Chapter 7: Felicity Smoak and Big Belly Burger
Ben's insomnia walks had expanded beyond hunting for Hood activities to include late-night diners and 24-hour establishments, partly from genuine sleeplessness, partly from the nagging awareness that he needed to start building connections with people who would become important. The problem with knowing the future was that it made every random encounter feel loaded with potential significance.
He just hadn't expected to find her at two in the morning, hunched over a tablet in Big Belly Burger's fluorescent-lit wasteland, swearing at lines of code with the creative profanity of someone who'd been debugging for far too long.
The blonde woman looked up when Ben approached the counter, and he felt a jolt of recognition that he carefully kept off his face. Felicity Smoak, future backbone of Team Arrow, current IT specialist at Queen Consolidated, and according to the show's timeline, probably about six months away from having her life turned upside down by a certain hooded vigilante.
Right now, she just looked exhausted and annoyed.
"Coffee, please," Ben told the bored teenager behind the register. "Make it strong."
"You and her both," the kid muttered, nodding toward Felicity. "She's been here four hours. I think she's mainlining caffeine at this point."
Ben glanced over at her table, where she was glaring at her screen with the intensity of someone trying to bend reality through sheer force of will. Without meaning to, he found himself reading the code over her shoulder—network security architecture, encryption protocols, something about financial data streams that looked suspiciously advanced for 2012.
Post-quantum cryptography. She's building algorithms that shouldn't exist for another decade.
"Excuse me," Ben said, approaching her table with his coffee. "I don't mean to interrupt, but are you trying to implement a lattice-based encryption scheme?"
Felicity's head snapped up, eyes wide behind thick-rimmed glasses. "I'm sorry, what?"
"Your code. You're working on something that looks like post-quantum cryptography, but you're running into the key exchange problem." Ben gestured at her screen, where error messages were cascading in red text. "The algorithm you're using assumes computational resources that don't exist yet."
For a moment, Felicity just stared at him like he'd sprouted a second head. Then she blinked rapidly and straightened in her chair.
"Okay, first of all, how can you even read my screen from there? Second, how do you know about lattice-based encryption? And third, what do you mean computational resources that don't exist yet?"
Careful. You're about to sound like a time traveler.
"Physics background," Ben said, settling into the seat across from her without invitation. "I've done some theoretical work on quantum computing applications. And your screen is pretty visible from the counter—you might want to consider privacy filters if you're working on proprietary stuff."
Felicity's suspicious expression shifted to something more interested. "Theoretical work? What kind of theoretical work?"
Ben took a sip of coffee that tasted like it had been brewed sometime during the Clinton administration and carefully constructed his answer. "Mostly exploring what encryption might look like if quantum computers become practical. You know, worst-case scenario planning for when current security standards become obsolete."
"Right, but that's decades away. Maybe longer."
If only you knew.
"Maybe. But the math is interesting regardless. Your implementation—you're trying to use ring learning with errors, but you're not accounting for the polynomial approximation overhead."
Felicity leaned forward, suddenly animated. "Okay, now I know you're not just some random guy who wandered in here. RLWE is barely documented outside of academic papers that most people don't have access to."
"Most people don't spend their nights reading cryptography journals."
"Most people have lives."
Ben laughed despite himself. "Fair point. But if you want to make your algorithm work, you need to modify the key generation phase. Instead of trying to solve the whole problem at once, break it into smaller components that you can verify independently."
Felicity grabbed a pen and started scribbling notes. "Show me."
For the next hour, they fell into the kind of intense technical discussion that made the rest of the world disappear. Ben had to be careful, framing his knowledge of future developments as theoretical speculation, but Felicity's mind was sharp enough to follow his reasoning and improve on it.
"This is brilliant," she said, staring at the modified algorithm they'd sketched out together. "This would actually work. I mean, it would require some computational shortcuts that don't exist yet, but the fundamental approach is sound."
"What are you working on that needs this level of security?"
Felicity hesitated, then seemed to make a decision. "Financial forensics. I work IT at Queen Consolidated, but this is personal project. I've been tracking some... irregularities in the city's economic data. Nothing illegal, just patterns that don't make sense."
Ben's stomach dropped. He knew exactly what patterns she was seeing—the financial flows that would eventually lead to the discovery of the Undertaking. In the show, Felicity's investigation had been one of the key factors in exposing Malcolm's conspiracy.
"She's already on the trail. Months before Oliver recruits her, she's already digging into the same corruption that will make her essential to Team Arrow. But I can't warn her about what she's going to find. I can't tell her that following this thread will put her in the crosshairs of some very dangerous people."
"Be careful," he said finally. "Financial irregularities in Starling City tend to involve people who don't like being investigated."
"I'm not stupid. I know how to cover my tracks." Felicity paused, studying him with uncomfortable intensity. "What's your name? I feel like I should know who I'm taking cryptography lessons from."
"Ben Hale. I teach self-defense at a gym in the Glades."
"Felicity Smoak. And now I'm really confused, because gym teachers don't usually have advanced degrees in theoretical cryptography."
Think fast.
"I used to work in tech. Before I moved here. Burned out on corporate life and decided to try something more hands-on."
It wasn't entirely a lie—his previous life had involved enough interaction with technology and academia to support the cover story. But Felicity's expression suggested she wasn't entirely convinced.
"Where did you work in tech?"
"Chicago. Small company, nothing you'd have heard of."
Another partial truth. Ben had worked for a consulting firm that occasionally dealt with technology implementations, though nothing close to the level they'd been discussing.
Felicity pulled out her phone and started typing. "I'm putting my number in here. I want to continue this conversation when I'm not running on four hours of sleep and industrial-strength caffeine."
Ben handed over his phone in return, watching her add her contact information with the efficiency of someone who lived through her devices.
"Gym teacher who moonlights in cryptography," she muttered as she worked. "Right. Because that's not suspicious at all."
"Says the IT specialist doing unauthorized financial forensics at two in the morning."
"Touché." Felicity handed back his phone and gathered her things. "This was... unexpected. Thank you. You probably just saved me three weeks of banging my head against this problem."
"Happy to help."
She paused at the door, looking back with an expression that was part curiosity, part wariness. "Ben Hale from Chicago who used to work in tech and now teaches self-defense in the Glades while casually solving advanced cryptography problems. You're an interesting mystery."
After she left, Ben sat alone with his terrible coffee, processing the implications of what had just happened. He'd made contact with Felicity months earlier than in the show's timeline, potentially accelerating her investigation into the city's financial corruption. That could be good—more time to prepare, more resources to draw on when the Undertaking finally came to light.
It could also be catastrophic if her early discoveries attracted the wrong kind of attention.
POV: Felicity
Walking to her car through Big Belly Burger's empty parking lot, Felicity's mind raced with more than just the cryptography problems they'd been solving. The man she'd just spent an hour with—Ben Hale—was either exactly what he claimed to be or the most convincing cover identity she'd ever encountered.
Nobody just casually knew post-quantum cryptography. The algorithms they'd discussed were bleeding-edge theoretical work that existed mostly in academic papers and classified government research. For a gym teacher to not only recognize what she was working on but suggest improvements that were genuinely brilliant...
Felicity pulled out her phone as she reached her car, fingers flying over the screen as she ran a quick background check. Ben Hale, registered resident of the Glades for approximately two months, employed at Marcus's gym, no criminal record. But before two months ago? Nothing. No digital footprint, no social media presence, no evidence that he'd ever existed.
In her experience, people who appeared out of nowhere usually had very good reasons for wanting their past to stay hidden.
He pays cash for everything. No credit card transactions, no digital trail except for basic utilities and rent. Either he's pathologically paranoid about privacy, or he's hiding from something. Or someone.
The cryptography knowledge was the real red flag. What he'd shown her wasn't just advanced—it was prophetic. Like he knew exactly where the field was heading and had skipped ahead to solutions that wouldn't be publicly available for years.
Felicity started her car and pulled out of the parking lot, but instead of heading home, she took a detour through the Glades. Past the gym where Ben supposedly worked, past the apartment complex where he supposedly lived. The neighborhoods were rough, the kind of places where people minded their own business and asked no questions about where you came from or why you were there.
Perfect for someone who needed to disappear.
"In a city where vigilantes are shooting arrows at crime bosses and billionaires are returning from the dead after five years, maybe a mysteriously knowledgeable gym teacher isn't the strangest thing I'll encounter. But it's definitely worth keeping an eye on."
She saved his number in her phone under "Suspicious Genius Gym Teacher" and made a mental note to do a deeper background check when she got to work. Something about Ben Hale didn't add up, and in Felicity's world, things that didn't add up usually meant trouble.
But as she drove home through Starling City's empty streets, she couldn't shake the feeling that the trouble might be the kind worth investigating.
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