Chapter 10: The First Employee
The $1,440 didn't just cover seven months of the rent increase; it shifted the atmosphere in the Chen apartment. The heavy silence was replaced by a cautious, fragile hope. Jiang no longer looked at Alex's closed door with pure suspicion, but with a bewildered respect. He didn't understand what his son was doing, but the results, tangible in their bank account, were undeniable.
This small victory gave Alex the mental space to focus. The $5,000 mission still loomed, but the immediate pressure was off. He now had 50 CP and a renewed sense of purpose. The slow, steady grind of Sentinel continued, but he knew he needed to scale. He couldn't do everything himself.
The mission board agreed.
[FOUNDATION MISSION: THE FIRST RECRUIT.]
[OBJECTIVE: HIRE YOUR FIRST EMPLOYEE FOR A LEGITIMATE BUSINESS TASK.]
[REWARD: 200 CODE POINTS. BLUEPRINT: 'AEGIS' FIREWALL CORE (v1.0) - DEPLOYMENT MODULE.]
An employee. The thought was daunting. It meant payroll, taxes, and, most terrifyingly, trust. He couldn't hire just anyone. He needed someone who wouldn't ask too many questions, who was competent, and who needed the work.
His thoughts immediately went to his sister, Lily. She was sharp, tech-savvy for her age, and chronically bored. More importantly, she was family. She might poke fun, but she wouldn't betray him.
He found her in her room, scrolling through social media on her clunky phone, a look of profound boredom on her face.
"I have a job for you," Alex said, leaning against her doorframe.
She didn't look up. "Is it taking out the trash? Because you're supposed to do that tonight."
"It's a paid job. Ten dollars an hour."
That got her attention. Her eyes flicked up from the screen. "Doing what? Coding? Because I don't speak nerd."
"Customer support," Alex said. It was the most logical, least technical role he could offload. "For Sentinel. You'd just be answering emails, helping people with basic installation problems. I'll write the scripts for you, the answers to common questions. You just have to be polite and not sound like a robot."
Lily sat up, intrigued. "Ten dollars? Cash?"
"Transferred to your bank account. Like a real job."
The prospect of her own money, independent of parental allowance, was a powerful lure. "How many hours?"
"As many as you want. Probably start with five a week. But you have to be professional. This is a real business."
She narrowed her eyes, trying to see the catch. "And you're really making money from this... Wi-Fi thing?"
"Enough to pay you," he said simply.
A slow grin spread across her face. "Okay. Deal. But I'm charging fifteen if the customers are idiots."
He spent the next evening creating a simple knowledge base and template responses for the most common Sentinel issues. He set her up with a professional email alias—support@sentineldotnet—and gave her access to the ticketing system he'd built. It was a risk, handing over a piece of his operation, but it was a necessary one.
Watching Lily tentatively answer her first customer email, her tongue stuck out in concentration, was a strange sort of victory. He was no longer a lone operator. He was a manager. A founder.
The system recognized the milestone.
[FOUNDATION MISSION: THE FIRST RECRUIT - COMPLETE.]
[REWARD: 200 CODE POINTS. BLUEPRINT: 'AEGIS' FIREWALL CORE (v1.0) - DEPLOYMENT MODULE UNLOCKED.]
The new blueprint module was a game-changer. It provided the code and instructions to turn the theoretical 'AEGIS' firewall into an installable software package. It was the bridge between an idea and a product.
He now had 250 CP. He invested 150 of them into [SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (PROFESSIONAL)], solidifying his understanding of building stable, scalable, and maintainable code. The knowledge felt like muscle memory, the final piece solidifying his technical foundation.
His work with Chloe on the Nexus Protocol deepened. They had moved from architecture to writing actual code. Their encrypted workspace was a flurry of activity. Chloe had built a stunningly elegant proof-of-concept for the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, while Alex focused on the data storage and retrieval algorithms.
One evening, during a late-night coding session, a new message from Chloe popped up, its tone different from her usual technical brevity.
Chloe: Hit a wall. The cryptographic signature verification for the staking transactions is creating a bottleneck. It's slowing the entire network to a crawl during simulated load.
Alex leaned back, thinking. The problem was one of computational overhead. <—A bottleneck is a point of congestion that slows down the entire system, like a single-lane bridge on a busy highway, he visualized.
Alex: What if we batch the verifications? Instead of verifying each transaction signature individually as they come in, the validator node collects them for a few seconds and verifies them as a group. It's less real-time, but it would dramatically increase throughput.
There was a long pause from Chloe's end. He could almost hear the gears turning in her head.
Chloe: Batching... That's... actually not stupid. It introduces a slight latency, but for a storage network, a few seconds of delay is acceptable. The trade-off for scalability is worth it. Okay. I'll refactor the validation logic.
It was their dynamic in a nutshell: Alex, the visionary with unorthodox, system-informed solutions, and Chloe, the brilliant engineer who could tear down and rebuild his ideas into something practical and robust.
The following weekend, they met in person again, this time in a quiet corner of a public library. They needed to discuss something that couldn't be trusted to even their encrypted channel: incorporation.
"We can't just be two people in a chat room forever," Chloe said, her voice a low whisper. "If Nexus is going to be real, we need a legal entity. To own the code, to open a bank account, to protect ourselves."
Alex nodded. He'd been thinking the same thing. "A Delaware C-Corp. It's the standard for tech startups." <—A C-Corp is a legal structure for a corporation that is taxed separately from its owners. It's what venture-backed companies use, he recalled from his financial knowledge.
"Right," Chloe said, impressed. "You've done your homework. But that costs money. Legal fees, filing fees. A few thousand dollars, at least."
The number hung in the air. Another financial mountain to climb. The $5,000 mission was now morphing into a need for seed capital for their company.
"I'm working on it," Alex said, the weight of it settling on him. His stock market gamble had been a stopgap. He needed a more substantial, sustainable source of income.
As if on cue, his phone buzzed. It was an alert from the custom monitoring system he'd set up for Sentinel. A massive spike in traffic. And not the good kind.
He opened his laptop, his fingers flying across the keyboard. Chloe watched, her curiosity piqued.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Someone is stress-testing the Sentinel server," he said, his voice tight. "A distributed denial-of-service attack." <—A DDoS attack is when someone floods a server with junk traffic from many different sources to overwhelm it and take it offline.
The logs showed a flood of meaningless connection requests from thousands of different IP addresses, all designed to consume resources and crash his service. It was a crude but effective assault.
His first instinct was panic. But his [NETWORK SECURITY] expertise kicked in. He began implementing countermeasures, configuring his server's firewall to identify and block the malicious traffic patterns. It was a digital battle, fought in silence in the hushed library.
"Who would do that?" Chloe whispered, leaning in to look at the scrolling logs. "You're a tiny service."
"I don't know," Alex muttered, his mind racing. A competitor? The Unseen Eye, trying a more aggressive tactic? Or just a random, malicious botnet?
He noticed something strange in the attack pattern. It was powerful, but unsophisticated. The IP addresses were mostly from hijacked home computers in Asia and Eastern Europe. This wasn't the work of a state-level actor or a corporate security team. This was cheaper, messier.
After twenty minutes of frantic work, he managed to filter out the bulk of the attack. The server stabilized. Sentinel remained online.
But the message was clear. He was no longer flying under the radar. Someone, somewhere, had taken notice enough to try and swat him down. The world outside his family and his partnership with Chloe was not a friendly place. He had built his first foundation, hired his first employee, and found a brilliant partner. But he was also painting a target on his back. The game was getting real, and the stakes were rising faster than he had anticipated.