The victory was a sugar rush, brief and already fading. Sentinel was back online, but the taste in Alex's mouth was still bitter. Brenda Walsh had thrown him a bone, but the dog that had been sicced on him was still out there, hungry. Reed had shown his hand. He didn't need to fight fair. He just needed to make a phone call.
The paranoia was a physical thing now, a constant low-grade hum in his nervous system. He found himself checking his bank balance three times a day, waiting for it to hit zero. He'd stare at his phone, expecting it to ring with a call from some bored cop asking him to come down to the station for a "chat." The system's Existential Threat debuff wasn't just a number; it was a cold sweat on the back of his neck.
He met Chloe at a different diner this time, one deep in Brooklyn where the Formica tables were sticky and the coffee tasted like burnt tires. It felt safer. Less predictable.
"He got to our hosting provider," Alex said, sliding into the booth. No hello. "Made a call. Got us shut down for a bullshit TOS violation."
Chloe's face tightened. She didn't ask if he was okay. That wasn't their language anymore. "How bad?"
"Got it back. Had to… persuade a mid-level manager." He left the details vague. The less she knew about his methods, the cleaner her hands stayed.
She let out a slow breath, stirring a packet of sugar into her coffee. The spoon made a gritty sound against the cheap ceramic. "So that's his play. He's not coming for the code. He's coming for the plumbing. The electricity. The water." She looked up, her eyes hard. "We need to get off the grid. Completely."
"He can still call the bank. The payment processor."
"Then we need to be a moving target. And we need to be too loud to disappear." She pulled a folded flyer from her bag and slid it across the table. "The NextGen Founders pitch is in two weeks. We need to win it."
Alex looked at the glossy paper. It felt flimsy, a child's drawing against a tidal wave. "Fifty grand and a blog post won't stop him."
"It's not about the money. It's about the spotlight. It's harder to make someone vanish when they're on a stage." She leaned forward, her voice dropping. "But we can't pitch Sentinel. It's too small. Too… simple."
"What, then?"
"We pitch the vision. We pitch Nexus. We tell them we're building the next internet. A decentralized, user-owned cloud. We use Sentinel as the 'proof of concept,' the first brick. We make it sound so big, so audacious, that squashing us looks like… like killing the next Google."
It was a bluff. A massive, terrifying bluff. Nexus was a collection of brilliant, half-finished blueprints in his head and on her legal pads. It was a castle in the sky. But she was right. Survival wasn't about having the best product. It was about having the best story.
"Okay," he said, the word feeling like a commitment. "We bluff."
"Good." She finished her coffee in one grim swallow. "Now we have to build the deck. And you have to learn how to sell it. No tech jargon. You're not talking to engineers. You're talking to money guys who get hard for buzzwords and market size."
The next two weeks were a special kind of hell. By day, he was Alex Chen, college student. He went to classes, helped Leo with the final project—the kid was hopeless, but persistent—and pretended his world wasn't collapsing. By night, he was the Architect, refining the Nexus protocols, hardening their infrastructure, and with Chloe, crafting a lie so beautiful it almost felt true.
They practiced the pitch in her apartment, surrounded by her books and schematics. She was a brutal coach.
"Stop saying 'distributed ledger.' Say 'unbreakable, transparent record-keeping.'"
"'Latency' is a nerdy word. Say 'blazing fast.'"
"Your posture is shit. Stand like you own the room, not like you're waiting for permission to be there."
He felt like a puppet. He was selling a dream he hadn't even finished having. But with every run-through, the story got tighter, more compelling. Chloe was a genius at this. She knew how to sand down his rough, technical edges into something sleek and marketable.
The day of the competition, he put on the only suit he owned, a cheap, boxy thing he'd bought for a cousin's wedding. It smelled faintly of mothballs. He met Chloe in the lobby of the sleek Manhattan event space. She was wearing a sharp, simple black dress. She looked like she belonged. He felt like an imposter.
"Remember," she said, adjusting his tie, her fingers quick and efficient. "It's a story. Sell the future. Let me handle the technical questions if they come."
The room was full of a different species of human. Men in tailored suits that didn't smell of mothballs, women with sharp haircuts and confident laughs. They held glasses of champagne and talked about "disruption" and "synergy" without a hint of irony. Alex felt the old ghost of Lex Vance stir inside him—the part that used to move through these rooms like a king. But that ghost was drowned out by the kid from Queens who was counting the exits.
They were third to present. The first two were a guy with an app for scheduling dog-walkers and a woman with a subscription box for artisanal kombucha. The judges looked bored.
Then it was their turn. The lights were bright, hot. He could feel the sweat gathering under his arms, on his lower back. He looked at Chloe. She gave him a small, almost imperceptible nod.
It's a story.
He stepped to the podium. The first few words came out stiff, robotic. He saw a judge glance at his phone. Panic clawed at his throat. This was a mistake. They were going to be laughed off the stage.
Then he caught Chloe's eye again. She was standing off to the side, calm, her gaze steady. Believing. In the story. In him.
He took a breath. Fuck it.
He abandoned the script.
"You know what the problem with the internet is?" he said, his voice finding a lower, more natural register. "It's not yours. Your data, your photos, your life—it's sitting on a server farm owned by a company that sees you as a product. They sell you. They lose you in a data breach. They decide what you get to see."
He paused, letting the silence hang.
"We're not building another app. We're not selling another subscription box." He gestured to the screen, where Chloe brought up a simple, elegant slide. "We're building a new foundation. An internet where you own your own piece. Where your data is yours. It's faster, it's more private, and it can't be controlled by any one company or government."
He talked about the future. He talked about empowerment. He used the words Chloe had taught him, but he poured his own frustration, his own anger at Reed, his own desperate need for a world he could control, into them. He wasn't just selling a product. He was selling a rebellion.
When he finished, the room was quiet for a beat. Then, applause. Not wild, but thoughtful, respectful. The judges were leaning forward, their phones forgotten.
The Q&A was a blur. Chloe stepped in smoothly, deflecting the deepest technical probes with elegant non-answers about "proprietary architecture" and "patent-pending protocols." She was a shield, letting him be the sword.
They didn't win first place. That went to a biotech startup with a fancy machine that could supposedly diagnose diseases from a drop of blood.
They took second.
Fifteen thousand dollars. And the feature in TechCrunch.
As they stood there, a forced smile on his face as the biotech guys gave their acceptance speech, Chloe squeezed his arm.
"You see?" she whispered, her voice fierce with triumph. "We're not a stain anymore. We're a contender."
He looked out at the crowd, at the suited men who were now looking at him with a new, calculating interest. He had the check. He had the visibility. He had bought them some time, some armor.
But as he stood there in his cheap suit, the applause ringing in his ears, all he could think was that he had just painted a much bigger target on their backs. They weren't hiding anymore. They were on the radar. And he had a cold, certain feeling that Julian Reed's flamethrower was now being fitted with a new, more powerful nozzle.