Fanfic: Privacy Settings [Highlander]

[argentum_ls]

Prompt: Methos, a paranoid old immortal vs. social websites like Facebook

Word Count: 350

Notes: Originally posted to comment_fic

It used to be that when it was time to start over, you packed your bag, left your village, and walked for a few hours. At the next village, you introduced yourself with a new name and a new history, and no one had any reason not to believe you. A good sword arm was always valuable.

Later, as people became more mobile, routes had to be planned more carefully, deaths had to be planned more carefully. Disappearing could draw questions, appearing even more. But there were still plenty of wars and plagues, and no concept of family planning, to blame the inconsistencies on. Now…

He’d mastered the art of the paper trail, knew how to work Driver’s Licenses and Passports, could create a college transcript on his laptop in ten minutes flat. He knew how to avoid photographers, had to avoid London and Baltimore all together. He could speak more languages than most people knew existed, and could charm his way into or out of official and unofficial archives in all of them. Never mind if those archives were not as complete after he left. No one knew what was in them anyway.

Methos clicked on a menu, scanned the choices available, swore.  With every fiber of his being, he knew that this was A Very Bad Idea. Avatars were easy; enough people hid behind pictures of their cats that one more would only, at worst, elicit an eye-roll. Email was still easy; people used and abandoned email accounts like tissue during flu season. But now there were status updates, file sharing, picture tagging, wikis, and blogs—histories recorded in bytes and electrons under no one’s control, under everyone’s thumbs. Searchable, scannable, linkable, and impossible to erase.

Controlling his identity required constant vigilance, fortitude, and the prescience to guess what part of his life a distant face behind a distant computer would try to sell for a buck tomorrow. Four millennia of hiding, of successfully being anyone other than Death on Horseback, and it all came down to finding the right box to check.

Or was it to uncheck?