January 1st, 2025.
The screen blinked with a countdown: 00:03… 00:02… 00:01…
On the other side of the globe, in a penthouse littered with half-empty energy drinks, tangled ethernet cables, and forgotten contracts, the Tycoon laughed.
Not a triumphant laugh.
Not a malicious laugh.
But a reckless, fireworks-at-midnight kind of laugh — the kind that doesn't wait for applause.
"Let's see how this chaos dances," he muttered, tossing his last £8,000 into an ad campaign no investor had asked for. Thousands of micro-targeted banners would erupt across the internet in seconds. Every blog, every obscure forum, every stale social feed would suddenly carry the same flicker: Aurora Network — where your voice outlives you.
He wasn't doing this to be first. He wasn't doing this to be remembered.
He was doing this because it had to happen.
Even if he clicked "Register" the moment the servers went live, he could never guarantee being the first user. Time zones, routing delays, algorithmic variance — inevitability itself mocked the idea of "being first."
And so the platform went live.
Registration was not casual. No disposable emails, no bots slipping through. KYC protocols drilled deep — scanning IDs, cross-verifying records, even tracing digital lineages. Users who disappeared — by accident, by death, or by choice — left encrypted shells in the archive. A last word. A warning. A fragment of memory meant for descendants or investigators.
At the center of it all stood the Aurora AI — the Global Scribe.
It did not invent words, it logged them.
It did not moralize, it mirrored.
Every registration, every deletion, every invisible message — immortalized, impartial, undeniable.
The Tycoon's account was tagged Founder. A historical node, a marker of origin. A label with flash but no real power.
He leaned back in his chair, smirking. Tomorrow, a few reporters would call him a genius. Others, a scammer. Some, a visionary. He didn't care. Labels were the games of those who still believed history was written by winners.
He knew better.
History was written by inevitability.
As the first wave of users streamed in — strangers from London, Lagos, Manila, São Paulo — he became just another ghost in the crowd. His fingerprints dissolved into the very system he had set ablaze.
Because even he, the so-called Tycoon, was no exception.
Even he was bound by Absolute Inevitability, the Mother of Duality.
And so the fireworks began.