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Despite Derek being exhausted, he couldn't sleep a single second. It wasn't the ache in his muscles from those embarrassing push-ups, nor was it the stiffness in his neck from spending half the previous day hunched over a library computer. It was something deeper, sharper—like a serrated hook tugging at the inside of his mind. The idea of money. Not ordinary money, but life-changing money. Freedom money. "I can make it this time," he whispered into the darkness. His whisper sounded like a vow.
He lay on his back staring at the faint glow of his alarm clock. 3:04 a.m.
His heart thumped with too much energy for a body that was all bones and underfed muscle. It didn't matter. His mind was awake, on fire, racing with formulas and projections. He kept seeing numbers, graphs, currency tickers. He thought about his old world, where he'd worked himself to the bone only to have corrupt men in suits steal everything and profit off his genius. But here—this time—he would not be the naive idealist. Here he would be the predator, not the prey.
By the time the clock hit 5:59, Derek was already sitting up in bed, eyes bloodshot but burning with determination.
6:00 a.m.
He kicked off the thin blanket and dropped to the floor. He forced himself to do push-ups—if he could call them that. His elbows shook violently, his arms felt like wet noodles, and every downward motion made his chest throb. He barely managed ten. Then he tried sit-ups. His spine cracked on the third one. He wheezed on the fifth. But he finished them anyway. His body was pathetic, but his will… that was iron.
After a long, warm shower that barely revived him, Derek dressed quickly and marched out of the dorm into the cold morning air. The world around him was just waking up—students dragging themselves to early classes, joggers running past with an energy he envied, delivery trucks unloading boxes for the campus stores. He walked straight to the ATM, staring at the screen as he inserted his card.
Balance: $150.00
That was all he had left.
All or nothing.
A man with nothing loses nothing by risking everything.
He pressed Deposit and slid in the last of his bills. Then he turned away from the machine, feeling both sick and liberated.
Today was the test.
Today he learned whether he would end up homeless… or wealthy.
The library was open early, but still mostly empty. The fluorescent lights were too bright, the silence too loud. Derek walked toward the corner where the same computer from yesterday sat waiting. He could almost smell the faint metallic tang of anxiety inside himself as he pulled out his 1-terabyte thumb drive.
"Let's begin," he murmured.
First came the security precautions. VPN rerouting. Network trajectory splitting. Virtual machine isolation. System masking. He layered them one after another like armor plates protecting a fragile but priceless jewel. Only when the system was sealed tight did he insert the drive.
Pandora's interface bloomed on the screen.
It felt like meeting a sleeping dragon.
He began with simulations. Errors flooded the display within seconds—broken prediction chains, unbalanced weight distributions, corrupted feedback loops. But Derek didn't panic. He expected this. Pandora had originally been built to predict large-scale events—terror attacks, earthquakes, chemical spills—not the millisecond-level chaos of global currency trades.
His fingers danced over the keyboard with surgical precision. He worked faster than his scrawny body looked capable of. Memory fragments from his past life surfaced: algorithms he'd built, patterns he'd studied, the theory behind chaotic market movement.
By 10:00 a.m., the simulations ran perfectly.
Now came the real test.
He wired $120 into one of the shell company accounts he created the previous day. It was a pitiful amount in the grand scheme of finance, but it was the difference between rent and starvation. He opened a brokerage account linked to the company, took one slow, deep breath, and hovered his finger over the launch button.
The foreign exchange market was a monster—a volatile creature that devoured the unprepared. It was hostile, unpredictable, ruthless.
"Perfect place for a baptism by fire," Derek whispered.
At exactly 11:00 a.m., he launched Pandora.
For a few minutes, nothing happened. Derek stared at the still values, wondering if he'd miscalculated or if the market simply had no openings.
Then the numbers flickered.
A tiny profit.
Then another.
+0.005%
+0.006%
+0.000158%
Small percentages—fractions of fractions—but always positive. Gains without losses. Predictive consistency. Derek leaned closer, eyes widening. Pandora wasn't trading randomly. It was stalking patterns, reading liquidity shifts, and slipping between market movements like a ghost.
Ten minutes in, his total gain hit +0.665%.
That alone made Derek's pulse spike. Most day traders didn't earn that in a week of careful trading.
Pandora was speeding up. Learning. Adapting. His screen became a blur of micro-trades, instant adjustments, rapid-fire predictions executed with mechanical precision. Every algorithmic module worked in unison—the volatility engine, the pattern recognition core, the prediction net, the adaptive logic processor.
Some intervals produced +0.223%.
Others jumped above +1.9%.
One spike hit +10.2% before stabilizing.
The profits added up at frightening speed.
Hours passed like minutes. Derek barely blinked, mesmerized as numbers grew, stabilized, multiplied. He raised his hands once to wipe sweat from his forehead, realizing he'd been leaning closer and closer to the screen.
When the six-hour timer dinged softly at 4:59 p.m., he almost flinched.
The final numbers appeared:
Initial Capital: $120.00
Final Balance: $1,842.59
Total Profit: $1,722.59
Overall Return: 1,435.49%
Derek's breath caught in his throat.
He stared at the screen, unblinking. His heart pounded so hard it almost hurt. The air seemed to thicken around him. A chill crept slowly, deliberately, down his spine.
This wasn't normal success.
This wasn't genius.
This was power.
Dangerous power.
Enough to bankrupt hedge funds.
Enough to destabilize markets.
Enough to draw the attention of governments.
"…Pandora," he whispered.
He had unleashed something world-changing.
Immediately, he began locking it down. Complex encryptions formed on the screen—patterns built from the infinite digits of Pi, woven into glitch-resistant security algorithms. Then he wrapped the entire program with a cryptographic structure modeled on the unsolved P vs NP problem. Pandora locked itself behind a door that not even a quantum computer could bypass.
Finally, Derek created what he called the Nuclear Sequence.
A self-destruct system.
If anyone—any hacker, government, intelligence agency, or financial titan—attempted unauthorized access, Pandora would fry everything. The storage drive. The computer it touched. The network trying to read it. All data corrupted, all code obliterated.
No second chances.
No recovery.
No mercy.
Only once Pandora was properly sealed did Derek eject the drive, wipe all traces of it from the library computer, and step out into the dimming evening light.
He felt suddenly small.
Not physically—he had always been small—but in the sense that he now held something far larger than himself. Something that could reshape his entire fate.
He slipped the thumb drive into his pocket and closed his fist around it.
Tomorrow, everything would change.