AN UNMISTAKABLE SIGNATURE

The clock on the giant screen was a merciless shade of red, the numbers ticking down with agonizing slowness. Two minutes remaining. The auditorium was a pressure cooker of noise and anticipation. The announcer’s voice was practically shaking with excitement. "I have never seen a competition this close, folks! Nyx and Zero are in a dead heat, both hammering at the final layer of The Citadel's defense! Who will break through first?"

Anya felt a bead of sweat trickle down her temple. All her standard attacks had been blocked, her cleverest traps disarmed. Zero was a wall, a fortress of clean, efficient code that seemed to anticipate her every move. She was running out of time. There was only one option left: a brute-force assault so massive, so overwhelming, that it would act less like a key and more like a battering ram. It was a messy, high-risk strategy she rarely used, a move that screamed desperation. If it failed, it would crash her own systems and take her out of the competition entirely.

No choice, she thought, her knuckles white as she gripped her mouse. It's all or nothing.

She initiated the sequence. Lines of code flooded her screen as she unleashed a distributed denial-of-service attack, not on the server itself, but on the diagnostic tools protecting it. It was a digital smokescreen. While the system’s defenses were busy fighting off the fake attack, she would slip through the chaos and breach the core. On the big screen, the feed from her station showed a cascade of scrolling text, a visual representation of her all-out assault. It was working. The final firewall began to buckle.

From his station, Sameer saw it happening. Nyx’s attack was chaotic, but undeniably brilliant. His standard defenses were being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data. He had seconds to act before she broke through. His mind raced. There was no time to write a new defense. He had to use the tool he’d built for just such an occasion—a custom decryption key he had designed as a personal project. It was his masterpiece, an algorithm so complex and efficient it could slice through layers of encryption in seconds. He had never used it in public before. It felt too personal, a signature he kept for himself. But Nyx, this brilliant, aggressive, unpredictable rival, deserved his best. She had pushed him to the very edge.

With a deep breath, he closed his eyes for a second, then his fingers became a blur. He killed his own failing defense programs and opened a new terminal window. He typed a single command: execute rocket_key.sh.

On the main screen, the audience saw the feed from Zero’s station change. The frantic defense logs vanished, replaced by a single, clean terminal window. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, as the complex script initialized, a small animation flickered to life in the center of the terminal.

It was a loading icon. But it wasn't a spinning wheel or a simple progress bar.

It was a tiny, perfect rocket ship, crafted from ASCII characters, with little puffs of text-based smoke trailing from its engine.

   / \

  / _ \

 | / \ |

 | | | |

/| | | |\

/ | | | | \

(      / \       )

      /      \

  /               \

/                    \

It was on the screen for no more than three seconds before vanishing, replaced by a single line: Decryption complete.

The crowd gasped as Zero’s score shot up, claiming the final prize. The victory horn blared through the auditorium. But Anya didn't see the score change. She didn't hear the roar of the audience. Her entire world had frozen on that three-second image.

The rocket ship.

Her mind flashed back to the late night in the library, the quiet corner, the comfortable silence as they worked on their project. The conversation about their shared love for the old sci-fi show, Starlight Odyssey. She remembered watching his hand as he talked, the way he’d been sketching on a notepad while explaining a complex idea. He had been doodling, his pen moving without conscious thought.

He had drawn a small, simple rocket ship. It was identical. The same angle, the same small fins, the same puff of smoke.

Her blood ran cold. No, her mind screamed. It's a coincidence. It has to be.

But the dam had broken. The metadata comment in the library. The impossible timing of the cat prank while he was sitting right in front of her. The grey hoodie he had draped over her shoulders, the one she had "forgotten" to give back. Every little glitch that had bothered her, every strange coincidence she had dismissed, suddenly slammed into place with the force of a physical blow. The pieces didn't just fit; they locked together, forming a picture that was horrifying and undeniable.

It wasn't a coincidence. It wasn't paranoia.

Sameer—quiet, kind, awkward, hoodie-giving Sameer—was Zero. The boy she was falling for was the rival