His real name was  Edward Franklin Underhill, his real initials… EFU. His father’s private joke, he’d imagined. A name was perhaps the only thing of substance his father ever gave him, before he bailed on them, and Ace hated it. To him it was like a slap in the face.  Though it wouldn’t be until he adapted the identity of a hacker, to cover his strange ability, that he’d finally been able to bury it and become someone else. There were still people who knew him by Ed, Eddy, or even Frank, but by and large he had become known as Ace, a name he’d established as an acronym.

No one in the room could have known the truth about what his name really represented. In fact, most people usually guessed it was a boast about being elite, or that it eluded to a certain adept proficiency at acquiring information using his skills as a hacker, or something along those lines. This was what he’d intended by choosing a hacker tag which incorporated the logo of an eye within a floating pyramid, hoping to conceal the even more terrifying truth about his abilities behind something mundane. That truth being that his abilities weren’t bound to a computer. While he was a talented hacker, at least part of the reason for this was due to his real power. An ability known in the occult as the All Seeing Eye, the ability to see all things past, present, or future, regardless of distance. An ability illustrated by the very symbol he chose to represent his skill as a hacker.

As a small child, his power presented itself in the form of dreams, though he did not know what  they really were until much later. When he hit puberty, it began to manifest in his waking hours. Ace could watch the girl he liked from any reflective surface he happened to be in front of whenever his mind became fixated on what she might be doing. As he realized what was happening he began trying to control his ability, which quickly became his new fixation. He found he could employ this same power to help him discover information which would allow him to make money, hack computers, and avoid potential entanglements in undesirable circumstances. With his gains he’d purchased a top of the line laptop, and flip-down sun glasses with a reflective surface on the inside.beyond this he tried to remain modest, to avoid some of the futures he had seen, he used his abilities for personal gain only enough to preserve the future he desired.

One day Ace saw a vision of himself discovering an odd card , and passing through a door to  a place which, no matter how hard he tried, he could not see into. Needless to say this intrigued him, so he set out to search for this card. He had seen certain events and features which could lead him to a time and location. Unfortunately, he was completely unfamiliar with everything in the vision. Because of this, the process of tracking it down was comparatively a difficult one without something or someone specific to focus his ability on, this was another requirement of his power. He had searched for the card at first, but soon realized that it had been given or would be given to many others. Because he had yet to learn how to navigate the future, instead seeing what he believed were merely the countless potential possibilities, he instead searched through the past for clues. The past was always clear, in contrast to his vague visions of future events. Unfortunately, all he could determine was that after someone picked up the card they vanished beyond the next door they opened, doors he could never seem to see beyond. He couldn’t even be sure why the people had been chosen, they seemed random and were in most cases likely from distant locations.

Eventually, Ace decided he should focus on the details of his own future, the vision of the card. He’d actually had great success with things like reading future publications, such as sports scores and race track results, so long as he resolved to do exactly that when the time came. He’d earned extra cash, making friends with gambler who placed bets on his behalf in exchange for his tips. This worked because he could set up notifications to look up the results of such things on his computer, this way he would be sure to see them, which allowed him to check them beforehand.

In Ace’s vision he appeared to be in a police station, but he didn’t appear to be under arrest. Still, he had no idea why he would be there. What he did notice was a date. He’d opened his laptop to change the date, which could only mean he was looking into something that would be reported at a future time. Of course, he had his glasses down, so what was being displayed on screen was not what his future self was actually seeing. In fact, he was looking at an “Error – page cannot be loaded” message. He did noticed however, that it was a local news site, one that he’d been familiar with. Though he couldn’t tell what he was clicking on, he could only imagine he was there to prevent something terrible from happening. He wondered why he never thought to do so before. Sure, he’d rather avoid spending all day in a police station, unable to explain how he’d know such things, possibly being treated as a suspect. He certainly didn’t want to spend his entire life trying to stop things that hadn’t yet happened. But more to the point, he didn’t want to risk being exposed, he’d lived in fear of that scenario.

Ace visited his local police station to see if it looked familiar, it did. Next he set his computer to the date in question and checked the news site, which he’d often used to check sports scores, for crime related articles which might prompt him to get involved. Then he saw it, a girl had been abducted by a strange man. Witnesses only managed a vague description, but more importantly, he knew why he’d taken notice. It had been someone he knew, someone who’d always been kind to him. He’d checked further dates, and realized that she’d been found dead months later. He’d now committed himself to checking the site’s archive every week for the next few months, a small price to pay to find the details he’d sought.