Detroit didn't smell like the American Dream.
In the basement of a condemned building on 8th Street, it smelled like mildew, stale instant coffee, and the metallic tang of an overheating CPU.
Lucas Vance sat hunched over a folding table. He wore a hoodie that had been gray three years ago. Now, it was the color of dirty pavement.
He shivered. The heating had been cut off two days ago.
But Lucas didn't feel the cold. Not really.
His eyes were locked onto a cracked 24-inch monitor. The screen was a waterfall of green and red text, scrolling faster than a human eye should be able to track.
To anyone else, it was chaos. To Lucas, it was a symphony.
Lucas had mild Asperger's. He didn't understand people. He didn't understand why they lied, why they hugged, or why they bought things they couldn't afford.
But numbers? Numbers never lied. Numbers were pure.
And right now, the numbers were screaming.
***
On the corner of his screen, a muted video window was playing a broadcast from CNBC.
A man in a bespoke Italian suit was smiling. His teeth were too white. His tan was too perfect.
Julian Sterling. CEO of Sterling Capital. The God of Wall Street.
" The market is a precise instrument," Sterling told the interviewer, checking his Patek Philippe watch. "Our algorithm, *Titan*, creates a perfectly efficient ecosystem. There is no luck involved. Only superior intellect."
Lucas stared at the pixelated face of Julian Sterling.
"Superior intellect," Lucas whispered. His voice was raspy from disuse.
He looked down at his own hands. They were thin, pale, and trembling slightly. Not from fear. From adrenaline.
He tapped the 'Enter' key.
The code on his screen shifted. He wasn't looking at the front end of the stock market. He was tunneling through a back door he'd spent six months digging.
He was inside the data stream of Sterling Capital's flagship fund.
***
Lucas wasn't looking for money. He was looking for a mistake.
For the last three hours, he had noticed a anomaly. A "Ghost Pattern."
Every time the volatility index on the Asian markets dipped by exactly 0.04%, Sterling's *Titan* algorithm hesitated.
It was a micro-second delay. A hiccup.
To a normal trader, a micro-second is nothing. To a High-Frequency Trading (HFT) bot, a micro-second is an eternity.
"Come on," Lucas muttered, his fingers flying across the cheap, sticky keyboard. "Show me the logic."
He isolated the code block. He stripped away the encryption layers.
There it was.
A rounding error.
Because Sterling Capital was so arrogant, so sure of their dominance, they had optimized their code for speed, ignoring a tiny floating-point variable in their risk management protocol.
It was a tiny crack in the dam.
But if you hit that crack with enough leverage...
***
Lucas stopped typing. The silence in the basement was deafening.
He did the mental math. He didn't need a calculator.
If he executed a short squeeze at exactly the moment the algorithm hiccuped, *Titan* wouldn't just lose money. It would panic. It would try to correct itself by selling more, driving the price down further, creating a feedback loop.
A death spiral.
Lucas leaned back in his squeaky plastic chair. He looked around his room.
A mattress on the floor. A bucket for the leak in the ceiling. A half-eaten bag of chips.
Total net worth: $14.50.
He looked back at the screen.
Estimated value of the exploit: **$1,200,000,000.**
One point two billion dollars.
***
On the screen, Julian Sterling was laughing at a joke the interviewer made. He looked like a king sitting on a throne of gold.
He had no idea that a rat in a Detroit basement had just found the fuse to his throne room.
Lucas felt a strange sensation in his chest. It wasn't greed. He didn't care about buying yachts or sports cars.
He imagined the look on Julian Sterling's face when the red candles started falling. When the "perfect ecosystem" collapsed.
Lucas smiled. It was a cold, sharp smile.
He reached for his phone—a burner with a cracked screen. He dialed a number he had memorized but never called.
It rang once.
"Who is this?" a female voice answered. Distorted. Suspicious.
"Elena," Lucas said. "Stop mining crypto for pennies. I found a whale."
"Lucas? You sound crazy."
"I found a kill switch for Sterling Capital."
Silence on the other end. Then, a sharp intake of breath.
"I'm listening."
Lucas looked at the numbers one last time. The green rain reflected in his dark pupils.
"Get the servers ready," Lucas said. "We're going hunting."
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