Sharon Carter's POV
Before the billions, before the "Umbrella" name was etched in chrome and glass across the skyline, I was there. I was the one who stood in the quiet of his study when he was just a boy inheriting a ghost of an empire. I watched him bury his grandfather, a solitary figure in a sea of black suits. I saw the profound grief he hid from the world, and I made it my silent mission to be the one person he didn't have to hide from.
I'm a trained agent. I know how to compartmentalize, how to distance myself and how to treat a target as a mission objective. But Aryan Spencer was never a mission. He was the anchor I didn't know I needed in a life of shifting allegiances and temporary safe houses. I've spent every waking hour for years making myself indispensable to him. I know the exact temperature he likes in his office. I know the way his jaw tightens almost imperceptibly when a deal is about to turn south.
I thought being the first meant I was the only one who truly understood the man behind the mask.
But then came Wanda.
I noticed the change before anyone else did. I'm trained to see the hairline fractures in a structure before the catastrophic break, and right now, the fracture is in my own carefully constructed life. Wanda was a wounded animal when she arrived. But that shell has melted away in a matter of weeks under his quiet attention. She absorbed the company's complex systems like a sponge, but it's the way she's absorbing him that makes my heart feel like it's being squeezed by a invisible hand.
She smiles now. Not the practiced curve I've spent a lifetime perfecting, but something real. And it only ever happens when she's near him.
Today, I watched her walk into his office to bring him tea. Tea. A specific herbal blend she somehow procured from her war torn home. I stood at the door, a stack of vital reports in my hand. He didn't even look up from his work when I entered, but he had thanked her for the tea, his voice softer than I'd heard it in months.
It's an ache I can't explain away with logic or training. I've faced down assassins in darkened alleyways without a tremor in my hand, but seeing her hand him that simple cup and effortlessly occupying the intimate space that used to be mine alone unsettles me more than a loaded gun at my temple.
She has an innocence, a tragic purity that I can never reclaim. She looks at him with those green eyes, and I see him soften. He doesn't soften for me. For me, he is the strategist. He is the man who expects, and receives, nothing less than perfection. With her, he's… human.
I hate jealousy. It's ugly. It's inefficient. It's beneath me. Yet, I find myself comparing every year I've given him, every secret I've kept, every risk I've taken, to the few short weeks she's been here. I was the first to enter his orbit. I was the one who stayed when things were dark and uncertain. I don't want to leave. I can't leave. This office, this life, this man. They are all I have left that feels real.
But as I watch them through the glass partition, a quiet conversation passing between them that I am not privy to, I realize that being the first witness to his rise doesn't guarantee a place at the summit. I'm the shadow that helped him get there, and she's the light he's choosing to look at.
I gripped my tablet until my knuckles turned white, turned on my heel, and walked away before either of them could see the crack in my professional facade. I'm still the agent. I'm still the professional. But I still feel like I'm failing a mission I never even officially signed up for.
———
Aryan sat alone in the top-floor office long after the last employee had gone home and the lights of the city had dimmed to a glittering tapestry. On his desk, bathed in the cool glow of a single monitor, lay the final acquisition papers. Atlas Search Systems no longer existed.
From this moment on, it had a new name.
Google.
Forty million dollars. That was the price tag for the future. Most people believed power came from weapons or armies or political influence. They were wrong. Real power comes from the absolute control of information. Search engines are the most insidious form of that control. They are the gatekeepers of truth itself.
The acquisition of Atlas Search Systems was a formality, a tactical acquisition of talent and server space that he intended to strip to the bone. By midnight, the legacy framework was deleted.
He spent the quiet hours of the night rebuilding the core logic from the ground up, implementing a hierarchical structure that felt less like a product and more like a new law of nature.
He recalibrated the crawler bots to move beyond mere keyword discovery. They were now digital scouts, programmed to prioritize Domain Authority and Semantic Weight, identifying the nodes of the web that actually mattered rather than the ones that shouted the loudest.
He discarded the linear database for a hyper-scalable architecture. It was built not for the internet of today, but to anticipate an exponential explosion of data, capable of housing a volume of information that the current digital world couldn't even dream of.
He refined the recursive ranking algorithm, a beautiful piece of logic that measured the Graph Theory of human knowledge. It quantified the connectivity and authority of the world. If a piece of information was cited by trusted sources, its value rose; if it existed in a vacuum of self reference, it vanished into the digital abyss.
He approved the covert construction of Tier IV Distributed Data Centers across three continents. These were managed through a labyrinth of shell companies to avoid market speculation and regulatory oversight. The goal was Geographic Redundancy and Sub-Millisecond Latency. He wanted the answer to appear at the speed of thought, an act of seeming omniscience.
Most tech startups committed suicide by letting short term monetization dictate their search results. They sold their integrity for a high quarterly yield, polluting their own well. He would not make that mistake.
He authorized the development of AdSense. It was built on the principle of Relevance. Advertising would serve the user's intent rather than manipulate it. Paid placements would be clearly labeled and kept separate from the organic index. The integrity of the algorithm was his highest priority. If the world didn't trust the engine as an unbiased arbiter of truth, he couldn't use it to curate their reality.
He instituted a recruitment protocol that offered absolute creative freedom and obscene compensation, with one non-negotiable directive. The Algorithm is Sovereign. It would never be sold or compromised, not to governments, not to lobbyists, and certainly not to the petty gods of old industry.
Information is the ultimate weapon, and all weapons attract predators. He embedded security protocols into the very DNA of the system:
End-to-End Quantum-Resistant Encryption for all internal communications.
Air-Gapped Development Branches to prevent leaks or external tampering.
Heuristic Behavioral Monitoring to detect internal sabotage before a single line of malicious code could be altered.
But beneath all those layers was the one only he knew of. A Kernel Level Kill-Switch embedded in the root directory. If the empire he was building ever threatened to slip from his fingers, he could trigger a global blackout of information with a single thought.
When the new branding team saw the final proposal, they were hesitant. "Google," the lead designer said, looking at the simple logo on the screen. "It's... unconventional. A bit playful for a company of this scale, isn't it?"
"It's a play on 'Googol'," Aryan replied, staring out at the city lights. "A one followed by a hundred zeros. It symbolizes Infinite Reach and the absolute organization of a chaotic universe."
They nodded, impressed by the marketing logic.