Chapter 1The Soul Algorithm
The office was drowned in a thick darkness. The air had gone unchanged for hours, clinging to my skin like a second layer. Only the irregular hum of the servers broke the silence — a swarm of metallic insects trapped inside a steel box.
My eyes, red and burning after three sleepless nights, remained fixed on the monitor.
In front of me, Pattern C — my life, my obsession, the result of ten years of relentless work — was collapsing.
The charts were no longer just lines.
They had become a hemorrhage of red numbers devouring my fortune pixel by pixel.
I stood up abruptly.
The leather chair groaned as it slid across the wooden floor.
I walked toward the enormous mirror covering an entire wall.
The man staring back at me looked like a stranger.
Bald.
Sharp-featured.
His eyelids heavy with exhaustion.
His beard unkempt.
I didn’t see the founder who had changed the way the world navigated the Internet.
I saw the king of an empire beginning to crumble.
“Sell…”
My own voice was barely a whisper.
It sounded empty.
Distant.
As if someone else had spoken from the far end of the room.
But my fingers refused to move.
They felt too heavy.
One single click didn’t mean selling a company.
It meant breaking the last promise I had made to the woman who taught me that intelligence meant nothing if you forgot why you had started.
I pulled my eyes away from the monitor.
On the mahogany shelf rested a small wooden horse.
The paint was faded.
One of its legs had been repaired many years ago with a tiny nail.
I took it into my hands.
Instantly, the hum of the servers disappeared.
It was replaced by the whisper of wind moving through the trees of my childhood.
I could smell freshly brewed coffee.
Wet earth after the rain.
The lavender my grandmother grew beside the porch.
That little wooden horse was much more than a memory.
It was the last bridge connecting me to the man I used to be.
The final fragment of reality inside a universe built with code.
If I sold, I would keep the money.
But I would lose something no algorithm could ever calculate.
My soul.
Eighteen years earlier…
The air that morning smelled of lavender.
My backpack weighed heavily on my shoulders, filled with borrowed books from the village library.
My grandmother watched me from the old rocking chair on the porch.
She wasn’t crying.
She never did.
When I walked closer to say goodbye, she took my hands in hers.
They were covered in wrinkles.
Strong.
Warm.
They looked like roots holding a tree steady before a storm.
“The world will always try to silence those who dream differently, Anderson,” she said in that raspy voice that the years had never managed to break. “Don’t allow the noise to steal your essence.”
I felt a knot forming in my throat.
Until then, no one had understood the speed at which my mind saw connections where others only found scattered pieces.
She did.
She always had.
“I’m going to build a window, Grandma.”
The words came out before I could think.
“A window through which the world can see farther.”
She smiled.
It wasn’t a smile of pride.
It was the quiet smile of someone who already knew how the story would end.
“And someday, I’ll put your name at the highest place in the world.”
She didn’t answer.
She only caressed my cheek.
That silence eventually became the most important promise of my life.
When I arrived in the capital, the green of my childhood disappeared beneath miles of gray asphalt.
Everything seemed to move too fast.
Too high.
Too cold.
That night, I entered the shared bathroom of the university dormitory.
The mirror was cracked.
I stared at myself for several seconds.
I didn’t see a student.
I saw a mind full of ideas searching for a place where they could exist.
I placed a hand on my scalp.
I felt a constant pressure.
As if every thought was trying to break through the bone and escape.
I looked directly at my reflection.
“You were not born to become someone’s joke.”
The words hung in the silence.
They weren’t a phrase meant to lift my spirits.
They were a pact.
One I was willing to keep, even if I had to face the entire world.
The professor continued writing formulas on the board.
The same theories.
The same answers.
The same limitations.
The screech of the chalk finally shattered my patience.
I stood up.
The entire class turned toward me.
“That map belongs to the last century.”
The professor stopped writing.
“Excuse me?”
“We keep teaching people how to travel along paths others already built. What we need is to change the architecture from the foundations.”
The classroom erupted in laughter.
It wasn’t the first time.
And it wouldn’t be the last.
I took a deep breath.
“If we hack the basic structure, we’ll build a window capable of looking into the future.”
The laughter continued.
Until a chair scraped against the floor.
The sound alone was enough to silence the room.
Eric Bina had just stood up.
His expression remained calm.
His voice didn’t shake.
“I’m with him.”
Nothing else needed to be said.
At that moment, I understood that revolutions never begin with crowds.
They begin when two people decide to believe in the same idea.
A sharp beep tore through the memory.
Margin alert.
The present returned like a blow.
The screen burned red.
The losses increased second by second.
The monitor illuminated my face with an unsettling glow.
My hand hovered over the “Sell All” button.
It trembled.
Not because I feared failure.
But because I feared betraying the boy who had once left a small town convinced he could change the world.
The screen flickered again.
This time, there would be no second chance.
I inhaled deeply.
And for the first time in many years, I felt that the man who had built an empire depended on the decision of the child who was still alive inside me.
I clicked.
