Page 2 of A Little Bit More

Now that question he was used to getting, and kind of sick of too. “Or something,” he said, and then waited for the other standard questions he knew were coming. Things like, what’s your IQ then? Is your mother here with you? How can you do uni when you aren’t even old enough to drink? Yeah, he’d only been at uni for one semester, but already the questions were getting old.

“You should have gone to Cambridge,” the girl said.

Harry stopped eating. Okay, he hadn’t expected that either. “I had an offer from them, but I wanted to be close to home.” He’d had offers from half the colleges on the planet, but none of them were within easy reach of Invertary. “I did my undergrad at Cambridge—distance learning.”

She didn’t even blink at the mention of him already having a degree. “My entire family went to Cambridge. The colleges there are set up to deal with younger, brighter students. You probably would have fit in a whole lot better than here. The students here are mostly interested in how cheap the beer is at any given time.”

“You’re not interested in beer?” Neither was he. It smelled like cat piss.

“Goodness, no.” She shuddered. “I don’t mind a good wine, but beer…”

“So why did you pick Glasgow when everybody you know went to Cambridge?”

“I’m a rebel,” she said with a completely straight face. “What’s your name?”

“Harry Boyle,” he said between mouthfuls of food.

“Well, that’s unfortunate.”

“Tell me about it.” The girl was funny.

“I’m Rachel Ford-Talbot,” she said. “First year. Business major.”

That figured.

Rachel went back to frowning at her phone while he ate.

Harry watched her for a while, knowing he shouldn’t say anything, but he couldn’t help himself. “You need to set up your security so it’s airtight on those phones. They’re easy to hack.”

Those piercing eyes hit him again. “Don’t be ridiculous. iPhones are well known for being unhackable.”

Harry cocked his head. “I could do it.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Prove it.”

He shrugged, reached into his backpack, pulled out his laptop, and booted it up. Five minutes later, he’d changed Rachel’s screen image and locked her out of her phone. That’s when it occurred to him that he might have made her mad.

Warily, he glanced up from his laptop to find her staring at her phone in awe. “What else can you do?” she demanded, as though he were some sort of performing monkey whose sole purpose was to entertain her.

“I’m designing a security program that basically works by piggybacking onto the existing security within a system and plugging holes to make it titanium tight.” There’d already been interest from the British government for the code.

“If you design something like that during your studies, does the program belong to you or the university?”

Once again, she surprised him with her question. “Why would the uni own my research?”

“For the love of Prada, didn’t you look into this before you accepted a place here?”

“I’m fifteen.”

“That’s no excuse. Your parents should have thought to check into this too. Did they?” Before he could answer, Rachel carried on, “Don’t answer that. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then they probably don’t either. Basically, there’s something called intellectual property rights, and depending on the policy of each university, either the school owns the research of its students or the students do. Or some combination of those two options. If you’re designing something potentially worth millions, you need to make sure you own that product. Otherwise, the university will get the money from it. Not to mention, they’ll be the ones to decide what happens to your work.”

Harry pushed his half-eaten meal away, feeling suddenly nauseous. “How do you know all this stuff? You’ve only just started your degree.” Did she read business books for fun? If she did, she was in good company. He’d been curling up with books on coding since he was in nappies.

“Business is in my genes. My family owns a pharmaceutical company. Father is a business genius and saved my grandparents’ company from ruin. Mother is a chemist. She was always more interested in the science side of things. This kind of issue was standard dinner conversation.” Rachel pointed at him. “You need a lawyer and a business manager. You need to make the university sign a contract that stipulates your research belongs to you, and then you need someone to apply for patents, copyright protection, and trademarks. You need to protect yourself. Hasn’t anyone told you this?”

“Told me about protection? Sure. My brother gave me a lecture and a box of…never mind what he gave me…before I left home. But this isn’t the kind of protection he was talking about.”

“Is that what passes for humor when you’re fifteen?” she asked.