The first few days of school were a masterclass in social friction. At Palisades High, social status isn't just a vibe—it's a commodity, and I had crashed the market.
By Tuesday, the "Cold War" had officially begun. Vanessa Miller, who usually owned the oxygen levels in the hallway, had implemented a strict "Mason Silence" policy. Every time I passed the Spirit Squad in the quad, she'd pivot her head so sharply I expected to hear her vertebrae crack, giving me a shoulder so cold it could have preserved meat for a nuclear winter.
The rumor mill, fueled by a mixture of teenage Boredom and Vanessa's wounded pride, claimed she was "devastated" that I'd chosen "the help" (Haley) over her . I didn't regret it for a second. In this life, family was the only currency that actually held its value. Besides, between my Peak Athlete Physique demanding 4,000 calories a day and my Total Recall keeping me three steps ahead of the curriculum, I didn't have the bandwidth for a high-maintenance cheerleader whose biggest existential crisis was a chipped acrylic nail.
$$INTERVIEW - MASON$$
Mason: Look, Vanessa is a classic Season 1 antagonist. High ego, low strategic depth. She operates on a reward-loop system that I broke the moment I prioritized Haley. I'm currently managing a portfolio that includes Bitcoin and Silicon Valley startups; I don't have time to play 'who-texted-who-first' with a girl who thinks 'long-term planning' is deciding what to wear to the Friday night bonfire. Family first. Always.
Wednesday was defined by the grind.
It started at 4:45 AM. Jay didn't believe in alarm clocks; he believed in the heavy, rhythmic thud of a fist against a bedroom door. "Rise and shine, Delgado! The defense doesn't sleep in!"
The morning drills were a brutal test of my enhanced body. Jay had me in the backyard, running cone drills while he stood there with a stopwatch and a thermos of coffee that smelled like jet fuel. He didn't care about my "miracle" survival; he cared about my footwork.
"Again!" Jay barked as I hit the final cone. "You're rounding the corner like a minivan, Mason! I want to see you cut! Explode! If you can't beat a plastic cone, you're going to get eaten alive by a middle linebacker from Westlake."
I didn't complain. I pushed. My muscles burned with a satisfying heat, the Peak Athlete Physique absorbing the stress and rebuilding stronger within minutes. I could feel my coordination tightening, my reflexes sharpening to a razor edge. Jay was watching me with that grim, wolfish satisfaction, seeing the athlete he'd always wanted.
By 8:00 AM, I was at the breakfast table, consuming a small mountain of eggs while Manny watched me with a mix of awe and horror.
"Is it truly necessary to consume the entire carton, Mason?" Manny asked, dabbing his mouth with a silk napkin. "I feel as though I'm witnessing a biological event. Like a locust swarm contained within a single teenager."
"Brain and brawn, Manny," I said, winking. "Need fuel for both."
School itself was a different kind of endurance test. I spent my lunch breaks in the library with Alex, which was effectively social suicide for anyone else, but for me, it was a tactical briefing. Alex had reclaimed a corner of the reference section as her "War Room."
"Vanessa is attempting a pincer movement," Alex said, not looking up from a complex spreadsheet. "She's been seen talking to the Varsity captain, Brian. She's trying to provoke a jealousy response from you by proxy. It's a primitive strategy, roughly equivalent to a silverback gorilla thumping its chest."
"Let her thump," I said, reviewing the academic files she'd pulled. "How are we looking on the math department?"
"You've already tested out of AP Calculus," Alex noted, her eyes narrowing behind her glasses. "The teacher asked if you'd cheated. I told him that your brain just functions on a higher clock speed. It's creating a bit of a rift, Mason. The faculty doesn't like it when a freshman knows more than the tenure-track staff."
"I'll tone it down," I lied. I wasn't going to tone anything down.
Thursday arrived. The day the Syndicate moved from the "playground" to the "market."
I was in the Dunphy basement. The air was cool, the only sound the hum of Alex's custom-built servers. This was where the "Pritchett Miracle" became a financial entity.
"The social drama upstairs is fascinating ," Alex remarked, her fingers flying across her keyboard. "I've been tracking the metadata of Vanessa Miller's social media activity. It's a fascinating study in frantic insecurity."
I leaned back, watching a line of code scroll past. "She's trying to reclaim the narrative, Alex. In her head, she's the protagonist."Getting rejected by a freshman doesn't fit the script she's been told her whole life."
"It's more than that," Alex said, adjusting her glasses with a smirk. "She's currently trying to start a 'Save the Iguana' foundation just because you were seen near the reptile enclosure at Luke's party. It's a transparent attempt to associate her brand with your 'hero' arc. I've already drafted a cease-and-desist letter for her dignity, but I doubt she'd be able to read the larger words."
"Let her play her games," I said. "We have bigger prey."
"Agreed. Although watching her try to 'sub-tweet' you using a vocabulary that barely hits the sixth-grade level is my new favorite hobby," Alex added,
She turned the monitor toward me. Instead of the usual spreadsheets, she had the Burbn interface pulled up. It was cluttered, messy, and trying to do too many things at once. It was a failure of vision that I knew how to fix.
"Thirty thousand for five percent of a failing check-in app?" Alex asked, her business mask sliding back on. "I know you have 'intuition,' Mason, but even with my math, this looks like a sinkhole. We're essentially paying for his server debt."
"It's not a sinkhole, Architect. It's the foundation of a skyscraper," I said. "In twelve months, everyone with a smartphone is going to be obsessed with filters and square photos. We're getting in before he realizes what he actually has. We're not buying a check-in app. We're buying the pivot."
Alex said, pausing her work to look at me intently. "But there's something that's been bothering my analytical side. You have never told me—how are we actually allowed to sign these contracts when we are not of legal age? Systrom's lawyers will flag the contract the second they see our birth dates. Minors can't sign binding equity agreements."
I leaned in, my voice lowering. "I have long since taken care of it. I used Gloria's help. I told her I want to invest some of my money to set up a legacy fund for the family, and I needed her signature as a custodian. Mother trusts me to be good with money. Back when we were alone in Colombia, I used to help her with all the paperwork and finances so she didn't have to worry about it. She's used to me handling the details, so she doesn't ask a lot of questions. She signed the UTMA custodial papers long before we even set up this Syndicate."
Alex stared at me, a slow grin spreading across her face. "You used Gloria. That's genius. Mom would have asked too many questions, but Gloria... she treats you like a partner in her own house. If she's the custodian, this is deep-black ops. Nobody in the family will ever know until we're billionaires."
The VOIP software chimed. Alex hit 'Connect.'
The screen flickered to life. Kevin Systrom stared back at us from a noisy cafe in San Francisco. He looked exhausted.
"Uh, hello? "I'm looking for... the 'Delgado-Dunphy Strategic Group'? Is this a joke? You guys look like you're in a basement."
"We are in a basement, Kevin. That's where the best ideas start," I said, my voice dropping into that calm, resonant frequency that demanded attention. "I'm Mason, the Managing Partner. This is Alex, my CIO. We've looked at the Burbn metrics. They're terrible. Your retention rate is dropping by eight percent every week."
Kevin winced. "I... well, we're iterating.The check-in feature is popular in certain—"
"Stop iterating," I interrupted. "You're trying to be Foursquare when you should be Kodak for the digital age. People don't want to tell the world where they are; they want to show the world how good their life looks. We're prepared to offer you thirty thousand dollars for five percent equity, on one condition: you drop the check-in features and focus entirely on the photo-sharing stream. Give them filters. Make every bad cell phone photo look like a professional Polaroid."
There was a long silence on the other end. I could see the gears turning in Kevin's head. He was looking at his bank balance, then at his messy code, and then at the two teenagers on his screen who were speaking with the authority of seasoned VCs.
"How did you know we were thinking about a photo pivot?" Kevin whispered.
"The offer is on the table for sixty seconds. After that, we take our capital to a competitor. Alex is pulling up the DocuSign now. It's routed through a custodial trust under Gloria Delgado-Pritchett. It's all legal, Kevin. Accept, and the wire initiates."
Sixty seconds?" Kevin stammered. "I need to talk to my partner, Mike—"
"Mike will agree because you can't pay him next month without this cash," I said. "Forty-five seconds. Alex is pulling up the DocuSign now. It's routed through our custodial trust. It's all legal, Kevin. All you have to do is click 'Accept' and the wire transfer initiates from our account."
Alex's fingers blurred. "Contract sent. Thirty seconds remaining, Kevin. The server logs show your hosting bill is due at midnight. Do you want to keep the lights on, or do you want to keep failing?"
"Okay," Kevin said, clicking his mouse. "Okay. Thirty thousand for five percent."
Alex let out a breath she'd been holding for five minutes. "Mason... that was... terrifying. And exhilarating. We just bought five percent of a future titan using my step-grandmother's legal signature and a basement internet connection. I think I need to go calculate something just to calm my heart rate."
"Don't get too comfortable, Architect," I said, standing up. "We have football practice in twenty minutes, and I have a feeling Vanessa is going to try something desperate at the bonfire tomorrow. The social market is just as volatile as the tech one."
The Syndicate was officially open for business, and with Gloria as our silent legal partner, the world—and the family—had no idea we were coming.
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