Over the course of the next three weeks, David and his team operated with the efficiency of a military campaign. There were no speeches, no grand announcements
They didn't need any of that as they were trying to be as discreet as possible. It was just focused action for them.
The first move was securing a location for the data center.
They didn't just purchase the land—they bought everything surrounding it. Every adjacent plot. Every dilapidated structure. Every strip of roadside vegetation that could be turned into a lookout point.
The goal was clear: total isolation.
No homes, no small businesses, no nosy neighbors. The data center had to be invisible in plain sight.
The reasons were tactical.
First, security. Any structure within line of sight could become a surveillance risk. With the kind of sensitive infrastructure they were deploying, even a rooftop camera from a curious resident could compromise the operation.
Second, acoustic silence. Server centers generated consistent low-frequency noise. It wasn't loud, but it was constant—and a nearby resident could notice the pattern and start asking questions.
Third, emergency control. In the unlikely event of a breach, outage, or sabotage, they needed clear perimeter control. No local traffic. No obstacles. No third parties with emotional or financial ties to the surrounding land.
Once the site was secured and cleared, the real work began.
By the fifth day, land acquisition was complete. Within two days, bulldozers moved in.
The plot was leveled, and the earth compacted to prepare for foundational reinforcement.
Steel workers erected the server floor slab—double-reinforced concrete with vibration isolation to protect hardware from tremors and electromagnetic noise.
By the eleventh day, the perimeter fencing was up. Not chain-link, but reinforced steel mesh, with motion sensors embedded into the structure.
The outer gates were motorized, ID-locked, and monitored via private CCTV feeds routed through an isolated substation.
On fifteenth day, server rack installation began.
Inside the facility, the internal layout had been designed like a military server farm—cold and hot aisle containment systems sealed the temperature zones, keeping airflow efficient and preventing thermal buildup.
Each row of racks was bolted down, caged, and grounded with insulated flooring. Fire suppression units were mounted overhead—clean agent systems that wouldn't damage electronics but would suffocate any heat spike instantly.
...
By day 18th, second week since the project began, the cooling systems were installed—precision units capable of handling heat loads far beyond their expected maximum. Redundant chillers were built into the side structure, with auto-failover control loops.
Power redundancy was a priority. Triple-tier UPS backups were installed—battery arrays that kicked in under 500 milliseconds of loss detection.
Two diesel generators were mounted on-site, stored under noise-dampened enclosures, fueled and ready.
The hardware arrived in discreet shipments under third-party names—crates filled with servers, routers, node controllers, and crypto-locked firewalls.
David made sure that each components had no company logos or brand—as requested by Tyler.
David's imported IT specialists moved like ghosts—skilled, silent, and surgical in their deployment.
By the 21st day, the internal system was online in test mode. A simulated environment ran thousands of dummy transactions through VaultPay's custom nodes.
Every packet was analyzed, rerouted, encrypted, and stored—exactly as Tyler designed.
Everything was completed and in third week, while the data center came online, David arranged a meeting with SkyAxis Telecom—the largest bandwidth provider in Gumua.
The meeting was held in a private boardroom, away from press or public eyes.
David didn't come with slides. He came with a proposal.
"We're building a sovereign infrastructure project," he said. "We'll need high-speed fiber. Dual-path routing. Full uptime SLAs."
The SkyAxis director, a grizzled man named Kweku Addae, nodded. "If you want high-speed, private access, that's going to be expensive."
David smiled. "We're offering something in return. You'll gain backend access to our rural merchant network. VaultPay will roll out terminals across over 100 underserved zones."
Kweku's eyes narrowed. "Revenue share?"
"Ten percent gross on merchant data routes. Locked in for the first five years."
"And what about redundancy?"
"We'll run dual lines—primary and shadow. If one cuts, the other switches instantly. We'll host the junction here at the facility."
Kweku looked at his advisors, then extended a hand.
"Deal."
A private fiber line was laid from SkyAxis' nearest junction point. It cut through public right-of-way under government permit, labeled as a "public digitization initiative."
After securing partnership with a telecom company, power was next.
On the 24th day, Gumua's Ministry of Energy approved the VaultPay facility as a critical infrastructure project.
The national grid connection was established the same day.
A direct line was wired in from the regional power substation—stable, prioritized, and independent of the volatile civilian grid.
Solar panels had been installed on the roof as supplemental backup. Not for full load, but enough to power key control systems if diesel and battery failed.
By the 25th day, the final internal dry run was executed. The system ran without flaws. All nodes reported normal. Routing layers synced. Security locks passed penetration tests.
On day 26, VaultPay finally went live as the final security audit was signed off that morning.
VaultPay was now fully operational.
Inside the command room, David stood beside the core rack. He inserted a crypto-authentication drive into the control slot. Lights blinked to life. Status monitors turned green.
Tyler's voice came through on the secure line.
"You're live?"
David smiled. "We're live."
He tapped the final confirmation.
The VaultPay core node—Node Zero—activated.
So immediately as VaultPay went live, across the country, preloaded VaultPay terminals in rural clinics, NGO offices, and merchant locations began syncing with the master system.
Over the course of three weeks that the project was underway, David had used the NGO to roll out VaultPay terminals and started to onboarding some members of the public.
They intend to start with civil servants. They intend to roll out VaultPay by giving bonuses to this particular group, this way they will build trust in the general public.
Transactions were now live and encrypted data began flowing in.
In his home, Tyler watched the dashboards come online—heatmaps lighting up, transactions pinging across the screen, private node balances trickling in.
It had begun.