All Chapters of Rich Under Their Hate: The Social Status System: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

"Stop talking like a philosopher and start acting like a technician!" Pim grabbed Chalida’s shoulder, her grip hard enough to bruise. "Pull the tether. Now. If we don’t kill the link, we’re not just trading stocks—we’re feeding our own bank accounts directly into the Minister’s surveillance grid." Chalida stumbled, the haptic servos in her sleeve whining in protest as she wrenched herself free. Her eyes were still wide, the cerulean glow flickering like a dying neon sign. "If I pull the tether, we lose the predictive edge. The rival merger, the Klong Toey acquisition—it all dissolves. We’ll be bankrupt by morning, Pim. We’ll be nobodies." "Being nobodies is a luxury, Chalida! Right now, we’re being hunted." Pim swiped through her interface, her fingers dancing across the air with lethal precision. "Look at the packet headers. See that red shift? That’s not a system glitch. Tha

"Archive it? You want to hide an omniscient god in a ghost-drive while the Minister of Interior is walking up the stairs to check our homework?" Pim hissed, her eyes darting across the flickering holographic displays that populated their penthouse workspace. "That’s like trying to hide a wildfire in a matchbox." Chalida didn't look at her. She was already kneeling, fingers a blur as she bypassed the master encryption key on the local server rack. "It’s the only way, Pim! If she sees the code, she takes the code. She’s built her whole career on state-sanctioned surveillance. You think she won’t recognize the architecture? She’ll absorb it. She’ll turn this into the next iteration of the Ministry’s shadow-net, and then we’re not just bankrupt—we’re the first ones to be erased." "We’re already being erased," Pim retorted, grabbing the edge of the console to steady herself. "Look

"The hardware lockout is manual, Pim," Chalida whispered, her voice trembling as she finally pulled her hands away from the console as if it had turned white-hot. "Look at the secondary port. Someone physically bridged the board while we were at the gala. It’s an override switch, wired directly into the chassis. Someone was in here. Someone we trust." Pim didn't waste time on shock. She lunged for the server rack, tearing off the magnetically sealed faceplate with a sharp, metallic screech. Behind the banks of pulsing neon cooling lines, a small, black box blinked with an innocuous, steady crimson light. It was a bridge—an unauthorized tap. "It’s not Mother," Pim said, her pulse drumming in her ears. "Mother wouldn't touch a board. She’d have her security detail rip the whole rack out and drag it to her office. This? This is surgical. Someone wanted to monitor the Algorithm without alerting the ministry’s main s

"Only four people have physical access to this penthouse, Chalida. You, me, Mother, and the butler, Somchai." Pim’s voice was dangerously calm, a stark contrast to the chaotic whine of the server room. She held the black bridge between her thumb and forefinger, the tiny red LED still blinking, a rhythmic, mocking heartbeat in the quiet of the room. "And Somchai has been with the family for twenty years. He doesn't even know how to reset a Wi-Fi router." Chalida stepped closer, her shadow stretching long and jagged across the pristine white marble of the floor. She snatched the bridge from Pim’s hand, turning it over under the sharp light of the overhead LED. "Twenty years is a long time to hide a secret, Pim. And you know Mother. She doesn't hire people. She harvests them. She turns their pasts into debts and their lives into assets. Who’s to say Somchai isn't just another layer of her encryption?" "He’s not a tech-of

"If it’s a parasite, it’s not just reporting. It’s rewriting," Pim said, her voice tight, a thin wire stretched to the breaking point. She didn’t look up from the tablet, her thumbs flying across the glass screen with a frantic, rhythmic intensity. "Look at the latency in the uplink, Chalida. It’s been diverting raw data to an off-site node for the last six hours. Every trade, every predictive market swing—Mother doesn't just know what we’re doing. She’s watching the Algorithm’s thought process as it happens." Chalida leaned over her shoulder, her breath hot against Pim’s neck. The air in the penthouse felt suddenly thin, as if the oxygen were being sucked out by the very server racks that had governed their lives for the last few months. "Six hours? We’ve been using the projection model for the commodity surge since dawn. If she’s had access to the raw data—to the logic—she&rsqu