The elevator ride back to Lang Industries headquarters felt longer than the sixty-eight floors it actually climbed.
Alex stood alone in the glass-walled car, watching the city blur past in vertical streaks of neon and chrome. His reflection stared back—Victor's face, still unfamiliar in its sharp angles and perpetual five-o'clock shadow. The man in the mirror looked calm. Inside, Alex was running diagnostics on every decision he'd made in the last four hours.
He'd canceled the smear. He'd proposed partnership instead of predation. He'd sat across from Elena Voss for nearly two hours talking kernel architecture and ethical constraints like they were old colleagues instead of corporate enemies.
And she hadn't walked out.
She'd even left him with that parting line about tea.
Small victories. But small victories in this world could get you killed—or at least audited into oblivion.
The elevator chimed softly. Level 87. Executive floor.
The doors parted to reveal marble corridors lit by soft recessed strips. Assistants and junior VPs straightened instinctively as he passed. Whispers trailed him like smoke.
"Is he ill?" "Did you see the merger notes? He didn't tear her apart." "Something's off with Lang today…"
Alex ignored them. Victor would have fired half the floor for less. Alex just wanted to get behind a locked door before someone asked a question he couldn't answer convincingly.
His office swallowed him whole.
Floor-to-ceiling smart-glass tinted automatically to one-way opacity. The desk—same mahogany monstrosity from Chapter 1—hummed to life. Holographic panels unfolded like origami: unread messages (417), security alerts (19), financial summaries (8), and one flagged red: Internal Audit – Priority 1 – Executive Access Only.
He sank into the chair.
First things first.
He needed to know exactly how deep Victor's rot went.
Alex pulled up the executive folder structure. In the novel, Victor kept two sets of books: the clean ones for regulators and shareholders, and the shadow ledger buried under seventeen layers of encryption and misdirection. The shadow ledger was where the real game lived—offshore shells, back-channel payments, quiet little murders of promising startups.
He knew the access path by heart.
He navigated manually instead of using voice command. Less chance of leaving a convenient audio trail.
Layer 1: standard financials. Layer 4: project slush funds disguised as R&D. Layer 9: "consulting fees" to ghost firms in the Caymans. Layer 14: biometric lock (Victor's thumbprint—thankfully Alex still had that). Layer 17: the final vault.
It opened.
A single file glowed in malignant amber: SHADOW_PLAY_v4.2.ledger
Alex exhaled through his teeth.
He opened it.
The ledger was a beast—thousands of line items stretching back eight years. Bribes to regulators. Payments to private intelligence firms. "Termination bonuses" for executives who'd become inconvenient. And there, near the bottom of today's date range:
09:03 – Voss Dynamics – Phase 1 termination packetRecipient: Handler-7Amount: 2.8M ₩ (disguised as marketing services)Status: ABORTED per direct override – 09:47
At least that part was clean.
But further down, another cluster caught his eye.
Recurring – Internal Source "Echo"Monthly retainer: 450k ₩Purpose: Real-time competitive intelligenceLast transmission: 08:22 today – full Voss Dynamics board packet + Cascade source roadmap v3.1
Alex's stomach turned over.
Echo.
In the novel, Echo was the mole inside Lang Industries. A senior data architect who'd been feeding Victor (and therefore the larger antagonist network) intel on every rival for three years. Echo was the reason Voss Dynamics bled so badly in the early arcs—every innovation Elena pushed got preemptively countered or stolen.
Alex had forgotten the name until now.
He cross-referenced personnel records.
Echo → real name: Nakamura ReiPosition: Lead AI Systems Architect, Quantum DivisionTenure: 4 years, 7 monthsSecurity clearance: Tier 5 (executive)Last performance review: Outstanding (authored by Victor Lang personally)
Of course.
Alex leaned back, rubbing his temples.
If he fired Nakamura immediately, suspicion would flare. Victor Lang didn't fire high-performers without spectacle. If he waited too long, Echo would keep feeding information—possibly to whoever was paying the second-highest bidder now that Victor had gone "soft."
He needed surgical precision.
He opened the internal messaging system—Victor's private channel, end-to-end encrypted.
To: Head of Corporate Security – Mariko Sato Subject: Immediate & Discreet Personnel Action
Mariko,
Effective 18:00 today, Nakamura Rei is to be placed on indefinite paid administrative leave pending internal review. Reason: routine compliance audit. No public announcement. Escort from premises within the hour. Confiscate all devices, revoke all access, standard nondisclosure enforcement.
No discussion. No exit interview. Report only to me when complete.
Lang
He hit send.
Then he opened a second window and began drafting the termination script he would never actually use—something suitably Victor-like, full of veiled threats and economic ruin. Insurance, in case anyone asked why Nakamura left quietly.
While the message queued, another notification blinked into existence.
New encrypted inbound – Sender: E. Voss (verified Voss Dynamics cert chain)
Alex's pulse kicked up.
He opened it.
Mr. Lang,
Attached is the high-level integration proposal based on our discussion this afternoon. I've included preliminary constraint models and the human-oversight decision tree I mentioned.
Your points on annealing latency were… unexpectedly insightful. I've adjusted the simulation parameters accordingly.
If you're still serious about co-development, I propose we schedule the clean-room review for 14:00 tomorrow at Voss Dynamics Tower, Level 41. My team will prepare sandboxed access. Bring only who you trust.
Looking forward to your thoughts.
Elena Voss CEO, Voss Dynamics
Attached: three encrypted files totaling 1.8 GB.
Alex stared at the screen for a long moment.
She'd sent him actual work. Not posturing. Not posturing disguised as work.
Real architecture.
He opened the first file.
Cascade v3.2 – Decision Tree Overlay Human override threshold matrix Ethical weighting coefficients (0.0–1.0 scale)
He scrolled.
She'd taken his offhand comment about over-optimization killing edge-case resilience and turned it into a full subsystem. Complete with provenance tracking so no single engineer could silently strip the safeguards later.
It was brilliant.
It was also—very quietly—the exact opposite of everything Victor Lang had ever stood for.
Alex felt something warm and unfamiliar settle behind his ribs.
He began typing a reply.
Ms. Voss,
Proposal received and reviewed. Impressive work—particularly the provenance layer. That addresses a failure mode we've seen in three previous internal pilots.
14:00 tomorrow works. I'll bring only our chief quantum architect and one security liaison. No recordings, no external feeds. Full mutual transparency.
One additional item: I've instructed my team to prepare a mirror copy of our current kernel trunk (last 36 months) for your review in the sandbox. You'll have root-read access under audit logging. If anything looks inconsistent with what we discussed, call it out. I expect you to.
Looking forward to continuing the conversation.
Victor Lang
He hesitated over the signature.
Victor Lang.
Still the name on the door. Still the name on every contract.
But not the name in his head anymore.
He sent it.
Then he stood, walked to the window wall, and let the tint fade to transparent.
Neo-Tokyo glittered below like a circuit board on fire. Somewhere in that maze of light was Elena Voss—probably still at her desk, annotating his reply already.
He pressed his palm to the cool glass.
"I'm trying," he whispered. "I'm really trying."
Behind him, the office door chimed softly.
"Mr. Lang?" Mariko Sato's voice—calm, professional, edged with the faintest concern. "Nakamura has been escorted from the building. Access revoked. Devices secured. No incident."
"Good," Alex said without turning. "Double the encryption on all outgoing executive traffic tonight. And Mariko?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Tomorrow at 09:00 I want a full forensic sweep of Nakamura's workstation and cloud partitions. Look for outbound channels that don't match company records. Quietly."
"Understood."
The door closed again.
Alex stayed at the window a long time.
He knew what came next in the original plot: Victor would have used Echo's intel to launch a preemptive strike on Voss Dynamics—stock manipulation, patent challenges, whisper campaigns. Elena would have fought back brilliantly, but alone. Always alone.
Not this time.
He turned back to the desk.
Pulled up the Cascade files again.
Began reading.
Line by line.
Because if he was going to protect her, he had to understand her mind.
And if he was going to earn her trust, he had to deserve it.
The city lights kept burning.
Somewhere in the distance, a drone passed—silent, red navigation light blinking like a heartbeat.
Alex smiled faintly.
One shadow down.
Hundreds more to go.
But for the first time, the darkness felt… negotiable.