Few lives where as boring or as monotonous as Morgan Underwood’s. He would get up every day at 7am without fail, he would go the toilet, shower, dry, shave and brush his teeth in the exact same order every day. He had the same two slices of toast for breakfast every day. Make the same 15 minute tube journey into the city every day.
He would then walk the 10 minutes from the tube station to his work every day, not once indulging in any kind of variation to his route. At work he was known to be consistent, quiet and hard working. Never doing too much nor too little work. While his job was monotonously boring, it did privy him to certain information that would be deemed harmful to the government if it were to ever be made public.
Morgan worked for a special surveillance branch of the government. His job was simple, to observe a designated individual over a period of a day week, month, sometimes even a year. Over that time, he would build up an extensive surveillance file about that person. Mapping their entire lives. Routes they took to work, what they ate, who they talked to and socialised with, relationships (both platonic and sexual), what type of people they where attracted to, annoying habits, everything. He would build up a profile so comprehensive, that he often would come to know a person better than they knew them self’s. Then, with no explanation given, he would be reassigned to another person, and his comprehensive profile would be passed on to the higher level of authority that requested it.
His social life consisted of half a pint and half a pint only down the local pub on the occasional staff birthday and Christmas party. His love life was none existent. His impact on other people was none existent. And after 15 years of the same routine all that would be noticeable would be an empty seat on the tube and an empty work station in the office.
However for a seemingly insignificant existents, Morgan Underwood was surprisingly influential to a society that could be forgiven for not knowing he existed. Because when most people like Morgan Underwood, who lived a dreary and depressing existence went to sleep and dreamt of a better and more fulfilling life, Morgan Underwood did exactly the opposite. He did not dream of a better and more fulfilling life, he lived it. At night this seemingly empty shell of a man took on an entirely different persona.
He became the very man he wanted to be. A vigilantly figure. A man that was a firm believer in the truth and justice. A man who harbours utter contempt toward the government and negligent authority figures and is bitter toward the uninvolved public who give the authority its power. A man who believes that the key to preventing global government surveillance from turning into global suppression is to always insist on basic liberties and to keep government and law-enforcement agencies under constant scrutiny. For years, this second persona had only ever existed virtually. Using the information he acquired at work, as well as making a few key contacts willing to spool out snippets of information from time to time his second persona had built up quite a cult status as a free lance journalist.
How people consumed the news had changed dramatically since the turn of the century. Many news papers and magazines now printed pages from digital magazines and more predominantly blogs. And since the introduction of digital paper around 2012, anyone could read anything on plastic paper. People no longer where told what they should read, they choose what to read. Individuals now became their own news editors, subscribing to news and blogs relevant to them. However you could often guarantee one blog that everyone subscribed to was Morgan’s. Of course, he didn’t use his real name, that would defy the point. Instead he gave his persona an entirely different identity, something perfectly common in his day in age. Many people had at least 2 identities, their physical one, and their virtual one. So Morgan called himself Hermes after the Greek God. Hermes was the son of Zeus. He was a messenger for Zeus and he was the fastest of all the gods.
However, the past year had seen the persona of Hermes become more than a virtual one. Recent years had seen the emergence of many underground medical practitioners, offering services to the poorer members of the populations. While it had begun with the best of intentions, it had also become home to some more experimental and often dangerous procedures. And it had been one of these procedures that had allowed Morgan to take on his second identity not just in a virtual sense, but in a physical one. Using a proverbial cocktail of mental conditioning, advanced hypnosis and a series of neural suppressing drugs, a second personality could be constructed. In a world where it had long since become common to have multiple identities, the procedure, known as Personality Augmentation, or P.A. for short had become a popular underground procedure.
And so, one weekend per month, Morgan would go to sleep early on a Friday night after taking an injection, and, after it knocked him out for 2 hours, he would wake up as his alter ego for 72 hours. For Morgan, the events of the next 72 hours would become nothing more than a dream. And this is where our story begins, early on a Monday morning, after one of these weekends.
I drew inspiration for this narrative from Walter Mitty, a fictional character in James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", first published in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939, and in book form in My World— and Welcome to It in 1942.
From Wiki:
Mitty is a meek, mild man with a very vivid fantasy life. Although the story has humorous elements, some critics see a darker and more significant message underlying the text, leading to a more tragic interpretation of the Mitty character. Even in his heroic daydreams, Mitty does not triumph, several fantasies being interrupted before the final one sees Mitty dying bravely in front of a firing squad. In addition, it is possible to read the events in the story as the responses to the stress of reality by an aging man who is sliding into senescence. In the brief snatches of reality that punctuate Mitty's fantasies we meet well-meaning but insensitive strangers who inadvertently rob Mitty of some of his remaining dignity.
His wife is the only inhabitant of reality that we meet more than once. Thurber cleverly leads us into accepting her as a nag by giving Mitty's fantasies a charming lightness and comic-book simplicity that disarms deeper scrutiny. On the other hand, her final appearance suggests that she is a woman struggling to cope as her role shifts from loving life-partner to care-giver as Mitty slowly slides into his second childhood.
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