Georgia Hale
Six years ago.
The world smells like cold pizza and electricity. It’s three in the morning. Our world is a single room, a converted warehouse loft with exposed brick and enough server racks to power a small city. This is Genesis.
Our Eden.
“It’s sentient,” Simon says, his voice a low murmur beside me. “I swear to god, El, it’s learning.”
I don’t look away from the lines of code scrolling across my screen. A cascade of green and white symbols that feel more like poetry than logic. “Don’t be dramatic. It’s a predictive analytics engine. It’s not going to ask for voting rights.”
I feel his grin more than I see it. His arm snakes around my waist, pulling me back against his chest. He rests his chin on my shoulder, his warmth seeping through my thin t-shirt. “But what if it did? What if Prometheus actually came alive?”
Prometheus. That’s what he calls our core code. The part of the system that could map a person’s digital footprint and predict their next move. It was supposed to revolutionize online security.
“If it comes alive,” I say, leaning my head back against his, “we’ll teach it to make better coffee. This stuff tastes like battery acid.”
He laughs, a sound that vibrates through my whole body. “You’re so pragmatic. It’s one of the top five things I love about you.”
“Only top five?” I arch an eyebrow, finally turning to look at him. His face is illuminated by the glow of the monitor. Dark hair falling across his forehead, eyes so bright with intelligence and something else, something just for me, that it still makes my breath catch.
“Well, there’s your brain. The way you look when you’re solving an impossible problem. The fact you can quote every line from Blade Runner. Your very questionable taste in music,” he says, ticking them off on his fingers.
“My taste in music is impeccable.”
“It’s not. But I love it anyway. And then there’s this.” His thumb gently traces my bottom lip. My own private algorithm goes haywire. My heart rate spikes. My skin temperature rises. All the biological data points of being hopelessly, completely in love.
He leans in and kisses me, slow and deep. It tastes like stale coffee and the future. A future so bright it’s blinding. When he pulls away, his eyes are serious.
“The final build is compiling,” he whispers. “It’s done, Georgia. We did it.”
“We’re close,” I correct, my voice softer than I intend.
“We’re there. Tomorrow we lock the code. Next week, we show it to the world. And Marcus Hale can kiss our collective, brilliant asses.”
Marcus Hale. Our competitor. A man with more money than sense and a team of coders who couldn't innovate their way out of a paper bag. He’d been trying to poach us for months.
“I’d pay to see that,” I murmur.
“We won’t have to. We’ll be so far ahead of him he’ll be a speck in our rearview mirror.” He kisses my forehead. “Get some sleep. We have a universe to launch tomorrow.”
I don’t sleep. I stay up, watching the progress bar on the final compilation. Watching our dream become a reality. I trust him. I trust him with my code, with my company, with my heart. The trust is absolute. A constant variable in the chaotic equation of my life.
That is my first mistake.
Two days later, the universe ends.
It doesn’t end with a bang. It ends with the cheerful ping of an incoming email. I’m at my terminal, running final security checks. Simon is in a meeting with our patent lawyers. The subject line is from a friend at a tech blog. ‘Congrats on the acquisition?’
My fingers freeze over the keyboard.
Acquisition? We haven’t been acquired. We haven’t even launched.
I open the email. There’s a link. A press release from Hale Industries.
‘Hale Industries Acquires Groundbreaking Predictive Technology, Set to Unveil Flagship Product ‘Oracle’.’
My blood runs cold. I read the product description. It’s not similar to our work. It’s not inspired by it. It’s a word for word lift of the abstract from our patent application. It’s Prometheus.
“No.” The word is a crack in the silence of the office.
It has to be a lie. A scare tactic. Marcus is arrogant, but he’s not stupid enough to claim something he doesn’t have.
Unless he has it.
My hands fly across the keys. My mind is a steel trap, slamming shut on every emotion except cold, hard logic. Accessing the server logs. Checking the firewalls. Everything is clean. Too clean.
No breach. No forced entry. No alarms tripped.
It wasn’t taken from the outside.
It was given from the inside.
My search deepens. I peel back layers of encrypted logs, using the backdoors only Simon and I know exist. My heart is a frantic, panicked drum against my ribs.
And then I find it. A single data transfer. Three a.m. the night before last. While I was asleep, dreaming of our future. A compressed file, containing the entire source code for Prometheus. Sent from an internal terminal. Masked. Rerouted. But not good enough to hide from me.
I run the final trace. My fingers tremble.
The screen flashes with the origin point. The terminal’s unique identifier.
JKeaton_01.
Simon’s machine.
For a moment, I just stare. My brain refuses to connect the dots. It’s a frame job. It has to be. Someone spoofed his ID. Someone got his credentials.
I keep digging. I need more data. I hack into our financial servers. Another backdoor, this one I built myself, just in case. I search for any unusual activity. Anything linked to Simon.
Something pings. A shell corporation I’ve never heard of. A transaction was processed yesterday. A transfer from an untraceable account based in the Cayman Islands. A deposit.
Fifty million dollars.
The beneficiary account is registered to one person.
Simon Keaton.
The data is clear. The evidence is irrefutable. My algorithm, my logic, my own two eyes are telling me a truth so monstrous I can’t breathe.
The man I love sold our dream. He sold our future. He sold me.
The door to the office clicks open.
It’s him. He’s smiling, holding two cups of coffee. The same way he does every morning. He looks exactly the same. Nothing in his face betrays the cataclysmic betrayal he just unleashed.
“Hey,” he says, his smile widening. “Lawyers are handled. The patents are ironclad. You are officially looking at the co-founder of the most valuable piece of intellectual property on the planet.”
My face is a mask. I don’t move. I don’t speak. I just watch him.
His smile falters. “El? What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I have,” I say, my voice a hollowed out version of itself. “My own.”
I turn my monitor so he can see it. The bank statement is on the screen. The fifty million dollar deposit glowing in the dim light.
He puts the coffees down. He walks over. He looks at the screen. The color drains from his face. “What is this?”
“I think you know,” I say. My voice is steady. Frighteningly steady. The grief is so large it has burned away all the tears, all the anger. All that’s left is a core of frozen certainty.
“No. I have no idea what this is. This is a joke, right?” He looks at me, his eyes wide with a confusion that would seem genuine if I didn’t know better. If I didn't have the data.
“It’s not a joke.” I click a key. The screen changes to the Hale Industries press release. “This isn’t a joke either, is it? ‘Oracle.’ Did you come up with that name, or did Marcus?”
He reads it. He shakes his head, stepping back from the desk as if it’s radioactive. “No. Georgia, no. This is impossible. Someone stole it.”
“Yes,” I say, standing up. We’re facing each other across the space that used to be our shared world. “They did. The transfer came from your terminal, Simon. The money went to your account. Do you see the problem here? Do you see the data?”
“The data is wrong! It’s forged! It has to be!” He runs a hand through his hair, his composure finally cracking. “Georgia, you have to believe me. I would never. We built this together.”
“Yes, we did. Which makes it so much easier for one person to sell out the other.”
“Why would I do that?” he pleads, taking a step toward me. “Fifty million? Our company is going to be worth billions! It makes no sense!”
“Maybe you got scared. Maybe you wanted a sure thing. Maybe you were lying about everything, all of it, from the very beginning.” The words fall like shards of ice.
He stops. He looks at me. And in his eyes, I see something shift. The panic recedes, replaced by a strange, bleak resignation. It’s the look of a man who knows he’s been perfectly trapped.
“Don’t say that,” he says, his voice quiet. “Don’t you ever say that.”
“Give me a reason not to.” I challenge him. “Give me one piece of data to contradict what I’m seeing.”
He just stares at me. He opens his mouth, then closes it. He can’t. He has nothing. The evidence is perfect. The frame is flawless.
“I can’t,” he whispers. “You just… you have to trust me.”
I laugh. It’s a terrible sound. Brittle and broken. “Trust? Trust is a variable I’ve eliminated from the equation. All I had was you. Your word. Your promises. They were my constants. And they were all corrupt.”
His face hardens. “If you think that, then there’s nothing I can say.”
“No,” I agree. “There isn’t.”
The silence stretches. It’s filled with the ghosts of every late night, every shared dream, every kiss.
“Get out,” I say. The words are calm. Final.
“Georgia.”
“Get out of my company. Get out of my life.”
He looks at me for a long moment, his expression unreadable. It’s not guilt. It’s not anger. It’s something else. Something that looks almost like pity. As if I’m the one who is lost.
Then he turns. He walks to the door without another word. He doesn’t look back.
The door closes behind him.
I am alone.
I stand there for an hour. Maybe two. Time has ceased to have meaning. I walk over to the whiteboard. It’s covered in our handwriting. Flowcharts, equations, plans for the future. ‘Genesis Launch Party.’ ‘Buy Champagne.’
His name is next to mine everywhere. Georgia & Simon.
I pick up a dry erase marker. I walk back to my terminal, to the glowing screen with the evidence of his betrayal. My hand is steady now. My purpose is clear.
He took my heart. He took my trust. He took our company.
I will not let him take my work.
I sit down. I open a new file. Blank. Clean. A fresh start. I will build something new. Something better. Something that can never be broken or betrayed.
Something that can see a fracture like this coming, and protect against it. Something that can find the perfect match, with perfect certainty, so no one ever has to feel this way again.
My fingers begin to move across the keyboard. The first lines of a new code appear on the screen. The first lines of Elysian.
