Unhedged

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Unhedged

He’d proved it. He now knew just how easy it was to be successful. Success, of course, can mean very different things form one person to another; money, celebrity, cultural, academic or social achievement. All are variously deemed markers of success. Luke could now be deemed a success - and one which gave him a most intense pleasure; he’d beaten them all.

When he first saw the list he hardly gave it notice. The four crumpled sheets of white A4 sat messily on the District Line seat next to him; he’d seen the owner who’d sat the other side of the paper leave them there as he hurriedly exited the tube at Hammersmith and had initially thought it had been a deliberate act of littering. Glancing at the top sheet he could make out three vertical lists in boxes. They were headed ‘name, email and mobile’. Oh dear, it looked as if another civil servant might be leaving more of our personal data on public transport – but it was a very late train; so almost excusable.

The next thing he saw made him start. The first name at the top of the list was Alfred Christie – surely he was the man who had set up the Bendo’s chain of coffee stores? The next was Benedict O’Connor – the new American owner of Arsenal football club. Grabbing the top sheet and peering down the page, Luke realised that this was a list of a hundred or so of the most successful people of the time with their email addresses and mobile numbers. Quickly scanning the other three pages, Luke folded the bundle and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket. His mind was racing. His drinks after work with his school friend Andy who worked, like him, for a boring Bank in the City, had turned out to have an unexpected bonus; and the courage to pocket the papers.

That was six months ago. Luke had decided that the value of this information was far, far greater than any finders’ fee. Besides, whoever had left it there was hardly going to go public with his mistake. No, Luke had discovered something that could be the key to him finding his way in life – something to get him off the bottom rung he believed that he occupied. These were all successful people and Luke had to find a way of extracting some of that success for himself.

For nearly two months, the list had sat in the bottom of his sock draw during the day whilst he worked, only to become the focus for all his attention in the evenings as he researched the knowledge required for his plan to succeed. His stolen laptop – well, not exactly stolen but taken from outside the IT office as it waited for them to bin it; someone ‘higher up’ had wanted to be upgraded – worked fine once he’d deleted company specific programmes and found out how to log onto next doors’ wi-fi account – they should have made it secure! Luke had never gone out much and his new project curtailed his outings even more. Even his mother was starting to worry why it was that he was always home whenever she called.

‘Some of the world’s greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible.‘ Doug Larson