He worked late, most days, and finished early. He finished a full night of work by the time his landlady was banging the trash cans in the morning. It didn’t lend itself to much of a social life, but it wasn’t like it was important to him.

When he was working he usually forgot what time it was. The trash cans were a kind of alarm, actually. He turned the monitor’s contrast up to eleven and used the editor’s full screen mode, and he’d forgotten to add a clock to the GUI when he compiled his OS from a scratch GNU project. He didn’t miss it.

Sometimes he opened up a web browser and lost himself in the infinite pathways of the Internet. Then the bright white of the sanitized digital information superhighway made a glare that was harsh to his eyes, made his pupils contract painfully. That brief romance never lasted for long.

When he pushed the bridge of his glasses higher on his nose he noticed that the glare from his monitor on the lenses shifted weirdly, like he was looking at the world from a fishbowl.