Crack

I never thought John Whitley did it.

The first time I meet John was at the art gallery, West 227. He was standing in front of a work on display composed by digital footprints. The peculiar sight of it captured only the two of us. As I approached him and aligned with him shoulder to shoulder inches apart, I could see it from his eyes, the passion, the curiosity beamed nakedly into the screen.

He stood there staring blankly at the artwork, with arms crossed in front of his blue sweater, hands under his armpits. His messy long hair and unattended beard extended everywhere like a bird nest. I glanced at him by the corner of my eyes, he looked entranced, obsessed, in a frenzy state almost as if he was immersed into the digital world, drowning in the sea of 0s and 1s.

When I had eventually walked around the gallery and left, he was still there, looking at the lines of codes, his eyes traced with every single dot that came through, and it made me thought of those console in the movie Matrix. Maybe he could read those lines, maybe he saw something there that I couldn’t, something with meaning.

The next day he was on the news, he was identified as a possible suspect, a hacker that stole money from a bank near the gallery and converted into digital currency and distributed far and wide. He ripped that bank off and tipped the poor, a cyber Robin Hood, people named him on the Internet.

From the footage release by the police that was broadcasted on the news, it looked like he found a way of access through that digital display. According to the description by the designer, it was reading raw electronic signals from the ten miles radius and thus, included that bank.

A female officer later contacted me and scheduled an interview with me regarding that matter, because I was in the surveillance video, they saw me stood next to him, though they didn’t know if we had communicated with each other or not. I made my best effort and explained the situation to the madam and she was pleasantly surprised that I remembered so much about John, except, I didn’t know he was called John before seeing the morning news.

At first sight, I thought John was just obsessed with those codes, just like any other people who are obsessed with coffee, soda, bacon, movie, porn, book, history, economy, philosophy, astronomy and computer technology, and many more.

Maybe John did it, maybe he didn’t, I couldn’t tell. He might just be a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time with queer actions.