CHAPTER 42: TURN AROUND

In just a few minutes, Sentinel went from one of the most anticipated software for that month to the biggest question mark.

Online reactions were already spiraling.

Twitter, live threads and news banners all flooded in within a minute,

{#SentinelCrash

"Was it all just hype?"

"Glitched during its first demo—OmniTech in trouble?"

"A system that predicts threats can’t even predict its own failure."}

It was almost as if the people who made the posts had anticipated this and had prepared before hand.

This was exactly what Nathaniel wanted. He could’ve just ordered Sentinel be shut down as quickly and as possible, but he bided his time for one single reason.

Public opinion.

More accurately, their trust. If OmniTech was capable of coming up with up a software like Sentinel, then their was no guarantee that they wouldn’t come up with something even better.

So the best step was to destroy their credibility.

Once trust was gone, once the world believed OmniTech was incompetent or reckless, it wouldn’t matter what innovative idea they came up with next because no one would be willing to risk backing a company

To investors, it would look like amateur hour, a liability to cooperates and to the public, it would just be another overhyped product that failed to deliver.

That was the brilliance of Nathaniel’s plan— it wasn’t just to acquire the product for himself, it was to ensure another product from them would never be trusted again.

His aim was to erase them, completely.

Nathaniel’s grin got larger as the seconds passed and more Twitter posts and news blogs popped up.

The first few might’ve been his doing but the public was eating it up as much as he wanted.

Standing up, Nathaniel slowly walked towards the screen before him, his glass of wine still in hand.

"Like I said," he started with a grin, "checkmate."

Back in Atlanta, Tag and his team sat in their new base, observing the downfall of Sentinel unfold.

This was proof that their job was successfully completed. Seeing Sentinel freeze on the live stream at least helped Tag completely calm down and bask in their success.

At least with this, Dmitri wouldn’t be on his neck anymore. The job was complete and his team was safe.

"Well, that was anticlimactic," Silk muttered, stepping on the panda plush beneath her feet. "I could’ve sworn something would go wrong."

"Don’t jinx it," Bypass chided with a frown.

"Relax, keyboard Jesus," She turned to him, "it’s not like they’ll miraculously find a way to fix it in just a few minutes, and even if they did, the seed of doubt has already been planted in the minds of the public."

She paused before adding , "no matter the outcome, Sentinel is done anyway."

Silk was right, Sentinel’s launch momentum had been slowed and even if they salvaged the situation, there’d still be that little bit of skepticism.

Spectra stood with them watching the ongoing livestream in silence. It wasn’t that she felt guilty, far from it after all, this was arguably the best hacking job she had done in years.

But seeing the consequences of her actions play out in real time left a bitter taste in her mouth.

Usually, after hacking into something, she’d not bother outcome before moving to the next job.

Even with all those thoughts, Isabella knew that she’d help hack into Sentinel regardless of whether she knew the consequences or not.

"Are you okay?" Tag asked as he walked to her side.

"Yeah," she nodded before asking,"You think they’ll recover from this?"

Tag didn’t answer right away. He glanced at the frozen feed, then at the team behind him. Nico was quietly braiding Zero’s hair to keep him still. Juno was asleep again, while Silk and Bypass were bickering.

They were one of the best ’grey’ hat hackers the underworld had ever seen, so the chances of OmniTech recovering anytime soon were close to none.

"No," Tag replied, "I don’t think they’d be able to recover from this, not for a while before anyway."

"I see," Spectra nodded before focusing back on the monitors before him.

There was a moment of silence, with Tag having a massive mental debate. Not because of OmniTech’s downfall but something more important....to him.

’Go ahead, ask her.’

Tag’s thoughts were full of him convincing himself to ask Spectra out.

’What if she says no?’ he questioned before reprimanding himself, ’come on, you’re the leader of the Vigilants, there’s no way you’d be nervous at something so simple.

That seemed to have done the trick as he soon opened his mouth, "Spectr—" before he could complete what he wanted to say, Nico suddenly interrupted.

"Isn’t it strange?" She calmly asked as she looked up from where she was braiding Zero’s hair and towards the monitors.

They followed her line of sight to the monitors as the cameras focused on Lillian’s face.

"If this was really as bad as it seems, wouldn’t she be panicking right now?" Nico’s words immediately caused them all to focus on the monitor.

She was right, OmniTech’s COO didn’t look like someone who had be caught off guard infact, it seemed like everything was going well, which, from what the team had seen, was far from the truth.

So that brought the question, was she just wearing a calm expression as a facade or was there something the team had missed.

A soft chime suddenly echoed from Bypass’s monitor. He quickly checked his alert before he froze.

"...Guys?"

"What now?" Silk asked.

Bypass turned his screen for everyone to see. A red line of text appeared at the top of his coding software’s window:

{Unauthorized signal detected.}

"We’re being hacked."

________

Back on stage, Lillian stood calmly as the screen before her froze.

If she was being honest, she really was nervous. This was a big day for her, it was the launch of a product overseen by her.

But Ethan had informed her previously that something like this would happen and that he’d take care of it, so she trusted him.

And so, she turned slightly, giving the audience her profile, soon enough, the frozen screen changed and the system that was supposed to open, opened up.

This left question marks floating on the heads of everyone sitting in the ballroom.

Was Sentinel really just hacked or did they encounter a bug that made the the software freeze on boot up.

But luckily, they didn’t have to wait long because Lillian soon addressed them.

"Well, ladies and gentlemen," she began, gesturing toward the two white-hat hackers from Northbridge Solutions, "although we hired these two professionals for the job, it seems we had a few... unsolicited applicants as well."

Her words confirmed that Sentinel really was hacked into, but if they were, then how did they solve it so fast?

"What you just witnessed was a live hacking attempt from one of the most notorious black hat hackers," Lillian continued with a smile as she relayed the information from Ethan, "the Vigilants."

A wave of murmurs rose from the crowd as soon as that name was revealed.

The Vigilants were notorious for breaching corporate cybersecurity systems—and they rarely, if ever, failed.

Lillian let the crowd absorb the weight of the situation for a while before she continued

"What you just witnessed was one of Sentinel’s capabilities," she clicked the remote in hand and the screen displaying the system with sentinel switched, showing a before and after surface code of Sentinel, "it’s adaptability."

The code shown on the screen looked like two completely different codes, until they saw the previous code switching to match the other.

"The moment the Vigilants’ intrusion was detected, Sentinel initiated what we call an Intelligent Reformat Protocol. It began restructuring its own codebase to neutralize the threat while simultaneously isolating the compromised environment from the live core."

She paused to let that sink in.

"In simple terms—while most tools patch vulnerabilities after an attack, Sentinel adapts and evolves during it."

The silence that followed was almost deafening.

For a moment, the ballroom full of executives, investors, developers, and journalists didn’t know what to think. Many of them had already made up their minds minutes ago—that OmniTech had failed, that Sentinel was a bust.

The headlines practically wrote themselves.

But now?

Now they were witnessing something that shouldn’t have been possible. A code capable of rewriting itself was unheard of.

Yet, they had just witnessed it happening while neutralizing one of the most infamous hacker syndicate on the planet, all the while still executing its original functions?

It was revolutionary and unbelievably terrifying.

She really was right in her opening statement, this was a software of the future.

______

Back in his office, it was Ethan’s turn to grin as Nathaniel’s plan became undone by him.

"I wonder how that feels, Nathaniel," he murmured. "What will you do now that things are not going as you planned?"

This might not have been the final battle, but it was a strike that landed deep. And right now, he had more pieces on the board.