For the next few weeks, the atmosphere inside Logos Labs transformed. The vast server farm, once dedicated to simulating galactic collisions and protein folding, now channeled its immense power into a universe of a different kind—a digital abyss of candlestick charts, trading volumes, and millisecond-level price quotes.
Leo practically lived in the lab, sleeping on a couch in the break room, fueled by stale coffee and a cold, burning obsession. He and Odin began their archaeological dig through time.
Odin's capacity for learning was staggering, but the "noise" of the financial markets was far greater than Leo had ever imagined. The AI's initial reports were a flood of statistical coincidences and meaningless correlations, frustratingly logical yet utterly useless.
`ANALYSIS: The event with the highest temporal correlation to your father's trading records on October 23, 1997, was the luminosity flare of Supernova SN 1997eg. Correlation: 73%.`
"Wrong, Odin," Leo said, rubbing his temples, his voice rough with exhaustion. "It's a spurious relationship. The grand narrative of the cosmos has nothing to do with the petty greed of man."
He realized he couldn't just feed the AI data; he had to teach it humanity. He began inputting decades of literature on market psychology, from Shiller's Irrational Exuberance to Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. He established new foundational principles for Odin, programming the messy, unpredictable chaos of human emotion into its pristine logic:
`NEW PRINCIPLE | Rule_05: Humans are irrational. They sell on fear and buy on greed. This irrationality is, in itself, a predictable pattern.`
`NEW PRINCIPLE | Rule_06: Look for the footprints of 'whales'—single participants whose volume is large enough to disturb the market. Their actions are not noise. They are the signal.`
He translated the vague, emotive language of his father's journal into executable commands.
"My father wrote that he saw 'the thrill of destruction'," Leo spoke into the microphone, his voice a low monologue. "Define 'thrill of destruction'. In a financial context, what does that mean?"
Code scrolled rapidly across Odin's interface as it processed the abstract concept, cross-referencing it with market crash data. Finally, a definition solidified:
`'Thrill of Destruction': A pattern of anomalous, large-scale short-selling during a market crash, where the profit motive is secondary to the act of accelerating the collapse. The behavior deviates from standard risk-reward models.`
"Good, Odin," Leo whispered, a flicker of light in his tired eyes. "Now. Rescan all October 1997 data using that definition."
This time, the result was different. Out of the billions of trades, a single, stubborn signal emerged from the static, like the final pulse of a dying star.
It was an anonymous fund, registered in an offshore haven through a Swiss bank. During the most frantic hours of the Hong Kong market panic on October 23rd, 1997, this entity had executed hundreds of massive, perfectly-timed short trades. The targets were precise, surgically striking the very blue-chip stocks his father had been heavily invested in.
Its trading pattern was a 98% match to Odin's "Thrill of Destruction" model.
It was a great white shark that had waited in the depths, striking only when the water was thick with blood.
Leo stared at the screen, his knuckles white. This was it. This was the whale that had killed his father. But he couldn't see its face. The fund's name was a shell, its funding sources buried under layers of legal firewalls and Swiss banking secrecy.
The trail had gone cold.
Just as despair began to set in, a new window popped up on Odin's interface, unprompted:
`ANALYSIS: The trading algorithm of the 1997 entity displays a rare 'adaptive learning' signature. I have detected this signature only once in post-2008 market data.`
`CROSS-REFERENCE: An entity known as 'Leviathan Capital'.`
`CONCLUSION: There is an 87% probability that both entities originate from the same 'player'.`
Leviathan.
Leo's fingers flew across the terminal, typing the name. The search results were sparse. A private fund registered in London, impossibly discreet, with almost no public footprint. It was like seeing the silhouette of a monster in the dark, but still not knowing its true shape.
"It's not enough, Odin. It's not enough," he said, his voice low and intense. "I need to see its face."
He needed more data. Not historical data, but live data. Real-time. He needed to get inside the stock exchange's core servers. He needed to watch Leviathan's moves as they happened today.
The thought was insane. It was technically perilous, a feat of hacking few could even contemplate. And it was a serious criminal offense, one that could send him to prison for decades.
Leo looked at the image of his father's journal on the screen. The phrase, 'the lamb led to the slaughter,' echoed in his mind. The image of the shattered white Go stone, stained with his father's blood, burned behind his eyes.
He took a deep breath and opened a long-dormant, never-before-activated module in Odin's architecture.
The module was named "Prometheus." Its purpose was singular.
To steal fire.