Ron Donaldo: Rise Of The Apex Don

Chapter 49

Sitting in the corner, eating a small piece of stale bread, was Zero. The skinny, pale hacker looked up. His heavy mechanical goggles were resting on his forehead. 

"Zero," Ron commanded. "Bring me your backpack."

Zero quickly dropped his bread. He grabbed his heavy, clinking metal backpack and ran over to Ron and Silas. He unzipped the bag. 

"Did you bring the silver hard drive from Sub-Level 4?" Ron asked. 

"Yes, Apex!" Zero squeaked proudly. He reached deep into the bag and pulled out the thick, heavy silver hard drive. "I pulled it right from the main console before we escaped the bomb."

Ron took the hard drive. It was cool and heavy in his hand. This small block of metal held the last remaining secrets of The Director. 

"Plug it in, Silas," Ron ordered, handing the drive to the nervous hacker. "Let’s see what The Director was hiding."

Silas took a deep breath. He took a thick black cable from his desk and plugged it into the silver hard drive. He connected the other end to his powerful, custom-built computer terminal. 

The main screen on the wall flickered. A loading bar appeared. 

"Okay, I am in the main directory," Silas said, his fingers flying across the keys. "I see the blueprints for the Sterling Core. I see the fake bank accounts. This is all the stuff we already released to the news this morning."

"Look deeper," Ron said, stepping closer to the screen. "Look for hidden partitions. Look for files that do not belong."

Silas typed a complex string of code. He ran a deep-scan program. The computer hummed loudly. 

Suddenly, a bright red warning box popped up in the center of the screen. 

ACCESS DENIED. ENCRYPTED PARTITION DETECTED.

Silas pushed his glasses up his nose. His face turned very serious. 

"You were right, Sir," Silas whispered. "There is a massive, hidden section on this drive. It is incredibly heavy. It is using a military-grade encryption algorithm. Twenty-five-six bit. It is locked tight."

"Can you break it?" Ron asked. 

Silas hesitated. "I can try. But this is not a normal lock, Sir. This is an active defense matrix."

"What does that mean?" 

"It means it is a digital trap," Zero piped up from behind them, his eyes wide. "If we guess the password wrong, the drive has a built-in virus. It will release a worm that permanently deletes every single file on the drive in milliseconds. We only get one chance."

Ron frowned. One chance. If they failed, the locations of the Vaults would be lost forever. The Syndicate would win. 

"Let me look at the lock," Ron said. 

Silas stepped aside, letting Ron look closely at the screen. 

The red warning box faded. In its place, a strange, beautiful mathematical equation appeared on the black screen. 

It was a complex algebra problem, filled with strange symbols, Greek letters, and long numbers. Under the equation was a single, blank text box, waiting for an answer. 

At the very top of the screen, a digital timer appeared. 

03:00. 

The timer began to tick down. 

"Three minutes!" Silas yelled in a panic. "The drive knows we are scanning it! It triggered a self-destruct countdown! If we do not enter the exact right answer in three minutes, everything is erased!"

"Turn the computer off!" Zero shouted, reaching for the power cord. "Cut the power!"

"No!" Ron grabbed Zero’s wrist. "If you cut the power, the fail-safe will trigger instantly. We have to solve it."

Ron stared at the mathematical equation on the screen. 

02:45.

His core struggle was replaced by pure, absolute focus. The Warlord stepped back, and the brilliant engineer stepped forward. Ron’s brain was a supercomputer. He loved math. He loved puzzles. 

He read the equation carefully. It looked familiar. Very familiar. 

"Dr. Aris," Ron said loudly, not taking his eyes off the screen. "The Director did not write this code. He was a businessman. He was not a mathematician. You wrote this encryption lock, didn't you?"

In the cage, Dr. Aris went completely pale. He did not say a word, but his silence was all the answer Ron needed. 

"You built the lock, Aris," Ron said, his eyes scanning the numbers. "And you are a proud man. You always believed that mathematics was the pure language of the universe. You taught me that every complex problem has a simple, beautiful solution."

02:00.

"Sir, two minutes!" Silas cried. He was sweating heavily. "I can run a brute-force hacking program! It might work!"

"A brute-force program will take a thousand years to guess this," Ron said calmly. "The answer is not a random password. The answer is the solution to the math problem."

Ron looked at the Greek letters on the screen. He saw the symbol for Phi. 

"The Golden Ratio," Ron whispered to himself. 

He remembered a warm, sunny afternoon in a university classroom, ten years ago. Dr. Aris had stood in front of a giant chalkboard, drawing spirals and talking passionately about how the Golden Ratio—1.618—was the secret code of nature. It was found in the shape of galaxies, the curve of a seashell, and the proportions of the human face. 

But this equation on the screen was twisted. It was backward. 

01:30.

"Give me a keyboard," Ron commanded.