The name hit the air and detonated. *Zero*.
For a heartbeat, the frantic energy of the room vanished, sucked into a vacuum of pure shock. The shouting investors, the weeping Chloe, the grim-faced lawyers—they all faded into a gray, silent periphery. There was only Julian, his chest heaving, his finger pointed at me like a weapon, and that name. A name he had no right to speak.
*Zero*.
It was more than a name. It was a myth. My myth. My origin story. The ghost in my machine, the architect of my mind. Five years ago, I was just a prodigy burning out in a dead-end data-entry job, playing with code on obscure forums in the dead of night. I was brilliant, but I was formless, a scatter of light without a lens to focus it. Zero was that lens. An anonymous handle, a legend in the deep architect
