Chapter 3: Product of Fate: The Evolution of a Hacker

by Russ Rogers as "Saul"

Overview

Looking back on the entire event, no one could really say how everything ended up the way it did. Saul has always done well in school. And though his parents might not have been the greatest people on the planet, it s not like they didn t love him. So, what could have enticed a bright, seemingly normal kid like Saul into committing such a heinous crime? No one knows. But, then again, no one knows what really happened , do they?

Saul was the product of what started out as a normal middle-class family living outside Johannesburg, South Africa. His family lived in a simple house, nice but not too expensive. His father was a typical Type A personality who dreamed of working hard and becoming independently wealthy and his mother was a beautiful social butterfly in the community.

Saul s one big interest was technology. He had always been computer smart, ever since his father bought him one three years back, when he was still 15. It was a laptop and his father would often spend time with Saul teaching him to surf the Internet and set up web servers. It wasn t long before he was much more adept at using computers than his own father, which really served only as a precursor to their eventual isolation from each other. Instead of being proud of his son, Saul s father soon began to feel intimidated, creating a gap between them that only widened as Saul grew deeper into his teenage years. Eventually he lost the ability to communicate with Saul. The father-son relationship started to deteriorate.

As for his mother, she had never been much of a good influence either and had a tendency to spend far too much time boozing it up with her friends. Eventually, the normal middle-class family began to break apart; his parents divorced, and Saul found himself being forced to live with his mother in the city, picking up empty scotch bottles and feeding her canned soup when she could no longer feed herself. Despite all this, however, it was really just boredom that drove Saul into the project. He was just another bright kid at a local high school, bored with courses that continually failed to keep his interest, with a severe lack of friends due, in part, to his own introverted personality. Saul failed to find value in the everyday occurrences at school and certainly wasn t interested in competing in the inane day-to-day popularity contests. His father had told him many times before that the people you meet in school will generally not be around when you get older, so why bother getting attached?