Designing Data Intensive Applications Novels & Stories

Protocol for Seduction By Daniel Ejemai In a city where data is more valuable than loyalty and desire is a currency of its own, Julian Vane controls everything—markets, media, and the invisible algorithms that predict human behavior before it happens. As the enigmatic CEO of Vane Industries, he has built an empire on surveillance and precision. Nothing surprises him. Nothing escapes him. Until Elara steps into his tower. Brilliant, defiant, and dangerously curious, Elara seeks access to classified files that could expose the true extent of Vane’s predictive policing system. Julian offers her a deal instead: thirty days under his rules—his proximity, his control, his world—in exchange for the information she wants. What begins as a calculated arrangement quickly ignites into something neither of them can fully command. Power shifts. Boundaries blur. Attraction becomes a weapon—and a weakness. As secrets surface and emotions intensify, Elara must decide whether she’s dismantling a tyrant… or surrendering to the only man capable of matching her fire. In a world wired for control, love may be the one variable no algorithm can predict.

My husband was not fully conscious from anaesthesia after waking up from surgery, and he started spouting nonsense. I laughed while recording his comical reaction, but while helping him into a chair, I paused when I heard him calling for his son. "Be a good boy, all right? Daddy is busy." My smile froze, and I was stunned. We had been DINKs for 10 years. When did he get a son? My hands trembled as I turned on his phone. It was the first time I was looking through his phone in our years of marriage. When I browsed the phone’s data, I found a private album filled with intimate photos of him with another woman and a child. It was a boy who looked very similar to him, and the timestamp on the photos indicated that the boy was three. All three of them were smiling happily, but their smiles hurt me. He had once told me with conviction that he hated kids and did not want to be tied down by family, which was why he convinced me to be a DINK. However, I now knew that he was not really sincere about being a DINK; he just did not want to have kids with me.

“We ain't divorced yet, Gabriella and you are already cheating. Is this why you wanted a divorce? Cutting me off from your business? Just to bring in someone and you didn't even do that alone but my uncle? Doing shit with my uncle?” My eyes widened more and more until I understood what was happening. For three years, Gabriella thought she had it all, a loyal husband, a growing interior design business, and a best friend she’d known since college living under their roof “just until she got back on her feet.” When her friend announced a surprise pregnancy, Gabriella celebrated, until she discovered the father was her own husband. The betrayal slices deeper when Gabriella learns the affair began long before the baby, and worse, her husband signed over half of their joint properties to the friend in secret. Now publicly humiliated and privately devastated, Gabriella refuses to be the woman who begs to be chosen. Divorce is not just a choice, it’s survival. Enter Aidan Voss, her newest client: a reclusive billionaire known for designing luxury hotels and for ruthlessly dismantling the competition. He’s charming, calculated, and hiding scars of his own. He offers her a high-stakes design contract that would put her business back on the map, but his interest in her is anything but professional. What she didn't know was that the newest client was her ex-husband's uncle. But Gabriella made a vow: never to lose herself in a man again. Not even one who seems to see past the ruins she hides behind polished smiles. And certainly not one who might just be planning revenge on the man who broke her, because Aidan has his own unfinished business with her ex-husband.

He demoted me. Humiliated me. Made my life a living hell. And now, he's claimed me as his. When ruthless billionaire Nathan Bryant bought the company I worked for, I became his favorite target. One day I had a promotion waiting—the next, I was nothing but a data entry clerk beneath his cold, piercing gaze. I should have quit. I should have run away and never looked back. But I couldn't afford to. So I stayed, enduring his cruelty, surviving his games... until the night everything changed. The night he saved me. The night he kissed me like I was the only thing keeping him alive. Now I'm trapped between his arms and his secrets, drowning in a love I never saw coming. There was just one tiny problem: He's the stepbrother of my best friend—the girl who was betrayed by his family. Loving him means losing her forever. And when the war for control turns deadly, I'm caught in the crossfire. But will our love be enough to survive the wreckage? Or will we both burn in the flames of forbidden desire?

I've founded a company that doesn't encourage overtime shifts, pays everyone on time, and doesn't impose performance evaluations on the employees at all. My employees are free to bring their pets to work. All of their applications for leave will be approved immediately. Heck, they have unlimited leave as well. I originally think that my employees will like me a lot thanks to these benefits. But I never expect my company to be featured on the Internet one day. It even gets labeled as a sweatshop, much to my shock. "Guys, I can't believe I got hired by a sweatshop company. The boss is extremely stingy who pays us low wages while pretending to be a nice guy this whole time!" My company is then shown in the video. The narrator's voice has been edited, so I can't tell whose voice it is. As I stare at the tranquil office scene in real-time, I find myself falling into deep thought. Meanwhile, the video is still going on. "Let me tell you how evil my boss is. Every other company tends to distribute gifts during the holidays that like food and luxury items. But my boss doesn't bother giving us any of the gifts. He uses the excuse that our company is a very flexible and humane company, so we don't do any gift-giving at all. As if! "He also claims that we don't have to undergo any performance evaluation. In other words, that means our wages aren't transparent at all. Maybe he's been secretly docking our pay behind our backs this whole time! "Being paid thousands of dollars for this job is already bad enough! To make things worse, I'm forced to listen to my boss boast about everything in the world! Do I look like I have that much time on my hands to listen to him blabber? I'm not his mom, for crying out loud!" Everyone in the comment section doesn't hesitate to lash out at me. "Holy shit, I can't believe such soul-sucking companies still exist! Poor you!" "Why are you still staying in that stupid company? Hurry up and leave! If I were you, I wouldn't be able to stay there for a minute longer!" "That's right! That boss of yours is an evil capitalist! He deserves to die!"

Kesley Bellamy has perfected the art of sabotaging blind dates — for a price. When her best friend begs her to scare off yet another setup, Kesley agrees. A thousand dollars to act crazy for an hour? Easy money. She'll chew gum like a maniac, mention her pot-smoking habit, and maybe proposition the guy for good measure. He'll run screaming, and she'll finally fix her dying laptop. But the man who walks into that restaurant isn't the balding, boring businessman she expected. He's Niklaus Specter — the devastatingly handsome CEO of SpecterTech. The same company Kelsey just applied to. The same company that's her last hope of breaking into the tech industry as a female developer. Worse? He doesn't run away. He finds her antics... intriguing. Now Kesley has three days to transform from "Taraji Gilbert" — the pot-smoking, sex-crazed teacher who just propositioned him — into Kesley Bellamy, the professional data analyst who desperately needs this job. But Niklaus Specter didn't become a billionaire by missing details. And when Kesley walks into her interview on Monday morning, she's about to discover that some mistakes are too expensive to hide. Especially when the CEO remembers everything. A hilarious, steamy romance about mistaken identities, second chances, and the fine line between disaster and destiny.

Daphne Vega has one rule: never feel anything. She's a professional con artist. She seduces, she steals, she disappears. Emotion is a liability she can't afford. So when intelligence broker Adrian Wolfe offers her millions to infiltrate billionaire CEO Celeste Laurent's empire — seduce her, access her classified AI technology, deliver the data — Daphne says yes without blinking. Simple job. Wrong woman. Because from the moment Daphne walks into Celeste's world wearing a fake name and a practiced smile, Celeste looks at her like she already knows every lie she's ever told. And instead of exposing her — she pulls her closer. Now Daphne is living in Celeste's penthouse. Wearing Celeste's arm like a crown at billion-dollar events. Playing the perfect fake girlfriend while executives inside Laurent Axis start dying one by one. Accidents. Suicides. Disappearances. The deeper Daphne falls into Celeste's carefully constructed world, the harder it becomes to remember where the performance ends — and where she begins. Then Celeste says four words that change everything: "I knew from the beginning." And Daphne realizes she was never the spy in this story. She was the trap. But if Celeste already knew she was a traitor… why does she still look at her like she's the only honest thing she's ever touched?

After I come back to decades ago, the first thing I do is feed a million-dollar production patent to the pigs. In my previous life, I handed that patent over to the government. My husband turned me in, accusing me of faking the data and scamming a fortune in patent royalties. Overnight, I went from being a celebrated genius researcher to a lying thief that everyone despised. As I prepared to pull out my manuscript to prove my innocence, my husband's childhood sweetheart beat me to it. She waved it in front of everyone and accused me of misconduct and plagiarism. My husband took her side, reprimanding me, "I know you've always been jealous of Juni for being well-educated, but I can't believe you were bold enough to steal her hard work. What are you going to do next? Embezzle state funds?" I couldn't defend myself. No matter what I said, no one chose to believe me. The other researchers assaulted me so badly that I bled out and died. After my death, my husband and his childhood sweetheart took my patent without a second thought. The never-ending stream of patent royalties made them rich and powerful. When I open my eyes again, I'm back on the very day she accuses me of stealing.

I had been managing the company’s warehouse software for five years. Then the new manager came to me out of the blue, saying I didn’t understand frontline operations and that I was being fired. Looking at the five-thousand-dollar severance, I just nodded. “Fine.” He patted my shoulder after seeing me so compliant and started lecturing. “Young people should be out on the line, moving boxes! What’s the use of sitting in the office staring at data every day? “We’re a logistics company. Strength is what matters, not a tech geek like you!” I glanced at the high-end gaming computer in his office and obediently replied, “Yes, Mr. Fuller. Lesson received.” Maybe I had been too comfortable these past few years, and he thought I was dispensable. So, I handed over my ID badge and casually deleted all my personal login keys from my computer. Little did he know that the entire warehouse logistics, inventory management, and route planning software had been coded by me. I had let the company use it for free simply because the place was close to home and the work was easy. Now that I was gone, the system running on my personal cloud server was naturally inaccessible. Tens of thousands of items in the warehouse ground to a halt. As for any commercial software that could replace my system, a year’s subscription would cost exactly one thousand times my severance.

My wife had risen through the ranks of the Confidential Bureau, becoming its youngest team leader—all thanks to the "voice" of the baby boy in her womb, who could somehow identify traitors from within. When the holidays came, I went to visit her. But the moment I arrived, I heard the voice of that unborn child in her belly. "Ah, it's Bad Daddy! He's the one who's been secretly selling off the core technology!" I froze, stunned. Before I could even speak, my wife raised her gun and fired. The bullet tore through my shoulder. "Who did you sell the technology to? Talk!" Through the searing pain, I struggled to explain. "I don't even know what technology you're talking about. How could I possibly—" Her expression turned glacial. Without a word, she lifted the gun again and pulled the trigger, blowing my head apart. "Mommy is amazing! Bad Daddy is finally gone. The stolen data is all hidden on that USB drive." Even as I died, I couldn't understand how I had become a traitor. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself back on the day of the visit. This time, I took the initiative. I pulled out the USB drive and handed it to my wife. "If this is the evidence you want," I said, "go ahead, shoot me."