There were a few times in Troy’s life where he had truly learned the consequences of sleeping through his alarm. Through trial and hardship, he had grown accustomed to the slightest sound around him. This did make him very lightly, but the young man thought it more of a boon than anything.
He could still remember his younger days, where he would just walk around when done with his daily dose of information being jammed into his thick skull. Others in his class would go out in the city, and try out the various entertainment possibilities. Troy never had the opportunity to do any such things, unfortunately. This was not due to an unwillingness, but actually due to a lacking ability to do so.
In layman's terms, a person who had any amount of money on his account had more money than him. He did not even have an account back then, his mother taking over any cheque sent his way. Which was something Troy was regularly supposed to get, as he learned much later in his life. The state wanted to give students more time to study their preferred profession. That had culminated into every person under eighteen getting a monthly stipend, that would allow them to forgo extra hours in the part-time work. That is if they had any work to get to. There were most definitely a few floating around, but under one per cent of youngsters ever achieved the goal of a job requiring no education.
Troy was part of the average in that regard, never securing himself any official employment until much later in his life. That was one of the several indicators that he was not cut out for such things, but there was no reason to think of that now. He certainly did not put too much thought into the subject until the ripe age of seventeen, when he was automatically notified of his account being set up. Not by the government of course, but by his mother who noticed her lack of monthly pay-check for having a son. One needed the money to buy alcohol from somewhere, and that lady right there was not going to have it when any coin was stolen from her.
He would have called it a mental ass-whopping if not for the fact that he came out with a few blue or purple marks. There was even green on his lower back, but that had not been noticed for several days. Not like he wondered much about the number of battle-wounds or where they were placed on his body. That young boy had been much to focused on the fact that he now had an ability to work hard and get rich.
The drive to earn money had been enough to distract him from language study, which spoke more than anything else would have been able to. Instead of studying, Troy had gone out in search of acquiring some digits on his bank-account. As he was one of the few that had no debt holding him down, there was nothing stopping him from getting some cold hard cash.
Other than his inability to gain any official employment, of course. When one looked past that facet of life, everything would just be running fine and dandy. Troy had certainly done that in the beginning, applying everywhere he could. With the help of his older connections, he had even been able to gain an interview or two. Both had gone… bad. The first had been what was to be expected. The interviews had been nice enough to start with, shaking Troy’s hand, asking how his day was and all. It had been when the more in-depth question had started that it became obvious what they were after.
He had been coming in for a semi-regular paid position. What was actually there was a full-time contract-obligated intern-based position. The young man had gotten the offer of working for free for them for a year, with the potential of gaining an actual position after that time had passed. To put it simply, two adult people had attempted to trick Troy into being a legal work-slave for no benefit at all. In the contract, he would not have been allowed to notify others of his involvement with the company, so it was not even something he would have been able to put on his work-certificate as legal experience. Suffice to say that he had jumped off that wagon before it could gain speed.
The second interview had not been much better, ending up with the police being called on him. Apparently, the fact that Troy had been living in the bad part of the city had been a clear sign of him committing fraud and forgery, as there was no way he could be anything other than a drug-addicted social-muncher. That had been a fun reality-check, really putting the young man’s life into perspective. Those days, people spoke about their opinions honestly, as if the ones being talked about couldn't clearly hear them. The stay at the police station had outright been the dullest part of the experience, Troy just being asked the same questions again and again. He could still not understand why anybody thought it a good idea to slowly switch out real police officers with automatic ones. It might have cost less in wages, but the extra time had to have made it worthless.
Forgoing the long rant about machines being useless and only humans being worthy of working, Troy knew then and there that he had to find another source of income. Back in those days, he deemed himself a failure the second he realised that he wasn't sustainably alive, that the moment he turned eighteen his mother would likely throw him out of the house.
Solutions had come in plenty, some of them even being offered to him upfront. He had friends going into more… unofficial type of business. Some called it the reselling of medical supplies. Troy liked to call it drug-dealing. And those younglings were not the kind who would buy their supply from the less regulated website, and resell it hand-to-hand. No, these were the types of young people who would be making the drugs. A few machines had been acquired through shady investments, and patents were ready to be exploited. The people only needed some extra hands to quicken the process along, and Troy was one of the few that could truly be trusted. As a good and supportive friend, he had cut all ties with them and had actively avoided being near anybody from that part of his social circle.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
That had been a good answer to it, in the end. When it came to copyrighted medical supplies being sold to young people who could easily gain harmful addictions, there was nobody more furious than the copyright holders. That was money stolen from them, and not a single person could find such an action respectable. Everybody related to the trade had been thrown into a cell, while those higher up the ladder had been straight-up taken from the surface of the world. Troy still betted on them having been shot in the back of some dirty alley. Couldn't be proven, but so couldn't much of what those medical companies were up to most of the time. With how large they were and how much money they imported into the country, it was not like the government would be too strict with them.
So with a lack of employment from a company and an unwillingness to go down the same route as those around him, Troy had found himself with one choice left. He would need to gain money through his own original efforts. He would have to come up with something that could gain him money without it being done in his neighbourhood.
An example of such would be the collection of the frequent dumps of aged technology that appeared at the end of the road where he used to live. The young man had once used it to make remote-controlled cars for the children around him, but the adults had taken to selling the parts for straight cash. They used it to fill whatever desire they had, but any details were hard to get. Troy had always guessed it to be drugs, but it might as well have been food in some cases.
Nevertheless, he had been forced to be creative in how he would be gaining money. As might have surprised some, he did succeed in this endeavour. Instead of selling old tech to whoever would buy them, Troy sold the information about where it could be found. As luck would have had it, the young man was smart enough to have memorized all the known locations of where some company or another would illegally dump their trash. This knowledge could be sold for a quick buck on some forum or another, allowing the cash to flow inside his bank account.
And here was the greatest trait about selling information. When Troy told somebody that little secret, he still possessed it himself. It was not like any of the buyers were going to reveal what they had been told. As long as he had proved that his information was valid, there were plenty of people who bought into his scheme.
It did wear itself out thin after three whole months of hard work. There were only so many spots to reveal, and there were so many more people who wanted a bite of it. Troy was forced to keep up with demand by showing multiple people the same places, eventually making others reveal that he was selling reused information. It had been a good run for him, though, as it had allowed him to attain nearly ten thousand dollars. The idea had been solid.
Yet… it was the acquirement of the money that was the easy part. What came after would be the hardest months that Troy had ever lived through. His mother was the only one able to see what he had in his account. Normally, he would have been able to access it just fine, but a fault or two with his brain implant stopped anything like that from being allowed.
However, that did not mean that she was able to access this sum of money. It was only through the power of luck that the woman had not noticed it while Troy had been in the process of attaining the money, instead just writing in the sum needing to be transferred and Troy playing a fool to it.
For the transfer to be allowed, it required certain identifiers that Troy was allowing it to happen. While it had commonly been a certainly required movement done by his eyes, his mother had been able to change it to fingerprints instead. As she had been unable to get the young man to consent into handing the money over, she had tried getting something easier to cheat with to get access to the cash.
There was a catch to this identifier, though. As it was a very simple action to force a person to do, being certainly much harder than a series of movement done by the eyes, another requirement was that Troy needed to be at a regular level of pulse, anything surpassing ninety instantly locking the account for several minutes.
If his mother was to force his hand to be shown, under either the promise of violence or just actual violence, there was no doubt that Troy’s pulse would have been closer to a hundred than anything else.
This culminated in her sneaking into the young man’s room while he was awake, and using the opportunity to withdraw from his bank account. Though, as he was still a minor, there was a maximum drawing limit. This was something Troy figured out the first time his mother attempted the first withdrawal, as she very angrily cussed at him after trying to drain his account in one go and finding out that it failed completely. That had also been the time he had learned she was sneaking into his room.
That had been a disturbing experience. Troy had always been suspicious of his parent from before then, yet there were some boundaries which he did not think would have been broken so easily. He had thought his room a safe space where he could fully relax, yet that idea had been broken in the time it would take somebody to sneeze.
With caffeine and a massive amount of stress in his blood, Troy had stayed up the next night, waiting to see if the even was a one-time thing. Even back then, he had been so quick to exist anomalies as unique happenings, that was impossible to happen ever again. As a slap from fate, his mother had walked into his room as soon as the time had hit midnight.
She had hardly opened the door before she had stopped in her tracks, caught by the wide-eyed young man, sitting on the bed with tired eyes. There had been no large reaction from her, other than a comment about him not being able to resist sleeping forever.
God, that bitch had thought herself so smart. Those words of hers had help trigger what Troy had thought of as his inability to get a full nights sleep, no matter how long he slept. There was just some part of him that would never rest itself, always making sure that he was not about to get stolen from. When having told others about it, they had advised him to get help about it, yet such thoughts had not been mirrored once.
Sure, the young man might have had a mild case of chronic insomnia that was based on childhood trauma. So what? Plenty of people had that, and they likely lived a happy life. Who was to say that Troy did not have a chance of going the same route?
Also, being able to wake up before Dr Hale reached the bedside while holding a kitchen knife in her hand, was a general plus in Troy’s eyes. Giving himself a few seconds to think about the sight even allowed him not to scream himself to death.