Capítulo 1: Dante
[Account Balance: $-2,345.44]
Dante's expression froze when he saw his new account balance after making a down payment for his new apartment. He had just come out of the real estate building too, and he was initially feeling good about everything.
Dante sighed and looked to the sky. At some point, drops of rain began to fall, which was kind of ironic given his current financial circumstances.
Were the heavens crying from sadness through empathy or laughter through mockery?
Dante sighed again. Truly, poverty would make any fellow have poetic and deep thoughts.
However, despite being in debt, Dante could truly claim to be poor. After all, he had grown up in an upper-middle-class family with two loving parents and a nuclear as well as extended family that were largely supportive and capable.
Dante smacked his face and changed his train of thought.
"You got this man, you made this decision and now you have to live with it."
Reminding himself of his own - probably - poor life decisions, Dante ordered an uber and set the destination to home. He then sat in the back lazily and leaned on their side, placing his earphones in as he opted to listen to hardcore rap music.
"~~Motherf*cker I killed three n***gas, f*cked three b*tches, and then robbed ten banks while smoking weed, and-"
As he soaked in the mindless words, his thoughts began to wander. He turned to look outside the window and saw the setting sun, which he initially felt was a sign that an old door was being closed in his life while a new one was being opened.
However, his balance had slapped him back to the reality that while a new door might have opened, what lay behind it was not exactly a frat party, but might be a neighborhood shootout.
Dante looked at the box in his bag and felt his eyes gleam. This was another reason why he had rapidly fallen into debt, the latest Huawei G20, a spectacular handheld phone made for enthusiasts and professionals who wanted to be productive on the go.
Its price tag was over $1500 for Christ's sake, and even the latest iPhone XV was even 300 dollars cheaper and about 20 years behind in technology.
What could Dante say, it was 2030 and China's technology was on the rise. After America's business empire declined due to the failure of fiat money and the betrayal of Saudi Arabia by eliminating the petrodollar, China quickly showed its fangs.
Not to mention, after raiding and plundering Taiwan, they had access to semiconductors and their technological might soared rapidly.
As a second-generation immigrant to the almighty United States of America, Dante was ambivalent about these happenings. For one, his relatively dark skin won him no favors with most Asians, and secondly, as someone who lived in America, his livelihood was tied to its continued dominance, like riding on the back of a tiger.
Dante's eyes flickered. Truly, he was thinking about all sorts of things, but the only thing he should consider now was what to do next; his future.
As a 21-year-old young man, he had endless prospects ahead of him. A second-class upper degree in BSc Software Engineering, a relatively good-looking face, and a good credit score thanks to intuitive parents, he had a great starting point.
Many would kill to have credentials like these, despite the debt. Not like any American was debt free anyway.
But what was the source of Dante's problems was not any external factor, but lay internally.
You may know what it's like to be a very clever kid in your formative years who loved to read, exercise and generally loved to explore new things, but had that all beaten out of you by the mindless school system which requires repetition rather than creativity.
You may know what it's like to be well-to-do during your school years, always having the latest games and computers, tinkering with them, and destroying enough of them that you got scolded often.
You may know what it's like to see your classmates struggle with their studies while things come to you relatively easily, until at some point you stopped putting in effort and got by with C's.
You also may know what it's like to love your cousins and extended family, but the pressure to perform due to endless comparisons cause a rift between you all during adulthood.
If you know any of these, and most likely all of them, you would understand Dante's conundrum.
Intelligent but unmotivated.
Competitive but quick to give up.
Tunnel visioned and unable to multitask.
And most crucially…
Driven for success through uniqueness but craving to do so independently.
Such led to the current situation where a young man from a family that makes more than $250,000 a year, is over $2,000 in debt.
This sudden drive for independence and the unwillingness to rely on his parents baffled the duo to no end, making them wonder if their son was going through a phase - but at his age? - or if someone was crudely influencing him.
His father wanted him to follow the same path he did and become a high-class architect to inherit his medium-scale company that mostly worked for upper-class contractors.
That way, he could push his son to the top of the business, lower the steep learning curve and also pass on his contacts and connections in the industry.
His mother, a chemical engineer working for the now beaten-up and bullied Pfizer, wanted him to learn an Applied Science. So she supported his decision to enter IT, but his father was not too happy that his hard work and small empire would die with him.
After all, how could a coder link up with architects? Unless maybe he learned 3D design and rendering.
Dante sighed for the third time in less than 30 minutes. His rash decision to rebel by doing what he wanted had led to a small tension in their nuclear family that became slightly more intense after the last Thanksgiving when his cousins were revealed to be Doctors, Pharmacists, and Lawyers and he opened his dog mouth to say 'I am an App Developer'.
Well, he was lucky it was 2030 and even the older generation understood that IT was the future. If it was around 20 or 10 years ago, most would have classified him as a failure right off the bat.
The painful question wasn't why he chose to be an App Developer. The hard-hitting question was: 'what app have you made?'
None. Nothing.
At least, nothing he wanted to show. Obviously, a few were from practicing, tests, and projects but none of them were going to go anywhere.
Dante looked down and gripped the phone box in his hands. With this new device, that should change though, as this device was built for people like him and came with many tools and suites to make coders excel.
He already had the code written on his laptop after spending over 3 weeks and screaming over 400 times at 'syntax errors' and only needed to package it and run the test build on the phone.
From there, any errors could be handled on the device itself and then curated carefully before a soft launch among peers and friends.
Just thinking about it made Dante giddy. He almost wanted to slap the back of his uber driver's head and tell him to hurry up, but was left speechless when he saw that there was traffic ahead of them.
He couldn't very well point to the pavement and say 'the sidewalk is good enough. Go!' like some 100-year-old British vampire who liked to pose and throw knives in stopped time.
Dante could only sit back and wait while his thoughts run abound, switching between excitement towards the - seemingly - promising future and anxiety towards the possibility of failure as well as disgrace.
Eventually the uber came to a stop before his house. Dante paid the fare with his credit card and increased his debt even more. However, with an exceptional credit score of 750, his credit limit was around $15,000 anyway.
It was more than enough for him to live on until he turned his first profit. Whether it was Muskovic, Billy The Gates, or the Zucc Meister, all had started from the bottom and had deceptively moving origin stories that motivated impressionable young men like Dante into risking it all.
With that much financial leeway, he would be able to kickstart his grand life!
Assuming of course, that everything miraculously works out on the first try, and he doesn't fail over and over until his debt runs high, and is able to make enough profit off whatever he creates that he can clear his debt, start a life and be fully independent.
This is the beginning of Dante's story, and it was quite impressive already.
However, the events in the next hour proved that Murphy was the number G.O.A.T in life as his law had an unbeatable winning streak against reality.
Capítulo 2: Quantum Entanglement
Dante got out of the uber and stood before his family home. It seemed like a typical suburban neighborhood, but it was actually a semi-walled as well as gated community for the elite among the middle class.
His eyes gleamed as he held the box in hand tightly and walked up to the gate of his house. The security guard at the front was watching videos on TikTok to pass the time and greeted Dante when he passed by.
"Yo Dante, what's up? You're back from the shopping?"
Dante turned to smile at the neatly-dressed and muscular guard who actually had a stun baton as well as a pistol strapped to his waist.
"Eduardo, what have I told you about TikTok? It's a psy-op from China to make the American youth stupid. Also, the shopping went well."
Eduardo rolled his eyes and waved his hand, not willing to descend into a tinfoil hat battle with Dante who was like a storm when he started. Dante wrung his lips with dissatisfaction seeing that he couldn't share his conspiracy theories with another unwilling person.
However, his attention was soon taken away when he entered his home then saw that his dad and mom were seated in the living room.
For being about 50 years old each, they still looked really good, mostly thanks to his mom who emphasized eating healthy and exercising at all ages.
His father was a handsome man with light caramel skin, a pair of square-rimmed glasses, and short-cropped black hair. Apart from a white Polo t-shirt displaying his broad chest, tucked into a pair of elastic Burberry shorts and a pair of green crocs, he also wore a bored frown.
Beside him was his lovely mother, a tall Eurasian woman that inherited the best characteristics from both ancestries. Long, silky black hair, two light blue eyes, fair skin that was neither pale nor pasty, but healthy, and the typical small, extremely cute face of an Asian woman.
Apart from her favorite blue sundress and a pair of slippers, what else would his mom wear when at home?
"Dad, mom, I'm home," Dante called out to them with a smile.
David, his father, turned backward and saw Dante then nodded. "Good to see you're home safe son. If you're hungry, let me know and I'll cook something up for you."
Dante rolled his eyes at his father's usual stoicism. "Alright dad, sure."
Aileen, his mother, smacked David on the shoulder. "Stop being childish just because he doesn't want to become a clone of you. Smile at your son, honey."
David simply looked away, folded his arms, and harrumphed. Aileen chuckled and Dante rolled his eyes again before going upstairs to his room.
He was an only child and had no other person staying here apart from the three of them, so his room was rather large with its own walk-in closet and bathroom.
He removed his clothes and tossed everything to the side before slipping into a singlet and a pair of mesh pop shorts that didn't require one to necessarily wear underwear because they had a net inside.
He then sat at his desk and opened his $3000 laptop with an Intel I-9 17900k, 128 GB 5000MHz DDR5 RAM, and an Nvidia RTX 6090 TI Super Mobile.
The specs were the latest of this year and it was definitely a beast. Dante had no issues gaming or working on it and his attempts to code had gone without a hitch so far.
He then opened the Huawei G20's box and unpackaged it slowly. It was always nice to unbox new tech, as long as you could ignore the wails of your wallet from the intense blow it suffered.
After unboxing, Dante plugged the new phone into the charge and saw it was at 75%. He let it charge to full, which only took like 15 minutes on Type-C fast charging, and then started it up.
He had already backed up his old phone onto his laptop previously, so he went ahead and plugged it in on the spot. He set it up using his backup, so in a matter of minutes, this phone was just like his old one, and ready to be used.
He then opened the productivity apps that came with the phone and saw the app he needed, he opened it up and imported the finished code as well as the necessary files from his laptop, then chose to build the package directly on the phone.
True to its advertising, it only took it around 1 and a half minutes to complete this, so Dante chose to run the app. The loading screen came up and Dante waited patiently.
Now would be a good time to talk about the app Dante was making. As Dante's lecturer had once joked, App Developers made apps in response to a need, not a want. It was the only way for an app to break through and become a legendary Super App!
So what did people need in this day and age that wasn't already covered? Dante had thought long and hard about it, doing extensive research, talking on many boards and social apps with randoms to see what they lacked.
The answer was always straightforward: 'I need something that can fix my f**king life, bruv. That's not something an app can do.'
So Dante's response to this was to make an all-purpose app. It was Facebook/Twitter, Snapchat/Instagram, Whatsapp/Telegram, Ebay/Aliexpress, Doordash/Ubereats, Spotify/Deezer, Youtube/Vimeo, Twitch/Mixer, Tinder/Grindr, and Chrome/Firefox in one.
It was a social media app with streamable music, pages for various e-commerce stores to sell wares, a page for people to watch uploaded videos - be they short like TikTok or long like youtube - and even watch live streams as well.
Also, it had an inbuilt browser.
From an objective point of view, the idea wasn't bad, but its fate would be decided by the execution. However, doing something like this would require near-perfect execution, especially on the backend.
Dante had agonized over building this thing for weeks and had finally put something together. After spending so much time and effort, he no longer even thought about failure.
It was either this thing succeeded or… he didn't even know what he would do next.
Now that the screen was loading, he couldn't help but anticipate whether it would activate without a hitch. For one, you should know that even if one develops an app, one can't just think of the technical details, but also of the aesthetic and external details.
So in order to make the app stand out from any competitors or just from the millions of productivity apps out there, he coded in a special intro.
When the person clicked on the app, they would see the app's logo for about 2 seconds before a transition would occur and they would be brought to a semi-realistic 2D background of a floating island.
Lines would appear on the screen saying 'are you ready to enter the world of eternal enjoyment?' and then they would pass through an animation similar to entering the animus or when a certain character accesses the full-dive.
Then, you go to the login page or the home screen depending on whether you've logged in already.
Yeah, yeah, the line and the various stuff were super corny, you didn't have to tell Dante about it, he knew. It was just a placeholder till he got a better idea, besides, it was not the point!
The app finally loaded up, much to his excitement, and took him to the screen. Right away, he noticed some issues with how the app lagged and that the resolution of the floating island was not optimized at all.
This didn't dishearten him, as he never expected the first test build to be perfect. No experienced programmer was that arrogant. In fact, most lived in fear of their code, believing that every line hid a potential bug.
If it run too smoothly, rather than be happy, the coder in question would sneer and know that it was a trick!
The bugs were hiding until the final version was published, then they would bare their fangs on the end user's devices and tarnish your reputation!
Dante clicked the button to switch from the intro scene to the actual login page, but something wrong seemed to occur at this point. A familiar and fearsome prompt appeared before him that every coder hated.
[Error at line 34598: Syntax Error!
Description: "#√ P− |ψ 〉 = |−z〉|+z hahaha Quantum Entangle my balls b*tch!#" cannot be read!
Ignore and continue?]
Dante was embarrassed and then furious.
'I put the bloody line in a hash! Why the hell are you reading it? Which editor does that?!'
Ignore and continue of course!
It was just something he typed into the editor near the 'jump' command that led to the login page because he felt like... well.
The first screen switching to the second screen - coupled with the animation - sorta looked like passing through a whole world, so he ended up thinking about the Quantum Entanglement equation.
He was tired, sleepy, and hungry at the time, so he angrily typed that out and felt much better before forgetting about it and continuing onward.
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