Chapter 7: Foundations
The next three days were quiet. And I needed them to be.
My body was still catching up. Five weeks in a hospital bed does things to you that you don't notice until you try to walk up the stairs and your legs start shaking on the fourth step. Mum kept trying to feed me like I was storing up for winter. Every time I came downstairs there was something on the table. Toast, soup, a full English, sandwiches, biscuits, more soup. I told her I was fine. She told me to eat.
So I ate.
During the day I was Liam. Sat on the sofa with Mum watching telly. Took Biscuit for short walks around the block, which were more for me than for him because my legs needed the exercise. Nathan came over on the second day and we watched Arsenal play a midweek match. They lost. Nathan blamed the ref. I blamed the defence. We argued about it for twenty minutes and it was the most normal I'd felt since waking up.
Dad came by after work. Didn't say much. Sat in his chair, drank his tea, watched the news. At one point he looked at me and said, "You look better." I said, "I feel better." He nodded. That was the conversation. And honestly, that was enough.
But at night, when everyone was asleep and the house went quiet, I opened the laptop and I learned.
I'd set myself a schedule. Midnight to four, every night. Mum went to bed at eleven. Nathan was at his own place. Dad was out by ten. By midnight the house was dead silent except for the boiler clicking on every now and then, and Biscuit snoring at the foot of my bed.
The first night I went through networking. All of it. How the internet actually worked, not the simplified version but the real thing. Protocols, layers, routing, DNS, how data moved from one side of the planet to the other in milliseconds. With System Insight I could see the concepts as I read about them. I'd read about TCP handshakes and then look at my own network and watch them happen in real time. Theory and practice at the same time.
The second night I did operating systems. Linux, specifically. How it was built, how it worked under the hood, how it was different from what had been running before. I downloaded a Linux distribution and installed it in a virtual machine so I could mess around without breaking the laptop. Command line, file systems, permissions, processes. I went through it all.
The third night I did security. How systems got broken into and how they got protected. Firewalls, encryption, vulnerabilities, exploits. How hackers worked. How defenders worked. The whole cat and mouse game laid out in front of me.
And I remembered everything. Every page, every diagram, every terminal command. Three nights and I had more knowledge in my head than most cybersecurity students get in their first year. My brain didn't just store it either. It connected it. I'd read something about encryption and my brain would link it to the networking stuff from the first night, and suddenly I understood something that neither page had actually explained. The pattern recognition was doing its thing, filling in the gaps between what I'd read, building a picture that was bigger than any single source.
It was mental. And a little bit scary, if I'm honest.
On the second morning, my phone buzzed. Group chat.
Jake: OI LIAM ARE YOU ALIVE OR WHAT!!!!
Jake: i have been trying to give you space but mate its been 5 weeks i need to know youre not dead
I stared at the screen for a second. Jake Morrison. Best mate. We'd been close since school. The messages between us went back years. Football, gaming, taking the piss out of each other.
I scrolled back through our old messages quickly. Jake called everyone "mate" and "bruv." He sent voice notes instead of typing when he was being serious. He used about fifteen exclamation marks per message. He was loud even in text.
I typed back.
Liam: YO JAKE yes im alive and well but tired sorry for not even messaging you once
Liam: but i have been sleeping a lot and mum wont even let me out of the house only to walk the dog for like a small round around the street feel like a prisoner in my own house
The response was instant.
Jake: BRUV
Jake: i was about to come round and check on you myself. How are you feeling actually tho? like properly?
Liam: tired mostly. legs are weak. brain feels weird but the doctor said thats normal
Jake: weird how?
Liam: just foggy. like some stuff i remember fine and other stuff is just blank. doctor said it might come back or it might not
Jake: thats mad
Jake: do you remember when we went to thorpe park and you threw up on the nemesis and it went on that woman in front
I had some idea. I was trying to find it in my memory. Found some bits of it, enough to work with.
Liam: mate i said foggy not brain dead. course i remember that
Jake: hahahaha good because that was the funniest thing ive ever seen in my life!
Jake: listen i dont wanna overwhelm you but can i come see you soon? like whenever youre ready no pressure
Liam: yeah course. give me a few more days to stop looking like death and ill let you know
Jake: safe. glad youre back bruv. genuinely.
Liam: cheers jake. means a lot
I put the phone down and let out a breath. That went alright. Jake wasn't the type to test me on purpose, he was just talking.
On the night of the third day, I sat at my desk and looked at the laptop.
I knew enough now. Not everything, not even close, but enough to know what I needed to do next. I'd spent three nights learning how systems worked, how they broke, and how they got defended. And now I wanted to actually do something with it.
But I wasn't stupid. The first rule before anything else: protect yourself. Before you touch anything, before you go anywhere, before you even think about looking at something you shouldn't, you make yourself invisible first. Because the internet remembers everything. Every click, every connection, every request. If you don't cover your tracks before you start, you're already caught. You just don't know it yet.
I looked at the laptop with System Insight on. Really looked at it.
It was a disaster. Old Windows installation, a complete mess. Tracking software baked into the operating system. Browser fingerprinting everywhere. The ISP logging every single connection. My IP address just sitting there, pointing straight back to this house, to this street, to Mum's wifi.
If I went anywhere interesting on this machine right now, it would be like robbing a bank wearing a name tag.
"Right," I said, giving my arms a quick stretch. "Let's fix that."
Before I wiped anything, I looked at the files. The FIFA clips. The photos. The random stuff I had saved. I couldn't just delete all of it. Some of it I might need later, not for anything important, but for personal reasons. If Mum or Nathan ever asked about something, I wanted to have it.
"There's got to be an external hard drive somewhere here." I looked around the desk, pulled open a drawer. There it was. I plugged it in and backed up the stuff that mattered. The photos, the clips, the personal stuff. The half-finished essays and browser history could go. After the backup, I wiped the rest.
I installed Linux from the USB I'd prepared the night before. Clean system. No tracking, no telemetry, no bloatware. Just a blank canvas.
Then I started building.
VPN first. I routed everything through a server in another country and turned on System Insight to check what it looked like from the outside. And yeah, it was leaking. DNS requests slipping past the tunnel, browser giving away my real IP, timestamp patterns that could tie me back if someone was skilled enough to look. Because on the internet, you never know. Took me about twenty minutes to fix all of it. Better, but not enough for where I was going.
Tor next. Three nodes, three layers, traffic bouncing across the world so nobody could see the full path. I configured it, locked it down, and checked it with System Insight. Found cracks. Fixed those too. Checked again and it was clean. Or as clean as I could make it.
Then I dealt with the MAC address. Every device has one, like a fingerprint, and I didn't want mine showing up anywhere. Wrote a quick script to randomise it every time I connected to anything. New fingerprint every time.
Last thing was the encrypted partition. Hidden, invisible unless you knew exactly where to look and had a sixty-four character passphrase to open it. Which only existed in my head. With Total Cognitive Enhancement, that wasn't going to be a problem.
I sat back and turned System Insight on one more time. Looked at the whole thing from top to bottom. Data went in, got encrypted, bounced through the VPN, through Tor, through three random nodes across the world. No IP. No MAC. No DNS leak. No browser fingerprint. Nothing pointing back to this house. Nothing pointing back to me.
I was invisible. Or as close to it as you could get. You can never be completely sure on the internet.
"Not bad for day three."
Biscuit was asleep on the bed behind me. He hadn't moved in hours. Solid moral support.
I opened the Tor browser. The screen was dark. A search bar in the middle. No Google, no ads, no suggestions. Just a blinking cursor waiting for input.
This was the dark web. Or the door to it, at least.
I typed in the address of a forum I'd found mentioned in a cybersecurity article. One of the big ones. A place where hackers talked, traded, and showed off.
The page loaded slowly. Tor wasn't fast, that was the trade-off for anonymity. But after a few seconds, it came up.
Dark background, plain text, no frills. Threads about vulnerabilities, exploits, tools, targets. People talking in shorthand and slang that I was only just starting to understand. Usernames that meant nothing. Avatars that were just default icons.
I didn't post anything. I didn't click on anything suspicious. I just read. Scrolled through threads. Looked at how people talked, what they talked about, how the hierarchy worked. Who got respect and who got ignored. Who was showing off and who actually knew what they were doing.
System Insight was going mad. Every post, every link, every username, I could see the digital fingerprints people were leaving behind without realising it. Writing patterns that could identify them. Timestamps that revealed their time zones. Technical details in their posts that narrowed down what tools and systems they used. Most of these people thought they were anonymous. They weren't. Not to me.
I spent about an hour just reading. Learning the landscape. Understanding the culture.
Then I closed the browser, shut down Tor, and disconnected the VPN.
I sat there in the dark, the laptop screen still glowing faintly. Biscuit had rolled onto his back at some point and was snoring with all four legs in the air.
I looked at the clock. 3:47 AM.
And nobody knew. Mum thought I was recovering. Nathan thought I was watching YouTube. Dad thought I was sleeping. And downstairs, my phone had a new message from Jake saying he'd found a video of a dog that looked exactly like Biscuit and I had to watch it.
Normal on the outside. Something else entirely underneath.
I closed the laptop and got into bed. Biscuit shifted and pressed his back against my leg.