"What? The little prince of billiards?"
In the corner office overlooking downtown Crestwood, Evelyn Lane glanced up from her monitor, her brows lifting in disbelief at what Claire just told her.
"Just him?" Evelyn scoffed. "Our own department rookie? Huh. Maybe it's time Everstream retires the pool table altogether."
Claire smirked, used to seeing the CEO's competitive streak show in private. Out on the floor, Evelyn was all poise and professionalism. In here, she was unapologetically blunt—and just a little petty.
That afternoon, Mike Hanlon gathered the engineering team for a status meeting. Ryan used the opportunity to quietly "scan" everyone's skills.
Out of nineteen engineers, three—including Mike—had Intermediate Programming skills. The rest had Basic Programming. Four had Basic Game Development.
But the real surprise? Three engineers had Hacking skills—and one of them was Charlotte Quinn, the quiet, no-nonsense coder who barely spoke to anyone.
Charlotte's Intermediate Hacking was rare—hundreds of times rarer than Intermediate Programming in the corporate world. Ryan knew that even Basic Hacking was uncommon and valuable. But Intermediate? That was top-100-in-the-country level.
Ryan copied it instantly, merging with what he already had to jump straight to Advanced Hacking.
Later, when he checked his phone, Ryan noticed something odd—lag, a hiccup when opening messages. He ran a scan with his newly acquired skills and found a basic Trojan already installed.
It had been there since lunch.
"Oh… clever," Ryan muttered. The time stamp matched perfectly with when Evelyn had "needed" his phone earlier. She'd planted an eavesdropping bug herself.
He chuckled. "Petty and talented. My kind of rival."
Instead of deleting it, he kept the Trojan in place, setting it so she'd only hear what he allowed. Then he wrote his own invisible listening program and slipped it into her phone remotely.
As he was about to log off, something else caught his eye—a dormant but far more sophisticated virus sitting on his company workstation.
"This one's… nasty," he murmured. The code was a dozen times more complex than Evelyn's bug, clearly designed to trigger on command. It took him ten minutes to strip it out completely.
That's when Penny from HR walked in. "Any guys free to help me with something?"
"I'm free," Ryan said instantly, already curious.
Over in the CEO's office, Evelyn was reviewing a pitch deck when her laptop screen flickered and froze. Then, an email popped up in her corporate inbox.
The message was in flawless English:
Dear Ms. Lane,Transfer $3 million USD within thirty minutes, or every machine at Everstream will be wiped. In one hour, confidential company documents will be posted online.
Evelyn's jaw tightened. She knew a ransomware play when she saw one—and she also knew this wasn't some script-kiddie attack. Everstream had paid top dollar for its firewall and had survived dozens of intrusion attempts before.
She tried a hard reboot. No change. Pulling the plug would just trigger the payload.
Her phone buzzed. It was Claire, rushing in. "Evelyn—every workstation in the building is infected. IT's panicking."
Evelyn's mind was already racing. She understood enough security to know this was beyond the usual engineering team's skill set. Programming, sure—they had that. But this? This was a different battlefield.
"Get Mike in here," she said, standing.
When the department heads arrived, she could read the same thing on each of their faces—panic. And underneath it, the fear that if they couldn't stop this, tomorrow morning's news cycle would have "Local Tech Darling Hacked" splashed across every business feed.