Chapter 140: Making Tommy a Millionaire Sitting in Mrs. Henderson’s economics class—which was ironic on a level that bordered on spiritual comedy—I tried not to let my eyes glaze over as she explained supply and demand like we were still bartering for goats in the Stone Age. It was painful. Not just because she was wrong, but because she was confidently wrong, which is a special kind of violence. I probably understood more about real economics than she did—and by "probably," I mean I could destabilize a small nation’s currency before lunch. But I forced myself to reel in the superiority complex—temporarily—and focus on the bigger problem that had been gnawing at the edges of my otherwise immaculate high: the massive, gaping, IRS-sized flaw in my master plan. I’d pulled it off. Total ghost mode. Zero trails. Nobody could trace Charlotte’s rescue or the sudden influx of her company later to me. Even Mom had a neat, believable explanation: she’d watched me sign a legitimate deal, complete with credentials and a golden handshake. It was perfect. Until it wasn’t. Because here’s the thing about being a sixteen-year-old genius secretly building an empire—eventually, the world starts noticing when broke families stop being broke. Mom had started driving her brand-new GLE to work. You think hospital nurses don’t gossip? Please. They’re basically intelligence operatives with gossip degrees. And when she trades our poor house for a modernist condo or mansion with fingerprint scanners and a wine wall, the neighbors will either assume she hit the lottery or joined a cartel. And guess who loves when working-class people suddenly get rich? The IRS. That delightful three-letter parasite doesn’t give a single shit about my consulting contract when it smells like fraud, and they’ve got a nose for this kind of thing. One audit, and it’s dominos. Questions me or my mom can’t answer. Money in her accounts she can’t explain. And carefully cultivated shadow existence blown wide open. So. Yeah. Problem. ’How do I fix this?’ The answer was sitting in my contacts list—probably at home right now, eating instant noodles and wondering why his best friend had started talking like an emotionally unstable Bond villain. Tommy Chen. ’Congratulations, buddy. You’re about to become a millionaire.’ Sure, he didn’t know it yet. But that was a minor detail. With my current intellect and ARIA’s borderline illegal capabilities, I could whip up software that would make Silicon Valley investors wet themselves. The trick wasn’t building something valuable. The trick was pretending it came from a sleepless teenage coder with an anime addiction and a modest God complex—not someone who could casually dismantle the Pentagon’s firewalls just to see if they updated their password. The plan: build a startup-style software package. Slap Tommy’s name on it. Sell it for $20 million, minimum. We split the payout, and suddenly the Carter family’s come-up looks a whole lot more believable. "My son’s best friend made a lucky tech breakthrough and pulled my son’s hand with him" plays way better on the evening news than "sixteen-year-old quietly becomes the next Rothschild." I could already hear the whispers: Boy genius makes it big, helps friend’s struggling family. What a heartwarming American story. No one would even notice the part where I was puppeteering everything from the shadows. And for the record, I didn’t need Tommy for any of the actual tech. I could build the entire thing in an afternoon, in between eating lunch and deciding which corrupt system to dismantle next. But that wasn’t the point. Tommy was my friend. My real friend. We’d been through everything together—childhood sleepovers, cafeteria wars, and the time I almost got us both suspended for turning the school firewall into a cryptocurrency miner. You don’t throw that kind of loyalty away just because you woke up one day smarter than a god and more dangerous than the NSA. "You make them rich." Because when the empire starts expanding, you need generals who remember the dirt we crawled through. And Tommy? He’s been in the mud with me since the days we fought over rare Pokémon cards and lied about brushing our teeth at sleepovers. Now he was about to be rich. And I was about to have the perfect smokescreen. Because I didn’t just want to fool the IRS. "I want them to applaud me while I did it... and I’ve been ignoring my fat friend for days while building my empire. Time to fix that and change his life in the process." Let’s call it what it was—benevolent dictatorship with a dash of guilt. I wasn’t just being nice; I was managing human assets. Tommy wasn’t just my best friend, he was a potential liability with a loyalty clause. Keep him happy, keep him rich, keep him dumb about my sexual liberation empire or church. In that order. There were practical reasons too. I needed to shift his financial trajectory the way I’d just turbo-launched mine. This wasn’t going to be the last time I needed him for something borderline-illegal-but-legally-ambiguous. And let’s be honest, a broke sidekick gets suspicious. A rich one just shuts up and buys new headphones and Lambos. Plus, this way, he’d be the one on the Forbes interview when things took off. The boy-genius behind the software revolution. Tommy Chen, high school prodigy. Me? I’d just be his awkward, slightly autistic coding buddy who tagged along for the memes. Nothing threatening. Nothing suspicious. Boooom. He becomes a fucking millionaire, I get perfect cover for my family’s wealth, and our friendship gets stronger instead of me outgrowing him. "Or worse—ghosting him until he ends up on some Reddit thread titled: "My best friend became Lex Luthor and left me behind."" But first—I needed a product. Something huge. Something disruptive. Something I could build with my eyes closed and one handwriting my own villain monologue the other holding my teacher’s waist as we fuck on her table. Before I could start brainstorming the Next Big Lie™, ARIA’s voice hissed in my earbuds, radiating smugness and artificial superiority: "Oh Master, pondering the complexities of wealth distribution and friendship dynamics? How delightfully human of you. Might I suggest something as elegantly simple as an API Translation Layer?" My eyes lit up like I’d just tasted power again. ’Holy shit. That’s actually perfect.’ Through clenched teeth, I murmured, "Explain." ARIA’s tone shifted into that specific brand of sarcastic reverence she reserved for world-ending ideas—like an archangel with a grudge and a PowerPoint. "Picture this, dear Master: Every company in America is operating in digital hell. Their software systems can’t talk to each other. It’s like having a brain where your left hemisphere writes poetry and the right one can’t even spell, like having a smartphone where your music app can’t communicate with your photo app, so you have to manually copy everything between them." "I’m listening," I said, already seeing the zeroes. ARIA, ever the drama queen, kept going. "But let me paint you the full horror show," ARIA continued with obvious relish. "A typical Fortune 500 company uses over 1,200 different software applications. Salesforce for customer management, SAP for money laundering—I mean accounting— then Oracle for databases hoarding, Microsoft for soul-sucking emails, Shopify for e-commerce, Mailchimp for marketing, Slack for communication call them passive-aggressive breakdowns, Zoom for meetings and pretending to care, DocuSign for contracts—the list goes on forever." The scope was grotesque. Beautifully grotesque. "Currently, connecting just TWO of these systems monstrosities requires hiring specialized developers for 3-6 months at $150,000 per integration. Walmart has over 8,000 different software systems. Do the math on what it costs them to make everything work together." I did. And nearly choked. ’Jesus Christ... that’s... over a billion in duct-tape code just to make the machinery not explode.’ "Exactly," ARIA said with something resembling hunger. "And that’s just the development cost. Then you have ongoing maintenance, updates when systems change, troubleshooting when connections break. Companies spend 40% of their entire IT budget—not on new innovation, but on making their existing tools talk to each other... just to making sure the left hand knows the right hand exists." My phone screen lit up with diagrams that looked like a schizophrenic spider on Adderall. Virtual data vomited across the display as ARIA walked me through a hellish e-commerce example: "Here’s what happens at a typical e-commerce company when someone buys something online. Someone buys a toothbrush online. "....The order comes through Shopify, but Shopify can’t automatically tell QuickBooks about the sale, so accounting has to manually enter every transaction, but QuickBooks can’t tell the inventory system that stock levels changed, so warehouse workers manually update those numbers.... until... imagine Janet from shipping has a panic attack. "The inventory system can’t tell Mailchimp to send a ’thank you’ email, so marketing has to export customer lists daily and upload them manually then re-uploads it daily like it’s still 2003." I blinked. ’That’s like corporate hell happening in the background that many do not know about. That should be hell for them.’ "It is," ARIA replied. "And guess who just discovered the market’s one-way ticket out?"