Last night, I got bored. So I wrote this. Part 1.

[Ghosty]

It would be far too cliche to say it was a dark and stormy night. Of course it was dark, as most nights are. And though there were thick layers of menacing clouds hovering above, grumbling quietly among themselves about the rain they had been threatening to release all afternoon and evening, they hadn't let loose a single drop of water over the house on the hill.
It wasn't a large and foreboding mansion with a large, rickety chain fence encircling its perimeter, keeping in howling guard dogs as the aforementioned forbidden phrase would suggest. It was just a simple two-story country home, with a short cobblestone walk leading to a dusty gravel lane sloping down the hill, and a rather large satellite dish on the roof.
There wasn't a frazzled mad scientist sitting at an organ in the attic, playing deep, haunting music while he waited for lightning to strike his latest monstrosity. There was just a young man sitting in the kitchen, some might just say a boy, his face aglow not with dangerous chemicals or surging electricity, but the faint glow of a laptop screen.
But this does not suggest that the 15-year-old midnight computer user out in the countryside of Oregon was any less intelligent or potentially dangerous than the cackling lunatic genius that has so deftly not been portrayed at this moment. For this laptop was not a typical netbook. It was merely the interface to the dozens of humming, blinking towers in the basement, which each had the computing capacity of approximately fifty ordinary personal computers.
The program this individual was focusing intently on was not some typical massively-multiplayer online game as might be imagined being played by someone of the user's age. In fact, it wasn't even actually running yet, merely being written, as it had been for the past ten months now. But it was nearing completion, and most of the code had already been tapped out weeks ago. But with a program of this scale, there could be no flawed logic, no miscalculated math, no misspelled variables. It had to be perfect on the first run, or it would be pointless at best, and disastrous at worst.
All this might suggest that this person was a dangerous hacker, working to break into important federal files in Washington, or perhaps Microsoft's network in the much closer city of Seattle, for potentially nefarious purposes. But this teenager was not preparing to bypass the security of any existing computer network. Yes, he would have to rely on sending signals through satellites that, strictly speaking, he was not meant to send signals through, and yes, there were surely people, important people, powerful people, out there who would highly oppose his work if they knew of it before its completion. And though he did actually have credentials to access the databanks he'd be accessing, he was quite certain that those with higher credentials would be curious at best, and condemning at worst, if he went about accessing them in the usual manner for this project.
And, of course, there was the little matter that if something went wrong with this program... well, he'd run those calculations once, and afterwards resolved quite firmly to make himself absolutely sure that nothing would go wrong with it, because the results were quite shocking, enough so that he nearly gave up on it completely... but if it went perfectly, the rewards were so high that the risk, while not ignorable by any means, was secondary.
The program would not be completed tonight, nor the night after, nor the night after that. In fact, it might not be completed for months. The mind of this young man was not reckless, or incautious, or actually anything short of meticulous. It would take as long as it must take. Time was immaterial, and success was more than worth every sleepless night of manually triple-checking equations hundreds of characters long.
He did, however, have a deadline. This night, that it has already been made quite clear will not be described as dark and stormy, was the second of July. Or, actually, now that it was several minutes past midnight, the third of July. Which meant that he had less than a month until August 1st, which was the day it must be launched. If it was not run within a two-minute timespan shortly past five in the afternoon, it would be another long four months until everything aligned again.
He was confident he would reach this deadline, perhaps even being ready days in advance. Maybe, just maybe, he would be able to allow himself the time off to have some fun soon. He'd been home-bound nearly the entire summer, his days spent communicating with several of his 'colleagues' or more often in a trance-like state that could not quite be called sleep, his nights spent diligently in front of this remote interface to the terabytes of processing power beneath him. But even such a devoted genius such as he was considered could get burnt out from constant work. A break would be good for him.
Just not yet. Not in the middle of this complex trigonometric algorithm. But soon.