A Great Yawning Black-Hole-Like Absence of Cool
He was 7th on the FBI's Least Wanted List.
He was the thing the cat wouldn't bother to drag in.
For the majority of his working life, over several different jobs, he had sometimes not been certain that his employer remembered that he worked for them.
Then there was that time the Mob, through an employment service, hired him to case a bank, emailing encrypted reports every third day. It had all been automated, so he hadn't known that the entire crew had been arrested—half of them dying in the preliminary shootout—and never let out.
It was the most boring job he'd ever had. Six months in, he realized he could just hide some spy cameras here and there, and do it all from home. In pajamas.
At the end of the second year, they closed the bank and tore it down. He continued to case the empty lot for another year, but then couldn't take it anymore. He quit.
When his pay kept coming anyway, he finally told his credit union there was a problem.
Investigations. Interrogations. The phrase "too clueless and too pointless to be criminal."
Then reporters got hold of the story.
Humiliation—as it did so often in his life—ensued.
Generally speaking, he was the odd man out, even in a group of two.
He once did a year's training for the pentathlon, only to discover he was doing the wrong six sports. The web site he'd seen was a satire.
In his period of political activism, he had experienced the collapse of several grassroots organizations. Generally, four to six months after he joined, he would discover an apologetic sign posted on the door of a deserted office. Or the local organizer's house would sprout a For Sale sign.
He did not know that he was being followed by "uncool scouts" who had identified him as a reliable indicator of downward trends and pathological uncoolness. Everything he bought, everything he wore, every stroke he entered on a keyboard was then looked on with suspicion. Where he went, capital fled.
"I see an ink blot. It's inkier than the first one, if that helps," he said, puzzled by the scientists' silly questions. But he was being paid good money to sit here, and the money would keep coming if he remembered not to say anything about why he signed up.
His life had taken an odd turn in recent months. Job offers came, from out of the blue, offering ever-higher sums of money for him to apply to participate in research studies. The odd thing about the offers was that he was to keep silent about being paid to apply, and being paid to participate, if accepted. Something about scientists policing other scientists, they said.
He was surprised at the number of these studies that closed early, for some reason.
It made him a tad paranoid, these labs closing down time after time. But he came to assume that they must have been shaky already, and that was why he was hired to test them out. He kept getting paid to sign up for more studies, and once or twice to seek employment at the labs—so that was probably it.
He never did understand why they debriefed him so rarely. If they wanted an inside look, you'd think they'd talk to him at length. But no, they took his emailed reports, talked to him online for fifteen minutes, and that was about all.
The end came abruptly. A despondent researcher, who couldn't keep staff and who couldn't ever seem to generate a single statistically significant result, went into one of the labs, turned on all the gas jets, counted to a hundred, and then squeezed the ignition striker.
The researcher had counted to one hundred rather slowly, and had not thought about the oxygen bottles in the room, or the propane tanks in the next room, or the benzene tank in the room above. It's a sad fact, but people who have decided to blow themselves up can be careless and self-centered.
Our Least Wanted protagonist was at the other end of the facility, but that provided no protection. A series of explosions brought down the whole building, and toxic fumes and fire followed.
The uncool scout community mourned his passing, briefly, but hoped to find more like him.
