Why expose others to this?
Why wasn’t it enough to take the risk alone?
Because he had tried.
Because he had failed.
And because Pegged had to exist—not as an experiment, not as a dream, but as a functional system that could not be stopped.
And he couldn’t do it alone.
Alias exhaled. This was the part he had been avoiding, the part that had crept into his thoughts at night, the part that made him sick with the weight of it. Because it wasn’t just about technology. It wasn’t about the limitations of infrastructure, security, or code.
It was about the Faustian necessity to act.
Alias knew the story, and Goethe's life long preoccupation with the theme. Doctor Faustus, the scholar who had everything but wanted more. Who signed his soul away to Mephistopheles in exchange for knowledge, for power, for the ability to transcend human limitations.
This—Pegged—was a Faustian contract.
Not with the devil. Not with any metaphysical force.
But with reality itself.
The moment he accepted that Pegged could not be built alone, he was signing away control. He was forging a pact—not with Lucifer, but with history, with the future, with the people who would step forward to make this thing real.
And that, perhaps, was the most terrifying part.
Because in every Faustian contract, there came a moment—the reckoning. The realization that power was not free, that knowledge had a cost, that action required sacrifice.
He wasn’t naïve. He knew that the moment Pegged became real, the lives of those involved would change irreversibly. Some would regret it. Some would try to undo what could never be undone. Some might even turn against it.
But he also knew this: humans were not made to conform.
They were made to rebel.
To pick up the gauntlet.
To fight.
Common sensical people could say it was hubris. That people who refused to submit to the natural order of things—who challenged power, who upset the equilibrium—were playing at gods.
And perhaps this was right.
But Alias had never been interested in playing at gods.
His was a different impulse—the deep, fundamental human desire to act. The refusal to accept the way things were simply because they had always been that way.
Because what was history if not a sequence of men and women who had looked at the world and said, “No”?
What was progress if not defiance made manifest?
There would always be a choice:
To conform. To bow. To accept.
Or to act, knowing full well the cost.
And in the end, humans always acted.
They couldn’t help themselves. It was what they were made for.
They picked up swords, crossed oceans, broke codes, fought wars against inevitability itself.
And now, in an era of data and artificial intelligence, the battlefield was different—but the instinct was the same.
And Pegged? Pegged was a weapon.
Alias had tried to deny it, had tried to convince himself that he could simply create the thing and walk away. But he knew better. This wasn’t about him anymore. It was about the others who would come, the ones who—whether by reason, conviction, or sheer necessity—would step forward and say, I will do this.
Because someone always did.
History demanded participants.
Pegged demanded heroes.
Alias closed his notebook, the decision made.
He would build the team.
He would sign the contract.
And this time, the devil - just as in Goethe's play - would not win.
