RWD: 3.01

3.01

“A total of 1.46 million, 62 solaris round trip…”

—THUFIR HAWAT

The faint, lingering scent of grape juice clung to the air as Paul stepped from the classroom into the corridor’s muted light. His hands found the familiar recess of his pockets, each footfall steady, measured. The corridor outside was a river of youthful chaos, currents of chatter and hurried footsteps flowing towards the promise of release. He moved against this tide, an observer unseen, a ghost in the machine. 

Near the locker bays, a familiar constellation of malice caught his eye: Emma Barnes and Madison Clements, heads bent in conspiratorial conference. Their laughter, sharp and brittle, grated against the ambient noise. Paul’s gaze narrowed, a fractional tightening, the blue-within-blue of his irises cataloging their postures, the micro-expressions of casual cruelty.

Fasad. Corruption. The insidious rot that begins in small things, unattended, and festers into systemic decay. He had seen its work on a galactic scale, empires crumbling from within, poisoned by seemingly insignificant cruelties allowed to breed. These girls, their juvenile torments, were a microcosm, a single, irritating grain of sand. Yet, sand, left to accumulate, could bury worlds. 

The memory of Oscar surfaced – A similar solution for these the irritants would be… efficient. Their removal would be a minor pruning, ensuring the larger garden’s health. It was not a matter of qisas, of retribution, for Taylor’s suffering was her own crucible, a forge for the strength he might later require. Rather, it was a question of maslaha, of public interest – or, more precisely, his interest. Their continued antics would inevitably escalate, drawing unwanted attention, leading Taylor to act and potentially compromising her civilian identity. A cape unmasked was a tool broken, a liability. And Taylor, with her unique control over the unseen world of insects, was a tool of considerable potential. 

The temptation to act was a cold, logical whisper in the silent calculus of his mind. Not crude elimination; that would be excessive, a hammer to crack a nut, and would inevitably draw unwanted scrutiny from the city’s self-appointed protectors. No, something more aligned with the subtle poisons of this world. The unearthing of shaming secrets they would rather keep hidden, the methodical destruction of reputations, the quiet severing of social and academic prospects until transfer to another institution became not a choice, but a desperate necessity. Such methods were within Paul’s emergent capabilities, requiring only time and the precise application of pressure.

Yet, he stayed his hand. The waqt, the timing, was not right. Taylor’s fear, though a useful lever, was still too raw, too easily tipped into outright distrust. Any misfortune befalling her tormentors now, however skillfully orchestrated to appear accidental or unrelated, would be laid at his feet. His analysis of her psychological profile, a mosaic of trauma, resilience, and a surprisingly potent, if misguided, moral compass, indicated an almost certain attribution of blame, evidence or no. Such an outcome would breed resentment, a far more intractable obstacle than fear. Sabr. Patience. Let the situation ripen. Let her own anger and desperation build. Intervention, when it came, must appear as a consequence of her own choices, or, at the very least, be deniable enough to preserve her utility.

He dismissed the fleeting tableau of adolescent malice, consigning it to the periphery of his awareness. There were matters of greater import demanding the allocation of his finite cognitive resources. The bus ride home was uneventful, the city’s weariness reflected in the grime-streaked windows and the slumped shoulders of its passengers. Paul moved through the familiar spaces of the Veder household with the quiet detachment of a visitor. The air was still, empty save for the faint, rhythmic clicks from upstairs – Tom, likely lost in the abstract landscapes of his school assignments. Paul ascended the stairs, bypassing his brother’s room without a sound.

In the sterile confines of the bathroom, the ritual of cleansing was a small act of reclaiming this borrowed flesh. The rush of water, first cool then warming, sluiced away the day’s accretions – the physical grime, the psychic residue of mundane interactions. He stood before the mirror afterwards, steam clinging to the glass, observing the subtle shifts in his reflection. The boyish softness of Greg Veder’s features had now yielded to a leaner, more defined structure. His shoulders, broader now, the lines of his torso hinting at a nascent musculature that was not entirely the product of adolescent development.

It was the work of tahwil, of transformation, orchestrated from within. The precise, controlled release of specific hormones, a biochemical symphony. Growth Hormone, GH, coaxed from the pituitary in carefully measured pulses, stimulating the liver’s production of Insulin-like Growth Factor 1. IGF-1, in turn, whispered to the chondrocytes in the epiphyseal plates of his long bones, urging them to proliferate, to lengthen. The thyroid, under his subtle command, secreted its own vital messengers, T3 and T4, stoking the metabolic furnace, ensuring the efficient synthesis of new tissue, the careful orchestration of bone mineralization. And the gonads, too, played their part, a nuanced increase in testosterone that encouraged the fusion of protein into new muscle, the hardening of bone, the sharpening of resolve. It was a delicate dance, a re-sculpting of the clay from the inside out, accelerating the path to a physique more suited to the demands of his ascension. The changes were incremental, almost imperceptible on a daily basis, yet the cumulative effect, Paul knew, would be significant. Days, not weeks, before lethality would be second nature to this frame.

Dressed in fresh, unremarkable clothing, he settled before the desktop computer in his room. The machine hummed to life, a familiar portal to the digital landscape of this strange new world. The silence of the house pressed in, a canvas upon which he could project the intricate architectures of his plans. First, the organization. The tendrils of Coil’s former enterprise, now re-grafted, reformed. The tripwires he had meticulously woven across the network flickered with activity. Many were the clumsy probings of the PRT, their digital hounds sniffing for the ghost of Thomas Calvert’s organisation, for the architect of his downfall. Predictable. Easily countered. He observed their methods, the patterns of their intrusion, and his own algorithms had adapted, learning, hardening the shell. Other alerts, fewer in number, signaled more… idiosyncratic attempts. Unidentified third parties, their motives and capabilities yet to be fully assessed.

And then, Tattletale. Lisa Wilbourn. Her digital spoor was distinctive, a chaotic yet surprisingly effective dance through his defenses. Her intuitive leaps, the hallmark of her power, had led her closer than any other to the scattered fragments of Coil’s wealth. Lisa had recovered twenty percent of the hidden funds distributed across hundreds of accounts. A not insignificant sum, located despite his increasingly sophisticated obfuscations. Her power was a fascinating anomaly. Each location she breached a layer, he studied her path, the unique signature of her thought process, and in response, wove new complexities into the digital labyrinth, strengthening the encryption, rerouting the data through ever more convoluted pathways. Of course, he could always order her to desist from such actions and achieve a reasonable degree of success, but what would be the value in that? This silent, ongoing duel in the world of shadows and code, was more productive; a whetstone against which he sharpened his own understanding of this world’s unique powers. The process was iterative: her intrusion, his analysis, his fortification. Ijtihad. Independent reasoning, applied to the ever-shifting battlefield of information. 

The hidden wealth that she sought, however vast, was finite. The initial restructuring, the relocation of assets, the securing of loyalties – or, more accurately, the purchase of conditional cooperation – had consumed a significant portion of it. Some twenty million dollars, gone like water in the sand. Another five, invested in expanding capabilities, acquiring new personnel, new resources. 

At this rate of expenditure, Paul deduced his coffers would run dry within months. A disquieting projection. He needed a new, more-sustainable source of income for the long campaign ahead. Coil’s methods – illicit trafficking, extortion – were effective, undeniably, but they carried inherent risks, demanded a recentralization that would again render the organization vulnerable. No, a different path was required. One that mirrored the subtle, pervasive influence he sought to cultivate.

His gaze drifted from the glowing monitor, fingers steepling before him. The path lay in the manipulation of pure information, the ebb and flow of capital in this world’s complex, inefficient markets. Al-Iqtisad. Economics. A different kind of warfare, waged with algorithms and arbitrage instead of crysknives and atomics. The digital marketplace, for all its apparent sophistication, was riddled with vulnerabilities, inefficiencies that any competent, Mentat-trained mind could exploit. 

The existence of Thinkers specializing in financial prediction was a known variable; the governments of this Earth Bet would undoubtedly possess countermeasures, tripwires designed to detect and neutralize covert manipulation. He must, therefore, be even more subtle, his interventions like the shaping of dunes by a desert wind – gradual, inexorable, leaving few clear traces of the force that directed them.

His fingers flew across the keyboard, the rhythmic clatter a counterpoint to the house's deepening silence. Lines of code spooled onto the screen, intricate and elegant. He was crafting a digital djinn, an algorithmic entity designed to sift the ceaseless torrent of global market data – stocks, commodities, currencies, futures – across hundreds of exchanges simultaneously. Its purpose: to identify and exploit arbitrage opportunities, those fleeting micro-second discrepancies in price that shimmered into existence and vanished in the blink of an eye. High-Frequency Trading. HFT. It would also analyze order books, news feeds, the subtle gravitational pulls of institutional investments, predicting near-instantaneous fluctuations with a speed and precision beyond the reach of conventional analysis.

The algorithm would not seek singular, spectacular windfalls. Such grand gestures were the domain of cruder powers, easily flagged, quickly countered. Instead, it would execute millions of trades per hour, each yielding a profit margin almost insultingly small – at most a few hundred dollars, but most times limited to mere cents. Kasb. Acquisition, through volume and velocity. The sheer scale of its operations would obscure its hand, the individual transactions indistinguishable from the anemic churn of legitimate HFT firms. Financial Thinkers, those specialized precogs employed by regulatory bodies, were attuned to the anomalous, the inexplicable. They would search for the signature of a single, impossibly prescient mind bending markets to its will. They would not, he wagered, readily detect the aggregated whispers of a million tiny, logical transactions, not until months of accumulated data revealed the subtle, persistent pattern of his algorithm’s success. Even then, attribution would be a formidable challenge. Taqiyya. Prudent concealment.

Three hours he labored, the lines of code weaving a tapestry of predatory logic. The aroma of dinner, prepared by Martha, drifted up the stairs – a mundane interruption he accommodated with his usual outward composure. He descended, shared the meal, offered the expected banalities of adolescent conversation, then retreated once more to the sanctuary of his room. 

Four more hours, and the algorithm was complete. A mere five hundred or so kilobyte of compiled code, its “dry weight,” yet it possessed the potential to siphon millions each month from the global financial bloodstream. This, of course, did not account for the petabytes of historical market data it would need to ingest, to learn, to refine its predictive models. That would come later, at a more sedated pace. He uploaded the core script to a pre-rented, air-gapped server in a jurisdiction known for its… flexible approach to data sovereignty. Beside it, he deployed a dozen watchdog programs, modified with a sole purpose to monitor the server’s integrity. Should any unauthorized connection be attempted, any unfamiliar process initiate, they would act, scrubbing the algorithm’s core and its operational data from the servers. Hisn. A fortress of code. Paul then allocated an initial five million dollars from his liquid assets, seeding a diversified portfolio of anonymous accounts through which the algorithm would begin its silent harvest.

The task complete, Paul shut down the computer. The mundane glow of the monitor faded, plunging the room into the deeper shadows of approaching midnight. He moved with renewed purpose, shedding his sleepwear, donning instead the dark, functional attire – a plain hoodie, nondescript jeans. HA inute later, he locked the bedroom door, a flimsy deterrent to keep Tom out in case he started wandering again, then slipped out the window with the practiced silence of a desert raider.