Chapter 7: The Unseen Eye
The air in the Chen apartment was thick with the smell of ginger and garlic, a familiar comfort that did little to ease the tension. Jiang Chen scrolled through the fares on his flip phone, his brow furrowed deeper than usual. The "goodwill" transmission repair had fixed the cab, but it hadn't fixed the underlying problem. The rides were fewer, the fares shorter. The city was changing, and he felt himself being left behind.
He watched his son, Alex, shoveling congee into his mouth, his eyes distant, lost in some world only he could see. The boy had been different since the router incident. Quieter, yes, but with a new, unsettling intensity. Jiang had checked the family bank account, a secret habit born of a lifetime of financial anxiety, and had seen the five-dollar subscription fee for "Sentinel" leave his account and return a day later. The boy had refunded him. The gesture was proud, foolish, and it worried Jiang more than any argument. What was his son building in that room, and where would it lead?
Later that evening, as Alex retreated to his room and the low hum of his electronics began, Jiang sat with his wife on their worn sofa. "He is hiding something, Mei," he said, his voice low.
Mei-Ling sighed, her hands, still chapped from a day of sewing, folded in her lap. "He is a young man. He is supposed to have secrets. At least he is not on the streets."
"But this is different. This computer work... it is not a path. It is a... a hobby." The word felt inadequate. "Mr. Li's son, he is already a junior accountant. He has a future."
"Alex is smart, Jiang. In a different way. We must trust him." But even as she said it, her eyes drifted towards Alex's door, a silent prayer in her heart. She saw the exhaustion in his eyes, the weight he carried. She didn't understand it, but a mother's instinct told her it was real.
Meanwhile, in the closet-turned-server-room, Alex was wrestling with a different kind of problem. The "Unseen Eye" alert was no longer a passive notification. It had escalated. His 'GHOSTNET' logs showed repeated, sophisticated attempts to probe the edges of his network, not to break in, but to map it. To understand its shape and size. It was the digital equivalent of a predator carefully circling its prey, studying its movements.
He had 660 Code Points, a small arsenal of skills, and a growing sense of paranoia. He couldn't afford to make a mistake.
---
Across the city, in a spartan, book-lined apartment in the West Village, Chloe sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a constellation of legal pads filled with dense mathematical notations. Her project, a decentralized ledger system she called "Ledger," was hitting a wall. The cryptography was sound, but the problem of "the double-spend" – preventing someone from using the same digital token twice – was a monster.
She thought of the boy from the meetup, Alex. His comment about encryption had been casual, but his eyes held a certainty that belied his age. "Sentinel," he'd called his project. She'd looked it up. It was simple, almost crude, but its underlying code, what little she could infer from its network packets, was elegantly efficient. It was the work of someone who didn't just use code, but understood it on a fundamental level. He ran his own server. In an age of moving to the cloud, that was either insane or brilliant. She wasn't sure which yet, but it was intriguing enough to keep his number saved in her phone.
Her own background was a study in controlled rebellion. The daughter of a stern, old-money banking executive and a concert cellist, she had been groomed for a life of polished mediocrity—an Ivy League degree, a respectable job in finance or law. But her mind craved a different kind of order, the pure, unforgiving logic of mathematics and systems. She had chosen NYU over Harvard, computer science over economics, and this dusty apartment over her parents' Fifth Avenue penthouse. Building "Ledger" was her declaration of independence, her proof that a new, more honest system was possible. She just had to figure out how to build it.
---
In a glass-walled corner office fifty stories above Manhattan, Julian Reed, CEO of Omni-Secure Solutions, sipped a glass of mineral water and stared at the skyline. His company was thriving. They had just landed a multi-million dollar contract with the Department of Defense. He should have been elated.
But a ghost was bothering him. A single, encrypted message from weeks ago. "YOUR FLAGSHIP ENCRYPTION IS A JOKE. THIS ISN'T. -C"
His security team had written it off as a prank. They'd found the source, some kid with a junk-filled computer, and closed the case. But Julian was a man who trusted his instincts, and his instincts told him that was wrong. The timing was too perfect, right before the DoD announcement. The message was too confident. And the attached program, the one that had self-destructed after delivering its taunt, had been a piece of coding art. He'd had his best people try to reverse-engineer the fragments, and they'd come up empty-handed. It was clean. Too clean.
He'd authorized a new, quiet investigation. No port scans, no clumsy probes. He wanted a shadow, someone to just watch and listen. He needed to know who "C" was. A rival? A disgruntled former employee? The thought that it might be a random, brilliant nobody never even crossed his mind.
---
Back in Queens, Alex decided he couldn't just hide. He had to act. He spent 150 Code Points on [ADVANCED CRYPTOGRAPHY (INTERMEDIATE)]. The principles of public-key encryption, hash functions, and zero-knowledge proofs unfolded in his mind, dovetailing perfectly with the 'SENTINEL' protocol. He saw a way to not just hide his traffic, but to poison the well.
He crafted a plan. He would create a digital doppelgänger, a fake data stream that mimicked the patterns of his real "Sentinel" traffic but was filled with nonsensical data and false leads. He would let the Unseen Eye "capture" this stream, leading them on a wild goose chase while his real operations continued undisturbed.
It took him two sleepless nights. He coded a sophisticated algorithm that generated believable but fake network activity, creating the illusion of a small, struggling startup with server problems and a handful of users. He carefully routed this decoy stream to be the most "visible" part of his network, a juicy, low-hanging fruit for the observer.
Finally, he initiated the protocol. He watched as his HUD showed the Unseen Eye's attention shift, its probes latching onto the decoy with the focus of a bloodhound. He had done it. He had thrown a rock in the opposite direction to hide his own footsteps.
A new notification appeared, its glow a soft, satisfied green.
[CRISIS MISSION: THE UNSEEN EYE - NEUTRALIZED.]
[REWARD: 150 CODE POINTS.]
He had 660 CP again. He had held his ground. But the victory was hollow. He knew this was only a temporary fix. The hunter was still out there, and now he had actively deceived them. The stakes had been raised.
The following Sunday, the Chen family took a rare trip to Flushing for groceries. As they walked through the bustling market, Alex's phone buzzed. It was an unknown number. A text message.
Saw your service. Code is lean. Impressive for a one-man show. Have a problem you might find interesting. Coffee? - Chloe
He stared at the message, a flicker of something that felt like hope cutting through the constant undercurrent of anxiety. It was an invitation from the one person who seemed to speak his language. An ally. Or, his mind whispered, a potential rival. In the world he was entering, the line between the two was often dangerously thin. He typed a reply.
Sure. When and where?
The game was expanding, and he was no longer the only player on the board.