Page 85 of Love and the Laws of Motion
“Oh, there were one or two cease and desist letters.”
“Nick!”
“Relax.Nothing serious.Corporate blowhards protecting their turf.But yeah, my parents were pretty freaked out.I was nothing like Chris.Straight As, on track to graduate with honors, already had a job offer from a major brokerage waiting for him when he graduated.To my parents, that’s what success looked like.What I was doing?That was just goofing around on the internet and getting into trouble.They changed their tune a little when I got the full ride to DeWitt, but they never really trusted me, you know?”
It must have sucked, to be constantly compared to his brother and found wanting.As different as she and her sisters were, never once had her father set one against the other.
“Anyway, when my little run-in with the Department of Defense happened, and I got kicked out of DeWitt, they were furious.I mean, I get it.They didn’t even go to college.They had to scrimp and save to put Chris through City College.I landed a full ride to an Ivy at sixteen and then Iblewit.I didn’t see it that way, but I can see how they did.”
“Howdidyou see it?”Livie couldn’t imagine screwing up so bad as to get kicked out of college and not seeing it as a life-altering disaster.It would have destroyed her, but Nick shrugged it off as some minor inconvenience.
“Honestly, college was boring.Two years in and I already knew what I was going to do with my life, and it had nothing to do with what was happening in class.I was never going to graduate and get a job writing code for Microsoft or running an IT department for some corporation.The crazy thing is, I was already working from my desktop in my dorm room.People were already paying me to do stuff.Interestingstuff.College seemed like a waste of my time.”
She wanted to tell him that education wasnevera waste of time, but she suspected this was yet another way in which she and Nick would forever differ.“So hacking the Department of Defense.”
He let out a soft chuckle.“Okay, I admit it.It was a stupid thing to do.But I was young and dumb, despite my brains, if you know what I mean.”
Of course she did.Nick was a genius when it came to figuring out a computer program, but sometimes he couldn’t figure out the right thing to do when it was staring him in the face.Livie was brilliant at making connections inside reams of complex data, but sometimes it felt like she couldn’t connect to a human being she wasn’t related to if her life depended on it.
“Why’d you do it?”
“I had a lot of friends online.Other specialized computer experts.”
“Hackers.”
“Yeah, I was running with a pack of hackers.The elite, if there was such a thing.Anyway, we talked a lot about the ultimate hack, what would be the hardest system to crack.It was all theoretical, really.A game we played.This one guy said the Department of Defense would be impossible.He was being kind of a dick about it, actually, so I decided to prove him wrong.”
“You’re right, that was really dumb, Nick.”
“I told you.”
“You hacked the Department of Defense on adare.”
“Okay, I get it.Believe me, I heard more than enough about it from my parents, back when it all went down.”
He was quiet for a bit, lost in his memories.She left him alone with his own thoughts as they wandered down Court Street, waiting until they’d reached the relative solitude of her block before she tried again.
“You were living back at home?”
“Right.And working.See, I got into trouble for what I did, but in certain circles, it made me kind of famous.”
“Famous?”
“Infamous.Legendary.I was picking up a lot of freelance work from people looking to utilize my specific brand of genius.”
“You were hacking.”
He shook his head.“Nope.No way.I told you I didn’t get indicted, but that doesn’t mean the government let me walk away scot free.I cleaned up their system for them so they didn’t prosecute, but they kept me on a pretty tight leash.I skirted the line of legality sometimes, but I couldnotafford to cross it, or our deal would be off.”
He paused again, dropping his eyes to the pavement.“I had offers, of course.People who wanted me to do what I did to the DoD, but to other government agencies...to othergovernments.There are a lot of seriously shady characters out there looking for guys like me to do their dirty work.”
“But you said no.”
“Right.There was no amount of money these guys could offer me that would make me risk going to prison for the rest of my life.I might have been dumb back then, but I wasn’t an idiot.”
“Prison for life?”Cold dread filled her stomach.What he’d done wasthatserious?
He shot her another small smile, a faint echo of his usual cocky grin.“Don’t worry.My government friends and I are on good terms these days.I don’t cross the big red lines and they leave me alone to do my thing.I wouldn’t work for any of the really bad guys, but guys like that, they don’t like to take no for an answer.”
