Chapter 2: A Ghost's First Steps
The moment his finger made contact with the shimmering green interface, the world dissolved into pure information.
It wasn't a shock or a jolt. It was an absorption. The intricate, three-dimensional schematic of the CODEX system flowed from the screen, up his arm, and directly into his mind's eye. The messy bedroom in Queens didn't vanish, but it was now overlaid with a clean, tactical HUD only he could see. The peeling paint and the cluttered desk were still there, but now floating beside them were translucent menus, status bars, and a central mission log.
[INITIATION MISSION COMPLETE.]
[REWARD: 10 CODE POINTS (CREDIT)]
[SYSTEM SHOP & MISSION BOARD UNLOCKED.]
A thrill, so sharp and pure it was almost painful, coursed through him. This was real. It wasn't a dying dream or a hallucination. It was a tool. His tool.
He focused on the [MISSION BOARD]. It glowed, expanding to dominate his vision.
[DAILY MISSION: ESTABLISH A DIGITAL PRESENCE.]
[OBJECTIVE: ACQUIRE A VINTAGE THINKPAD T60 LAPTOP. ITS CORE ARCHITECTURE IS IDEAL FOR SYSTEM INTERFACING.]
[REWARD: 50 CODE POINTS.]
[FOUNDATION MISSION: FINANCIAL FOOTHOLD.]
[OBJECTIVE: GENERATE $1,000 THROUGH NON-TRADITIONAL MEANS. CAPITAL IS THE FUEL FOR INNOVATION.]
[REWARD: 100 CODE POINTS. BLUEPRINT: 'SENTINEL' ENCRYPTION PROTOCOL (v0.1).]
A laptop. A thousand dollars. The goals were almost laughably mundane, yet they were the absolute bedrock of everything. He couldn't build an empire from a browser game on a family desktop. He needed his own portable, personal hardware, his own capital. The system understood the grind.
Next, he willed the [SYSTEM SHOP] to open. It appeared as a cascading series of menus, items glowing with a soft internal light. His 10 Code Points felt pitifully small.
SKILLS:
[C++ PROFICIENCY (EXPERT)] - 100 CP
[SOCIAL ENGINEERING (BASIC)] - 75 CP
[FINANCIAL ACUMEN (NOVICE)] - 50 CP
RESOURCES:
[1 TB OF OBSCURE RESEARCH DATA] - 200 CP
[ANONYMIZED USER DATA PACKET] - 150 CP
UTILITIES:
[GHOST PROTOCOL (1 HOUR)] - 30 CP
[FLAW REMOVAL (SINGLE USE)] - 80 CP
He was a king staring into a treasury he couldn't yet afford. The "Ghost Protocol" was tempting. But he needed to earn first.
A sharp rap on the door broke his concentration. The CODEX interface vanished from his sight, though he could still feel its presence, a latent hum at the edge of his perception.
"Alex! You planning to live in there?" It was his mother's voice, strained with a fatigue he now understood on a cellular level. "Come set the table. Dinner."
Dinner. A family meal. The concept felt more alien than the floating menus. Lex Vance took meetings with venture capitalists over hundred-dollar salads. Alex Chen set the table for congee.
He found them in the small, linoleum-tiled kitchen. His mother, Mei-Ling, was stirring a pot, her shoulders slumped with a day's worth of bending over a sewing machine. His father, Jiang, was still in his taxi driver's uniform, a faint smell of sweat and car air freshener clinging to him as he scrolled through a flip phone, scowling at the screen. Lily was already shoveling rice into her bowl, her phone—a clunky thing with a physical keyboard—propped up against the soy sauce bottle.
The scene was so normal it was surreal.
"Did you finish your applications?" Jiang asked without looking up from his phone. His voice was a low rumble. "The City College deadline is next week. You need a backup plan."
The words "backup plan" hit Lex like a physical blow. His plan was to redefine human-computer interaction. A community college application felt like a sick joke.
"He was up all night on his computer," Lily supplied helpfully, her mouth full. "Probably playing that zombie game."
"It's not a game," Alex said, and the defensiveness in his own voice surprised him. It was the reflexive anger of a genius being mistaken for a slacker. "It's… code."
Jiang finally looked up, his eyes tired. "Code. To do what? Make little men jump on a screen? This is not a career, Alex. It's a distraction. Mr. Li's son, he's an accountant. Stable job. Good money."
The pressure in the room was immense, a weight of love and fear and limited horizons. They weren't trying to cage him; they were trying to protect him from a world they didn't understand, a world that had always been a closed door to people like them.
Mei-Ling placed a bowl of congee in front of him. "Just eat, Alex. Your father is right. A stable job is a good thing."
He looked down at the plain, steaming rice porridge. This was the battlefield. Not a boardroom, but a kitchen table in Queens. His first mission wasn't to hack a Fortune 500 company; it was to navigate this.
Later, after the dishes were washed and his father had retreated to the couch to watch the news, Alex slipped back into his room. The mission was clear. He needed that laptop.
He fired up the ancient desktop, the CODEX interface seamlessly overlaying the screen as it booted. He navigated to a primitive, 2014-era classifieds website. The design was clunky, the ads basic. It was the digital wild west.
He found a listing in Bushwick. A guy named "Dave" was selling a "Lenovo ThinkPad T60, old but works, good for parts" for eighty dollars. Eighty dollars. To Lex Vance, it was nothing. To Alex Chen, it was almost his entire savings from a previous summer job.
He used the family's landline, the cord stretched taut into the hallway for privacy, to arrange a pickup for the next day. Dave's voice was gruff, the background noise sounding like a busy auto-body shop.
The following afternoon was a lesson in humility. A ninety-minute ride on a rattling, graffiti-scarred subway car. A walk through streets lined with bodegas and repair shops, a world away from the glass and steel of his former life. Dave's "office" was the back of a garage, the air thick with the smell of grease and ozone. The laptop itself was a black, brick-like machine, scuffed and worn, with a faded red TrackPoint nub in the center of the keyboard.
The moment his fingers brushed the textured lid, a notification flashed in his vision.
[TARGET ACQUIRED: LENOVO THINKPAD T60.]
[COMPATIBILITY: 91%. ACCEPTABLE FOR SYSTEM INTERFACING.]
He handed over the cash—a stack of worn bills that felt heavier than they should—and left with his prize tucked under his arm like a sacred text.
Back in his room, the real work began. He spent the evening meticulously cleaning the machine, wiping away years of grime from the keyboard, blowing dust from the vents. It was a ritual. A baptism. As he worked, the CODEX system hummed, running invisible diagnostics.
When it was clean, he plugged it in and pressed the power button. The machine whirred to life, the old hard drive clicking reassuringly. It was running a stripped-down version of Linux. <—Perfect. An open-source OS I can actually control, not like Windows, he thought with relief.
The moment the command line prompt appeared, the system flared to life in his mind.
[DAILY MISSION COMPLETE.]
[REWARD: 50 CODE POINTS.]
[INTERFACE CALIBRATION SEQUENCE INITIATED...]
A wave of clarity washed over him. The HUD in his vision sharpened, the text becoming crisper, the response time between his thoughts and the menu navigation becoming instantaneous. It was like putting on a pair of perfectly prescribed glasses for the first time. Having a dedicated, portable machine that he could truly call his own, one that the CODEX system could directly interface with, created a stable foundation for the digital symphony in his head.
He now had 60 Code Points. Still not enough for the major skills, but enough for a utility.
His eyes fell on the [GHOST PROTOCOL]. It cost 30 CP. An hour of digital invisibility. It was a gamble, but he needed to complete the Financial Foothold mission. A thousand dollars was an impossible sum to generate legally in a day for a student with no job. But illegally… the Ghost Protocol could be the key.
He purchased it. The points deducted, and a new icon appeared in his peripheral vision—a shimmering, translucent cloak.
[ITEM ADDED TO INVENTORY: GHOST PROTOCOL (1 HOUR).]
Now, for the money. He couldn't just hack a bank. That was crude, traceable, and the amounts would attract immediate attention. He needed something smaller. Something in the gray areas.
He remembered a story from his past life. Around this time, a major video game company, "Aethelgard Studios," had a catastrophic error in their new online game, Realm of Valor. For about six hours, a specific vendor in a starting city would buy a common, worthless junk item for 1,000 gold instead of 1 gold. Players who discovered it became instant millionaires in-game. The company eventually rolled back the servers, but not before a handful of clever players had transferred their ill-gotten gains to alternate characters or sold the gold to third-party websites for real money.
It was the perfect storm: a temporary, exploitable flaw, a virtual economy, and a path to cash.
He installed the game on the ThinkPad. It chugged, the old graphics card straining, but it ran. Using the CODEX system, he wrote a simple bot to automate the mind-numbing process of collecting the junk item and selling it. <—A bot. An automated script. This is child's play, he thought with a smirk.
Then, he activated the [GHOST PROTOCOL].
A cool sensation washed over him, like diving into a still lake. He knew, intuitively, that his IP address was now being routed through a dozen anonymous proxies, his digital fingerprints were being scrubbed, and any packet sniffing by the game's servers would see him as harmless background noise. <—IP Address: My computer's unique identifier on the internet. Proxies are middlemen that hide my real location. Packet sniffing is how they monitor data traffic. All being blocked now, he cataloged mentally.
He let the bot run. For fifty-seven minutes, it grinded, amassing a virtual fortune. On a separate, encrypted chat client popular with gamers, he found a gold buyer. He negotiated a rate, using the [SOCIAL ENGINEERING] skill he couldn't yet afford to project confidence and trustworthiness. The Ghost Protocol masked the entire transaction.
Just as the timer on the protocol hit fifty-nine minutes, the digital cash transferred to a dummy PayPal account he'd set up. He immediately initiated a transfer to his personal, feeble bank account.
The Ghost Protocol expired. The cool sensation vanished. He felt exposed, like stepping out of a shadow.
He sat back, his heart hammering against his ribs. He had done it. He had just committed his first digital crime in this new life. It was petty, it was victimless in the grand scheme, but it was a line crossed.
A new notification, glowing with a golden hue, appeared in the center of his vision.
[FOUNDATION MISSION COMPLETE: FINANCIAL FOOTHOLD.]
[REWARD: 100 CODE POINTS. BLUEPRINT: 'SENTINEL' ENCRYPTION PROTOCOL (v0.1) UNLOCKED.]
The points were one thing. But the blueprint… he focused on it. A torrent of information flooded his mind—complex mathematical formulae, elegant code structures, concepts for an encryption method that wouldn't be theorized in this world for another five years. It was a key. A key to building something truly secure.
He had 160 Code Points now. And a thousand dollars on the way.
He looked from the glowing, perfect code of the Sentinel blueprint in his mind to the scuffed, black chassis of the ThinkPad on his desk. The two worlds—the divine and the mundane—were finally starting to connect.
He was no longer just a ghost haunting a borrowed life. He had taken his first, concrete step. He had tools, capital, and a direction.
The name "CODEX" no longer felt like a fantasy. It felt like a promise. And he was just getting started.