Chapter 19: Two Sides
"Okay, that was way too easy to get into. But let's have a look around." I pulled up the job listing on my second monitor and scanned Driftwood's post again. He wanted proof that Meridian was selling personal health data to insurance companies without user consent. Specifically the data-sharing agreements, any internal communications about the sales process, and a sample of the database showing how the data was tagged. "Right. Data-sharing agreements, internal emails, tagged database records. Let's find them then."
I started with the database. It didn't take long to find what Driftwood was talking about. Thousands of records. Heart rates, sleep patterns, exercise habits, medication schedules. All pulled from health apps and fitness trackers. And every single record was tagged with an insurance company name and a pricing tier. The worse your health data looked, the higher the tier. The higher the tier, the more your insurance cost.
"They're literally sorting people by how sick they look and selling that to the highest bidder. That's... yeah. That's exactly what he said it was."
I had to move slowly. The intrusion detection was still running and I couldn't pull data in bulk or it would flag. Small queries. A few records at a time. Spaced out so it looked like normal database maintenance.
It was almost one in the morning when I found the internal emails.
The sales team had a shared folder. Account managers sending targets to each other, discussing which data packages to push to which insurance companies. I opened one from a senior account manager to his team. One line stood out: "The cardiac data is our best seller, push it hard this quarter."
Cardiac data. People's heartbeats. Sold by the quarter.
I pushed back from my desk. My jaw was tight. I could feel it in my teeth.
"You're talking about people who are sick. Actually sick. People with heart problems. And you're sitting in your office sending emails about pushing their data like it's a product. Like it's stock you need to shift before the end of the month." I was talking to an empty room but I didn't care. "These are people. Real people with real hearts that don't work properly and you're selling their worst moments to companies that will use it to charge them more money. And you're proud of it. You're telling your team to push it hard."
I stared at the screen. The email was still open. Push it hard this quarter.
"You deserve everything that's coming to you. Every single thing. I hope this gets out. I hope someone takes this and puts it on the news and everyone sees what you've been doing. I hope you never sell another person's heartbeat again." I cracked my knuckles. "I'd love to take you down myself. Properly. Burn the whole thing to the ground. But that's not my job right now. Right now I collect the data and someone else does the rest. My time for that will come. I need to build the reputation first. But you, Meridian, you are done. Whether you know it yet or not."
I kept pulling. The data-sharing agreements with the insurance companies were in a separate folder. Formal contracts, signed by both parties, with pricing schedules attached. Meridian was charging insurance companies between fifty and two hundred pounds per data package depending on how detailed it was. The premium package included medication data. Medication. What people were taking and how often.
By two in the morning I had everything. The client database, the insurance agreements, the internal emails, the pricing schedules. All documented, all packaged, all ready to submit.
I cleaned up. Closed the sessions, cleared the logs, wiped anything that showed I'd been inside. Their security team would come in on Monday morning and everything would look normal. By the time they figured out what had happened, if they ever did, the data would already be on the forum.
I posted proof on the forum. Screenshots of the database, samples of the insurance agreements, the internal emails. Enough to prove the job was done without dumping everything publicly. Driftwood verified within twenty minutes.
The BTC hit my wallet at half two.
10 BTC. Just over four thousand pounds. I sat there staring at the number. My total wallet was now sitting at just under ten grand. Three months ago I had nothing. Now I had more than Dad earned in four months and nobody on earth knew about it.
I closed Tor. Shut down the encrypted partition. Closed the laptop.
I brushed my teeth in the shared bathroom. The fluorescent light was too bright and my eyes were red in the mirror. Five hours until my alarm. First day of actual classes. Shaw.
I got into bed. The sheets were new, Mum had bought them. They smelled like the washing powder she used at home and for a second I was back in my room with Biscuit on the pillow and Dad watching TV downstairs and everything was simple and nobody was selling anyone's heartbeat to an insurance company.
I fell asleep at three.
The alarm went off at eight and I wanted to throw my phone across the room.
I had five hours of sleep. My eyes felt like sandpaper. I lay there staring at the ceiling trying to remember why I had to get up and then I remembered. Shaw. First supervision. Being late was not an option.
I showered, got dressed, went to the kitchen. Ethan was already there, fully dressed, eating cereal, reading something on his laptop.
"Morning," he said. Then he looked at me properly. "You look awful. What happened to you?"
"Couldn't sleep. New place, new bed. Took me ages to drop off and then the alarm went before I was ready."
"That's rough. I slept brilliantly my first night, no flatmate snoring for the first time in a year." He closed his laptop. "Shaw's at nine by the way. She hates lateness more than she hates bad maths, so we should leave in about ten minutes."
"You don't have to walk me there. I can find it."
"I know, but I'm auditing your supervision. Shaw told me to sit in. So we're going to the same place anyway."
We walked to the faculty. Neither of us said much. I was tired and he was reading something on his phone. Cambridge in the morning looked different from last night. Students on bikes everywhere. A group of rowers carrying a boat across the road.
"Is that normal?" I asked, watching them.
"Every morning. You stop noticing after a week."
Shaw's office was at the end of a corridor on the second floor. The door was open. She was at her desk writing something and she didn't look up when we came in.
"Sit down. Both of you." She kept writing for another few seconds, then put her pen down. "Ethan, you're auditing today because I told you to. Liam, this is your first supervision. The format is simple. I set problems, you work on them during the week, you come back and we discuss what you've done. If the work is good we move forward. If it isn't we go back and you do it again until it is. I don't accept excuses and I don't accept late work. Clear?"
"Clear, Professor Shaw."
"Good." She pushed a sheet of paper across the desk towards me. "Four questions. The first two are warm-ups, you should be able to do those without breaking a sweat. The third will take most of your week. The fourth you probably can't solve yet but I want to see how you approach it."
I picked up the paper and read through the questions. The first two I could probably do in my head on the walk back. The third was harder, something about spectral bounds on graph families that would need real work. The fourth made me stop and read it three times.
"Professor Shaw, this fourth one. Is this connected to the problem you showed me when I visited?"
She looked at me for the first time since I'd sat down. "It's adjacent. If you remember the direction you suggested during your visit, you might find it useful. Or you might not. That's for you to find out."
I looked at the question again. It was definitely related. The structure was different but the principle was the same. If I was right about the Laplacian approach back in her office, this was the next step. She was testing whether that idea had legs.
"This is going to keep me up at night, isn't it?"
"If it doesn't, you're not thinking about it hard enough."
Ethan was reading the problem set over my shoulder. I saw his eyes stop on the fourth question. He looked at Shaw.
"That's a research-level question," he said. "On a first problem set. I didn't get anything like that until second term."
"That's correct," Shaw said. "Liam is not you, Ethan."
Ethan didn't react, not visibly, but I could see his jaw tighten for half a second before he let it go. I felt bad for him. Shaw hadn't meant it as an insult but it came out like one.
We left her office and walked down the corridor. I wasn't sure what to say so I said the first thing that came to mind.
"Ethan, I don't think she meant to say it like that. She seems like the type who just says what she thinks without checking how it sounds first."
"She's Shaw. That's how she is. Don't worry about it." He didn't say anything else for a few seconds. "Fancy a coffee? There's a decent place about five minutes from here."
"I could do with a coffee after five hours sleep."
We got coffee. He told me which textbooks to actually read for Shaw's problems and which ones were a waste of time. He didn't have to do that. Shaw had just told him to his face that I was ahead of him and here he was helping me anyway.
I sat there with my coffee and the problem set on the table and the sun coming through the window.