In the bad sci-fi movies of the early noughties, the time-traveller always has it incredibly easy.
They wake up in their younger bodies, stroll down to the nearest corner shop, buy a EuroMillions ticket, and boom. Instant billionaire.
I absolutely despise those movies.
I sat on a rusted, dangerously wobbly stool in the centre of our Brixton basement. We affectionately called it the 'Cryptic Vault'.
Outside, the miserable July rain was doing its absolute best to wash South London straight into the sewers.
Inside, I was staring at a grease-stained notebook, aggressively trying to remember a single winning lottery number from the last decade.
Nothing. Just absolute, maddening static.
My brain was a bloated hard drive containing 999 loops of cosmic trauma. I could casually recall the exact resonance frequency required to shatter a tectonic plate.
I knew how to build a functional fusion reactor out of a microwave and a stolen catalytic converter. I could even recite the exact dying words of the Prime Minister in 2034.
But lottery numbers? Stock market spikes? The mundane, profitable trivia of a peaceful world?
Corrupted Data.
The sheer, crushing volume of entropic noise I'd absorbed over a thousand years had wiped my "easy mode" completely clean.
I was a Grandmaster of the Apocalypse. But right now, my bank balance was that of a destitute uni student surviving on baked beans and pure spite.
Date: 14th July 2026
Location: The Cryptic Vault, Brixton
Time: 6:15 PM BST
The Vault was a riot of controlled, highly illegal chaos.
I had called a mandatory 'huddle'. In our group, that basically translated to Albie complaining about the damp ruining his loafers, and Dom pacing the floor like a caffeinated tiger.
In the corner, Dexter was silently sharpening a chisel. I had absolutely no idea why he needed a chisel for software development, but I knew better than to ask.
My lungs were finally settling back into a rhythm that didn't involve me tasting copper blood.
The hacked Tesla-link on my wrist was steadily pumping pirated electron recovery into my pathetic nervous system. It was the only thing keeping me upright.
"Right, listen up, you lot," I rasped.
I leaned heavily against the main resonator housing. I felt exactly like a tired vocational school lecturer facing a classroom of particularly chaotic mechanics.
"We're pivoting. The academic route is too bloody slow. We need hardware, we need capital, and we need it yesterday."
I paused, letting the silence hang. "But we aren't buying retail. We're going for the absolute rejects."
I tapped my smartwatch—the Frankenstein piece I'd cobbled together—and projected a crude blueprint onto Albie's obscenely expensive iPad.
The screen violently flickered as Eliza's influence surged through the Vault's dodgy Wi-Fi. She completely overrode Apple's pristine OS with a sleek, obsidian, Victorian-gothic interface.
"Rejects?" Albie scoffed, delicately adjusting his silk cuffs with a look of pure disdain.
"Mason, mate, I've got fifty grand in a high-yield offshore account just screaming to be spent on proper German engineering. And you want to buy... trash?"
"Not trash, Albie. Foundation," I countered, tapping the screen.
"We need every broken AR headset, every 'non-functional' smartwatch, and every 'beyond repair' motherboard currently rotting on the London black market."
I looked around the damp room, making sure they were following the logic.
"We're looking for 'Base Models'. Hardware that looks sufficiently futuristic on the outside but is brain-dead on the inside. I don't give a toss if the screens are cracked or the batteries leak acid. I only care about the chassis."
"He's actually right," Dexter grunted.
It was his first sentence in an hour. He didn't even bother looking up from his chisel. "Custom housings take weeks to 3D print. If the shell exists, we just rip out the guts and replace the soul."
"Exactly," I said, pointing a finger gun at him.
"Dom, Ramona—you two are on procurement. I want you hitting the back-alley tech markets in Dalston and the 'grey' importers down in Bermondsey."
Dom grinned, his mind already calculating the profit margins.
"If some bloke in a trench coat says an item is 'unfixable junk', you buy it for literal pennies," I instructed.
"Dom, you handle the logistics and the heavy lifting. Ramona, you handle the narrative. If a seller thinks they're ripping us off, let them."
I offered a dark, tired smirk. "We actively want them to think we're just a bunch of deluded art students playing with electronic garbage."
"Oh, I can do much better than that," Ramona said, her eyes flashing with a sharp, calculated glint.
"I'll frame it as a 'Sustainability Art Project' highlighting the tragedy of e-waste in modern society."
She crossed her arms, looking thoroughly pleased with herself. "They'll probably give us the broken tech for free just for the corporate tax write-off. By the time they realise we've built a quantum supercomputer out of their rubbish, we'll be three postcodes away."
"Brilliant," I nodded, then turned to our resident aristocrat. "And Albie. You handle the 'Instant Cash'."
Albie sighed, already knowing what I was going to say.
"No bank transfers. No paper trails," I warned him. "We pay in grubby twenty-pound notes. We need this entire operation to stay entirely off the Firmament's radar."
"Cash is king, I suppose," Albie groaned dramatically. He looked genuinely physically pained at the lack of a formal receipt. "Fine. But I demand a front-row seat when this alleged 'Miracle' happens."
Shienna, who had been leaning quietly against the damp doorframe, finally stepped into the flickering violet light.
Her presence was like a bucket of freezing water on our collective fever.
"And we are doing this in strict shifts," Shienna announced, crossing her arms with an authoritative glare that brooked no argument.
"Mason, you look like a Victorian ghost who just died of consumption. If you faint before the first shipment of junk even arrives, the whole thing goes belly-up."
She pointed a finger at the door. "I'm grounding the lot of you. No one leaves for the markets until we've established this 'Tesla Filter' you keep muttering about."
"The filter is already prepped," I said, tapping the side of my glasses. "Eliza? Care to grace us?"
A violent violet shimmer erupted in the centre of the damp room.
Eliza manifested. Her translucent, immaculate Victorian skirts hovered just inches above the grime and discarded pizza boxes on the Vault floor.
She looked at my squad with a potent mix of aristocratic boredom and mild disgust.
["Good evening, you squabbling mammals."]
["I have successfully calibrated the magnetic field sensors within the Vault."]
["When Dominic drags in the 'corpses' of these machines, the Tesla Core will perform a sub-atomic audit."]
["I will tell you exactly which components are salvageable and which are truly rubbish."]
["Think of me as your... supernatural quality control."]
She waved a glowing, translucent hand. A highly detailed 3D hologram of a broken Ray-Ban Meta frame appeared floating in the humid air.
["We will be creating two tiers of product,"] Eliza explained, sounding like a ruthlessly efficient, albeit ghostly, CEO.
["Tier One: The 'Elite' units."]
["These are strictly for the individuals in this room."]
["They will be integrated directly into my primary matrix."]
["You will see exactly what the Architect sees."]
["You will hear the music of the spheres—or at least, the encrypted data of this miserable city."]
"And Tier Two?" Ramona asked, leaning in, completely mesmerised by the floating hologram.
["The 'Dummies',"] Eliza smirked, her digital teeth looking dangerously sharp.
["High-tech shells that look like alien technology but are merely hollow receivers for the Tesla signal."]
["They'll perform simple tasks—flawless translation, thermal imaging, high-speed browsing."]
["They will be better than any 'Smart Glass' currently on the 2026 market."]
["But they are entirely empty."]
["If they are stolen, hacked, or dismantled, they revert to just bits of cheap plastic and wire."]
["The 'brain' stays right here. With me."]
"It's a master-slave architecture using Aetheric resonance," I explained, watching the profound realization dawn on their faces.
"We aren't just building gadgets to sell. We're building a decentralized hive mind. And the rest of the world is going to happily pay us for the privilege of joining it."
Dominic's jaw practically hit the floor before morphing into a massive, shark-like grin. He cracked his knuckles loudly.
"You're buying broken tech for pennies, and selling it as future-tech for thousands," Dom laughed. "All while using their devices to blindly power your own server. Mason, mate, you're a blooming criminal mastermind."
"I'm not a criminal, Dom," I whispered.
My 0.7 Vitality body was heavily feeling the crushing strain of my own ambition. But my eyes were burning with cold fire.
"I'm an Architect. And it's time to rebuild the foundations from the scraps."
["Quite,"] Eliza added.
["Now, move your incredibly lazy bones."]
["I have an emerging empire to audit."]
["And I absolutely refuse to do it in a room that smells this strongly of cheap garlic kebab."]
Her image flickered as she violently boosted the Wi-Fi signal to Albie's iPad, replacing his banking app with a sleek, rotating 3D mock-up of our first 'Chrono-Watch'.
The squad immediately moved.
The energy in the room had shifted. For the very first time, they weren't just followers listening to a mad, sickly physics student. They were active gears in a massive, invisible machine.
Dexter headed straight for his soldering tools. Dom and Ramona were already scrolling through their phones, hunting for Dalston's dodgiest tech contacts.
And Albie, with a resigned sigh, started counting thick stacks of untraceable twenty-pound notes.
The Great Deception had officially begun.