Shoothis had not always been his name. Born Brud Linden, he lived along the blurred line that divided the physical world from the shimmering pixels of the metaverse. His life was a peculiar jigsaw puzzle: one piece rooted in the tangible universe, the other pixelated in the virtual. Unlike most people of his era, he cherished privacy — a rare commodity in an age when nearly every human mind had been woven, thread by thread, into the cloud.
The nickname was born out of an unusual incident. During a routine voyage through the metaverse, Brud had stumbled upon a malicious invasive AI — a parasite intent on breaching his privacy walls. In a single decisive move he launched an eradication program he had written himself: a simple "shooting" algorithm designed to seek and destroy intrusive code. It worked flawlessly. The invader, packed up its signals and fled.
News of Brud's defence spread rapidly across the net. His fellow netizens began calling him Shoothis — a portmanteau of shoot this — a name that captured his trick of shooing digital intruders out of the sky. And so Brud Linden the private citizen became Shoothis, the privacy guardian.