r over a decade, a slow, steady culling of the brightest young minds. The pattern was always the same, a grim, repeating ni

went bankrupt under mysterious circumstances. There was nothing left of it. No buildings, no faculty, no records. The acceptance le

monoxide poisoning. Another kid, a math genius from California, an overdose. They were all brilliant, all had bright futures, and all, according to the police, simply gave up. It was a l

they had hit a digital brick wall. The emails were routed through so many dead-end proxies and encrypted layers that they were effectively untraceable

lies, there was a palpable sense of dread. Parents stopped sending their kids to elite coding camps. Students would int

coming and outgoing traffic. He put parental controls on my devices that were so restrictive they were practically unusable. He spent thousands of dollars, tens of thousands, on a system designed to pr

ears, it

d the wall crumble. The email wasn' t on my work account, or my personal one. It had come to a long-dorman

the digital artifacting around my name swirling like smoke. It was a masterpiece of malicious code, designed to be both beautiful and terrifying. It was an in