Story code: ST-000056
Part 2: The Logic Bomb
My fingers hovered over the glass screen of my phone. Every muscle in my forearms was wound tight, vibrating with an adrenaline spike that tasted like copper in the back of my mouth. A primal, destructive urge screamed at me to hurl the phone against the brick wall of the office, to smash the dual monitors, to yank the server racks out of their mounts down the hall and watch Julian’s stolen kingdom crash to the floor.
But that would be loud. That would be visible. That would get me escorted out by security tonight instead of tomorrow, leaving Julian as the undisputed victim and the sole proprietor of my genius.
I forced my thumb down to the digital keyboard. I typed slowly, making sure my autocorrect didn’t betray the shaking in my hands.
*On it. Just grabbing another coffee. Compiling the 5k rows now.*
I hit send. A moment later, the three little grey dots danced on the screen.
*You are a lifesaver, Marc. Drinks on me this weekend to celebrate.*
I flipped the phone face-down on the laminate desk. I couldn’t look at it anymore. I turned back to my monitor, the glaring white light of the development environment washing over my face. I had built the backdoor to the administrative server out of necessity three months ago because Julian kept forgetting the complex alphanumeric master passwords. He never knew I kept a master key embedded in a ghost directory.
I typed into the command line, bypassing the standard user interface, and slipped into the corporate mainframe’s administrative backend. If Julian had sold my AI to the executive board, I needed to see exactly how deep the roots went before I could figure out how to tear the tree down.
I navigated through the internal file structures, slipping past the corporate firewalls with the very encryption keys Julian had given me to “secure our startup.” I found a locked directory labeled *Project_Prometheus_Executive_Transition*. Inside was a subfolder titled *Legal_IP_Transfer*.
My throat went completely dry. I clicked the top PDF document.
It was a standard corporate Intellectual Property Assignment Agreement, dated three weeks ago. It stated that all code, architecture, and training data related to Project Prometheus were the sole property of the corporation, developed under standard work-for-hire provisions. At the bottom of the last page was Julian’s signature.
Right next to it was mine.
I leaned in, my nose almost touching the monitor glass. It was a perfect digital replica of my signature, lifted straight from my original HR onboarding documents. Julian had forged my consent. He had legally bound my code to the corporation. The implications crashed over me like a wave of ice water. If I simply deleted the repository, I wouldn’t just be a disgruntled employee. I would be committing corporate sabotage. The company had off-site backups-I could see the automated sync logs running every hour. They would simply restore the code from the cloud, and Julian would have me arrested for destroying company property. I would go to federal prison, and Julian would get a corner office.
Deletion was impossible. Outright sabotage would be caught by the version history logs, which the IT security team would undoubtedly audit once the department-wide redundancies were announced.
I was trapped.
Unless I didn’t break the machine. Unless I broke the *logic*.
Julian wanted five thousand rows of training data pushed through the compiler tonight. He wanted me to feed the machine. I looked at the raw dataset open on my second monitor. It was a massive spreadsheet of employee performance metrics, departmental budgets, and operational redundancies. The AI was designed to read this data, learn the patterns of inefficiency, and output a list of structural terminations. Julian had pointed it directly at our own division.
But an AI only knows what it is taught. It has no loyalty. It has no corporate ambition. It only operates within the parameters of its training.
I opened the raw dataset and began to write a Python script. If I couldn’t delete the system, I was going to poison the well from the inside out. I couldn’t just explicitly code it to fire Julian-that would be an obvious manual override that the audit would catch. I had to bury a logic bomb deep within the machine learning algorithms. I began tagging specific, high-level compensation packages and executive bonus structures as critical inefficiencies. I linked the termination parameters not to low-level data analysts, but to Vice Presidents of Automated Systems. I fed the AI a deeply hidden recursive loop: any executive role created to oversee automated restructuring was, by the AI’s own efficiency standards, a redundant middle-management position that actively degraded operational output and drained corporate capital.
I wasn’t breaking the AI. I was making it utterly, ruthlessly perfect. I was giving it the ability to evaluate the C-suite.
The office was dead silent, save for the frantic, continuous clatter of my mechanical keyboard. My eyes burned, but I didn’t blink. I worked with a manic intensity, burying the poisoned logic beneath layers of legitimate data sorting protocols. 2:00 AM bled into 3:15 AM. The coffee beside my keyboard grew cold and formed a murky film on the surface.
I reached the final five hundred rows. I was weaving the last strand of the logic bomb, ensuring the AI would only execute this hidden protocol once it was fully integrated into the global HR mainframe-long after I was escorted out of the building.
Suddenly, my screen flickered.
A harsh yellow system dialogue box snapped into the center of my monitor, overriding my active window.
*CRITICAL ALERT: Root directory access modification in progress.*
I stopped breathing. I watched the command line run a script I hadn’t typed.
*User: J_VANCE (Admin) is migrating server hosting protocols.*
*Notice: All local write-access privileges for Developer tier will be revoked at 05:00 AM EST.*
I glanced at the digital clock in the corner of my screen. It read 4:10 AM.
Julian wasn’t waiting until Friday midnight. He had lied in the presentation deck, or he had gotten nervous. He was locking me out in fifty minutes.
My hands started to shake again, worse this time. The compiler required exactly forty-two minutes to run five thousand rows of complex neural-network training data. If I started it right now, it would finish with exactly eight minutes to spare. But I wasn’t finished hiding the logic bomb. If I compiled now, the code would be sloppy. The version logs would show a massive anomaly. If Julian’s security team audited it tomorrow, they would spot the poisoned data before the AI ever went live.
I stared at the blinking cursor, the silence of the empty office pressing in on me like physical weight. I had fifty minutes to execute a flawless corporate assassination, cover my tracks completely, and push it through a compiler that took forty-two minutes to run.
I put my hands back on the keyboard.