Story code: ST-001521
Part 3: Schedule B
Leo pushed off the front tire, lunging into the open cabin of the Corolla. The air inside smelled of stale coffee and melting plastic. His fingers scrambled blindly over the passenger seat, closing around the rubberized edges of his diagnostic tablet. Beneath it lay the thick, stapled stack of legal paper he had printed out hours ago. He grabbed both, clutching them tightly to his chest as he threw himself backward out of the car.
He hit the driveway hard, ignoring the sharp scrape of asphalt against his elbows. Staying low, he crab-walked across the eight feet of exposed ground toward the limestone pillar.
The vibrant green laser instantly snapped onto his chest, tracking his desperate crawl with terrifying precision.
“Do not touch that panel!” Marcus’s voice boomed through the intercom, shedding the last of its mechanical composure. The audio peaked, distorting into a frantic, high-pitched demand.
Leo slammed his back against the cold limestone. He jammed the USB-C cable into the metal override port, his hands shaking so violently he chipped the plastic casing. He balanced the tablet on his knee, his thumbs flying over the glass screen to initiate the handshake protocol.
“It is not a worm!” Leo screamed back, his throat raw. “The compile is clean! I am pushing the memory allocation now!”
“The background traffic flagged at one-forty-five AM!” Marcus shouted, his words echoing off the dark canyon walls. “I saw the server logs! You downloaded a massive data package while the compile was running! You are trying to exfiltrate the proprietary architecture before you destroy the core! Step away from the terminal!”
Leo’s thumbs froze over the glowing digital keyboard. The loading bar on the terminal window reflected in his wide, bloodshot eyes.
*One-forty-five AM. A massive data package.*
He had not downloaded proprietary architecture. While waiting for a massive rendering bottleneck to clear in the staging environment, he had used his admin credentials to poke around the company’s secure legal directory. He had just been looking for the updated timeline on the upcoming IPO.
Leo looked down at the crumpled stack of papers he had dragged with him, currently pinned between his thigh and the wet grass at the base of the pillar. The neon yellow highlighter he had used back in the server room still bled brightly through the thin printer paper.
He looked up at the balcony. The imposing silhouette of his boss stood rigidly in the halogen glare. The man who had convinced him to work eighty-hour weeks for half of a competitive market salary, promising that they would change the world together. Promising that the equity would make them both kings.
“You didn’t see a worm,” Leo whispered.
The realization hit him like a physical blow, colder and sharper than the mountain air. He slowly lowered the tablet. He raised his voice over the dying hiss of the Corolla’s radiator.
“You saw what directory I accessed!”
“Step away from the gate!” Marcus yelled.
“You checked the legal server logs!” Leo shouted, the crushing exhaustion instantly vaporized by a hot, blinding wave of absolute betrayal. He ignored the tablet entirely. He reached down toward his thigh, his right hand moving swiftly toward the folded bundle of paper.
“Keep your hands where I can see them!” Marcus screamed. The green laser frantically cut across Leo’s collarbone, dropping down toward his moving arm. “Do not reach for anything! I swear to God, Leo, if you pull a weapon-”
“A weapon?” Leo snarled, his fingers closing around the thick document. He yanked it upward into the blinding light.
The canyon erupted.
A brilliant yellow muzzle flash strobed from the second-story balcony. The deafening, concussive crack of the rifle shot hit Leo a split-second before the gravel beside his right knee violently exploded.
Sharp fragments of crushed stone and hot asphalt tore through the denim of his jeans, slicing into his calf. Leo cried out, collapsing sideways against the limestone pillar. His ears rang with a high-pitched, agonizing squeal, completely drowning out the ambient hum of the security gate. He curled into a tight ball on the driveway, gasping for air, clutching his bleeding leg.
The heavy document slipped from his grip, sprawling open on the brightly lit asphalt.
The intercom hissed with the sound of rapid, panicked breathing. Marcus had lost his nerve. Confronted with a threat that wasn’t digital, he had pulled the trigger in pure, terrified reflex.
Slowly, shaking uncontrollably, Leo forced himself up onto his good knee. He ignored the green laser sight that was now darting erratically across the driveway, trembling violently with the shooter’s unsteady hands.
Leo reached out and picked up the document. He held it high above his head, straight into the aggressive glare of the stadium halogens, forcing Marcus to look at it through the magnified optic of his rifle.
“It is paper, Marcus!” Leo screamed, his voice breaking with fury. “Securities and Exchange Commission! Form S-1 Registration Statement!”
The green dot abruptly stopped moving. It hovered dead center on the thick stack of paper. The bright yellow highlighter marks were clearly visible under the beam, illuminating a dense grid of financial data on the page.
“Page forty-two!” Leo shouted, tears of pain blurring his vision. “Schedule B! The capitalization table reorganization! I read it!”
Silence hung over the driveway, heavy and absolute.
“You diluted the Series A pool,” Leo spat, glaring up at the dark, motionless figure on the balcony. “You issued a ten-thousand-to-one reverse split on employee equity, and then carved out a new class of preferred shares just for yourself. Five years of my life. Millions of lines of code. And you reduced my ownership to zero-point-zero-zero-one percent.”
The green laser began to shake violently on the paper.
“There is no polymorphic worm!” Leo yelled, pointing down at the diagnostic tablet still connected to the gate. “The compile is real! But you triggered the lockdown anyway. Because when you saw me access the IPO filing at one-forty-five, you realized I finally knew the truth.”
Leo dropped the document onto the gravel. It landed heavily, the highlighted cap table fully exposed to the sterile white light.
“You didn’t lock down the compound to protect the network from my code,” Leo said, his chest heaving as he stared down the barrel of the rifle. “You thought I was coming up here to kill you.”
The intercom remained open, broadcasting the amplified sound of Marcus’s ragged, unsteady breaths. The green laser drifted slowly off the papers, dropping aimlessly to the broken asphalt, stripped of all its former deadly precision.