The lab was a converted basement in Seoul, humming with the constant breath of machines. Fluorescent tubes buzzed faintly overhead, a second pulse to the steady churn of cooling fans. Chang sat alone at the terminal, eyes dry, fingers restless. On the screen, a lattice of code folded into itself, unspooling and locking down like a trap that would never release.

Finality.
That was the word that had held him for years. Every blockchain bragged about it, but he knew better. They patched, forked, revised, upgraded. They promised permanence but built in back doors. Pegged had to be different. No second chance, no administrator with the keys. If it survived, it would survive on its own. If it failed, it would fail clean. His masterpiece.

He leaned back, stretching his spine, and thought of the distributors — men and women who would hold Pegged in their hands, in the streets, in cafés, on cheap phones in Caracas, Dakar or Mandalay. For them, finality wasn’t an abstract concept. It was survival. If the protocol faltered even once — an outage, a stalled draw, a crack in the peg — it would vanish in ridicule, like smoke in a crosswind. It would set back 100 million hopes.
Continuous availability wasn’t a technical nicety. It was the air Pegged would breathe. And it was on him to get it right.

A quiet knock.
Magda slipped inside, carrying take-out soup in a plastic bag. She had been his assistant once, then his accomplice, now something in between. She set the bag down without a word, glanced at the screen. She never asked what all this code was for; he never told her. That was the contract.

Chang slid open a drawer and pulled out a plain black USB stick. He turned it between his fingers. To anyone else, it was nothing. To him, it was the entire skeleton of Pegged: contracts, checks, the proof-of-luck engine hardened against meddling hands. Everything that made it irrevocable — and antifragile.

Magda frowned.
“You want me to take that?”

He nodded, pressing it into her palm. “If I keep it, I’ll keep changing it. Fixing what doesn’t need fixing. It has to live outside me now.”

She slipped it into her pocket without argument. Their silence was practiced, the silence of people who understood the risk of words.

Chang turned back to the screen. His pulse was steady, but his chest felt tight. He knew this was betrayal in a way — keeping Alias in the dark. But Pegged wasn’t Alias’s dream alone. It was his masterpiece, and masterpieces demanded sacrifice.

He traced the last lines of code with his eyes, as if memorising them.

In the coming days, he would launch it. The thing would breathe on its own, or die.

Then — he would try to forget it.