Becoming A Tech Tycoon Begins With Regression novel Chapter 55

Chapter 55: Google Calls [2]

Amelia Rhodes sat at her desk, eyes locked on her monitor waiting for the timer on the screen to hit zero.

No, she wasn’t waiting for the legendary windows update to complete which would have required a lot less nerves than this.

She was instead waiting for the timer to complete on OmniTech’s CryptCall app.

Finding a way to get in touch with him was a whole lot harder than she thought, impossible even. After all, every meeting they’ve ever had was always cleanly wiped from her systems.

And she had not a single way to trace him, except he got in contact first, or so she thought.

As he had shown in all their previous communications, OmniTech was someone who never does something in the way she expected.

From his avatar to even the last message he sent her when they tried copying Sentinel, they all seem to show that he was a playful individual.

But Amelia was not one to be fooled, a thinking that was not wrong per day, but it was what caused her to overcomplicate the search for Ethan.

She had tried searching online, hacking into black hats forums, tracing deep web chatter, and even fed a few carefully crafted baits into honeypots just to see if anyone knew who was behind OmniTech.

But everything led to a a dead end.

It had taken her two weeks to finally realize that a clue was right under her nose and she wasn’t even actively looking for it.

______

Amelia collapsed into the chair in her home office, utterly drained from yet another fruitless day of chasing a lead on OmniTech.

She booted up her PC to complete some work before finally getting the chance to rest. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

But the moment the machine turned on, she was stuck in the boot up screen with the windows update.

"Damn it," she muttered under her breath before leaning back on the chair, waiting for the update to complete.

She sighed again and closed her eyes, letting the tension in her shoulders melt.

But when the update bar finally filled and the desktop booted to life, something immediately caught her attention.

Her background had changed.

Instead of the usual dark theme she always kept, the screen now displayed a pixelated version of the CryptCall logo except it was now glitched.

The disconnected parts of the logo formed a certain trail which her eyes followed, leading to what looked like a document she hadn’t remembered saving.

Her first thought was that she had been hacked, but that thought was quickly discarded due to the familiar logo on her screen.

She had remembered seeing it on the software usually sent by Ethan for them to communicate.

Narrowing her eyes, she clicked on the document and the screen immediately went blank and lines of binary started scrolling across her screen, confusing her.

Was she wrong in thinking that the update was from OmniTech? Had she been caught off guard by some black hat hacker?

But soon enough, with every few lines of binary, a letter scrolled past. After a couple of letters, she realized that a word was formed, forcing her to immediately take out a pen and writing pad from her drawer and started noting down each letter.

By the end of it, the binary disappeared and the PC booted back up, everything resetting back to how it previously was.

Amelia looked down on the notepad, on it was an arrangement of letters that seemed to be completely random.

She stared at the jumble of letters.

rFa2-KmT9q-vQbZ0-XuLw7-pNgE1

It didn’t look like a message. It looked like a license key... or perhaps—

Her eyes widened as the realization struck her.

"A one-time access link," she muttered.

She opened her terminal and ran a sandboxed virtual environment, then launched a secure browser instance.

A habit she had developed even though she knew it was useless to open the link in a secured environment, since her PC had just been hacked without her being able to do anything.

She pasted the code into the address bar, and hit enter.

The browser flickered.

Then the screen faded into black.

White text appeared one line at a time, in a minimalist, monospaced font:

"Curiosity killed the cat..."

Amelia arched an eyebrow.

Another line appeared:

"...but satisfaction brought it back."

Then the screen shifted, and a blinking cursor appeared beneath a simple prompt:

[ Solve me: 13, 1, 20, 8 ]

She frowned. Numbers?

That didn’t give her enough clues to work with after all, those numbers could mean anything and she has no idea where to start.

But that’s when a text box at the bottom of the screen caught her eye.

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