This is the second installment of my series of short stories. Not to be confused with a short story series. It was originally named “He” but the title changed with the modifications I put to the story. It’s the same as it was, only different.

He wished he could stay outside forever right now. The air smelled good, and felt good in his lungs. The sun washed out the scenery around him making the world look sort of ethereal.

When he thought about it, how could something as wonderful as the sun not have that effect on everything around it?

He wished he could just sit and watch the people going by with their ordinary lives all abuzz as always.

So much good in life. Such extraordinary things tucked inside the package of routine life.

Well, so much for life. He had to go to work.

Fifteen minutes later he opened a large wood framed glass door, nodded at Mrs. Valentine the the receptionist, then went through the door marked, “Dr. McManus”. Once inside, he pressed the intercom button, spoke his name, pressed his heel against the part of the floor that recognized the chip, and entered his lab. It was no ordinary lab as it was clean, neat, and devoid of everything but papers and a giant wall monitor.

The wall before him stood just the way he left it except he had 200 more emails than when he left twelve hours ago. He barely had a chance to sleep at all after he finally got work off his mind. He always left a clean screen but it always filled up. Four foot square of a solid pixelated work.

Now he was back in body and mind. All the thoughts flooded to him reminding him why he was here. Why he would sacrifice 12 hours a day five days a week for an indeterminable amount of time.

He was a genius.

There were no spaces between cases. Killers killed for sport. Terrorists killed for their eternal reward…which couldn’t come soon enough for him. He could make the connections that no computer could. He understood human motivations. No program could be designed to calibrate for the complexities of the human mind, or the depravity it can fall into if one stops resisting evil.

FBI and CIA outsourced their toughest cases to him and three others, but very few people ever knew about this program.

Money couldn’t pay him enough. The best payment was when he saw a man walk by him smiling as he talks to his wife, or the woman who desperately tries to keep her five children from randomly filling the shopping carriage while at the corner grocer. How many people could keep killers inline and prevent murders, bombings, and even wars that the ordinary people would never know about? He had been given an extraordinary gift.

Every ordinary day was a good day.