When I got home, I didn’t go to bed.
After a quick dinner, I headed to my barn, settled into my favorite chair by the window, and sat down in front of the desk with the computer monitor.
I tossed the keyboard onto my lap and logged into my freelancer profile.
Interestingly enough, I’d already caught the attention of a client.
He was offering a hundred dollars to optimize a fairly complicated program for a specific piece of hardware.
It wasn’t an easy assignment, but the money wasn’t bad by my standards either.
I started digging into it.
It turned out to be incredibly interesting.
My brain…
My brain was amazing.
No, not just amazing.
It was unbelievable.
I’d spent only one night reading whatever programming books I’d managed to pull from the Internet, and now I could already read the code the client had sent me without any difficulty.
More than that, I understood what I was reading.
I understood how it worked.
The moment I’d finished reading the source code, the entire problem seemed to fit inside my head at once, complete down to the last line of code.
It immediately transformed itself into a visual flowchart.
The programming books had insisted that you should always create a flowchart first, although I suspected that with my new abilities I could probably skip that step.
The flowchart broke itself down into smaller pieces, then into individual blocks.
Those blocks immediately began transforming into code inside my head.
Different code.
Not the code from the original program.
My code.
Improved code, with a corrected algorithm, slightly expanded functionality, and optimization specifically tailored to the hardware the client had requested.
In other words, I had two complete programs floating around in my head at the same time: the original and my version.
I could manipulate both freely, search for errors, debug them, compare them, and change them.
Hell, the damn thing was compiling in my head.
I couldn’t even begin to estimate the processing power required to do something like that.
It was obviously far beyond what the little machine I’d bought yesterday could handle.
I could literally “see” machine code while mentally emulating the computer itself, the operating system, the programming environment, the debugger, and the compiler.
The entire development process was happening inside my head.
The computer was basically just a tool for typing out the finished code and sending it to the client.
***
Naturally, I got carried away.
When I finally finished, I discovered another shocking detail.
I’d been in my accelerated state the entire time.
The same state in which time practically stopped around me, leaving objects hanging motionless in midair.
That meant that, objectively speaking, less than a second had passed since I’d first read the source code, yet I already had a complete solution ready to go.
Well, almost ready.
I still had to type it out, test it, format everything properly, and send it off.
God, my computer felt slow.
The keyboard was even worse.
It couldn’t keep up with my fingers.
Still, less than ten minutes later, I’d finished the entire job and sent it to the client.
A hundred dollars in the bag.
Pretty damn cool.
I still had to wait for the payment and figure out how to withdraw it into real cash.
What mattered was that I’d gotten hooked.
I liked this.
I hadn’t expected it, but forcing my brain to work was actually pleasurable.
It was comparable to the pleasure of having a healthy, well-trained body working hard and performing exactly as it should.
And I loved life.
I loved its pleasures.
***
Unfortunately, the situation with the freelance site itself was rather disappointing.
Only one client had found my profile, and he’d given me one assignment that I’d finished in about ten minutes.
That was far too little.
Luckily, the website had another section called “open jobs.”
The principle was roughly the same as the freelancer profiles, except the roles were reversed.
Clients posted their assignments and waited for someone willing to take them.
Some jobs were claimed almost immediately.
Others sat there untouched for weeks or even months, waiting for someone capable of handling them.
That’s where I went next.
I started taking the oldest unclaimed assignments one after another.
The hardest part wasn’t actually writing the code.
It was understanding what the client wanted in the first place.
A lot of the technical specifications were incredibly vague.
Some clients seemed to have only the vaguest idea of what they actually wanted their software to do.
I suspected I’d have to rewrite some of the things I delivered.
But that was fine.
That was part of the job.
You couldn’t avoid it.
The important thing in business wasn’t whether the code itself was beautiful.
What mattered was whether the client was satisfied enough with the result to pay you for it.
At some point, I took a break after hearing a car pull up beside the neighboring house.
I stretched, set the keyboard aside, and switched into my accelerated state long enough to run to the kitchen.
I poured myself a glass of Mom’s homemade compote from the pitcher in the refrigerator, grabbed a plate of cookies, carried both back to the barn, and set them beside the computer.
Then I took a sip of compote and looked through the telescope.
Lana had come home alone.
And she wasn’t driving Whitney’s car.
Some female classmate had dropped her off.
I vaguely recognized the girl, but nothing particularly interesting came to mind when I saw her.
Miss Lang.
She really was beautiful.
Even if I ignored the feelings I’d inherited from the original Clark, even if I completely separated her appearance from my personal preferences and tastes, I still had to admit she was beautiful.
And I’d done a good job setting up the telescope, so the view was excellent.
Of course, spying on the girl next door wasn’t exactly ethical.
Still, I could justify it to myself because I wasn’t actually watching her inside the house.
A telescope wasn’t an X-ray machine.
It could only show me what was happening outside, perhaps stretching as far as the porch.
And the porch was the absolute outer edge of someone’s private space.
So, technically, what I was doing didn’t bother my conscience.
It was another little habit I’d apparently inherited.
And it didn’t disturb my peace of mind. This story is hosted at g.com.
The girl really was beautiful.
No wonder they’d chosen her as Prom Queen.
It was a pleasure to look at her.
Especially when she was still wearing her dress from the school dance.
Pleasure mattered.
And pleasures were fleeting.
Lana disappeared through the door.
I returned to my chair, finished my compote, and went back to enjoying the combination of creativity and intellectual challenge.
Everything was going well.
Until, at some point, the open jobs simply ran out.
Every single one that had been available at that hour had already been completed.
And no new ones were appearing.
Which made sense.
It was the middle of the night, and normal people were asleep.
Although the site wasn’t limited to American clients.
There were probably people using it from other countries too.
Still, most of the users were local.
The site was in English-language, after all.
If I wanted jobs from overseas, I’d have to start looking at overseas websites.
And I didn’t know any other languages.
Yet.
I shrugged and took the end of the available assignments as a sign that it was probably time to go to bed.
There was one thing that bothered me, though.
Getting paid.
More specifically, how I was going to receive payments from clients.
Anonymous electronic wallets weren’t designed to handle serious amounts of money.
Anything over a hundred dollars already required verification of your real identity.
That wasn’t something I could do while sitting at home.
I could theoretically construct some complicated scheme to get around the requirement, but that would make things unnecessarily difficult for my clients.
Most of them were honest, ordinary, law-abiding people and companies.
Complicated payment arrangements could easily scare them away.
Besides, I didn’t actually need anonymity.
I planned to work honestly.
I was going to be a programmer, not a hacker.
So why make things more complicated than they needed to be?
I simply needed a normal bank account in my own name.
That wasn’t even difficult in America.
Parents could open accounts for their children practically from birth.
I’d deal with that tomorrow.
The county fair was coming up, and we’d be going into town anyway.
For now, I sent the banking information for my father’s account to everyone whose work I’d completed and told them to send the payments there.
Why not?
It wasn’t as though I was making the money for myself.
I was earning it for the family.
And now…
Time to sleep.