University Begins

It was almost September at this point, and well, I had one final year of university left to do. I really considered dropping out but then decided not to since Michael was still going to UCL and he would really need me to be there. Also, I need minions, and where better than the 5th best computer science school in the world?

Michael's parents were both from Poland and came over in the seventies. He grew up in a rough part of Croydon inside the system and ended up coming to the same college as us on a program that was started in 1997 to take kids from places where educational institutions were overcrowded and let people attend the less-overcrowded places. Me, Vicky, and Luke basically absorbed him into our group since he kind of fit in perfectly. 

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. How to commit tax evasion 101. Don't do anything illegal; just wait for the Tories to come back in power; somehow they manage that every time, even though everyone knows they will just cut taxes for the rich.

After buying a company laptop, I then decided to get a brokerage account and just invest it for the foreseeable future until I left university. The 2002 stock market slump from the dotcom bubble had made the market lose about a trillion dollars in value, so it was kind of the perfect time to invest because stock value had dropped more due to lack of trust than a loss of physical value. The problem was that it wasn't like I had spent my time memorising stock indexes or something. 

As I did some light research, I realised that the only company I was sure would have its stocks recovered would be Apple. While I didn't particularly like them or their later products, it was a safe investment, at least to a time traveller. Apple stock was currently at -36%. And was still steadily dropping. I knew for a fact it would increase, so I bought as many shares as I could with my money. At a currency conversion rate of around $1.58 to £1, my £293,600 I had left after some purchases became $460,350, and at a share price of $7.50 cents each minus the 0.37% broking rate. I bought a total of 61,152 shares and was left with like three cents, which I just left there. 

And that was all of my money from the painting. Shit. I hope the butterfly effect doesn't cause Apple to go under or something. Wait, what if there are other regressors? Why am I thinking about that? It's something to deal with when I come to it. The very act of me thinking that will curse it, quick think of something else, um, logarithmic algorithms No, ah boobs. Apparently boobs are good; nope, that's not working either. Okay, last resort, headbanging. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

"Fingers crossed it goes up at least a bit." I said to myself while rifling through the attic later that evening. "Ah there you; why did I ever leave you up here? Eh, more excuses for self-hatred, I suppose. Oh, my precious, I am never leaving you again." If anyone had seen me, they probably would have thought me barmy, but I had long learnt to not care. Eh, the older you got, the more people just kind of assumed you were crazy no matter how sane one acted anyway.

Actually, if I ever got in a relationship, would I tell them that there is at least a thirty-year age gap? I mean, people are kind of iffy about that kind of thing. I personally think it has more to do with power dynamics. Eh, we'll get to it when we do. 

I rub my hands together as the Dell Inspiron 8200 boots up. I shove down the urge to call it a piece of junk since this is cutting-edge tech for this primitive time period. I splurged and got the best I could so I could code without having to use the library or computer lab at uni. 

I opened up my lunchbox full of flash drives and pulled out the only one that wasn't brightly coloured; instead, it just had a dull metallic cover. I had attached it to a chain I could wear around my neck for when it wasn't in the lock box. 

Neither Tor (The Onion Router) nor Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) existed yet, so browsing the dark web was kind of dangerous. I didn't really have any other projects I wanted to do yet, so I got to work adapting the Freenet code into something I could actually use. 

Freenet was a way of sending and receiving internet traffic anonymously but would quickly be replaced by Tor in the next few years. Tails was a way of running a computer off of a thumb drive, and when one unplugged it, the computer would forget everything that one did on it. Combining both with a good VPN, it basically made it impossible to trace someone on the internet unless they did something dumb, which was how almost every person who got caught doing stuff online got caught. Like connecting your bitcoin wallet directly to you or something.

After creating my own version of Tails, which only took a few days, I could plug it into my computer, then boot up my laptop into the BIOS and then open it inside the Linux tails instead of Windows. This would mean that as soon as I turned the computer off, it lost all the data of what I had just done, hence amnesia. I then used a free VPN I found online, and I now had safe, unrestricted access to the dark web whenever I wanted. I had no use for it at the moment, but if I ever did, it would be great not to have to go through all of this in a crunch.

On the laptop itself, I download dev tools that existed while working on a few of my own that I had created myself in the original timeline or that just didn't exist yet. 

After that, I basically just studied, bug tested my new stuff, relaxed, and practised my guitar. I was pretty good with a lot of instruments as well as singing and knew the theory, but the muscle memory had all been lost, so I basically had to drill myself from scratch. The same went for my vocal cords, which currently sounded like a mix between a banshee and a fork scraping a chalkboard. 

My little sister basically refused to let go when I left for Uni. I ended up driving up to where Michael lives before we both took my car further up to the campus. We got the keys from the landlord to the flat we had rented for the last two years, and we then proceeded to spend the next few days just mulling around campus. 

I wasn't really worried about the course. After quickly skimming through the third-year textbook, I wasn't exactly stumped; I could run through most of it in my sleep; I just needed to brush up on some stuff I hadn't really done in decades because it was obsolete.

"Morning, I never knew you played guitar," said Michael as he woke up.

I paused eating my cereal as Michael looked at my guitars and amp I had retrieved from the attic weeks ago. "Huh, yeah. I stopped playing when I was sixteen. Thought I might as well start playing again." There was silence for a few moments as I then said, "I'm just wondering, but what are you planning on doing when university is over? 

"Don't know," he shrugged as he was filling the kettle. "Probably see if I can get a job. Maybe after a few years go somewhere else, why?" 

"Just wondering," I replied.

"Oh, what modules are you doing?" he asked.

I thought about it and then said, "Oh, um, other than the mandatory ones, I'm taking image processing, network design, and advanced mathematics for computer science." 

"Jeez, more maths. I crammed for a week straight just to get a high enough score in my A levels." He slurred, still partly asleep, as he poured himself a cup of tea and began to stare at it, almost trying to make it brew faster.

I took a bite of my cereal and said, "It has its uses. What are you taking?" I am so glad Nestle isn't bankrupt yet; I really am going to have to buy shredded wheat off them before they do.

"Dunno. I was thinking about computation systems and, um, functional programming." He shrugged again, not really caring.

I smiled and said, trying to be helpful, "They're fine; do database and information management as well since you're allowed three."

"Why?" He said, turning from his brew to me.

"Because you're currently paying almost ten grand this year, you might as well make the most of it. Besides, I asked online and like, half of the jobs available for us will involve database management." I said.

"Okay, why aren't you taking it then?" He said, smirking as if he won something. 

I just looked at him flatly and said, "Because I've decided I'm going to have my own start-up, and besides I already took it what seems like a century ago."

He seemed to ignore my comment about a century ago as he said, "Oh, what are you going to do? As your start-up. And why?" 

"Don't know yet; I'll figure it out, but you know I don't like listening to idiots, and if it's a start-up, I can choose who I work with and just leave if they turn into idiots later."

He took a sip of his still scolding but fully steeped tea and said, "Well, if it's a good idea, I might just join you. You never know."

The more I thought about it, I had tons of ideas. They just all kind of worked off of smartphones. And sure, I could probably become the richest person in the world, off of just recreating the famous apps and games I knew of, but that seemed kind of boring. There had to be something. 

As term started, lectures were okay; I spent most of my time trying to brainstorm an idea; the rest of my life was going okay; I was dieting and getting exercise, so I was slowly but steadily losing weight, and with a 500-calorie deficit every day, I had already lost four stone by new years. 

I had gone to the doctor for my acne, and after a firm foot was placed down, they had referred me to a dermatologist who was helping, so my skin was also clearing up thanks to liberal application of steroids, but my better nutrition surely helped slightly as well.

In January, we got our first group projects, which the whole class almost collectively hated. I remember getting paired with a girl named Claire and two guys named Karim and Graham. I kind of flopped on that one last time; I still had confidence issues and procrastinated on a lot of the work. Claire being one of only three girls in the whole class didn't help either. This time though, I won't end up letting them do most of the work. 

I was paired with the same group again and made sure to do a good bit of the work and helped Karim when he didn't understand something. It turns out when you actually chat with people and you have a shared interest while willing to listen to them, you can make friends pretty easily. 

Michael's grades were like ten times better since I was helping him understand things. My experience teaching was leagues above the people here anyway. I also took the liberty to improve his skills in a few things that weren't even taught here since I would need help coding things in the future.

In part of the project where we had a huge dataset that was constantly changing to work through and turn into a graph, everyone else was stumped as I thought of an idea and said, "An interesting approach involves using randomised logarithmic projections to approximate the principal components of the data; doing that, we could reduce the dimensionality in a way that scales logarithmically with the size of the data. That would be especially useful when dealing with high-dimensional data like this; it's the type of thing that could even be used in computer vision or natural language.

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