Chapter 4: The Honey Pot

Chapter 4: The Honey Pot

The RV, once a symbol of their dreams, had become a war room. Its cramped interior was now papered with network diagrams, timelines, and profiles of OmniCorp executives. The scent of stale coffee and hot electronics was the new atmosphere of Aether-Works. They were no longer building a company; they were building a weapon.

The first shot was fired at 2:13 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Elara’s face, illuminated by the ghostly green glow of her terminal, was a mask of intense concentration. She wasn’t writing code to create; she was crafting a lie. On her screen was a small, impossibly elegant block of code. It purported to be a function for a “quantum-entangled compression algorithm,” a piece of technobabble so advanced it bordered on science fiction. The code itself was a masterpiece of misdirection—brilliant, seductive, and fundamentally useless without a non-existent quantum framework.

“It’s beautiful,” Todd murmured, looking over her shoulder. His engineer’s eye could appreciate the artistry, even if it was fraudulent. “It looks real.”

“It’s better than real,” Elara said, her fingers poised over the keyboard. “It’s bait.”

She wrapped the code snippet in a shell of brutally complex, but ultimately solvable, encryption. It was a digital puzzle box, designed not to keep people out forever, but to make them obsess over getting in. With a final keystroke, she uploaded the file to a public code repository under a dummy account, left it there for exactly ninety seconds—long enough for any automated corporate intelligence scrapers to find it—and then deleted it, along with the account itself. The perfect, calculated “mistake.”

“The line is in the water,” she announced, leaning back in her chair, the tension in her shoulders easing slightly. “Now we see if anything bites.”

Phase two was Megan’s domain. Two days later, she and Todd walked into “The Grind,” a sterile, overpriced coffee shop across the street from OmniCorp’s gleaming glass tower. Megan looked every bit the high-flying marketing exec in a sharp pantsuit, while Todd, in a worn flannel shirt, played the part of the beleaguered, genius engineer perfectly. They chose a table in the center of the room, surrounded by OmniCorp employees with their lanyards and laptops.

“I’m telling you, the thermal bleed from the core is unsustainable,” Todd said, his voice a low, concerned grumble just loud enough to carry. “We can’t push the compression ratio past 90% without risking a cascade failure in the quantum state.”

Megan waved a dismissive hand, pulling out a tablet with complex, meaningless graphs she’d designed herself. “The investors don’t care about thermal bleed, Todd. They care about the numbers. And the numbers are insane. Elara’s new algorithm is processing petabytes like they’re kilobytes. We’re talking about a paradigm shift. We just have to keep it quiet until the prototype is stable.”

“If we can get it stable,” Todd retorted, leaning in. “This thing is a temperamental beast. It’s not like our old platform. It’s… something else entirely.”

At a nearby table, two men in identical OmniCorp fleeces stopped their conversation, their ears practically swiveling in their direction. Megan met Todd’s eyes for a fraction of a second, a silent confirmation. They were being overheard. She took a sip of her latte, her hand perfectly steady, betraying none of the exhilarating, sickening thrill coursing through her. She was a natural. Using her charisma to sell a lie felt disturbingly similar to using it to sell the truth.

They kept it up for another twenty minutes, a carefully choreographed argument filled with tantalizing keywords: “Project Chimera,” “proprietary hardware,” “phase-gate stabilization,” and “unprecedented efficiency.” Then they paid in cash and left, melting back into the anonymity of the city.

The results came faster than they’d expected.

Back in the RV, Elara had set up what she called her “digital feelers.” She wasn’t actively hacking OmniCorp—that was too crude, too noisy. Instead, she was monitoring the bait. The deleted code snippet had a digital signature, a unique hash. She had trackers scanning the web for any chatter related to that hash, any attempts to decrypt it.

A day after the coffee shop performance, a blip appeared on her monitor. Then another. And another.

“They found it,” she announced, a grim smile touching her lips. She pointed at the screen, where a graph was slowly beginning to climb. “Someone inside OmniCorp’s network is running brute-force attacks against the encryption.”

“They took the bait,” Todd said, a slow grin spreading across his face.

“Not just took it,” Elara said, her eyes gleaming. “They’re dedicating resources. Look at this.” She brought up another window showing server traffic from a known OmniCorp IP block. “These aren’t a few desktops. This is a cluster. They’ve got a team working on it.”

The small victory felt intoxicating. The humiliation of the failed demo, the memory of Henderson walking away, the silent mockery of the OmniCorp logo—all of it began to recede, replaced by a cold, sharp sense of purpose. They were no longer victims cowering in the dark. They were puppeteers, pulling the strings of the corporate giant that had tried to crush them.

The disinformation campaign escalated. Todd fabricated a set of stunningly complex hardware schematics for a “Quantum Resonance Chamber,” printing them on A2 paper and then taking a slightly blurry photo of them, which was then “leaked” onto an obscure engineering forum. Megan used her old marketing contacts to plant whispers with tech bloggers about a stealth startup on the verge of a world-changing breakthrough in data compression.

Each breadcrumb was a calculated move, designed to reinforce the others. The overheard conversation gave context to the leaked code. The schematics gave a physical form to the digital myth. They were building a ghost story, and OmniCorp was desperate to believe in ghosts.

The true turning point came late one night, a week into their campaign. Elara was staring at her monitors, her eyes bleary from exhaustion, when a high-priority alert flashed red across her screen.

Her blood ran cold for a second, thinking they’d been discovered. But it was the opposite. It was the jackpot.

“Megan. Todd. Get over here. Now.”

They rushed to her side. On the screen was a massive spike in processing power directed at their encrypted code. The traffic wasn’t just coming from a server cluster anymore. It was being routed from OmniCorp’s main R&D data center.

“My God,” Todd breathed. “That’s their server farm. The one they use for primary product development. They must have a hundred engineers on it.”

Elara nodded, her expression one of grim satisfaction. “They’ve stopped treating it as a curiosity. They’ve elevated it. Project Chimera is no longer just a file they found. It’s an official, high-priority OmniCorp initiative.”

The trap wasn’t just set anymore. The beast had its foot in the jaws, and it was pulling with all its might, tightening the snare with every move it made. They had done it. They had turned OmniCorp’s own massive, lumbering strength against itself. The honey pot was working perfectly. And somewhere, deep inside that corporate fortress, they knew their own personal Trojan Horse, Santiago Vargas, would be preening, taking credit, and ensuring no one looked too closely at this incredible gift that had fallen into their laps.