Chapter 2

My desk was tucked away at the back of the tech department. The open office was empty, with only a few machines still running tests.

My desk was spotless. A 32-inch monitor, a mechanical keyboard, and three thick notebooks stacked neatly on the shelf.

There was a sticky note on the wall: "Code never lies."

I ripped it off.

Crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash.

Then I started clearing out my desk. There wasn't much personal stuff—just a power bank, a spare pair of glasses, and two unopened boxes of coffee. I packed them into a cardboard box.

All that was left were those three notebooks.

Five years. From my first day at StellarTech, through every core system upgrade, right up to the AI security model I'd been building lately. Every page—my own handwriting, my algorithms, my formulas, my architecture sketches.

I opened the first notebook.

The date on the first page was from five years ago, in the fall. Back then, there were only fifteen of us, crammed into a tiny incubator office. Richard patted me on the shoulder and said, "Alex, work hard—this company will be yours one day."

I closed the notebook.

Then I put it in the box.

My phone buzzed.

It was a message from Susan Lee. Just three words: "How'd it go?"

She was the company's legal director. Last month, during that competitor plagiarism case, she stayed up four nights straight with me, digging for evidence. In the end, she told me, "Alex, you're way too blunt. One day, that's gonna bite you."

I didn't reply.

I locked the screen and slipped my phone into my pocket.

I picked up the box and headed out.

I was alone in the elevator. The mirror reflected a thirty-year-old with dark circles under his eyes and an unbuttoned collar—just another laid-off code monkey, not the guy who built this company from scratch into a billion dollar business.

The elevator reached the first floor.

The lobby was brightly lit. The receptionist saw me with the box in my arms, opened her mouth to say something, but thought better of it.

I walked through the revolving door.

It was 6:30, rush hour. People poured out of the office building, blending into the river of cars outside.

I set the box down and pulled out my phone.

I scrolled through my contacts.

Landed on "Legal Authorization Affairs."

I hit call.

"Hello? Mr. Carter?" A young woman's voice came through the line.

"Jenny," I said. "The 32 patents under my name—you've got all the authorization files, right?"

"Yeah, they're all logged in the system. Do you want to check—"

"No, that's not what I need," Alex cut her off.

I stared at the billboard across the street. The StellarTech logo was up top, its blue light flickering on and off.

"Right now, draft a termination letter. All exclusive licenses to StellarTech—terminate them, every single one," Alex said.

There was a two-second silence on the other end.

"Mr. Carter, are you sure? Those 32 patents are the backbone of everything the company runs on. If you pull the licenses—"

"I know," Alex cut her off.

'I knew exactly what would happen.' Alex thought.

StellarTech's server clusters, security protocols, AI engines, data encryption—every bit of it runs on my patents. Yank those out, and the whole system is just a pile of junk.

"Get it sent to their legal department's email by tonight," Alex said.

"Okay, Mr. Carter," Jenny replied.

I hung up.

I looked up at the billboard.

The blue light kept flickering.

But it wouldn't last much longer.