Jason woke the next morning to a message on his encrypted line from Amy.
Amy: We've got a problem. A big one.
Jason called her before even getting out of bed.
"What's going on?"
Amy's voice was tight. "PulseCast's servers were hit with a DDoS attack. Took us offline for four hours overnight. Logs are showing coordinated IPs, mostly Eastern Europe proxies."
Jason groaned. "Corporate sabotage?"
"Not just that." She hesitated. "Someone also cloned our front-end UI. Pixel for pixel. Launched it under a new domain: StreamNow.io."
Jason stood up, heart pounding. "Who's behind it?"
"Name on the WHOIS is buried behind three shell corporations, but I traced the hosting... It leads back to Bellamy's investment group."
Jason's jaw clenched.
Marc Bellamy—the same vulture who tried to buy PulseCast before it even had legs—was now trying to steal it instead.
Jason paced his loft.
"Okay. So he's not trying to compete. He's trying to force us into a corner."
"Exactly," Amy said. "We don't have the legal budget for this. If he keeps this up, users will lose trust. Or worse, the narrative will flip and we'll look like the copycats."
Jason's mind raced. "Then we flip the game."
He grabbed his phone and called Victor.
"We're about to get ruthless."
---
Later that afternoon, Jason and Victor sat in a downtown office with a man named Leon Dyer, a top-tier IP attorney known for his cutthroat takedowns in Silicon Valley and Wall Street alike.
"Bellamy's stepping over the line," Jason said. "We want to hit back—hard and fast."
Dyer, a wiry man with silver hair and eyes like a hawk, leaned forward. "We'll hit him with a cease-and-desist, a digital takedown request, and notify the FTC. Even if it doesn't stick immediately, it buys us noise."
Victor added, "And we leak it to TechCrunch. Make it look like Bellamy's ripping off a poor indie team trying to disrupt the dinosaur media."
Dyer grinned. "I like it. Paint the narrative right and even if you lose legally, you win publicly."
Jason nodded. "Do it."
---
By evening, #JusticeForPulseCast was trending on Twitter.
StreamNow.io was bombarded by angry users accusing it of theft. Bellamy's office issued a vague denial, but the damage was done.
Jason stood on his balcony, watching the chaos he'd unleashed with cold satisfaction.
Then his phone buzzed. A message from Naomi.
> "Saw the news. You always this dramatic?"
Jason smiled and typed back:
> "Only when threatened."
Her reply came quick.
> "I like that. Let me know when you want a photo that doesn't lie."
Jason's heart thumped a little faster.
He hadn't realized it, but in a world of code, lawyers, and sharks, she was the only thing that felt... real.