Deprivation - Henry

Henry always hated his name. He thought it sounded goofy and weak. His mother must have been prescient, because before he was born she knew his name would be Henry. And sure enough, he looked like a Henry. As he matured he looked more and more goofy. And timid. And weak. 

Henry wasn’t an unattractive man. It was more like he was transparent, a wraith, almost like he wasn’t there. When people did notice Henry, it was with a sense of pity. Henrys face was just a little too big for his head, and his brow was just a little too pronounced, with thick black eyebrows that he never trimmed. They hung down a little over his eyes. His black hair rarely saw a comb, and it sprouted from his head in all directions. He wore large brown tortoise shell glasses with coke bottle lenses that hid his startlingly blue eyes. His lower jaw hung slightly open when he was thinking, which was just about all the time. The plain truth was that Henry looked simple. Slow. Not quite all there.  He spent the first few years of his life trying to be tough. Trying to be cool. Trying to convince others that he was. Trying to convince himself. For awhile he actually came close to convincing himself, but nobody else was buying. They saw his mask of toughness as an attempt at hiding how stupid he was.

Eventually, as he got older he realized that looking the way he did was an advantage. Henry discovered that when people saw you as inferior, they would very quickly dismiss you as non-threatening, as harmless. Not worthy of notice. For many years Henry was insulted and hurt by this, and he railed against it. When Henry was twelve it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing. As a matter of fact, he began to see the tremendous power in it. He could move through life virtually unnoticed, doing pretty much whatever he pleased as long as he didn’t draw attention to himself. At twelve years old, Henry began to disappear.           
In spite of his appearance, Henry was far from stupid. With an IQ of 190, Henry was actually a genius. Henry hid it well, and although his mother knew his IQ, he even convinced her he was two blocks west of idiot. His mother was quick to look for the worst in people, so it wasn’t that difficult for her to believe he was stupid and lazy. His father had told her that all along and Henry did his best to prove him right. So the only person that knew Henry was a genius was Henry, and he wasn’t telling.            
Because everyone thought Henry was stupid, they also thought he was weak. Every bully in every class he took from first grade to high school singled him out as their whipping boy. And every year Henry took the abuse, silently laughing at the abuser, because Henry had a secret. Henry had many hidden gifts, many hidden talents, but there was one special talent Henry had that would make MIT graduates weep with inadequacy. Henry was a computer wizard. In the purest sense of the word. Henry could do things with computers that NASA scientists only dreamed of.  
         
With his photographic memory, Henry never forgot anything. Using catalogs, old computer parts and a vast array of tools that his father had left in his workshop when he decided that family life wasn’t for him, Henry built his first computer. Granted, it was kind of clumsy and inefficient, but it actually worked. Henry sold it to one of the kids at school for fifty bucks to use as a science project. Henry was eight years old.            

By the time Henry was ten he had built and sold enough electronic equipment to finance a high-end computer. He built his own modem and began to explore cyberspace with enthusiasm that he had never displayed for anything else. Henry had always been an avid reader, but it had always been more of a hobby. Fantasy, science fiction and the like. After visiting the website for the Library of Congress, Henry realized he was missing out on an entire world of information. He started checking out books from the library on everything from particle physics to international finance. He absorbed everything he read and only forgot something if he chose to, which was rare. The only things he had chosen to forget to date were the times his father had beaten him and his mother, and when his mother would sometimes come home drunk and climb into his bed. She was invariably naked and she would touch him and make him touch her and kiss her down there. He didn’t like those things, so he simply chose to forget. Just like that.

The things Henry remembered were so numerous that sometimes he amazed himself. He checked out books on computing and computer hardware and software. He began to design more and more sophisticated computers and began experimenting with software for the new designs. He learned about reverse-engineering. He began to disassemble and redesign his computers and hardware to perform more and more complicated functions. He designed his software using a Windows-based, user friendly interface. He created automated programs that were hands free once you configured them to do whatever job you had in mind. They were highly reliable, effectively untraceable with the current technology, and based on engineering models that were years ahead of their time. Henry had also built into the software so many fail-safes and routing loops that someone could spend months just trying to figure out where the hack had come from. By the time anyone figured it out, Henry would be long gone. Henry had a plan. His efforts were coordinated with his coming high school graduation. Because Henry never forgot things, he consequently held tremendous grudges. He remembered the name and face of every student who ever teased him, spit on him, struck him or humiliated him in any number of ways since first grade. He knew who was still at the school. He knew who would be graduating. He knew each and every grade they had made throughout their years of schooling. He even knew who had applied to college, and which colleges they had applied to. He had copies of transcripts, applications and letters, and with his creative editing, the last laugh would certainly be his.