Chapter 131The official exoneration letter had been a public symphony. What arrived three days later was a private, dissonant chord struck in a soundproof room.Lucas was finalizing the reinstatement paperwork for his lab access, the bureaucratic tedium a strange, peaceful counterpoint to the preceding months, when a priority alert flashed on his encrypted terminal. It wasn’t routed through any university server. It bypassed his firewalls via a method he couldn’t immediately trace, appearing as a plain text file in a supposedly air-gapped directory he used for decrypted evidence. The intrusion itself was a message—a flex of superior reach.The file was named `ASSESSMENT_UPDATE.txt`. He opened it.The text was austere, devoid of branding or salutation.`Mr. Johnson,``The recent resolution of your institutional grievance has been observed. The Office of Academic Integrity operates within its mandated scope. Its determinations are noted.``Your independent inquiry, however, extends bey

Chapter 133The silence in Lucas’s apartment had changed. It was no longer the tense quiet of a siege, but the focused hum of a workshop. With Operation Perplexity set in motion—a formal challenge lobbed directly at Sentinel’s opaque heart—he knew his isolation was his greatest remaining vulnerability. He had evidence, he had a legalistic strategy, but he lacked eyes and ears. Sentinel watched from the shadows. It was time to build his own panopticon.His recruitment would not be based on friendship or shared grievance alone. Those were volatile motivations. His network would be architected like a secure system: each node selected for its specific function, its operational value, and its undeniable separation from the others. He was building a counter-surveillance infrastructure, a mirror to the one deployed against him.But every network needed a central hub—a trusted relay. For Lucas, that was Dev. They had met in their first-year coding marathon, two quiet outsiders who communicat

Chapter 135Lucas Johnson sat in the room, with his hands placed on gis cheeks. Before him, on the long folding tables that now dominated the living space, the physical archive of his persecution was laid out with museum-like precision. To his left, the digital realm: three monitors displayed file directories, code strings, and timeline software. To his right, the physical: printed chat logs in neat binders, annotated maps of network architecture, and a wall plastered with a constellation of photos, dates, and red string that would look like madness to anyone but him.Tonight was the Crestmont University Benefactors’ Gala. In twelve hours, he would walk into the glittering heart of the institution that had tried to erase him. He would not be a guest. He would be a strategic detonation.But first, the audit.He began, as he always did, at the beginning. He opened the first binder, labeled INITIATION. Here were the initial “Community Well-being Alerts” against his ID, the dry, automated