Ted had always known that he was different. It didn't matter to him. The way he was different empowered him. Ted hadn't bothered to seek answers to how or why he was different, he simply revelled in the fact that he didn't give a single shit about how other people felt. When he accidentally came across a paragraph in a book, or a scene in a movie or TV show that hinted at what might make him different, curiosity would force him to wonder if he were a sociopath, psychopath or borderline personality, but for the most part he didn't think about it much.
Happily immersed in the predicable world of computers, Ted had a job in I.T. for an oil and gas company that supplied parts to pipelines. It was a sales office with a group of lunkheads who knew nothing about how PCs worked. For the most part, Ted merely had to keep the dummy's out-of-date, heavily abused computers running, update security and keep servers running. In any given day Ted had around two hours of work to do in an eight hour day thanks to multiple automated programs he'd installed to make his job much simpler than his bosses knew it was.
In the end, a person like Ted having all that free time was unfortunate for Ted's bully, a coworker named Arthur.
For some reason Ted didn't care about at all, Arthur had targeted Ted as soon as they met. Arthur was a huge, middle-aged failure of a former football player. Once he'd been a bodybuilder, but when Ted met him, Arthur tended toward fat. Desperately trying to keep the weight off, but too enamoured of baking to succeed, the big man may have been jealous of how fit Ted was. Ted was an averaged sized guy, but fairly skinny due to being a bike rider for transportation. Covering just under twenty kilometres a day on his commute, the computer tech in his late twenties was half the weight of the bigger, older man. Non-confrontational by nature, Ted however didn't cower when the big man loomed near.
The initial encounter came the first time Ted dared enter the open office space Arthur lorded over as his personal fiefdom.
As a neurally divergent person, Ted constantly scanned nearby faces for clues to each social situation. None of the half dozen other salesmen present seemed anxious when Arthur tried intimidating Ted. Tight grins showed they would tacitly go along with Arthur, but they took no great pleasure in his bullying. None of their eyes showed fear of violence, however. More like thinly veiled weariness of Arthur's nonsense.
Gambling on a fraction-of-moment's-intuition, Ted allowed his cold, reptilian stare to meet the increasingly fuming older man's gaze. Using his superpower of disinterest in how other people felt, Ted simply waited for Arthur to lose steam, or for Ted's supervisor who was giving him a tour of the building to carry on.
As he'd suspected, Arthur wasn't going to risk losing his job by touching Ted, but that first challenge had put a target on Ted that Arthur was drawn to like a bull to a waving cape.
For months, Arthur took every opportunity to belittle Ted as much as possible. Precisely because Ted hardly ever reacted, Arthur continually sought a nerve he could press. Eventually, Arthur found it by making Ted work on his computer in the office where everyone could listen as he badgered Ted, who couldn't simply walk away.
Somehow, Arthur sensed Ted's anger, but not its intensity. Smelling blood, Arthur took every opportunity to demean Ted as the tech was crawling under Arthur's desk.
"Hey, while your down there don't be looking at my junk, faggot."
Or.
"You spend so much time on your back, you remind me of your mom."
Arthur would get mud on his shoes before calling Ted so the tech had to lay down on the filthy floor under his desk to work. Normally Ted was very tidy and disliked getting dirty, Arthur saw that, and exploited that vulnerability.
During these episodes, externally Ted appeared unfazed, but internally he raged with a hot enough anger that, if Arthur had seen, would have frightening the bigger with its intensity. Ted's nights filled with dreams of ruining Arthur's life. Before long, Ted actually proceeded to enact his fantasies of vengeance in reality.
With his computer access, Ted could hack into every aspect of Arthur's professional life, but before long Ted was creeping around in Arthur's personal life as well, scouring his financial, medical, school records and social media. As his planned formed, Ted didn't smile, gloat or feel anything at all. It was just another task that gave him a modicum of pleasure because it was a way to occupy himself while at work.
But he was as thorough as an obsessive, as cold as a knife.
Uncertain which avenue of revenge to take first, Ted observed Arthur's pathetic life, making small invasions, setting long term goals, waiting for an opportunity to set in motion what had become his favourite pastime. Destroying Arthur's world.
The epiphany happened when Arthur's daughter Jayna came into the office to see her father.
Arthur had gotten divorced not long before Ted started for the company and Jayna had gone to live with her mother. The girl hadn't visited the office the whole time Ted had worked there and he wasn't the only one who noticed how grown up she was. The teen had an athletic body, slender, firm, and graceful as she followed her father to his cubicle. Dressed like a skater girl in an unzipped, black hoodie, band-tee, shorts and sneakers, she stood under five foot five, her pale face heavily made up. Thick, chestnut-brown hair fell in silken waves almost to her narrow waist. Bare-legged, her knees had old scars on them, but no new scabs, her coltish legs shapely with defined muscles. The beat-up long-board she held confidently looked well-used, her sneakers scraped and scuffed.
Not looking at anyone else, she went with her father, ignoring the lingering gazes ogling her femininity. When Arthur glanced around all eyes dropped to abandoned work, except Ted who openly stared at the sexy girl who had just infiltrated their entirely masculine workspace.
"You see something interesting nerd?" Arthur challenged.
Relishing the opportunity to engage with Arthur in front of the girl he had been studying online, Ted spoke to Jayna, knowing it would bother her father.
"Is that a Landyachtz board?"
"Oh, I wish!" she laughed.
"Shut-up dweeb. Go scurry back to your hidey hole" the papa-bear growled as expected.
"Dad. Please! Relax. He's just asking about my skateboard."
The meekness and awkwardness she showed told Ted she rarely stood up to her father, but that she hated his bullying and felt compelled to say something.
With a predators gaze, Ted noted Arthur's struggle. The huge man wanted to belittle the smaller one with all his being, it was his favourite thing to do, but something about his daughter's plea pulled him up like a dog on a leash. Ted intuited that in spite of all his faults, Arthur loved his daughter and wanted her to think well of him.
"Hah, don't worry sweetie" Arthur forced a laugh" We joke like this all the time, right Ted."
"Yeah you old windbag, we always tease each other. Hahaha!"
Ted had practised being charming his whole life, but rarely bothered using it. Pouring on the charisma, he openly flirted with the teen skater-girl while prodding her dad, scanning her face for which words amused her more.
"This pompous old fart talks about you all the time, bragging about how beautiful you are. It's bewildering that his lying mouth was actually underselling you somehow. I figured he had to be exaggerating, like he always does about everything, but in fact you're even cuter than he said."
Ted experienced a fluttery physiological reaction while he spoke. So many favourable things were happening at once, he actually felt a positive emotion. The assembled co-workers were gaping with shock at Ted's open challenge of Arthur's dominance. The girl blushed and soaked up the compliments thirstily, giggling at the insults to her father. Arthur himself looked apoplectic, so red and sweaty he might have been having a coronary.
"Alright shithead, Put your tongue back in your mouth!"
Pleased with the reactions he was getting all around, Ted waggled his eyebrows at the girl and retreated back to his office in the basement, Arthur glaring holes in his back, while the rest of the office stood stunned by the usually silent IT guy.
Weeks before, having scoured her social media, Ted had surmised that Jayna was oddly insecure about her pretty face, but justifiably proud of her amazing body. The compliments had planted a seed he hoped she would allow to germinate. Even before she'd entered the office, he'd been proceeding with an avenue of revenge involving her, but meeting her in person had been an unexpected surprise. In his office he focused on Jayna's part in his revenge plan, choosing her as the starting point of his primary vengeance.
After meeting Jayna, his first action was to introduce a file that would add advertisements for his newly minted photography studio to her social media feeds. Having scraped the internet for specific photos of girls who looked as much like Jayna as possible, he created a fake portfolio. From that moment onward ads for his website appeared exclusively on her feed, filled with girls that looked like Jayna posing for professional pictures in exotic locations.
For weeks he had been creating AI bots that would like the girl's most revealing photos on social media. At the same time, he had manipulated the algorithms to raise her photos in the feeds of all the men her father knew, hence the ogling when the guys in sales had spotted her. As she got more and more likes, Ted noticed Jayna post new pics in more revealing outfits and bikinis. Those photos in turn drew more attention from the men in her sphere, boosted by Ted and his bots. Insidiously, Ted's bots ignored photos that centred primarily on Jayna's face. Cute as she was, Ted wanted her to feel insecure about her face, so she would focus on pictures of her body.
Ted's name was nowhere on the website and he did his very best to hide his tracks with the cunning of a lifelong rule-breaker. To pay for all of these endeavours, Ted had been carefully stealing money from Arthur's sales accounts, making it look like Arthur himself were the one doing it. Laundering the money through Arthur's bank accounts and spending it on fake gambling sites, Ted filtered the money to himself. Creating sites that were one or two letters off of actual gambling sites, he gathered resources for his revenge plan.
As all the men he knew ogled Arthur's daughter online, Ted courted her from afar, urging her to pursue a modelling career and seek out his agency in order to begin.
It took a few days for Arthur to catch up to Ted after the exchange in the office in front of Jayna, but eventually he cornered Ted in the break room when no-one else was there. Ted hadn't noticed Arthur come in as the computer tech warmed up a burrito.
