effort, perfection should be expected, but Empathy hadn’t managed to completely cover up his tracks. The government had finally realized that someone had managed to hack through their famously impenetrable firewall. That certain individual was Empathy, who had been scouring through the code to find its weak points for the virus to target. He would do it himself, but due to his horrible memory, he would never manage to remember all those weak points. Plus, there was so much code that it would take at least three full days to personally locate and destroy all the main points, by which time the government would have found out and arrested Empathy. The most efficient way to go about this near-impossible task, as his ten-year-old-self had concluded, was to record all the data in a virus that would finish the job in but a few minutes. But, his sloppiness in attempting such a feat proved to be a grave mistake. The government’s best computer programmers had managed to catch Empathy’s account anonymously on the government’s main server. They had, at the same time, noticed the hack in their firewall and concluded that the seemingly dead account belonging to Empathy had been cloaking itself so that the user could get into the code unnoticed. They managed to un-encrypt the data about Empathy’s account, among which was the location of the user. Without any questioning or pause to consider the matter, Empathy was immediately taken into custody.

They took him to one of the most secure and most difficult to hack through holding facilities in the world. It was dubbed “Modern-day Alcatraz,”  because no prisoner was said to have ever escaped. Knowing that there was another hole in the firewall that he had left in the case of an emergency, however, didn’t hurt his chances at being the first.

By the third day at the prison, Empathy had memorized the repetitive schedule and the exact amount of time he was allowed on a computer each day. Every prisoner was forced to watch three hours’ worth of videos of propaganda and rehab compiled into a playlist on a private domain. So, in those three hours, he would have to somehow get on the government-operated server without being noticed by any of the digital AI guards. He would then need to get access to the code of the server using the little hole he’d left for himself. From there, it was all a matter of finding the code running the prison’s server in time.

On the fifth day, Empathy had memorized when the digital guards checked his screen and the gap of time in between routine checks. They were programmed to check every fifteen minutes. He would have to find and copy down the government-regulated main server in the first span, then find the security hole in the next set of fifteen minutes. From there, he would need to locate the code running the prison’s main server and temporarily disable it. Assuming he required all of the three hours, he would be able to allow himself exactly three sets of fifteen minutes per each task.

By the sixth day, he was ready to put his escape plan into action. As always, the digital guards unlocked his cell’s computer and sent him to the website with the videos ready to play. Once the digital bot left, Empathy got straight to work… except he was stopped by a sudden change to the website. The videos blinked off the screen, and taking their place was a message. The message read: “Apologies. This server is down by government command, due to the discovery of a hole in their security system. Instead, we ask you to go to the following website:” and included a direct link. As he expected, when Empathy clicked the link, it brought him to the same exact website but with a different domain. Not to mention that this one was absolutely festering with AI security bots. That meant he would have to work much faster or risk never achieving his goal. He’d also need to change his plan around a bit. Instead of shutting down the prison and then finding a safer place to plant his virus, he decided he would need to plant his virus on the spot, from within his prison cell. His eyes flicked around, as though the AI could see him, as though they had eyes so piercing they could read even the slightest bad intention. Thankfully, the physical prison guards were computer-operated and only deployed when the security system was penetrated. They would also all simultaneously deactivate once he shut down the prison’s server. They were, however, equipped with inhuman speed and deadly weapons designed by some of the most renowned engineers, so Empathy would have to work quickly.

It was now or never. All or nothing. He would finally accomplish what he had been waiting 40 whole years to do, or die trying. He went to the private website where he had left a downloadable version of his personally tailored computer virus in case he was separated from the computer it had been developed on. This did, in fact, set off an alarm throughout the entire prison, but at this point, he really didn’t care about his life. His excitement and anticipation had taken over his whole body, his own brain, and crossed the point of no return, where he would either succeed or die. He was easily able to locate the website operating the main server, and found that he had made it before the hole had been fixed. Acting quickly, he chose the most advantageous place for the virus to start: the prison’s code. He placed the virus, which began immediately decrypting and destroying parts of the code, but instead of the feeling of triumph and accomplishment he had been expecting, he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach.

He whipped around at the sound of a nearing guard. By the time his head was facing the bot, it had begun to falter, until it came to a stop entirely and fell against the bars of his cell with a lifeless thud. His mind took him back over 40 years, back to the day his parents died, to the lifeless thud of their dead hands, of the beeping of the life monitor, of the tears streaming out from someone’s eyes, screams from someone’s mouth, grief from someone’s heart, who knows whose it was, maybe it was his. He realized that the sinking feeling in his gut was his own instinct, his gut telling him that his virus was much more devastating than he intended it to be. His own subconscious had been nagging at him, trying to tell him something. Only when Empathy had begun to listen did he understand. He realized that there were others who were going through what he had gone through. There were people’s lives being held together by the very thing he sought to destroy. Innocent people. People like his parents. People who didn’t deserve to die because of the mistakes of a single idiot. He finally realized that he forgave whoever had created the faulty technology that killed his parents. He forgave them because he now knew what it felt like to be them. To feel the weight of innocent lives resting on his thin, gnarly shoulders. He whipped back to his computer screen. The virus had not yet spread to the hospital section of the code, which meant he still had time to stop the monster he had created. He remembered, somehow remembered, that he had also made an anti-virus in case the virus got out of hand during tests but had never expected to use it.  He had stopped working on it about a year ago, while the virus was still in development. He hadn’t seen a good reason to waste time that could be spent on the virus, especially on something he wouldn’t even use. He wasn’t sure whether the anti-virus would work anymore or not, but it was worth a chance.

His sweaty hands desperately swept across the keyboard, searching for the right keys to the server domain where his anti-virus was patiently waiting. Panicking, he clicked the download button over, and over, and over again. Once it was successfully downloaded, he went right to the server code and placed the anti-virus around the code operating the hospital. His fingers absently drummed on his lap in anticipation, from the racking of his nerves. He found that the anti-virus spread as the virus did, but was unable to destroy the virus entirely. Instead, the anti-virus prevented the virus from spreading any more and contained it to a small space. Thankfully, the virus did not reach the hospital equipment and ended up barely even straying from the prison’s server code.

At first, he was sentenced to execution for nearly destroying society itself, but was later pardoned to twenty years in prison and labor when they discovered he had prevented the virus from wiping out the entire code. Once he came out of prison, the tech department of the government took an interest to him, and he was eventually hired and recognized as one of the world’s brightest minds. He lived a rich and happy life, even marrying and doing what he did best to make technology safer, more secure, and easier to use for the people. He worked doing what he not only excelled at, but loved, all the way up until the last few days of his life, when he passed away at the ripe old age of ninety-two.

Empathy: the greatest man to ever live