The alarm hit at 3:17 p.m.
The Roth Industries command center, typically a realm of muted clicks, low voices, and glowing dashboards erupted into controlled chaos. Red alerts began cascading across the master display, each line of error code a glaring signal that something was seriously wrong.
Elena was in a boardroom when it began, locked in another exhausting exchange with Victor Crane. Her phone buzzed once. Then again. Then four times in rapid succession. When Sophie slipped into the room and silently mouthed, "Server outage," Elena didn't hesitate she stood mid-sentence, ignoring Victor's smug interruption, and walked out.
By the time she reached the server operations floor, the air was thick with tension. Screens showed critical systems blinking offline client access panels, intranet communication tools, even parts of their secure prototype cloud were compromised.
"What the hell happened?" Elena barked, her heels striking the concrete as she strode toward the cluster of engineers.
"Massive failure across multiple zones," muttered the head of network architecture. "It's not a full breach, but it's not normal lag either. Almost surgical in nature."
Elena's eyes narrowed. "Is it internal?"
"We can't tell. We're tracing it."
And then ,like a shadow stepping into a storm Liam Carter arrived.
No fanfare. No flurry. Just him, black hoodie, laptop already open, eyes scanning the monitors with laser focus.
"I need access to the deep trace logs," he said, calm but clipped.
The lead engineer looked to Elena, who gave the nod.
Within minutes, Liam was plugged in fingers flying across keys, eyes darting between screens. Elena stood behind him, arms crossed, silently observing the strange calm that seemed to envelop him as everyone else spiraled. He didn't fumble. He didn't speculate aloud. He simply acted, like his brain was operating ten seconds faster than everyone else's.
Then he muttered, "Got you."
Elena leaned in. "Talk."
"It's not a traditional breach. No external IPs. Someone piggybacked on a legacy server route. A diagnostic protocol buried under the original Roth OS kernel. Hidden behind a legitimate handshake pattern."
"How old?"
"Fifteen years. Maybe older."
Her blood ran cold. "My father's era."
Liam didn't look at her. "This isn't just technical sabotage. Someone knew how Roth's original architecture was structured. It's intentional."
"Can you patch it?"
"I already did," he said, as screens began to stabilize one by one. "Redirected the vulnerable pings, scrubbed the bad handshake, and blackholed the rogue loop. We're clean for now."
"You did that in under ten minutes."
He shrugged. "Didn't need more."
Around them, the operations team slowly relaxed. Someone muttered "Holy shit" under their breath. A few engineers clapped softly, in disbelief more than celebration.
Elena looked at Liam again, this time with something unspoken flickering in her eyes.
Not just competence. Genius. Dangerous genius.
"Where did you learn that kind of backdoor architecture?" she asked slowly.
Liam's fingers paused over his keyboard. "Old habits," he said vaguely. "Sometimes you know how to disarm a bomb because you built one like it before."
The room went still for a beat too long.
Before Elena could respond, he unplugged his laptop and stood. "I'll send a full trace and patch log in an hour."
And then he walked out,no applause, no explanation,just as quietly as he'd arrived.
Sophie appeared beside Elena seconds later. "Well," she whispered, "either that man is our company's greatest asset… or our biggest liability."
Elena's gaze lingered on the path Liam had taken. "Maybe both," she said.