Simon Keaton
The city sprawls below my office window, a glittering circuit board of light and ambition. A thousand stories playing out in a million windows. My story is in the corner office of the tallest building, the one with bulletproof glass and a view that costs more than most countries’ GDP. I am the man who built the unbreachable fortress. Keaton Security. My name is a synonym for digital armor.
It’s a lie.
Every fortress has a flaw. Mine is a ghost shaped like a woman I haven’t spoken to in two thousand one hundred and ninety days.
My desk is a slab of polished chrome, empty except for a single terminal. I run my company from the shadows, through proxies and encrypted channels. Power is quietest when it’s invisible.
“Mr. Keaton?” My assistant’s voice, filtered through the desk’s discreet speaker. “Your car is ready. The flight to Geneva is wheels up in ninety minutes.”
“Cancel it,” I say without turning from the window.
“Sir? The acquisitions deal…”
“The deal can wait. Clear my schedule. Indefinitely.”
“Of course, sir.”
The silence returns, thick and heavy. I’ve cultivated this silence for six years. It’s my penance. My cage.
Then, a sound cuts through it. A soft, three note chime.
It doesn’t come from my corporate systems. It comes from a small, black server humming quietly in a climate controlled vault behind a false wall in my office. A machine that is not on any network. A digital island.
No one has heard that sound in six years. Except me.
My heart, a sluggish and disciplined muscle, gives a hard, painful kick against my ribs. I walk to the wall, press my palm against a seamless panel. It slides open, revealing the vault. I enter the server’s interface. No sleek graphics. Just raw, green text on a black screen. A command prompt blinks, waiting.
This is a relic. The last piece of Genesis. The last piece of us.
I type a single command.
> show alert
The system replies instantly.
> CERBERUS PROTOCOL TRIGGERED. > SOURCE: UNKNOWN. > TARGET: ELYSIAN CORE ARCHITECTURE. > INTRUSION SIGNATURE: PROMETHEUS PROBE.
I stare at the words. Prometheus. Our name for our original code. The beautiful, impossible thing we created in a warehouse that smelled of cold pizza and ozone.
Cerberus was the digital watchdog I coded into its deepest layers, a last resort. A silent guardian only I knew how to wake. It was meant to be a failsafe against corporate espionage. Against Marcus Hale.
But it was never meant to be used. Because the only way to bypass Georgia’s modern defenses and trigger this specific, ancient alarm is to know the original system’s architecture. To know its secrets. Its soul.
Someone is trying to break into her house using the blueprints I helped draw.
My hands are steady on the keyboard, but a cold fire is spreading through my veins. I run a trace. The signal is a ghost, bouncing across the globe, a professional disappearing act. But they left footprints. Faint ones. The probe wasn’t a brute force attack. It was exploratory. Elegant. It moved through her outer defenses with an intimate knowledge of how she thinks. How she builds.
They were looking for flaws in the foundation. My foundation.
The chime was a warning. A shot across the bow. They’re coming for her. For Elysian. And her team, no matter how good, will be looking for a threat coming through the front door. They won’t see the one that’s already in the walls.
Six years. Six years of watching her from a distance. I’ve seen every public filing, read every article, tracked every stock fluctuation of her company. I watched her take the ashes of Genesis and build an empire. I watched her become a recluse, a ghost in her own machine. Each success was a victory. Each report of her isolation was a fresh twist of the knife.
I see her face from that last day. The cold, broken certainty in her eyes as she looked at the screen. The evidence was perfect. Irrefutable. A fifty million dollar deposit in my name. A data transfer from my terminal. A flawless frame.
“You just… you have to trust me,” I’d whispered.
She laughed. That sound, brittle and hollow, still echoes in my quietest moments.
I could have fought it. I could have told her the truth. I could have shown her how our CFO, the man she saw as a father figure, Arthur Finch, had orchestrated the whole thing.
He’d called me into his office an hour before she found out. He showed me a different set of files. Doctored emails. Falsified reports. A neat little package that proved Georgia had been selling trade secrets to a foreign power. It was absurd, laughable, but it was just plausible enough to ruin her. To end her career before it began.
“She’s a genius, Simon,” Arthur had said, his voice dripping with paternal concern. “But she’s fragile. An accusation like this, even if it’s false, will shatter her. The company will collapse. But you… you’re a fighter. You can weather a scandal. Take the hit. Disappear. Let her believe you’re a monster. Let her use that anger to build something indestructible. Protect her.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a checkmate. My reputation, or her future. It was never a choice.
So I walked away. I let her hate me. It was the only way to save her.
The money Arthur used to frame me, the fifty million, I funneled it back. Anonymously. It became the seed capital for Keaton Security. I built my own empire on the ashes of my name. I became the monster she needed me to be. All of it, every sleepless night, every ruthless deal, was for her. To build a shield she never knew she had.
And now, the real threat is finally showing its face.
This attacker is too good. They move like a state sponsored entity. They want Elysian, and they won’t stop until they have it. Or until they’ve erased the person who built it.
My silence is no longer a shield. It’s a liability.
I look at the name on the screen. ELYSIAN. Her life’s work. Of course that’s what she called it. She was always trying to build paradise. A world without pain. A world without betrayal.
I protected her from a lie for six years. Now I have to protect her from the truth.
My finger hovers over the keyboard. There’s a backdoor in the Cerberus protocol. A way for me to send a single, untraceable message to her system. A warning. A name. Just one word: Arthur.
But she wouldn’t believe it. Data is her god, and the data says I’m the traitor. A cryptic message from a ghost would be dismissed as another attack. It would only make her more vulnerable.
There is only one way.
Not data. Not code.
Me.
I have to go to her. I have to stand in front of her and take whatever she throws at me. Her rage, her hatred, her security team. It doesn’t matter. I have to make her listen.
I stand up, the city lights reflecting in my eyes. The master of an empty kingdom. For six years, my world has been a fortress of chrome and glass and regret. Tonight, I’m breaking out.
I pick up my phone. It rings once before my head of operations answers.
“Alex,” I say, my voice calm, level. The voice I use when I’m about to go to war. “I need a location. A private estate. Her name is Georgia Hale.”
There’s a pause. He knows that name. The whole world knows that name. And he knows my unspoken rule. We never, ever, touch her orbit.
“Sir?”
“You have five minutes.”
I end the call. The echo of the chime from my private server seems to hang in the air. A bell tolling across six years of silence. She’s going to see me as the ghost who ruined her life.
Let her. The most important thing is that I get there before the real monsters do.
