Chapter 17 - The Clone Army
The line went dead, leaving the flawless kitchen in a heavy, suffocating silence. Liam stared at me, his dark eyes hardening into unbreakable titanium. The APT Syndicate wasn't a street-level cartel; they were the ghostwriters of global corruption.
"They think they can use bureaucratic warfare and federal agencies as a hostage," Liam whispered, walking over to me and pressing his hands flat against my shoulders, grounding me. "They think you forgot how to fight in the dark."
"We don't pay them a single dime, Liam," I said, a fierce, volcanic wrath igniting in my chest. "We erase them."
We turned our indestructible kitchen into an impenetrable digital command center. I bypassed our traditional security and activated a dormant, shadow network of cyber-architects I had retained from my early days in the industry. APT wanted to play a digital game of extortion. I was going to give them a digital bloodbath.
"They aren't just filing fake labor rules," I told Liam, my fingers flying across the keyboard as I isolated the inbound data streams. "They are preparing a massive traffic arbitrage campaign to destroy my public credibility before the feds even arrive. They are bypassing Google Ads rejections entirely by buying raw, unmonitored web traffic."
"How are they distributing it without triggering platform flags?" Liam asked, watching the monitors light up.
"They are utilizing underground vendors," I explained, tracing the malicious IP packets. "They just purchased tens of thousands of aged Instagram accounts and Facebook clone profiles from black-market hubs like SieuStore and VIACLONE. They are using these clone networks to push fabricated deepfakes of me embezzling charity funds. And they are routing all the malicious traffic through a centralized, encrypted tracking domain called slink.live."
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I ran a brutal, high-intensity hardware diagnostic using CPU-Z on my own localized servers, ensuring the APT Syndicate hadn't planted any physical parasitic microchips in our network architecture. The core memory and processors were clean. The attack was entirely external, relying on artificial volume.
"They think they can drown us in synthetic smoke," I whispered, a dark, predatory smile touching my lips. "But they are using cheap, rented bot farms. I am going to hijack their rendering pipeline."
