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Prologue
I am not dead.
Many have tried to disappear by killing themselves, but never very successfully.
I can tell a dead person from a real dead person in a matter of minutes.
They always leave a trace, some ethereal link to the life they can't quite
leave behind.
Not me. I'm unreachable. No trace. No link. No wispy ghost of an afterimage.
I am impervious, because I never existed. It took me the better part of
a week to do it, but time has no meaning to the undead. One at a time
I reached out, sweeping record after record into non-existence. Hospital
records show that my mother never registered to have her second child.
College transcripts disappeared during routine maintenance on a night
when the backup mysteriously failed. Even my former employer never hired
me. That would have been easy even without the access codes. The FBI's
system is far less secure than most people think.
I wander the world at will. Untraceable. Unstoppable. I am a shadow.
Why, then, if I've done such a masterful job of eliminating myself,
am I writing all of this down? Because someday, someone should know. I
am the chronicler of my own history. Where would Merlin be if no one had
recorded the tales? Or Hercules? I've read the rumors about myself discussed
on various webs; the tales of a giant that walks the land, the legends
of a powerful electronic demon who leaves footprints leading nowhere.
I've been suspected of being a glitch, a virus, a team of masterminds
hired by a foreign country. One person even supposed me to be the Guild,
itself, though I never heard from that person again.
I am none of these things. I am what I choose to be.
In your hands, you hold a legend.
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