Chapter 2

I did the math.

One pill a day, every day, for three weeks.

That was twenty-one perfect twelve-hour windows. Twenty-one days where my brain ran at full throttle while the rest of the world idled in second gear. Five thousand pills minus twenty-one left me with four thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine. Still an absurd amount of runway—over thirteen years if I stayed disciplined.

The interesting thing, though—the thing that kept pulling at me during the off-days when I sat with a normal brain in a quiet flat—was that it wasn’t simply unlocking what was already there. That was the popular theory, the clean and flattering version: dormant potential, finally released. Eddie had been characteristically vague on the mechanics. It helps you think, he’d said, with the particular economy of a man who’d long since stopped needing to explain himself.

But that wasn’t it. Or not entirely.

I’d devoured everything available online within the first fortnight—pharmacology databases, neuroscience preprints, grey-literature forums where serious researchers went to say things they couldn’t publish. Then I started going to the library on my days off, the big central one with the academic stacks in the basement that smelled of old paper and serious intention. I read everything I could find on brain chemistry: synaptic plasticity, neurogenesis, myelination cycles, the role of adenosine in cognitive fatigue. I wasn’t researching NZT specifically—there was essentially nothing published on it—but I was building a framework, trying to reverse-engineer the phenomenology from first principles.

What everything pointed toward was closer to a defrag than a simple unlock.

A normal brain is cluttered. Decades of half-formed associations, redundant pathways, memories filed in the wrong place, emotional static bleeding into logical processing. The cognitive load of simply being a person—the background noise of anxiety, habit, unresolved loops—consumes an enormous proportion of available bandwidth before you’ve even started thinking about anything useful. NZT, as best I could reconstruct it, didn’t pour new intelligence into the vessel. It reorganised the existing architecture with radical efficiency. Pruned the dead branches. Defragmented the drive. Old connections that had been firing out of habit rather than utility went quiet. New ones—faster, more direct, more apposite—formed in their place with an alacrity that normal neuroplasticity couldn’t approach.

It wasn’t that I knew more. It was that what I knew became accessible in a way it had never been before. The connections between disciplines stopped feeling like separate rooms and started feeling like one continuous space. And critically: the brain being rewired on the drug stayed partly rewired when the drug wore off. Not fully. Not permanently. But each cycle left sedimentary traces—new pathways that had been carved deeply enough to persist, habits of thought that the reconstructed architecture had laid down like fresh tarmac.

I was changing. Measurably, cumulatively, in one direction.

In that time I added another five languages to the roster: Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Japanese, and Arabic. Ten in total now, if you counted the half-decent Mandarin I already had. The tonal languages were still the trickiest, but even they surrendered eventually. I could order street food in Tokyo, argue politics in Moscow, and flirt credibly in Stockholm without sounding like a complete tourist. The accents slotted in neatly; my ear had become a scalpel.

The writing had exploded. What started as a hobby became a small industry. The high school novel I finished on that first full day off was now sitting at over forty thousand downloads across the platforms. The Stargate material was doing even better—readers were feral for it. I was producing chapters with the efficiency of a machine: tightly plotted, character-rich, dialogue that crackled with a particular electricity. Fan art started appearing. Discord servers formed. Someone made a subreddit. I watched the analytics in real time on the new laptop, numbers ticking upward in satisfying little increments while I sipped coffee that tasted noticeably better on NZT.

And then there was the gambling.

Blackjack had become trivial once I could maintain perfect running counts across six decks while simultaneously reading the dealer’s micro-expressions and the pit boss’s shift patterns. Poker took longer, because people are messier than cards—but I studied like a man possessed. Game theory, tells, bet sizing, ICM, GTO solvers I ran in my head during slow shifts. I played low-stakes online to sharpen the edge, then moved to the Tuesday night pub game. Within two weeks I was the quiet terror of that table. Diane the dog groomer started calling me “the bastard” with something close to affection.

What I was doing, I understood on NZT with crystalline precision, was a form of weaponised apophenia—except inverted. Where ordinary pattern-seekers impose false order on noise, I was extracting genuine signal from data sets most people lacked the processing power to read. The cards weren’t speaking to me. I was simply listening with better equipment.

Then the phone rang.

It was a Thursday afternoon, my second day off. I was in the middle of a brutal kettlebell complex when the mobile buzzed on the kitchen counter. Unknown number. I answered on the third ring, barely breathing hard.

“James? It’s Michael from the Sovereign Casino. We run a small friendly tournament every couple of months—mostly locals, a few regulars. Heard you might be the man to give it some proper competition. Fancy joining us this weekend?”

I paused mid-rep and set the kettlebell down with controlled precision. On NZT the decision tree bloomed instantly: schedule, risk, reward, cover story, exit strategies.

“Count me in,” I said.

I booked the entire week off. Told Mark it was a family thing. He didn’t question it—my recent performance had purchased a surprising amount of goodwill.

The Sovereign was a mid-tier casino in a converted Victorian theatre about forty minutes away. Chandeliers that had seen better days, thick carpet that smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and old ambition, the constant electronic chime of slots threading through the background like tinnitus. On NZT it was a symphony of information: I could read the fatigue in the dealers’ shoulders, the desperation embedded in the recreational players’ betting patterns, the subtle rhythmic sweep of the security cameras overhead.

I sat down at the tournament table with two hundred other hopefuls and felt something click into place.

By the final table I had a mountain of chips and a small crowd at the rail. The last opponent was a local property developer who’d been bullying the table with undisciplined aggression all evening. On NZT he was transparent—an open book with a terrible poker face and a tell involving his left thumb that he’d presumably carried since university. I took him down in seven hands.

Fifteen thousand pounds in crisp notes, handed over in a plain envelope after the paperwork.