They stared right through me. It used to bother me. Now, it’s essential.

I uncoupled the mag-links while Symplex’s security personnel looked past me. I didn’t fit their profiles, didn’t merit a glance. That’s what it is to be me.

I live by a pair of simple rules. The fact that they come from fantasy novels doesn’t make them any less realistic. Especially, in this reality.

Rule One: Amateurs obsess over strategy. Professionals obsess over logistics.

Rule Two: A good thief goes unseen. A great thief goes unnoticed.

When the last mag-link unhitched, the brainframe froze and everybody at Symplex knew they’d been jacked. They just didn’t know the jacker was freaking out alongside them.

It did freak me out. I hadn’t really thought, I’d make it this far. You don’t go from feeling invisible most of your life to suddenly feeling invincible, so actually bringing down Symplex’s touted brainframe was a shocker.

Which was good because I had the same stunned expression as everyone around me. I completely fit the scene. Unworthy of note. Easy to dismiss. Something I was very used to as a clugee.

Actually, a child of clugees. My parents fled Louisiana after superstorm Naomi, whose cat 7 tidal surge never fully receded. Trying to make a new start farther west, my family was marked. Our hurricane-devastated zip code and area code became code for clugee.

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Climate Refugee.

Unwelcome. Unwanted. Unrecognized.

America’s newest pariahs, pushed to the bottom of the ladder, the back of the bus. My parents gave up trying to fight for their rights to be counted, to be heard, to be repatriated into the country they’d never left, but which had abandoned them.

Clugee turned out to be a pretty apt slur for us because we constantly had to kludge our lives. Constant barriers. Push back. Marginalized to the extreme, but I didn’t give up. I fought. Tooth and nail to get an education, a decent career. To be seen. To be noticed. To be rewarded. Until I realized the real power I’d been given: invisibility.

I’d taken for granted the power of being taken for granted. A spit-upon cloak of invisibility.

Perfect for a thief. Unseen. Unnoticed

I schemed to steal all I was owed from the privileged, to re-jigger the balance sheet of justice. And I worked hard at it, grew wilier, grew richer. But my outlook remained poor. Nothing important had changed for my fellow clugees.

Until. I hit upon the perfect job. A caper that would turn the country on its head. Almost literally. The beauty of this heist was that I wouldn’t be taking anything. I would be giving.

Over the last two decades, Symplex had grown into the nation’s most reliable, highly touted, data security and privacy consortium. Its massive brainframe housed the personal and professional data of the everyday elite.

Once the Symplex brainframe was down, I inserted my viral “gift” that on reboot would automatically change the zip and area codes of the ruling classes to those of the disaster-fleeing masses. The security status of the privileged would turn to pariah in a matter of nanoseconds, and they would quickly experience what it is to be a clugee, feeling the disconnect, dislocation, and disdain my family and all the families like us had suffered as outcasts.

Unseen. Unnoticed.

And, maybe, that would finally unite us.