His grandmother’s words from the night before echoed relentlessly in Leo’s head. He knew she wanted him to chase his dreams, but his pride completely rejected the idea of accepting a thirty-five thousand dollar handout from a stranger. The next morning, he went back to the billing desk at Mercy General to press the clerk for answers, but the hospital staff remained completely tight-lipped about the anonymous donor. Even so, Leo’s gut pointed straight to Dylan. Attempting to outrun the debt, he picked up extra courier shifts, pushing his beat-up bike day and night through the city streets. But after running the numbers on his meager delivery commissions, reality set in: it would take him years just to scrape that kind of cash together. Two days later, exhausted and disheveled, Leo cornered Dylan in a quiet, empty campus corridor. "I know it was your money, Dylan," Leo said flatly, staring intensely at him. "I don’t know how you got your hands on that much cash, but I’m going to work

Dylan didn’t sit idle after Leo walked away in a panic. He immediately breached the city’s corporate registries and municipal databases, digging up everything there was to know about Gavin Brown.Gavin was the son of Alex Brown, the owner of Brown Cyber-Tech—a mid-tier digital security firm currently on life support and entirely dependent on vendor contracts from Pacific Maritime.Recognizing a fatal point of leverage, Dylan decided to pull rank. He contacted his older brother, Dominic Haugland.The meeting was set for that very night at The Horizon Club, a hyper-exclusive private lounge perched on the 85th floor of Haugland Tower—the nerve center of Pacific Maritime. Only the Haugland inner circle and executive board members possessed the VIP keycards required to access the floor.Dominic Haugland was sitting on a plush leather sofa, sipping top-shelf whiskey, wh

Dylan wasn't about to let a complete stranger walk into his operation without a vetting process. He locked his eyes onto Clara Valerie, analyzing her expressions for any subtle micro-movements that might expose a lie, or any indication that she was a proxy sent by Vance or Gavin. But Clara’s gaze remained clear, burning with the unfiltered ambition of a true engineer."Follow me to the lab," Dylan said flatly, grabbing his laptop.Without a word, Clara kept pace with Dylan’s long strides as they headed up to the private research lab on the third floor of the engineering building. The second the heavy door clicked shut behind them, Dylan pulled up his proprietary AI algorithm framework and threw it onto the primary workstation monitor."This is the core navigation logic for the autonomous system," Dylan challenged, crossing his arms. "The throughput demands a multi-tiered data processing architecture. Most standard university hardware will bottleneck and thermal throttle within three s