Return of the Legendary Cyber King

CH 6

David threw the shaking tablet onto the table with a loud clatter. On the screen, bright red error boxes were popping up one after another.

"Look at the screen, Miss Rose!" David cried out, his voice cracking with pure panic. "All forty banking servers went completely dead at the exact same time! Their firewalls think our database is infected with a virus!"

Rose jumped up from the sofa, her face turning pale. "What do you mean, dead?! Brandon checked the entire system yesterday!"

"The city tech team just saw the outage!" David yelled, grabbing his hair with both hands. "Because Chairman Vance paused the meeting, they gave us an urgent countdown of two hours!"

David leaned forward, his eyes wild with fear. "If our system fails the live test when they call our name, Humpton Tech will be kicked out for fraud! We will be banned from doing business with the city forever!"

"Banned?!" Eleanor gasped, rushing into the room from the hallway. "We spent millions getting ready for tonight! If we get banned, the banks will take back their loans by tomorrow morning!"

"Worse than that, Mrs. Eleanor!" David shouted, his hands shaking as he pointed at the screen. "If we fail a city safety test, the government will cancel our company license! We will be sued into total bankruptcy by sunrise!"

Rose felt the whole room spin around her. She turned to Brandon in pure terror, grabbing his suit jacket with both hands.

"Brandon, you heard him!" Rose begged with tears in her eyes. "You built this code! You fixed the system with your own hands! Please, open your laptop and fix this right now!"

A wave of cold terror hit Brandon's chest. Cold sweat soaked right through his expensive shirt, dripping down his back.

He knew the truth: he didn't write a single line of that code. The cheap files he bought online were just broken scraps that he didn't even understand.

If he sat down at the computer right now, he wouldn't even know how to turn the system on. Everyone would find out he was a fake.

Brandon suddenly let out a loud, painful groan. He fell back onto the sofa, grabbing his bandaged left hand and holding it tight against his chest.

"Ah! My hand!" Brandon cried out, twisting his face like he was dying of pain. "The broken glass... when Henry’s thug pushed me into the table, a sharp piece cut deep into my nerves!"

Rose dropped to her knees beside him, her heart beating wildly. "Brandon! Is it bleeding again?!"

"My fingers are totally numb and swollen!" Brandon wheezed, clenching his teeth as if he were in deep pain. "Typing the master code takes total focus and fast hands! If my hurt hand slips and types the wrong letter, the whole database will wipe itself out forever!"

"Then what are we going to do?!" Rose cried out, her chest tight. "We only have ninety minutes left before the city board calls our name!"

Brandon leaned forward, his eyes full of sly malice as he pointed into the air. "Don't you get it, Rose?! This isn't a normal error! This is a trap!"

Rose blinked in shock, wiping the tears from her face. "A trap?"

"Henry!" Brandon hissed through his teeth, pretending to be furious. "Yesterday afternoon, I saw that beggar sneaking around our server room! He knew we had the big gala tonight! He put a hidden virus in the code so our servers would die the second we got on stage!"

"That evil, ungrateful dog!" Eleanor screamed, hitting the wall with her fist. "He knew we threw him out, so he decided to drag our whole family down with him!"

Rose stood in the middle of the room, her fingernails cutting into her palms. Her heel hurt like fire, but the fear in her heart was ten times worse.

"There has to be an old backup," Rose said in a panic, pacing the floor. "During the first two years of the company, we wrote down the core system rules and setup notes on paper and locked them away!"

David looked up, his red eyes lighting up with hope. "The paper notes! If we have the original notes, my tech team can rebuild the system from scratch!"

"Where are those notes kept?!" Brandon asked, trying to sound helpful while secretly praying for a way out.

"In the villa's basement," Rose said, grabbing her coat with shaking hands. "Henry always cleaned and kept the old storage boxes. We have to go back to the house right now!"

"David, stay here!" Rose ordered, turning to her tech chief. "Use every excuse you have to stall the city judges! Do whatever it takes to buy us time until we get back!"

"Understood, Miss Rose! You have less than eighty minutes!" David shouted as they ran out the door.

Thirty minutes later, the car slammed to a stop outside the Humpton villa. Rose, Brandon, and Eleanor ran through the front doors, their shoes loud in the empty house.

Rose pulled open the heavy wooden door to the basement and ran down the cold stairs. The air was freezing, smelling of damp walls and dust.

For four years, Rose had almost never come down here. This was the dark, lonely room where Henry had slept and lived during their whole marriage.

In the corner sat an old wooden desk under a single yellow bulb. Unlike the messy boxes around the room, Henry’s desk was completely clean and neat.

Rose ran to the desk, her heart pounding in her chest. She pulled open the top drawer, but there were only plain pens and blank paper inside.

She dropped to her knees and yanked open the heavy bottom drawer. It slid open with a loud creak.

Inside were three empty bottles of cough medicine, several empty fever pill packs, and a stack of thick, black spiral notebooks.

Rose stared at the empty medicine bottles, feeling a weird ache in her throat. She remembered the nights Henry had coughed while she slept upstairs, and how she had only yelled at him for making noise.

She pushed the bottles aside and pulled out the heavy notebooks. The covers were worn and bent, stained with old coffee marks from long nights of work.

Rose opened the first book under the dim light. Her breath stopped in her throat.