Aarika trusted her first employee. A soft-spoken, eager developer named Elise who reminded her of herself ten years ago. Smart, hungry, respectful.
So she gave Elise a pitch to present to a new client.
Two days later, the client vanished. Her prototype appeared—repackaged—under a competitor's brand.
And Elise had gone dark.
Aarika stared at her laptop screen, rage and disappointment boiling together. She had known better. She had.
She didn't go to the authorities. She went to the source.
Zayden's name was all over the hosting service.
He had found her again.
This time, she hit back.
She released a decoy prototype under an open-source license. Anyone who tried to use it would trigger a recursive loop—crashing their systems silently.
Two days later, Zayden's three subsidiaries suffered catastrophic outages.
She thought that was the end.
Until the media announced a new rising tech star: Soren Vale.
Twist: The leaked prototype code contains embedded metadata signed by "S. Vale" — and the version was uploaded before she even created it.