Here’s some more flavor fiction about my Mage LARP character. This was originally posted on 27 Apr 2006.
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They all said that he needed to move on. It wasn’t his fault. He’d been controlled. They had taken control of his mind. He’d been captured.

Matthew lightly touched the bandage on his forehead. The skin underneath itched intensely, despite having had moisturizer applied twenty minutes ago. It would likely itch for another few days, and then finally finish healing. He shook his head and tried once more to put the thread through the tiny eye hole in the needle.

He was almost done sewing. One by one, the parts had been shipped in from all over the world. Laptop hard drives were a dime a dozen at mom and pop computer stores, so he’d just purchased a few locally. The heat and moisture transfer fabric – a new blend of polypropylene, the stuff they use in hardcore long underwear – had shipped first. He’d ordered a few yards of it from a winter camping company in Alaska.

The segmented and distributed motherboard, video card, wireless networking card, Bluetooth card, and I/O controllers had come from a start-up company in London run by some science fiction fans. The Bluetooth card had been sent from London to a very small, and very anonymous, company (hacker) in Indonesia. Its encryption chips had been replaced with a custom design, and this guy was -very- good at following specifications.

The fingertip-and-wrist keyboard had come from Japan. It was a small chip that attached to the interior of any metal wristwatch. As long as it was in contact with the wrist band, it could pick up the electrical signals and skin pulses that resulted from finger and wrist movements, and could translate that into input. He’d ordered the Bluetooth model, of course.

The heads-up display glasses had been tricky. He’d had to find a defunct military supplier that would be willing to ship anonymously in return for a great deal of money. That wasn’t the hard part. Sam knew quite a few of those, and she was almost overly-interested in making sure that Matthew was okay. This small favor wasn’t a big deal. It was his prescription. His eyesight wasn’t that poor, but the HUD required a nearly-flat surface to work properly. So, after a bit of extra investigation, he’d gotten some ultra-thin plastic lenses made to his prescription – the thinner the plastic, the less the curve, it seems – and shipped them to Russia.

All in all, he thought he’d have to wait for weeks instead of days. Luckily, money made things move quickly.

The lenses had just arrived, and the glasses had synced perfectly with the encrypted Bluetooth controller. Matthew tied off the last stitch in the ragged trench coat. That had come from the used section in the Army & Navy surplus store. Each component was sewed into a pouch of heat-transferring fabric. The ones that needed to be wired were connected with low-resistance insulated cabling. No one would suspect that when in range of each other, his watch, trench coat, and glasses were officially rated a supercomputer.

And now, the final touch. Two pin-on buttons, seemingly innocuous, wired into the power supply of the coat. It was amazing, really, how much light two small metal circles could catch.

Matthew tried the coat on, and smiled slowly. He’d have to replace one of the interior pockets with a fabric holster, but that would come soon enough. His forehead itched, and he lightly touched the bandage. Wisdom had finally been granted to Matthew Samuel McNally. He understood, now, that they were right, there was nothing that he could have done to stop the break-in. Nothing to stop the shooting. The fault had not been his, nor the gun’s. The fault laid with the squad of Technocrats.

Wisdom dictated that in a place as dangerous as this, he must become proficient in defending himself. Then, and only then, could he defend and protect others. The first step had been beginning to re-build his foci. In this, Samuel’s old dictum of “staying below the radar” had been key. Matthew switched on the power to the unit, which was nearly silent, and scanned the bootup code as it streamed down his glasses.

The second step had been to acknowledge wisdom. He would no longer drown himself in the process of the mathematics, the coding, and the technology. They were tools to reach conclusions. It was in the conclusions, and the actions that followed those conclusions, and the lessons learned from those actions, in which wisdom lived. Matthew had taken an action, a painful action, and had learned from it.

Wisdom – Tetu.

Tetu. Matthew touched the bandage and smiled.