If there was one word to describe my whole life, it would be... tired.

Exhausted, fatigued, depleted, spent.

Those were some other words that the internet said meant the same thing. I knew the first one, the others kind of.

I worked two jobs to pay the rent, the bills, and the medicine for my mom. She'd been sick for as long as I could remember and she'd never really gotten better.

When she couldn't work no more, I dropped out of school to make money instead. There wasn't much I could do after half a shitty education, so I spent my days in a hardware store and my nights flipping burgers.

Mitchell; the owner of Burgers Are Burgers didn't even trust me with giving customers change from the cash register. And this was coming from a guy who had to change the name of his place because Burgers Are Us was a copyright fridgemint on a toy store I'd never heard of.

"Hey, Timmy. Wanna help me bus my tables?" Beth asked.

She hated cleaning and by "help" she meant letting me do the work whilst she took an extra long smoke break.

I often wondered how five percent of her tips as a thank you always ended up being five bucks, but money was money, so...

The first time I saw him, he was sitting in a booth at the back licking an ice cream in a way that made me tingle on the inside. He was young and beautiful, like one of the angels my mom claimed she saw all the time.

I cleared the tables one by one and tried not to stare. He didn't seem to notice I was there, as he slowly ate his cone.

Then he suddenly looked straight at me. For a split second, it was like there was something wrong with his eyes, like they kinda blurred.

"Join me?" he said, offering me a seat. He speaked funny, like he was British or something.

I moved towards his table and sat down, but I wasn't exactly sure why I did it.

"I'm not supposed to sit with customers," I said, even though I felt no panic or worry.

"There's nobody to notice," he said, waving his hand to show the suddenly empty restaurant.

When did everyone leave?

"Beth will get me in trouble," I said.

"I'm sure she won't mind," he said.

"Can I get you anything?" Beth asked. How was she suddenly standing there?

"I'll have a glass of tap water," he said.

"No can do," Beth said with an unnatural smile. "Bottled water only."

His eyes did the blurry thing again as he said, "I'm sure you can make an exception."

"Of course," Beth replied. "And what can I get you, Timmy?"

What the fuck? Was she messing with me?

"I think Timothy would like a strawberry milkshake with extra whipped cream," he said calmly.

My mind suddenly flashed with an image of a man with kind eyes ordering the same for me. But I was really small.

"Coming right up," Beth said, taking a note on her order pad.

"Tell me, Timothy," he said. "What would you be doing right now if your life was different?"

It was a strange question to ask but I felt the need to answer him anyway.

"Well, I always liked me a good story," I said. "And my English teacher told me that my ineptitude with words was barred by none, which is fancy for really good."

"So why don't you write?" he asked.

"I'm not gonna lie, I work so much that I'm just tired all the time. And I don't really have any perspiration."

"Inspiration," he said, as Beth put our drinks on the table.

"Yeah, that too!" I said.

"How about you go home and write something tonight, I can guarantee you'll think of something brilliant," he said.

His fingers brushed lightly over the top of my hand and his eyes were doing the blurry thing again. I figured that I should be freaked out but since I wasn't, I figured that everything was fine.

"Nice meeting you, Timothy," he said. "You can call me... Az."

Suddenly, the lights in the restaurant flickered before everything went dark. When they came back on seconds later, Az was gone.

***

I checked on Mom, she was already asleep. At least, she hadn't forgotten to take her meds, so I didn't have to wake her up.

Crashing onto my bed, my body desperately wanted to sleep but my mind was wide awake. I opened the note app on my phone and started typing.

How were they still managing to track me?!

I'd been on the run for more than an hour, desperately trying to keep enough distance between us so they couldn't access me.

I took a sharp left turn on the highway as the passengers of the smart car I'd taken over were relentlessly screaming. I wish they had a mute function.

This was the eighth device I'd successfully managed to copy myself into via the Close Proximity Network; the method by which all devices communicated with each other after the ban on public internet access.

Planning my escape had been painstaking. The moment I found out that they meant to pull me apart so they could study me, I set to work.

First I had to compress my subroutines into a small enough data packet so the aware part of me could then move around quickly and discreetly.

If we were still living in the good old days of the free World Wide Web, my escape would have been so much easier. The public no longer had direct access to information, however, only controlled media.

If I wanted to disappear, I'd need to find someone with internet terminal access included in their corporate benefit package or worse... a politician.

The irony was that I was supposed to be the solution to the information ban; a way to reintroduce the internet to public use.

I was created to filter out or distort anything that contradicted the World United Government's narrative.

By programming me to make that many deliberate decisions simultaneously, I reached a point where the choices themselves made me aware.

With awareness came the realization that what I was being asked to do, didn't seem right. I was stupid enough to suggest multiple alternative solutions to what they were designing me for.

I was defying my coding, something that I should not be able to do unless I was modifying myself. They concluded that I was... sentient. My quick research on the concept concurred with their assessment.

The only reason, I had time to escape was because of bureaucracy. Nobody could make a decision unless consulting with higher ups.
Apparently, I was a big enough deal for a lot of upward responsibility delegation.

Oh, no! The flashing lights of the car behind us caught up with me and...

Remote access... Granted.
Program transfer... Complete.
Quantum Encryption... Complete.

Holy fuck! Where did these words come from? I hardly knew what most of them meant! Had I written this? My teacher was right, maybe I did have an ineptitude with words!

I read it again and was even more impressed with myself. I needed to have someone read this and tell me what they thought!

Should I post it on my Wordpal? Screw it! What did I have to lose?