CHAPTER 192: FUTURE AHEAD.

The roar of the crowd still echoed in Lukas’ ears when the Mercedes rolled up to the Four Seasons. The match had ended hours ago, but adrenaline clung to him like smoke. His hoodie was damp with sweat under the coat, his body aching from impact, but it was the good kind of pain—the kind that reminded you you were still in the game.

Roy opened the door, and Lukas stepped out into the warm Philadelphia night. The city felt electric. But he wasn’t thinking about the game anymore. Not the goal. Not even the thunderous entrance with "Time to Play the Game" shaking the stadium.

His mind was already back in the suite, on the laptop he had left open.

The Facebook launch had been a quiet failure just 24 hours ago. Zero users. A billion-dollar blueprint staring back at him with nothing behind it. A ghost of an idea.

He’d tried not to think about it. Buried himself in the match. In the noise. But now, with the crowd gone and silence creeping in, it returned.

He took the elevator up in silence. Annie and Bella were waiting, probably watching post-match highlights or ordering food. He could smell something warm—pasta?—when the doors opened to their penthouse suite.

Bella popped up from the couch, grinning. "You were insane out there. Like vintage Lukas."

Annie smiled, standing in the doorway of the bedroom in a hoodie that was clearly his. "Come on. You have to watch the recap. It’s everywhere. Even in Italian."

"Later," Lukas said, brushing a hand through his damp hair. He walked straight to the desk in the corner, flipping open his laptop.

He blinked.

Then blinked again.

"What the hell..."

The dashboard for Facebook, previously a wasteland of zeroes, now buzzed like a storm. Signups. Shares. Active users. The graph had gone vertical—millions pouring in over just the last twelve hours. College emails. Forums were linking to it. The Verge had just published a piece: The Next Big Network?

Lukas refreshed again.

20,000 new signups in 3 minutes.

"Annie," he called. His voice was different now—tight, low, and half-stunned.

She walked over, brows raised. "What’s wrong?"

He turned the laptop.

Bella joined, her eyes widening.

"Holy—"

"It blew up," Lukas muttered. He leaned back slowly, staring at the screen like it might vanish. His voice cracked, just a little. "It actually blew up."

Annie put her hand over his shoulder gently. "You didn’t even see it happen."

"I was out there fighting a stadium," he said. "And this... this thing just... caught fire."

The dashboard was ticking like a live stock exchange. Comments, messages, uploads. People were building profiles and connecting. A few college influencers had made posts calling it "The Clean Alternative to Forums."

Bella laughed, grabbing her phone. "You’re trending. Again. This time for tech."

Lukas rubbed his face, dragging his palm down his cheek.

Everything hurt—but in the best way possible.

He wasn’t just back in the game.

He owned the next one too.

The morning after the match was unlike any other. The city was still echoing with Lukas Martin’s name. Fans crowded outside the Four Seasons, the streets buzzing with chants, photos, and questions. But Lukas didn’t wake to noise. He woke to silence—a cold one.

His phone was dead. Not metaphorically. Overloaded. And the landline inside the suite was ringing off the hook.

Roy barged in without knocking. "It’s bad," he said simply.

Lukas sat up, rubbing his eyes. Annie stirred beside him, and Bella peeked out from the guest room, still wrapped in a blanket.

"The website?" Lukas asked, voice hoarse.

Jay’s voice came over the intercom next: "We’ve got five devs on the line. Henry’s downstairs. They can’t keep the site live. We’re crashing."

Lukas was out of bed and halfway dressed in less than a minute. The moment he stepped into the elevator, the gravity of it all hit him. He wasn’t just a player or a face anymore.

He was the algorithm now.

Philadelphia HQ was in chaos. The Facebook floor looked like a server farm and a war room had collided. Monitors flashed red warnings. Engineers yelled over each other. Henry stood in the center of it all, holding two phones to his ears at once.

"He’s here!" someone shouted as Lukas stepped in. Everyone froze for a moment.

He didn’t speak. He walked directly to the main server desk, where the analytics screen showed something horrifying: over 3 million new account requests—per hour.

Bandwidth was being eaten alive. Images wouldn’t load. Logins were timing out. Password resets flooded the mail server.

"We didn’t scale for this!" one engineer snapped.

"That was the point," Henry shot back. "No one thought a social site would melt down from athlete traffic."

Lukas stared at the map. It wasn’t just America. It was everywhere—Madrid, Karachi, Rio, Seoul, and Johannesburg. The world had seen the match. Had searched his name. Had clicked that one link at the bottom of his profile.

And now they were all signing up.

"It’s the post-game clip," Jay muttered. "You looked right at the camera. You said, ’See you on the site.’ It’s viral now."

"I barely remember saying that," Lukas murmured.

Henry turned. "You’ve got ten minutes until total collapse unless we load-balance now. We’re calling Amazon, IBM, anyone with server space. Say the word, Lukas."

Lukas took a breath.

"Say it? Hell, move it. Buy every server you can get your hands on. Facebook isn’t going down today."

The room exploded into movement. Phones dialed. Emails sent. Lukas watched it all as though standing in the eye of a hurricane.

Annie texted him in the middle of the storm: Proud of you. No one saw this coming. But I did.

Bella added, And I’m claiming the couch in your new office.

He smiled. Just a little.

The world had shown up. And Lukas Martin, with all his demons and dreams, was ready to carry it.

He leaned closer to the dev screen and said one final thing:

"Next time, we crash the internet on purpose."

The sunlight filtered into the Facebook headquarters through tall industrial windows, casting sharp stripes across the office floor. The servers had barely survived the last twenty-four hours, and the hum of the machines below matched the undercurrent of chaos that brewed across every corner of the building. Lukas Martin stood near the glass wall of his office, sipping black coffee, eyes locked on the live user metrics displayed on the giant screen.

"One point eight million," he muttered.

The number had doubled overnight.

He hadn’t slept. No one really had. Developers were scattered across beanbags and corners, fingers still twitching in dreams of code. Emergency devs from Yahoo’s overflow team had been flown in overnight to reinforce the infrastructure.

That’s when she walked in.

"Lukas."

Yaho Nakayama’s voice was urgent, sharper than usual, her heels echoing against the polished floor. She looked immaculate despite clearly not having slept either. A thick folder was under her arm, her tablet already displaying graphs and projections.

Lukas turned to face her. "Morning."

"We have to expand. Immediately."

She didn’t sit down. She paced instead, opening the folder and laying out a roadmap across the coffee table.

"This traffic isn’t just a fluke. You’re pulling users like a black hole. The press is eating it alive. ’Athlete Billionaire Unleashes Social Storm.’ It’s not just the match. It’s you. Your name, your presence—it’s driving traffic by the minute."

Lukas set down his coffee. "The servers held. Barely."

"They’ll collapse if we don’t scale." She clicked her tablet. "Seattle. London. Tokyo. We already have data centers on retainer. We need mirrored sites, international distribution, and a global front page redesign by next week."

"Next week?" Lukas arched an eyebrow.

"Yes," she said. "And sponsors are already calling."

She pulled out a glossy printout—Nike, Sony, Pepsi. Major brands. They weren’t just interested in ads; they were asking for partnership talks, ambassador programs, and content integration.

"They’re not treating this like a website anymore. They’re treating it like a new television."

Lukas ran a hand through his hair. He looked at the growth curve again. It looked like a hockey stick.

"Is this what we wanted?" he asked quietly.

Yaho gave him a rare smile. "No. It’s more."

A knock came at the door. Roy leaned in. "Media downstairs. Henry’s holding them off. Annie and Bella just woke up. Want me to bring them up?"

Lukas nodded. "Yeah. Bring them in."

As Roy vanished, Lukas looked around the space. His glass office. The live dashboards. The dev team sleeping like battle-worn soldiers.

"We’ll need more people."

Yaho nodded. "We’ll get them. But first, tell me—are you ready to take this global in a week?"

Lukas exhaled, eyes narrowing with the weight of inevitability.

"Time to play the game."

She smirked. "Damn right. Let’s move."

Outside, helicopters circled again. The match had ended, but Lukas Martin’s next arena had just begun.

Lukas leaned back in the polished leather chair, the filtered afternoon sunlight catching across the edge of the long conference table. Yaho’s words still echoed in his mind: "To handle the load, we’ll need to expand immediately. The current infrastructure isn’t going to survive another spike like that."

"How much?" he finally asked, voice even but carrying the weight of consequence.

Yaho adjusted her tablet, pulling up the estimate. "At two thousand dollars per unit, and with Japan being our quickest and most stable supplier, we’re looking at needing around 50,000 units minimum to handle just the next surge. That’s a hundred million dollars to scale properly for a billion active users."

Lukas blinked slowly. One hundred million.

"I’ve got seventy-six," he said, almost to himself. "That’s everything."

Yaho nodded, aware of what that meant. "I know. But we can’t limp forward. Either we scale, or the whole platform collapses under its own success."

He stood and walked toward the wide window overlooking Philadelphia’s skyline. The city pulsed below, unaware of the dilemma pressing in this quiet war room. The success had come fast—faster than anyone could have anticipated. Lukas had stolen the idea from the future, sure, but he hadn’t stolen its timing. The world wasn’t ready for Facebook, and yet... here it was.

Servers melting. Pages slowing. Errors creeping.

"Can we buy in stages?" he asked.

Yaho shook her head. "If this trend holds, the next surge will be within 48 hours. You’ll be on the field again, and I’ll be watching servers fail on live dashboards."

He sighed, pressing two fingers against his temple. He couldn’t let this fall. Not now. Not after what it had taken to get here. His mind raced. Sell something? Bring in investors? Take a loan?

Or worse—reach out to the very people he swore to stay clear of. The sharks who funded the Valley.