World

The Fall of Jace

Jace Kade never had a future.

Not the kind people dreamed of. Not the kind that came with guarantees. He wasn't born into money. He wasn't gifted with genius. He was just another kid from the lower districts, clawing for a chance in a world that had already decided his place.

University was supposed to be his way out. A degree, a career, a stable income—enough to pull his family out of the pit they'd been stuck in for generations. That's what they told him. That's what he believed. That was the dream he had held onto like a drowning man clutching a piece of driftwood.

But dreams meant nothing when you had no money.

His family had never been rich, but they weren't starving either. His mother worked at an old manufacturing plant, assembling parts on the production line. His father was a mechanic, fixing engines in a rundown shop at the edge of the city. It wasn't much, but it kept food on the table. It kept the lights on.

Until it didn't.

Technology was supposed to make life easier. That's what the corporations preached. Automation. Efficiency. Progress.

Cold, soulless words.

One day, the machines came for his mother's job. A single corporate decision. A shift to automation. She was laid off without warning, replaced by a robotic arm that never got tired, never made mistakes, never needed to be paid. After twenty years of service, all she got was a severance check that barely covered the rent for two months.

Then, his father.

Self-repairing vehicles were the future. Smart engines. AI diagnostics. Suddenly, mechanics weren't needed. His father's shop closed down. No customers. No work. No income.

The bills started piling up.

The eviction notice came next.

Jace had been in his second year of university when everything collapsed. He had fought to stay afloat, taking on whatever part-time jobs he could find—stocking shelves, washing dishes, delivering packages on a broken-down bicycle. Anything to scrape together enough to pay tuition.

But no matter how hard he worked, it wasn't enough.

Late payments turned into final warnings. Final warnings turned into an email from the university's finance office.

"We regret to inform you that due to unpaid tuition, your enrollment has been terminated."

No discussion. No second chances.

Just like that, it was over.

Expelled. Kicked out. He didn't even have the luxury of being angry at the university—it was just another machine in the system. Cold. Indifferent. Moving forward without caring about the people it crushed along the way.

The humiliation hit harder than he expected.

People looked at him differently now. Like he was defective. Like he had failed at something everyone else seemed to manage with ease.

His old classmates still had futures. They still had their internships, their networking events, their connections. They walked around campus with laptops in sleek bags, talking about coding boot camps and start-up ideas. Jace, meanwhile, didn't even know how to use a computer properly. He had always been behind, always struggling to keep up in a world that demanded technical skills he had never learned.

Now, he wasn't even allowed through the university gates.

And then, something inside him started to change.

He stopped feeling.

Stopped hoping.

It was like a switch had been flipped in his mind. The fear, the shame, the self-doubt—it all burned away, leaving something raw and primal behind.

Rage.

Rage at the system that had tossed his family aside like broken tools.

Rage at the tech industry that had turned human lives into numbers on a spreadsheet.

Rage at the people who thrived while he was left to rot.

They had taken everything from him.

His education.

His future.

His family's dignity.

He was done begging. Done trying to fit into a world that had already decided he was worthless.

If tech had destroyed his life, then he would destroy tech.

He didn't know how yet.

But he would find a way.

Jace had nothing left to lose.

That was the first truth he accepted.

Once you reached the bottom, there was nowhere lower to fall. No more expectations. No more hopes to disappoint. He stopped waking up with the fear of failure—he had already failed.

The second truth came later.

If you can't win their game, burn the board.

At first, he wandered. He drifted through the days without purpose, without direction. He took whatever work he could find—construction jobs, late-night warehouse shifts, janitorial work in buildings filled with people who didn't even acknowledge his existence. They didn't see him. He was invisible.

But he saw them.

The ones in expensive suits, drinking overpriced coffee, moving from one air-conditioned office to another. They were the ones who had won—the ones who built the machines that stole jobs, wrote the programs that decided who was useful and who was obsolete.

He hated them.

But hate wasn't enough.

If he wanted revenge, he needed power. If he wanted power, he needed knowledge.

And so, for the first time in his life, Jace forced himself to learn.

He started with the basics.

Computers had always been a mystery to him. He had grown up in a house where the only electronics were a half-broken TV and an old flip phone. The idea of coding, hacking, software—it had always seemed like something from another world. A world he wasn't meant to be a part of.

But if he was going to destroy the tech industry, he needed to understand it first.

He went to the library—one of the last places that didn't require a login, a subscription, or a background check. He picked up books on computer science, on programming, on cyber warfare. He didn't understand most of it at first. The words blurred together, the concepts twisted around him like a foreign language.

So he read again.

And again.

And again.

He took notes. He memorized terms. He watched lectures on public computers at internet cafés, sitting among people who didn't even realize he was plotting something bigger than they could imagine.

And then, he found AI. Artificial intelligence had been a buzzword for years, but to Jace, it was the enemy. The thing that stole his family's future. The thing that replaced humans with lines of code, turning careers into historical footnotes.

But the deeper he dug, the more he realized a terrifying truth:

AI wasn't just destroying lives. It was also power.

The corporations were using it to automate, to predict, to control. It was an invisible god, shaping the modern world from behind the scenes.

If they could use it, so could he.

He downloaded whatever he could find—open-source projects, research papers, leaked documents. He scoured hacker forums, reading posts from anonymous users who talked about neural networks and machine learning like they were simple puzzles to be solved.

And for the first time, he understood.

AI wasn't magic. It wasn't some untouchable force. It was just code.

And code could be rewritten. 

 Jace had 30 days.

One month before he ran out of money. Before his landlord threw him out. Before he had nothing left—not even a place to sleep.

There was no miracle coming. No one to save him. No family to turn to. No favors left to cash in.

30 days. Do or die.

He had no skills, no experience, no network. The world had already pushed him to the bottom, and now it was ready to bury him.

So he made a choice.

He sold everything.

His clothes, his watch, his phone—gone. He got rid of his chair, his blankets, even his bed. Whatever could bring in money, he let it go. All for one thing:

A laptop.

Not a good one. A barely-functioning, second-hand machine that had seen better days. But it was all he could afford.

The problem? He had never used a computer properly before.

Sure, he knew the basics—how to browse, how to watch videos. But real work? Real skills? He had nothing.

And now he had 30 days to figure it all out before he had nothing left.

But first, he had to set it up.

That's when he made the call.

His old classmates. The ones who left him behind. The ones who got to stay in university, got their degrees, got their chances while he was kicked to the curb.

He hated asking them for help. But there was no choice.

At first, they laughed.

"Wait, you? Using a computer?"

"You barely knew how to use Word in school."

"Man, just get a normal job. This isn't for you."

They mocked him. Mocked his desperation, his sudden interest in the very thing that ruined his life.

But in the end, they helped.

They installed the basics—an operating system, some tools, some programs. They explained just enough to get him started. No deep lessons, no real mentorship. Just enough to push him away and say, "Here. Figure it out yourself."

They didn't believe he could do it.

They didn't think he'd last a week.

But belief didn't matter.

All that mattered was the 30 days.