Sunday evening settled over Cambridge with a restless chill, the kind that crept into your bones and made every breath feel heavier. The sort of cold that whispered reminders of everything you hadn't accomplished yet, everything slipping through your fingers. Derek pulled his thin jacket tighter around himself as he walked briskly down the street, his footsteps sharp against the pavement. The lamps overhead cast long, stretched shadows behind him, transforming the sidewalk into a dim corridor leading him toward one thing, and one thing only—the electronics store on Elm Street.
If he wanted Pandora to continue running without risk, he needed his own system. Not a school computer. Not a borrowed device. Something clean. Something hidden. Something he could make disappear without a trace.
A fortress.
A ghost.
The automatic doors slid open with a hiss as he stepped inside. The fluorescent lights blasted down from above, harsh and clinical, almost painful after the darkening sky outside. The smell of plastic and metal filled the air. Rows upon rows of laptops stood on display tables like polished soldiers waiting to be chosen.
Derek moved straight toward the performance section.
He didn't browse.
He didn't hesitate.
He came here knowing exactly what he wanted.
The MSI Venture 16.
There it sat—sleek, black, minimalistic yet powerful, with the faint glow of its branding visible beneath the overhead lights. A device built for heavy computation, multitasking, and high-speed performance. To anyone else, it was a high-end laptop. To Derek, it was the perfect shell, the vessel that would carry Pandora into the world.
Core Ultra 9 processor.
1TB SSD.
Customizable BIOS.
Hardware he could bend, warp, and twist into invisibility with the right configuration.
He checked the price.
$1100.99.
His stomach knotted. The number hit him like a slap. That was almost everything he had left in the world, money he could not easily replace—not when his bank balance was already scraping the bottom.
But this wasn't a luxury.
This wasn't optional.
This was an investment in the only future still open to him.
"I'll take this one," he said.
The employee—a guy in his late twenties with thick glasses and a friendly smile—scanned the box and nodded. "Nice choice. Powerful machine."
If only he knew just how powerful it was about to become.
The receipt printed with a whir, and Derek took the paper bag carefully, almost reverently. He thanked the cashier in a whisper and left the store, the cold air slapping him again as he stepped onto the street.
His hands trembled slightly—not from the cold, but from the realization that he had just crossed a line. There was no turning back now. Pandora needed a home, and he had bought it one.
He walked all the way back to his dorm without stopping, climbing the stairs two at a time until he reached his tiny room. Once inside, he locked the door, pulled the blinds down, and set the laptop on his desk like it was something sacred.
He plugged it in and opened the lid.
The next several hours passed in silence—only the faint hum of the laptop and Derek's steady, controlled breathing filled the room. He worked with surgical precision, fingers moving quickly across the keyboard.
He scrubbed the BIOS.
Locked the firmware.
Cleared the system kernel.
Replaced it with a customized build.
Layer upon layer of encryption followed—crisscrossing, overlapping, recursive.
Firewalls.
Virtualization environments.
Dead-end network routes funneling through abandoned servers on three continents.
Hidden partitions buried so deep they might as well have been phantom limbs.
Every few minutes, he paused, listening for footsteps in the hallway. For voices. For anything that suggested someone might approach. But no one came. His dorm remained still, quiet as a tomb.
It was well past midnight by the time he leaned back, rubbing his tired eyes.
The device in front of him was no ordinary laptop anymore.
It was a ghost.
Invisible.
Untouchable.
Untraceable.
Perfect.
When dawn crept into the sky, coloring it in shades of pale gold and grey, Derek was still awake. His fingers were stiff, his eyelids heavy, but his mind was sharp, buzzing.
He slid the 1-terabyte thumb drive into the port.
Pandora's interface bloomed onto the screen like a deity rising from slumber. Cold. Efficient. Ancient yet futuristic all at once. It wasn't just a program. It felt like something alive.
This was it.
He logged into one of his shell company accounts—one of more than thirty scattered across the globe—and transferred the last of his usable funds.
$622.59.
Almost nothing in the world of finance.
Everything to him.
His heart hammered slowly, steadily, like the ticking of a countdown.
This day would decide everything.
If Pandora succeeded again, then Harvard became optional. The future became mutable. Derek Morgan could choose his path instead of being shoved down one.
If it failed…
He didn't want to think about that.
Not now.
He clicked Start Algorithm.
The screen flickered.
The numbers shifted.
And Pandora began.
The first ten-minute cycle returned a 0.9% gain.
Then 1%.
Then 1.5%.
A strange 0.003% followed—a minuscule return, barely a breath—but it was still profit.
Still upward.
Then Pandora surged again with 1.5%.
Then 0.5%.
Then 0.8%.
The hours blurred.
Students passed by outside his door, laughing, gossiping, living their normal collegiate lives. Someone played music down the hall. Someone shouted about a test. Someone slammed a door.
But Derek didn't move.
Didn't blink.
Barely breathed.
Pandora was adapting.
It flowed through the market like water.
It learned with every fluctuation.
It predicted shifts before they occurred.
It reacted before trends even formed.
It was beautiful.
When 24 hours finally closed and the last interval completed, Derek leaned back slowly, every nerve taut as he checked the final result.
Initial Investment: $622.59
Total Return: 893.23%
Profit: $5,561.60
Final Balance: $6,184.19
For a long moment, he didn't speak.
Then—very quietly—he whispered:
"…It's real."
His hands trembled. A laugh nearly escaped him. He covered his mouth, stunned.
This wasn't luck.
This wasn't a fluke.
This wasn't a glitch.
This was destiny.
He wasn't a starving student anymore.
He wasn't powerless.
He wasn't trapped.
He was standing at the threshold of something monumental.
Pandora wasn't just a tool—it was a gateway.
His lips curled into a slow, rare grin—
Knock. Knock.
The sound cut through the air like a blade.
Derek froze.
His head snapped toward the door. No one visited him. No one checked on him. No one cared enough to knock—
Except…
He unlocked the door and pulled it open.
Veronica stood there.
Blonde hair perfectly brushed.
Blue eyes sharp, expectant.
Pretty enough to fool the old Derek.
The naive Derek.
The Derek who hadn't yet realized that destiny didn't reward the soft or the sentimental.
The same girl who dumped him days ago for someone wealthier. Someone "more promising."
All the light inside Derek dimmed in an instant.
The electric thrill pumping through his veins vanished.
His expression cooled into blank stone as he stared at her.
Veronica opened her mouth slightly, surprised he wasn't already begging, apologizing, or falling apart.
But Derek simply looked at her—cold, distant, unreachable.
And the air between them thickened into something sharp enough to bleed.