After Launching My AI Startup, My Father Demanded I Hand Over a Core Module to His Son — He Didn't Know I Was Recording
The taste of defeat from the ethics committee still lingered, a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. I sat in my office late into the evening, the city lights reflecting off the glass walls, feeling utterly drained. Arthur had successfully used his power to invalidate my claims, painting me as an emotional, misguided child.
My phone buzzed, startling me. It was an anonymous message, encrypted, from an unknown number. My first thought was Arthur, trying to further intimidate me, but the encryption was too sophisticated for his usual blunt tactics.
I opened the message cautiously. It contained only a single, seemingly innocuous code snippet. A small block of Python, beautifully written, but entirely out of context. It looked like an elegant algorithm for data compression, something complex but harmless.
I frowned, staring at the lines of code. It had to be Owen. The elegant syntax, the specific optimization techniques—it bore his signature, despite his general academic mediocrity. He was a decent coder when he applied himself, which was rare.
Why send me this? Was it a taunt? A misplaced attempt at reconciliation? The specific cruelty of the situation lay in its ambiguity. He knew I was hurting, knew the committee had dismissed my case, and this was his cryptic response.
I copied the snippet into my development environment, running it through a debugger. No obvious malicious payload, no hidden viruses. It was just a clean piece of code.
But a nagging feeling persisted. Owen was many things, but he wasn’t senseless. He knew I was under immense pressure. Why send me something so cryptic, so seemingly irrelevant, in my darkest hour? It had to mean something more.
I started dissecting the code, line by line. The compression algorithm was advanced, using a fractal-based pattern. It was not something he could have whipped up quickly. It looked like a component of a larger system.
Then, a specific variable name caught my eye: `chimera_pattern_factor`. The word “chimera” stood out like a beacon. It wasn’t a common term in typical compression algorithms. It felt like a deliberate breadcrumb, a small, subtle act of rebellion from Owen.
I remembered a vague mention of “Project Chimera” from Arthur’s earlier days at Beaumont Tech, a whisper of a failed, ambitious venture that predated my involvement. It was a project that had been deliberately erased from public records, relegated to the dusty corners of corporate history.
Could Owen be hinting at something more? Was this his conflicted way of helping me, of acknowledging Arthur’s wrongdoing without directly betraying him? The thought was a slim thread of hope, but I clung to it.
Owen was fundamentally weak, a pawn in Arthur’s game, but he wasn’t entirely heartless. He had always been envious of my talent, yes, but he also harbored a strange, quiet admiration for my coding prowess. He knew I would be the one to recognize the quality of the code, and perhaps, the hidden message within it.
The subtle cruelty of Owen’s action was that he couldn’t bring himself to speak directly, to offer concrete help. He offered a puzzle, a veiled hint, leaving me to do the difficult work of piecing together the truth, all while he remained in the safe shadows of plausible deniability.
I spent another hour cross-referencing “Project Chimera” with any Beaumont Tech archives I could access. Most public-facing mentions had indeed been scrubbed. It was almost as if the project had never existed.
But the code snippet itself was a tangible object, a digital key. Owen, in his own cowardly way, had given me a lead. He was too afraid to speak, but not too afraid to provide a breadcrumb.
I saved the encrypted message and the code snippet to a secure drive. It was a long shot, a needle in a haystack, but it was the only new information I had received since the ethics committee’s devastating dismissal.
I pulled up an old Beaumont Tech organizational chart from a cached version of their website, scrolling back years. Project Chimera had a brief, shadowy mention under “Advanced R&D,” led by a name I didn’t recognize: Elias Caldwell. The name itself felt like a ghost.
My mind started piecing together the puzzle. Owen was, perhaps, trying to tell me that Arthur’s current actions with Phoenix AI were not new, that they fit a pattern. The “chimera_pattern_factor” variable suddenly held a far deeper meaning.
The frustration still burned, but it was now laced with a flicker of renewed purpose. Owen’s cryptic clue, even in its guardedness, had given me a direction. I had to find out what Project Chimera was, and more importantly, what happened to Elias Caldwell. This felt like a faint, distant echo of Arthur’s past misdeeds.
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