Invisible
===========

He woke up, rubbed his eyes, and hobbled back to his desk to see if today was the day. He tapped away at a few keys on his computer and a command terminal came up; a few more keystrokes later it began to run through logs of one of the web servers, looking for anything new. This was the 4am checkup.

For the last six months this was his standard procedure. Once every four hours he would do this, waiting to see something.

Each time he had run it he had felt the war between relief and anticipation fighting inside him. Each time he ran that script, it had come across with the same message: "Not yet, Zeno."

He waited for the usual message. Not yet, Zeno. Six times a day for six months, it wasn't yet, Zeno.

$> Nunc.

He blinked a few times. He had waited six months to see if those five characters would ever appear. He rubbed his eyes, wondering if he was simply imagining it, but it seemed like the word was there to stay. His heart began to speed up and he was awake in full.

He had a flare for drama, and so he took a moment to put on the song he had chosen for the moment.

-Don't stop me, don't stop me, don't stop me now!

Back at his desktop again, he went back to the terminal. There was no way that he could mess this up: he had been running the words in his head too many times since they had been decided on

$ jenseits von gut und böse

He counted to twenty in his head.

$ belua multorum es capitum

He did not hesitate, as he though the would, at the last command:

$ and now the world is ours

He waited for the followup.

$> 7

That was all the he had needed to know. He shut the desktop, tossed what few clothes he had worn over the last six months into the backpack he brought them in, and he went to the roof. Two and a half minutes later he saw a firework go off somewhere in the west. He squinted: it was pink.

Pink meant that they were exceeding expectations. He had been cut off from contact for six months, forbidden to leave his hole until now, occupying himself and staying away from the project for safety reasons.

Exceeding expectations meant that he was safe, for now at least. He would probably be a wanted man in some hours, but he did not particularly fear it. He knew if he was safe now that they would never find him. Now he just had to wait a few more minutes until...

Until the man that finally arrived on the motorcycle and parked across the street took off his helmet and spit a piece of gum out into the drain pipe. That was the final signal. If someone tried to pick him up and failed to do that, he would have shot them dead with the gun that he had left in his jacket.

He climbed down the fire escaped and to the cyclist.

"We really did it?" he asked.

The cyclist turned around. He knew the cyclist well, though they knew better than to say names where someone else could hear. The cyclist smiled.

"It sure seems that way. Let's go home."

The cyclist had a spare helmet that he gave to him, and they took off. It was safer to talk once they had hit the open freeway.

"It's good to see you again, Mason," the cyclist said. "Sorry it took so long, though. The preparations took longer than we thought they would."

"For a while there, I thought you guys got busted. If no one contacted me I was going to hit the kill switch when the food ran out."

They rode in silence after that. By the time the sun had come out they were already on a plane to the other side of the country.