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Fry is sat at a table, looking at a small pile of ten bean seeds in front of him.

This is a stupid holiday homework project. Why can't his new teacher ask for a 'what did you do over the summer' scrapbook like a normal person?

After about ten minutes of staring at them, he opens the scrapbook and writes.

'1. I can line up the beans in a row.'

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Fry pauses.

"I could measure the beans with a ruler and calculate the average diameter."

"If you want to get laughed at, sure. That's thinking right in the middle of the box. Take about two steps outside it."

Stick them up your nose. Do something that isn't boring.

"I have a whole summer." Fry says.

"You're not seriously telling me you're planning on spending the whole summer doing math?"

WHY?

"No, my parents don't let me do maths more than an hour a day."

"... Good god. I don't even use my degree for more than an hour a day."

What even are ethics in journalism?

"You do geometry?"

"Hell no. I'm a reporter."

"What's that got to do with degrees?"

"Because when you spend forty grand a year at college, you get a degree that you ultimately don't put toward anything at all once you get a job that requires the damn thing."

"Oh."

Beat.

"Do you think you made good life choices?"

"Could have made worse ones."

But no, Wilford doesn't regret anything, if that's what Fry's asking. He's right where he wants to be, and he already knows where he's going. And things could be much, much worse.

"I just wondered. I though most people liked university."

Wilford laughs. "Your teachers tell you that?" he asks. "Because there's nothing enjoyable about spending forty hours a week at school, and finding the time to work enough to pay for your ass to stay there without failing out."

"Got Dad away from his dad."

"Your old man might have enjoyed the outcome, but that's not the same thing as liking being there," Wilford points out. "I spent four years in school to do what any kid with an internet connection can do now."

And that really stings. Wilford at least recognises that the tactics used by kids on the internet are going to be the only way forward very soon.

"Google stuff?"

"Google stuff, run a blog, post their opinions all over the place for anyone to read and take as fact."

And some of these kids will be taken more seriously than the people who spent a fortune on college to be able to work for the big names.

"Doesn't that make proper journalists more rare now?"

Wilford laughs again. "Oh god no. Not if you define 'proper' as 'taken at all seriously by anyone.'"

In which case, they'll soon be everywhere.

"Oh. Well that's a shame." Fry says.

"That's why you need to think outside the box," Wilford says. "If you keep doing what's obvious, and what everyone tells you you should be doing, before you know it, you'll have pissed away a hundred grand to accomplish something the guy next to you spent twenty bucks on."

Wilford could have gone back even farther when he opened the old save. He could have skipped over the entire nightmare all together, and taken the internet blogger path, and still could have potentially ended up in the same place.

But he didn't. Because he didn't want to risk that big of a change, first off, and this time around, he knew what to do to make it easier on himself.

"Maybe that's what my new teacher is getting at."

"Maybe," Wilford says. "Do yourself a favour and lay off the math until September, huh? Go break something and try to fix it before your folks find out."

"I actually do dismantle things."