Chapter 12: Two Minds
I lasted two days before I got bored enough at school that I just had to go back to the book.
I needed to do something about this. I didn't need a better uni, not really. My friends were here. Jake, Dave, the others. They'd had my back through the hospital, through everything. If I left I'd still be friends with them, I knew that, but it wouldn't be the same. It's never the same when you leave.
But I couldn't keep sitting in lectures where my brain had nothing to do. My mind was off doing things now that I couldn't explain to anyone, and staying here pretending was starting to feel like wearing someone else's clothes.
On the first night I did three jobs. I found three ways into an admin panel for an e-commerce site in twenty minutes. The bloke didn't believe me until I sent him screenshots of his own dashboard. Then a penetration test on a startup's email server. Then a crypto wallet security check for someone whose setup was so bad I felt guilty charging for it.
The work was getting easier. Not because the targets were getting weaker but because I had a rhythm now. Find a job on the forum and turn on System Insight, find the crack, get in, document everything, get out, post proof, get paid. The nervousness from that first night was gone. Replaced by something colder. Focus.
I didn't even care that much anymore about what I was hacking. I still checked the targets before I took a job, just to make sure I wasn't doing something that would keep me up at night. But I never turned anything down. Most of them were crypto shit anyway. Exchanges held together with duct tape and hope, platforms that existed to skim money off people who didn't know any better.
In my old life I'd watched the whole crypto scene rot from the inside. Memecoins, rugpulls, influencers selling garbage to kids who thought they were going to get rich. That hadn't happened yet in 2016 but the bones of it were already here. The same greed. The same corners being cut. The same type of people running things.
I didn't feel bad about taking from them. They were building traps for other people. If someone came along and cleaned them out first, that was just the world working the way it should.
The Bitcoin I earned stayed in my wallets. All of it. I knew what it would be worth in a few years. The 0.1 BTC from tonight's job would buy a car one day. The 1.2 sitting in my wallet right now would be worth more than Mum's house.
I was hacking the crypto world because the people in it deserved it, and I was hoarding crypto because I knew it would make me rich. Both of those things were true at the same time. I didn't see a problem with that.
0.1 Bitcoin here. 0.15 there. Nothing life-changing yet. But the wallet was growing and so was the profile. Eight completed jobs by Thursday. Every single one clean. No complaints. No traces.
On Tuesday night a regular called BlackVault sent me a message after I finished his job. One line: "Clean work. I'll keep you in mind for bigger things." I read it four times. It was the first time anyone on the forum had acknowledged Null as more than just a new name on a list.
I'd be in the middle of a job, scanning a network, mapping connections, and my brain would suddenly go: what about the eigenvalues though? I'd be sitting in a lecture pretending to take notes and I'd catch myself drawing hypercubes in the margin instead of potato dogs. I'd be lying in bed at two in the morning after finishing a bounty and instead of sleeping I'd be staring at the ceiling thinking about subgraphs and vertex degrees.
On Wednesday night I gave up pretending. I had the forum open, I was scrolling through new listings, and my hand stopped on the trackpad. I was staring at the screen but I wasn't seeing bounties. I was seeing the maths.
I closed the forum and opened a new tab. Typed "sensitivity conjecture boolean functions" and started reading papers.
The original paper by Nisan and Szegedy from 1992 was dense but I got through it. Total Cognitive Enhancement meant I could read an academic paper the way most people read a newspaper. One pass, everything locked in, every theorem and definition sitting in my head ready to connect to everything else. I read the follow-up work. The partial results. The special cases where people had managed to prove weaker versions. Every single one of them got close from a different angle and hit the same wall.
I read for three hours. Forgot about the forum. Forgot about Null. Went to bed with my head full of mathematics and slept like shit because my brain wouldn't stop turning things over.
Thursday. Lectures in the morning. Jake found me at lunch with Dave in tow, and before they'd even sat down Jake was already on about the eight pints.
"I've done the maths," Jake said, slamming his tray down. "Forty quid at five quid a pint is eight pints. That's basic arithmetic, Dave. Even Liam could do that and he's been acting like a weirdo all week."
"I haven't been weird. And since when do you do maths voluntarily?"
"Since Dave stole forty quid from me via his stomach. Don't change the subject." He shoved chips in his mouth. "But seriously though, you have been proper weird. You're walking around like someone who's got something going on and doesn't want anyone to know about it."
"I've got nothing going on, Jake. I'm just bored of lectures."
"Bored? You? Liam, three months ago you were crying over Stats homework."
"I wasn't crying. And I'm not bored in a bad way, I'm just... I don't know. Everything feels too easy now."
Jake and Dave looked at each other. Dave raised his eyebrows. Jake turned back to me.
"Right, so either the hospital gave you superpowers or you've joined a cult. My mum watched this documentary about cults and she said the first sign is when people get quiet and start acting different. You've been quiet and acting different. I'm just saying."
"Your mum thinks everything is a cult. She thought your nan's book club was a cult."
"To be fair, they were reading some weird stuff." He pointed a chip at me. "But I'm watching you. Something's going on." Then his face changed, just for a second, and he leaned forward. "Look, I don't know what it is. You don't have to tell me. But I'm here, yeah? If you need anything." He said it fast, like he wanted to get past it before it turned into a moment, and then immediately: "Also you have to come to the pub on Saturday because Gemma might be there and I need you there for moral support. And by moral support I mean someone who makes me look good by comparison."
"That's a tall order, Jake." He told me to shut up and I told him I'd be there.
They left for their afternoon lectures and I sat there in the canteen for a bit. Jake was right. I was being weird. Walking around campus thinking about hypercubes instead of paying attention to anything around me. I needed to either commit to the problem or let it go, because this halfway thing was making me useless at everything.
After lunch I went to the library instead of my Computer Science lecture. Sat down at the table by the window with a Linear Algebra textbook open in front of me like a prop. Lasted about twenty minutes before I gave up pretending and went and pulled the book off the shelf. The spine was still sticking out from where I'd left it. Nobody else had touched it. Of course they hadn't.
I got a piece of paper and started sketching. Small hypercubes first. Two dimensions, which was just a square. Three dimensions, a cube. Four dimensions, which you can't really draw but I tried anyway and it looked like a cube having a nervous breakdown. I shaded subsets of vertices, counted degrees, looked for the pattern.
After about an hour I stopped. Sat back. Looked at the mess of diagrams and notes spread across the table. I hadn't found anything. Not a breakthrough, not even a real lead. Just a better understanding of why the problem was so hard. The hypercube was too symmetric. Every approach ran into the same wall. You couldn't pin down the high-degree vertex because there were too many places it could hide.
I put the book back. Went home. Did two Null jobs that night. Earned 0.25 Bitcoin. Went to bed at three.
But I wasn't thinking about the jobs. I was thinking about something I'd read in one of the papers. Using the eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix of the hypercube to bound the degree of a subgraph. It hadn't worked in the paper. The bound they'd got was logarithmic, not polynomial. But the idea was sitting in my head like a splinter.
What if the matrix was different? What if you changed it?
"Go to sleep."
What if you flipped some of the signs? What would that do to the eigenvalues?
"Go to sleep, Liam."
I didn't.
Saturday. The pub. Jake had insisted we get there early "for strategic positioning" which meant he wanted to be sitting in the right spot when Gemma arrived so it looked casual. He spent ten minutes choosing a table.
"This one's too close to the toilets. This one's too far from the bar. This one has a wobble." He finally picked one near the window and sat down and immediately started checking his hair in the reflection.
"You look fine, Jake."
"Fine isn't good enough. Fine is what you say when someone asks how your nan is. I need to look better than fine."
Dave showed up at seven. Then a few others from Sports Science. Gemma didn't arrive until half eight, by which point Jake had drunk three pints and was significantly louder than when we'd started.
"GEMMA. Hi. Hello. We were just talking about you."
"No we weren't," Dave said.
"Shut up, Dave."
She sat down and Jake was somehow the loudest and most nervous person I'd ever seen at the same time. He talked too much and laughed too hard and kept finding excuses to touch her arm when he was making a point. But she was laughing too. Not at him. With him. She actually thought he was funny.
I sat there with my pint watching it happen and something warm settled in my chest. Not for me. For Jake. Because Jake was the most genuine person I'd ever met and he deserved someone who laughed at his jokes.
"You're doing it again," Dave said to me, quiet enough that Jake couldn't hear.
"What thing?"
"The thinking thing. You've had the same pint for forty-five minutes."
I looked down. He was right. I'd barely touched it. Because even here, even in the pub on a Saturday night with my mates, part of my brain was somewhere else. Sketching matrices. Flipping signs. Watching eigenvalues move.
"Just tired," I said.
"Yeah," Dave said. He didn't push it. Dave never pushed anything. That was the nice thing about Dave.
I walked home at half eleven. The rain had stopped for once and the streets were wet and shiny under the streetlights. The house was dark and quiet. Mum asleep. Dad asleep. I went upstairs. Biscuit was on my pillow again.
I sat at my desk and opened my laptop and I didn't open the forum. I didn't open Tor. I didn't look for bounties.
I opened a blank document and started writing. Not a paper. Not even close. Just notes. Fragments. Ideas I'd been carrying around in my head all week that I needed to get out before they drove me mad. The adjacency matrix. The eigenvalues. What happens when you modify the matrix. What that does to the interlacing theorem.
I wrote for two hours. Most of it was probably rubbish. But somewhere in the mess, somewhere between the wrong turns and dead ends, there was something. A thread. Thin and fragile and probably nothing.
But it was there.
I closed the laptop at two in the morning and got into bed. Biscuit pressed his back against my leg.
This is either the smartest thing I've ever done or the biggest waste of time in the history of wasting time.
I fell asleep thinking about matrices. Again.