Jason didn't sleep that night.
He lay on his mattress, staring at the cracked ceiling of his rented apartment, heart pounding.
Blacklight Group. A private intelligence firm created by paranoid billionaires to sniff out financial manipulation. They weren't interested in ordinary crime.
They hunted outliers.
People like him.
He was a man acting out of sync with time. A man investing in companies that shouldn't matter yet. Winning bets no one should see coming. Planning platforms that hadn't been conceived.
And someone had noticed.
He picked up the burner phone Griggs had given him.
"Did they confirm how they found me?"
Griggs' voice came low and hard. "Not directly. But they've got access to payment processors, crypto gateways, and offshore banking metadata. You set off a pattern. Someone flagged your Cayman shell—Horizon Algorithms LLC—as having too-perfect timing."
Jason cursed under his breath. "So I've got a tail."
"No. Not yet. But you've got a file. A real one. And if your profile grows too fast, too clean, they'll knock on your door. And not politely."
Jason stood and walked to the window, watching the early morning light begin to cut through the fog.
Then a grin slowly curled on his lips.
"I'll give them what they want."
Griggs was silent for a moment. "What's that?"
"A narrative."
That day, Jason began reshaping his public image. He orchestrated a new identity—a street-hustler-turned-savant. He began feeding breadcrumbs online: poker forums, code repositories, even startup subreddits. Stories of a poor genius from the Bronx who hit it big on gambling and taught himself finance through public library books.
He created the legend of Jason King, the wild-card investor with street smarts and a genius streak.
Let Blacklight trace that story.
Meanwhile, he launched PulseCast's alpha demo to a small community of college students at NYU and Stanford—most of them pirating music or anime through Napster and LimeWire. PulseCast offered something different:
> Streaming without downloading.
Sharable playlists.
Creator monetization baked in.
And it all worked, because Jason had retrofitted Napster's P2P logic with Amy's encrypted infrastructure.
By April 2000, PulseCast had 1,500 users.
By May, 12,000.
All organic. All off the radar.
But not for long.
Because one of the students was the son of a Time Warner exec.
And he sent a link to his dad.