Ugh, what a night. The rain outside tasted as nasty as Jack Lockwood's mood. He was twenty-seven and technically a VP, but he walked with a heavy slump that totally contradicted his expensive suit. He was numb—his mind was just replaying the smug face of the guy who had just stolen the huge infrastructure deal he'd spent six solid years working on.
That promotion was a joke! A velvet cage, really. He chased meritocracy to the finish line, only to find the gate locked by inherited privilege. He had no name, no entry, and no chance. It was so unfair! He'd tried to drown his humiliation at the bar with way too much whisky. Now the booze was just a heavy, suffocating blanket, leaving him totally isolated in the middle of a wide, wet avenue. He felt this deep, corrosive despair—realizing his ambition had only made him the best-paid servant in the room.
Suddenly, the quiet was destroyed by a deafening roar. A truck horn went off—it felt like a drill right through his skull! Then came the tearing screech of tires and a blinding, brutal flash of white light. BAM!
There was no time for fear, just a massive, immediate crash. His whole self—the electric core of his being—just flew away into a silent, cold void. His last thought? Six years wasted. That was his final anchor.
Then, a searing electric shock! The darkness was gone, replaced by a blinding, metallic white.
Jack gasped, a strangled, tearing noise from a throat that wasn't his. The air tasted stale and metallic, heavy with the ghosts of cheap liquor. He checked his hand. Holy cow! It was impossibly young, soft, and uncalloused. Pure panic sliced through the haze of whatever just happened.
The name that slammed into his mind wasn't Jack Lockwood. It was Andy Stark.
The fusion was instant and violent. Jack Lockwood's cold, cutthroat financial genius mixed right in with Andy Stark's pampered privilege and crushing family grief. The body was weak and poisoned, but the mind? It was now a terrifyingly sharp, fused weapon.
He dragged himself into a sitting position. He was in a fancy, dark-wood study—a room built for contemplating power. He looked at the desk. Next to three empty bottles (the grim evidence of the original Andy's grief-induced overdose) was a huge monitor. And, holy smokes, that screen was a chaotic mess of RED!
The company logo—the stylized bronze column of the Stark Group—sat next to a stock number flashing down over 15% in one single day. Headlines screamed: 'STARK GROUP OWES $1.5 TRILLION!' "Trillion-Dollar Meltdown," "Private Banks Demand Repayment." The charts were a vertical cliff dive. This wasn't a failure; this was the collapse of an empire! No wonder the original Andy had given up.
Then something bizarre happened.
Right over the blinking red chart, a crisp, blue holographic text field flashed in the corner of his internal vision. It was like an augmented reality overlay accessible only to him—a cheat code!
— System Initialization Complete — — Core Protocol: Financial Analysis Engine — — Status: Active —
The prompt vanished, but the pressure behind his eyes was real. He realized he—now Andy Stark—had inherited a debt bigger than some sovereign nations and a six-month fuse held by the grace of the US government.
He pushed himself to his feet. He had his name, his background, and his tool. He had six months to save a company he had just been murdered into, or he'd die again under the weight of someone else's ruin. The time for sorrow or comprehension was over. The game was officially on!