The words ‘Terminal pancreatic carcinoma. Prognosis: 90 days’ burned themselves into Baltasar’s retina. The screen, reflecting the neon glow from the city below, shimmered with the brutal clarity of a death sentence. Not a software glitch. Not a cross-connection anomaly. A stark reality. Don Hector. Ninety days. The grueling 90-day punishment wasn’t some eccentric lesson in humility; it was a ticking clock. A silent countdown to his grandfather’s demise, and to Leandro’s complete absorption of the Rivo empire. His hands, which had so recently moved with surgical precision to bandage a puppy, now trembled. The air in his throat dried out, heavy as lead ballast. It wasn’t just about his inheritance, his servers, or even his pride. This was about Don Hector, the man who had taught him how to see the world as a series of elegant algorithms, the man whose gruff affection was the closest thing Baltasar had ever known to family. Leandro wasn’t just stealing assets; he was planning to dance on a grave. Churro, sensing the shift in his human’s mood, poked his scaly head from the thermal bag, his single eye fixing on Baltasar with an uncharacteristic solemnity. He let out a low, guttural churr, almost a question. Cosima, who had been quietly cooing to the puppy now nestled in her lap, looked up. “Baltasar? What’s wrong? You look like you just saw a ghost, or worse, Leandro’s credit score.” Her voice was lighter than the moment demanded, a reflexive defense against his sudden pallor. He couldn’t speak. The words caught, trapped by the sudden, overwhelming fury that surged through him, eclipsing the shock. Fury at Leandro, at Don Hector for his secrecy, at himself for being so blind. He looked at Cosima, her face framed by the city lights, concern softening her usually sharp features. He wanted to tell her, to vent the poison, but his throat felt constricted. His pride, an anchor even in crisis, held him silent. How could he, Baltasar Rivo, the infamous Cascabel, admit such raw, vulnerable fear? Especially to someone he barely knew, someone who, by all accounts, was part of the problem? He slammed the laptop shut with a sharp *clack*, the sound echoing in the confined space of the fire escape. The puppy yelped, startling Cosima. “Hey!” she protested, her brow furrowing. “What was that for? You almost gave poor Solana a heart attack!” Baltasar ignored her, his mind racing, pulling threads of code, security protocols, and server architecture. He had to stop Leandro. The gig, the moped, the humiliation—it was all secondary now. The goal had utterly, violently shifted. He needed to dismantle Shadow Conglomerate LLC, to expose Leandro’s machinations, and secure the Rivo legacy before the ninety days ran out. He pulled his old hacking laptop open again, faster this time, his fingers flying across the keyboard with renewed purpose. “I need a live connection to the Rivo mainframe,” he muttered, more to himself than to Cosima. “I need to lock him out. Now.” Cosima watched him, her earlier annoyance giving way to a more cautious curiosity. “Lock who out of what mainframe? Baltasar, you’re acting… unhinged. Is this about my cousin? Did he do something even more detestable than usual?” He ignored her, his focus absolute. He bypassed the local network firewall, a ghost in the machine he had once built, and sent a direct ping to the Rivo Tech central server, bypassing all external access points. He plugged in his old alias credentials, the master tokens that once granted him untrammeled entry to every byte of Rivo data. It was a master key, forged in his youth, used to circumvent the very systems he later designed. Static hummed beneath his fingertips. The screen flickered green with ‘Access Granted’ for a fleeting moment, then just as quickly, the text morphed to an indignant, unyielding red: ‘ACCESS DENIED. LEGACY CREDENTIALS DEPRECATED. UNAUTHORIZED ATTEMPT LOGGED.’ Baltasar froze. Deprecated? His own backdoor, the virtual escape hatch he’d meticulously crafted, was sealed. Don Hector, ever the shrewd strategist, must have anticipated an internal attack. Or perhaps Leandro, in his relentless ascent, had already brought in new architects, new security measures to lock out the past, including the ghost of Cascabel. He leaned back, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. This wasn’t a remote lock he could simply pick. The legacy backdoor wasn’t just a string of code; its manual failsafe was hardwired into the server room of Rivo Prime, the main tower. A contingency he’d designed in his paranoia, a lethal override that could only be triggered directly from the hub rack. It meant he had to stand in person inside the Rivo Tech building to initiate the lockout. A manual intrusion. And he was just a delivery person, banned from the premises. “Denied,” he breathed, the word a bitter exhalation. “He locked me out.” Cosima, surprisingly, didn’t mock him. She saw the genuine distress, the raw frustration on his face. “Who locked you out, Baltasar? And why are you trying to break into… whatever it is?” Before he could formulate a response, his DashGo app, still open on his personal terminal, flashed. Not a delivery ping. Not an update. An urgent, crimson banner unfurled across the screen, pulsing with an ominous light. It was a message from the highest echelons of the network, a message he knew instinctively could only have come from one person. [ADMINISTRATOR OVERRIDE: EMPLOYMENT TERMINATED. IMMEDIATE EFFECT. ALL ACCESS PRIVILEGES REVOKED. YOUR DIGITAL IDENTITY HAS BEEN ERADICATED FROM THE SAN VESPERA GRID. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE.] The red banner swallowed his profile picture, his DashGo rating, his entire work history. A cascade of phantom firewalls slammed shut, not just on his app, but on every connected device. His personal comm-link went dead. His ride-share account, gone. His bank account, frozen. Even the city’s public transit card, tied to his citizen ID, became inert. Leandro’s counter-hack wasn’t just retaliation; it was an execution. He hadn’t just lost his job; he’d been erased.

The Ninety-Day Deadline