He adjusted the timestamps to match the current clock so the metadata appeared flawless.
Then he pushed the continuous loop through the cellular connection.
“It’s finished,” Kurt said, stepping away from the monitor. “The cameras are now broadcasting yesterday’s reality.”
He pointed toward the screen.
“To the person watching, you are sitting inside your apartment and working at the computer. They are receiving a perfect high-definition stream.”
In reality, my apartment was empty.
I had already dismantled the workstation.
At dawn, I locked the primary hard drives containing the $37.5 million algorithm inside a bank vault.
The watcher was observing a ghost.
With the immediate threat temporarily contained, Kurt turned his attention toward the destination of the stolen footage.
He traced the outgoing internet packets.
The data was being transmitted to a commercial cloud-storage provider.
“They are paying for enormous storage capacity,” Kurt said, watching text move across a secondary monitor. “Video requires significant space. I’m examining the payment gateway connected to the cloud subscription.”
I stood behind him as lines of code moved across the screen.
I needed a name.
I needed to know who had entered my home and attempted to steal four years of work.
Kurt performed a reverse search on the billing information.
He moved beyond the initial privacy protections and extracted the registered account details.
One line appeared on the monitor.
Registered entity: SC Group.
“That’s all,” Kurt said flatly. “No personal names and no direct phone numbers. It is a shell company registered through a third-party legal service.”
He continued reading.
“The billing address is a post-office box in Delaware.”
I stared at the letters.
SC Group.
The name meant nothing to me.
It didn’t match any competing technology company I knew.
It wasn’t connected to any venture-capital fund I had rejected.
“Can you investigate further?”
“It will take time,” Kurt replied. “Shell companies are designed to become dead ends.”
He turned back toward his screen.
“I need to trace the money financing the account. That means moving through financial-security layers. I’ll continue running searches, but for today, we have reached a wall.”
I left his office one hour later.
The fog outside had thickened, matching the uncertainty inside my mind.
I didn’t know who was sitting behind a screen watching false footage of me writing code.
It could have been a corporate spy.
A former colleague with a grievance.
I had no confirmed suspect.
I gripped the steering wheel and stared at the traffic ahead.
The proxy server gave me an important window of safety, but I was still operating in darkness.
Someone wanted my life’s work.
They possessed enough resources to enter my most private spaces to obtain it.
On Monday morning, an urgent email marked in red appeared from my intellectual-property attorney, Vera Sterling.
I canceled my meetings and drove immediately to her downtown office.
Vera was already waiting.