Delve
Marcus doesn’t know what he wanted to be when he cleared 12th grade. To him playing basketball with the guys and spending time jacked into the matrix is life. What more can there be? He is jacked in right now, waiting outside the virtual office space that belongs to his guidance counselor. He’s seen her once in the meat world. It was one fo the 16 days he went to face to face school. Living in the towers gave him a pass for getting to school ever since the Backyard Boys started the gang war that already resulted in 11 dead Lonestar cops and 48 dead kids. Any boy under the age of 25 on the streets was bound to get shook down leaving the complex. He didn’t bother trying. Instead Marcus took that as a sign that he was better off navigating the world in virtual space. It offered more than meat and even AR.
Amanda Hixon was the fourth guidance counselor Ginsburg High had recruited since he started High School three years ago. The first one died. He didn’t even know what happened to the second. Word was the guy picked up a contract from a local corp and left that day. Marcus heard the guy never cleaned out the office, leaving everything. Hixon came along soon after and she felt different. He didn’t know anything more than that. They’d never met. Of course, that never stopped him from doing the deep dive before. He called the work delving. He even coined the hacker tag High Delver. He found that word in the dictionary back in the elementary school days when he would do quick web searches on whatever he could in order to pass the time he was locked up in his house and him momma wouldn’t let him out. Back in the times before Mr. Ralph started coming around.
Delving was an art form. Anyone can look a person up, but a delve is a deep dive. He followed the threads that came off the threads, looking for the stuff that didn’t feel like what everyone else’s profile looked like. He knew many professionals had profile curators–people who checked their online patterns and erased evidence of activity that prospective employers might frown at. In fact he’d thought about doing that sort of work professionally. In fact, that is what brought him to the counselor today.