Chapter 63: Initiation
2 Days Later
The compound buzzed with movement—half chaos, half progress.
Jack dropped the last monitor onto the sleek black desk, catching his breath. "This one’s yours, Anwar. Don’t fry it."
Anwar, a scrawny intern with thick glasses and a sarcastic mouth, saluted like a soldier. "Yes, sir. I only fry CPUs on Sundays."
Richard grunted, arms deep in cable management hell. "If you fry anything, it’s coming out of your paycheck. Which, let me remind you, is still zero."
The kid grinned and wheeled the chair around to start booting up.
Rows of desks filled the long glass-paneled wing, the kind of floor you’d expect in a Silicon Valley tech temple—if Silicon Valley had guts. Dozens of PCs, cooled by humming liquid systems, each one linked into a unified mesh. The hum of power was a kind of music. The kind that promised war, innovation, and late-night ramen.
"Where’s the SATA cable?" Jack asked, digging through a crate.
"Left box. Under the GPU brackets." Richard didn’t even look.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "You memorized our hardware stockpile?"
"You just have ," Richard said. "When you’ve got ten builds and no backups, you get good at knowing where your parts are."