The room smelled of detergent and old wood. The wallpaper had been peeled and painted over, badly. Chang didn’t care. The security was clean. Power was stable. The analog phone line was unplugged. He’d tested the RF shielding twice.

The machine in front of him wasn’t beautiful. Just right.
No camera. No mic. Custom board. Air-gapped. Fresh firmware, locally flashed. SSD zeroed and soldered. The bootloader was pure—he’d built it himself. Every component known. Every checksum verified.

He ran the script again—one last time, offline.
No alerts. No divergence. No entropy drift.

Three weeks. Four minds. Ten million lines of code and logic paths. This was the moment it all converged.

He didn’t think of the others. Not Alias, not Sofia, not Amara. He didn’t allow himself to. He hadn’t spoken since The Hut. Hadn’t needed to.

His task was the ignition layer: initializing the Pegged smart contract framework, pushing the zero-state of the core contracts to mainnet, and triggering the recursive entropy-reduction function across the lottery subsystem.

Alias called it probabilistic trust collapse mitigation.
Chang called it the clean surface.

He checked the time. UTC, synchronized by satellite. The IANA window opened in 47 seconds. The hashlock countdown had begun two hours earlier.

He inserted the key drive. His hand was steady.
Terminal open. Script staged. Final confirmation prompt blinking.

Launch sequence: READY
Deploy hashroot? (Y/N):

He entered the passphrase. It was not a word. Just a rhythm. Muscle memory. No linguistic footprint.

He pressed Y.

The fans kicked once. Silent.

Nothing flashy. No beep. No launch music.

Just output:

Pegged Core Contracts Deployed.
Entropy Channel Activated.
Seed Draw Initiated.
Genesis Timestamp Recorded.

It was done.

He powered off the machine. Pulled the drive. Broke it with a press of the heel. Collected every component in a Kevlar bag, added magnesium gel, and touched the ignition rod.

Two minutes later, nothing remained but smoke and ash.

Outside, it had begun to snow.

Inside the network, the first block of Pegged had propagated—unsigned, unowned, irreversible.

He opened the door, stepped into the cold, and vanished.