The next few weeks blurred together since almost nothing changed except the payment went into my PayPal. Well in fact the PayPal was in dad’s name. I had just put the address as a P.O. Box near us and grabbed a burner Sim for my phone which I could just switch out when necessary.

I found a website which exchanges your PayPal balance for cash. I exchanged two thousand for cash but they took a ten percent fee so it would be eighteen hundred. The remaining thousand was for something else. I then told dad I had won eighteen hundred as the cash prize for a tournament on one of the games online. “What do you want to use it for.” He asked and I seemed to think for a minute. “I want my own computer.” I answered.

“Sure. If mum says yes. But you have to promise to tell us what you’re doing on their, Okay.” He says with a firm tone. I just nod. A few days later when we get the cash in the mail. We head to a cheap computer store. Dad then askes. “I thought you wanted a computer that works why are we here.”

I then say in a tone of confidence which probably seems hilarious to him. I find a few motherboards which seems to have a splicer which allows it to attach to other motherboards. I then find a ram stacker which I also desperately need. While the program I want run only needs about CPU cores it needs about a terabyte of RAM to run. I thought I might have to make on myself. I then get everything else I need after checking if their working. This place is a goldmine. A technology historian would go nuts if they could see this place. I then buy five identical grey cases from some dells that had been cannibalized.

I decide to go with some huge air fans since I can’t really afford a reliable pump for water cooling. After finding a reasonable graphics card I head to the overweight guy in his fifties who seems to be only partially here. He perks up when he sees me and dad heaving a huge amount of stuff over. All this stuff is a few years old and will soon be obsolete. All in all, it comes to around a thousand three hundred. As were leaving the guy askes. “Hey, kid. What are you doing? Building a supercomputer?”

I just nod and speak. “I’m working on a project, and I’ll need a server. But until I got money this will have to do.” Once we load it into the back I turn to dad and speak. “Can we get a milkshake?” He shrugs and we go to a diner about a block away. I ordered vanilla while he got a chocolate. When they arrive, he asked. “I know it’s your money but why are you spending it on old junk that will be obsolete in a few years? Even someone like me who knows next to nothing about computers knows that.”

I take a long sip of the nostalgic drink and say with a gentle tone that lacks all of my previous enthusiasm. “Mum comes home every time, and I can see the look in her eyes. She tries to hide it and I’m not dumb. Every time it’s like a little bit more dies of the little bit she actually has. I’m not dumb. I know we have money problems. That’s why you got that trading account. You wanted to get mum to do less shifts and used the tiny bit of money you got from the short story to try and increase it.”

Dad drops his head as he takes a long sip from the milkshake. He then makes a deprecating chuckle and says in a tone which is a mix of relief and sadness. “I knew you were smarter than your grades let on. Both your mum and I still have to pay off the house as well as our Uni loans. If a recession happens or something happens to one of us. We’ll lose everything. I was trying to make a tiny bit of breathing room but just made things tighter.

I then decided to push it further. “I have an idea. That’s why I worked hard for that competition. I need your help convincing mum though of my plan.” He just looks at me with a concerned face and askes. “What…?”

“Well, I’ve read a bunch about the stock market and realized it has a glaring weakness.” I say and then take another sip. I then explained how I might be able to exploit the stock market. He doesn’t seem convinced I can do it, but I say let me build the computer and then we can do mock ones where I can say buy that and we can with it a see how things go. After a lot of testing, we’ll try it in person. After seeing how I carefully explained it and made it easy for him to understand he said. “Your serious about this aren’t you?” I just nodded.

After convincing mum again, we set it up in my room. All five units lined the walls after an intensive weekend of soldering and me pointing where my dad had to attach things. Without the cases it looked like the artificial equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. If a hardware engineer saw this, they would ring my neck. I crossed my fingers as it powered on. The heavy-duty fans kicked in as it all whirred to life and began to hum. I jump into the air and was about to hug dad when there was a thumping sound and the whole thing went dark.

I slumped my shoulders and we began to find the problem. We eventually found a wire had accidentally bowed in the heat and had ungrounded itself causing a short. After fixing it and unclogging the fan it finally began to work.

I then inserted a CD from the Computer in Dad’s study, and it made a humming sound as it ran the disk. Soon a black screen appeared along with a flashing green bar. I smiled realizing the basic program for writing an operating system was done in Auspex. It hurt to be stuck with this system, but I attached the ergonomic keyboard to the first unit and began to type.

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Dad just shook his head at my frantic typing ang decided to go back to writing. The next month continued with me waking up doing an hour of coding heading to school. Coming home and spending time with mum and dad for a bit and then back to coding while making sure to get eight hours of sleep. The only exceptions where Fridays with me having or going with Suji for Study or Tuesday evenings which was Tae Kwan Do which I also did with her.

I now understood why I had still got a hint of fear because of her when I saw her again for the first time. If it was in a match which followed a set of rules, she demolished anyone around her age and even a few of the guys who had gone into puberty.

I was still a beginner and she seemed to love fighting me. The reason I joined was because I didn’t want a repeat where by sixty even with all the new medical technology, I was almost seventy physically with multiple major conditions. I needed to stay physically fitter than the average person.

After about two months It was now the 8th of December, and I was finally done with the operating system as well as the learning algorithm. In about fifteen years’ time these things would have entirely taken over the stock market. I then connected several trawling programs to capture data from stock websites and historical data. I then loaded several hundred different versions and set them all in the stock date of 1st of January 1990 and let them all go nuts with the goal of being the biggest return with the least losses by the current date. They each started with a dollar, and it begun.

I then headed downstairs as all the fans worked overtime. I explained the concept to dad as he made something for lunch which seemed to click with him rather easily. After eating I checked and was already on generation eight. They all still sucked but at least they had figured out that purchasing stocks sometimes led to higher points. How long would it take them to correlate the rise and fall in price with the random data they were receiving, was unknown.

I could have just programmed a system that could do all this basic stuff and get straight to the bit of actually producing accurate predictions, but evolution always seemed to produce the most efficient and reliable results.

It took a few more weeks and by Christmas it was on generation 27,568 and the better ones were finally only just behind normal traders. Christmas was fun with us eating out. Suji sent me pics of her family having their Christmas party. And by party, I mean about forty different families. She hated those kinds of things, and I just teased her while we text occasionally. It ended when mum got called in to an emergency car crash. We just shrugged and asked for a to-go bag and got a taxi home after mum drove the car straight to the hospital.

We all exchange gifts, with cash coming from both grandparents and me sending them all hand drawn cards which I did since I now have quite a bit of free time. For Suji I made a bracelet with lavender and green. They were all weaved in a pattern which made them blend together perfectly. She beamed with happiness as I gave it to her. I had made one as a present to myself of white, black, purple, and white.

Dad had managed to convince grandpa to sell both of his properties and save the money in a high interest account. Because the real estate crash would happen sometime this year. If I managed to stop that from collapsing the family’s entire portfolio it would make it easier on my folks. The trading bots would need another year still before they would be good enough which was fine because I didn’t really need money until 2009 when I wanted to start mining bitcoin and even if it came out before then I couldn’t since we were in a recession.

In March when the bubble popped dad ended up picking me up and sending me into a spin. He then asked how I had figured it out. I just answered that because I was training the bots I had put in as much data as possible which included the information outside of the stock exchange that was public. It showed that the banks had been loaning to unreliable sources and the entire crash happened when someone figured it out.

Grandpa had worked in the air force and gotten a major compensation payment when he got injured due to negligence. It was basically hush money and he had taken it and bought a bunch of properties that he rented out at slightly below market value. Now that we had managed to sell four of seven properties with one being where they lived and the other being our house. The final was only a few days from being sold when the bubble burst. Once the price dropped, grandpa bought back his properties and ended up buying twelve others which would need a bit of work but were dirt cheap.

In the original timeline, when the bubble popped my grandfather lost most of the properties except for the two that he directly owned. Like thousands of others entire generations of work was destroyed by a few people at the top who in the end got paid by the government to fix the problem they created in the first place.

This kind of thing made me angry, so I focused back on the art class. This was one of the few classes where I actually paid attention. We were practicing sketching and I kept getting stuck on the eyes. No matter how hard I tried I was unable to get them right. If I tried to go realistic, they would just look creepy and if I went the other way, they just looked like circles.

Other than art, I also paid attention in Computer sciences and was in the top of the class, Music where I was learning piano. I had always wanted to but in my previous life when I found out how brilliant music was my life was already too busy and hectic to find the time. And finally, philosophy. Mainly because I loved having the moral compass, I guide myself by being cracked and rebuilt as it either affirmed or altered my core beliefs. They mostly remained unchanged, however.

As the bell rung the teacher yelled to the students rushing to get home, “Mr. Barton has asked me to remind you to bring back the permission slips.”