The backdoor into Aetherion's staging server was a silent, pulsing artery of data. From the sterile comfort of his penthouse apartment, a world away from their chaotic, hopeful workspace, Leo had a god's-eye view of their entire operation. He spent the next forty-eight hours not acting, but observing. He watched their coders push updates, saw their project managers shift timelines, and read their internal chat logs, all with the dispassionate focus of a biologist studying a microbe.
He learned their rhythms, their coding style, their blind spots. Their lead programmer, a prodigy named Kenji Tanaka, was brilliant but arrogant, favoring complex, elegant code that was difficult for his juniors to debug. Their security chief was overworked, constantly patching external threats while ignoring the possibility of an internal one. The company's culture of trust was its greatest vulnerability.
The time to act was 3:00 a.m. on a Thursday, when server activity was at its lowest and the only person on duty was a junior night-shift operator. Leo opened the connection, his Signatory Pen a silent key to their kingdom.
His objective was not to destroy, but to corrupt. A simple crash would be traced back to an external attack. He needed to plant a seed of doubt, a flaw so subtle, so deeply embedded, that it would look like their own creation.
He located the core of the 'Prometheus' AI—its heuristic learning module. This was the genius of their system, the part that allowed it to learn and adapt to new logistics data with breathtaking speed. And it was here he would plant his poison.
He didn't write a virus. He wrote a single, elegant, and utterly malicious line of code. He used his Data Mirage skill not to fabricate data, but to fabricate a programming style, perfectly mimicking Kenji Tanaka's complex and slightly arrogant syntax.
The line of code was a phantom variable. It was designed to do nothing 99.9% of the time. But on a random, intermittent basis, when the AI was processing a specific type of shipping data, it would introduce a rounding error of 0.05% into the final calculation.
It was nothing. A ghost in the machine. A tiny, insignificant flaw that would be dismissed as a random glitch, a data anomaly, a statistical fluctuation.
But over thousands of calculations, a 0.05% error would compound. It would create phantom shipping containers. It would make profitable routes appear loss-making. It would slowly, imperceptibly, make their perfect, revolutionary AI a liar. It would erode the single most valuable asset Aetherion possessed: trust in their own data.
He compiled the code, inserted it deep within the latest alpha build, and then used his access to mark the update as having been authored and approved by Kenji himself two days prior. He wiped his tracks, collapsed the backdoor, and logged out. The entire operation took seven minutes. The phantom was in the machine.
His System glowed with a notification of a successful, high-skill maneuver.
[Sub-Quest Complete: The Digital Seed] [You have successfully planted a logic bomb designed for maximum long-term psychological and operational damage, while maintaining perfect plausible deniability.] [Skill Progression: Corporate Espionage (Lv. 1) → (Lv. 2)] [New Effect: Your ability to mimic digital signatures and mask intrusions is now significantly enhanced.]
Leo leaned back, the city lights reflecting in his calm, unreadable eyes. The first part of the mission was complete. He had poisoned the well. Now, it was time to convince everyone that the water had been toxic all along, and that the only solution was to abandon it entirely.