When I was 7 years old a teacher's aide gave me a kid-level IQ test where I pegged its highest number. They wanted me to go from 2nd grade straight to 5th. Luckily my mom said no and I only went to 4th. It was still a huge mistake and messed me up badly. I was like Ender Wiggin in Ender's Game regarding all the isolation I suffered as a know-it-all 7 year-old showing up the 9 year-olds. I learned to keep quiet and my head down, then coasted under the radar, bored, sullen, and younger than everyone else, up into high school.

In my sophomore year I was still pretty miserable. I went on a few dates, got taken advantage of. Then I discovered the world of computers. They fascinated me. They were safe, they did what they were told, and I discovered I was very good at it. And the PC revolution was just starting.

Life started to get fun. I graduated with honors in Computer Science from a major university, then I worked on my Masters in a top-rated CS program at UIUC in Illinois. Here I saw firsthand the invention of the web. I mean literally, my office was down the hall from where it all began. The famous browser wars of the 1990s started in that hallway: Mosaic (the origin of Spyglass and Internet Explorer) and its offshoot Netscape (the origin of Mozilla and Firefox). Today if you go to the front of the building where my office was, you will see a bronze plaque monument on the front lawn of the place. It basically reads, "The Web Browser Was Invented Here." (It's a bit of an exaggeration. They need to give Tim at CERN more credit.)

The computer revolution was in full swing, and I was gaining a reputation as a wunderkind programmer. I bailed out from grad school when a government contractor dangled an obscene amount of money in front my face to work at a new applied-research facility for the US military. My love life was still a wreck, so I had no problem leaving my mistakes behind. I remember my grad adviser was appalled. "You want to leave for money?" Like 'money' was a swear word or something. Big deal. It was a lot of money, and money can buy a lot of happiness. I never regretted it. Later I got involved fairly deep in spookworld, working at a certain heavy-duty computer-security contractor during the First Gulf War on some rather deep applied math theoretical class A orange book stuff on data containment. Then the Internet really took off, so I was put on a team that wrote and sold the first firewall for a certain popular personal computer operating system made by a company in Seattle. Finally, with the dot-com crash looming on the horizon, I cashed out my stock options and bailed before the inevitable layoffs. I became an independent contractor, and I've been doing that (more or less) to this day.

I had a crazy romance. I took out a newspaper personal ad and got 50 responses, dated twelve, four disasters, four interesting, two serious, and one is now my SO. I think the secret was swapping out my coke-bottle eye-glasses for contact lenses, plus exercise and PMA. Still got my natural hair color, I'm getting looks again, and a new friend guessed I was 35. Yay!

No kids, just my cats, and that is just as well as my family history is pretty much all psych patients or wacky geniuses. My SO is also nuts (in a good way) and I love it.

I love being a white hat, chasing the hackers and catching them. It's like cops and robbers. They say I'm really good at it. All my life I have only worked for the good guys and have never been a black hat.

I will now confess a personal problem. I do know lately my IQ has been dropping. Age does that, and I can feel it. I really hope I never get Alzheimer's, as it would be the most horrible kind of death I can imagine. Which kind of makes me think I will get it, just for the irony of it. And there's a family history of it too, sigh.

It is one of the reasons I'm pushing out these fics. The first big fic is The Final Act of Haruki Suzumiya. Originally I planned to write one big honking huge epic sprawling galactic romance mystery super story. This story would have been my magnum opus, my Summa Theologica, of all my personal beliefs about life, the universe, and everything. It is unfinished and might never be completed.

To make things more manageable, I broke up the big themes in Final Act into several smaller independent novel-length fics. My second big fic is The Fifth Kind of Love, which is based on the anime and manga series Oh! My Goddess!. It is my comedic take on Final Act. The story told in Fifth Kind is the simpler and more emotional part, the 'right-brain' tale so to speak, in contrast to the huge sprawling SF story in Final Act.

The sequel to Fifth Kind is called After Ragnarök. It is a fun roller-coaster ride through cosmology and ontology, and it can be read as a standalone tale if you wish. (FKOL has a bittersweet ending that sets up AR.) It is my 'left-brain' tale and is far more technical and philosophical, diving fairly deep into epistemology and ontology. To make my philosophical arguments I cite recent results in cosmological physics and quantum mechanics, with some advanced mathematics thrown in (e.g., the transfinite number theory of Georg Cantor, Gödelian logic systems, and how your position on Atheism versus Deism basically boils down to your position on the Continuum Hypothesis). Don't worry, I translate all the heavy math for you into plain English in the dialogs.

My fourth fic is The Heart Connection, which is based on the anime series Kokoro Connect. It tries to follow a middle path between the comedy, the drama, and the philosophy stuff (not too light, not too heavy). It is a conventional high-school romance tale that follows two boys and three girls into adulthood. It tackles a couple of very old unresolved philosophical questions: The Problem of Evil and Why Does God Allow Bad Things to Happen to Good People? The story has received effusive reviews (wow, thank you) and is my personal favorite.

My most recently completed fic is SAO: Nobody Dies, which is based on the anime series Sword Art Online. The story explores what would have happened differently if nobody had actually died while playing the VR game. It is my fans' favorite story and has received some very nice reviews (again, thank you).

My current ongoing fic is The Guardian of Atlantis, which is based on the TV show Stargate: Atlantis. It explores what would have happened differently if a single ancient Atlantean had survived the Atlantis-Wraith war.

I will remain anonymous. You can PM me, but don't try to find me. I'm not on Facebook or anything like that. Although I am in Wikipedia in a few places, and I am a bit famous for something I can't discuss due to danger to my anonymity, you won't connect any of that to me here. And if you do figure out who I am, please PM and we can chat, but I beg you to please keep my identity secret.