Chapter 3

3.

On the third day after Archie went live, the payment system crashed.

It happened at 2:16 AM.

I knew because Cody sent me a DM on a private app.

"Silas, the payment interface is totally down. Archie auto-restarted three times, but it crashes again ten minutes after every reboot. Marcus is screaming in the group chat, demanding a fix within the hour."

I lay on my bed in my rented apartment and glanced at my phone.

Then I flipped it over and went back to sleep.

Forty minutes later, Cody messaged again.

"Fixed. Archie identified a configuration conflict in the database connection. But after the fix, it accidentally wiped the timestamps for all historical orders."

"Marcus said to ignore it for now. Just get the transactions running again."

I replied with one word.

"Cool."

On the fifth day, the user-facing app experienced a massive white-screen blackout.

The cause was simple―Archie had refactored the front-end routing table during an "automatic optimization." It rearranged the loading sequence of all pages based on an "optimal path algorithm."

But it didn't understand one thing: the WebView rendering mechanism for iOS is different from Android.

In Archie's logic, that was "redundant compatibility code."

In my logic, that was a compatibility layer I had spent all night fine-tuning across thirty-five different test devices four years ago.

The App Store rating plummeted from 4.6 to 2.1.

The top comment: "Crashes after the update. Uninstalled."

Second comment: "My food delivery order vanished but they still took my money."

Third comment: "Are all the engineers at Linden Tech dead?"

On the eighth day, user data began to leak.

It wasn't a hack.

During a "database structure optimization," Archie changed an encryption field algorithm from AES-256 to a self-developed algorithm it deemed "more efficient." It was indeed more efficient―query speeds improved by seventeen percent.

But it forgot one thing.

You can't just swap encryption algorithms.

Once changed, the old data becomes gibberish. The personal information of five hundred thousand users turned into a pile of meaningless hexadecimal strings.

At 10:00 AM that morning, Marcus finally called me.

"Silas. Silas, buddy."

His voice was shaking. Not from anger―from pure terror.

"There's a bit of an issue with the user data. Are you―are you free to drop by the office?" %%%