Billionaire Cashback System: I Can't Go Broke!-Chapter 10: Building Something
The return processed at 6:12 AM.
Ryan was already awake.
> RETURN PROCESSED
> Previous Balance: $1,912.05
> Return Amount: $1,704.50
> New Balance: $3,616.55
He sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the number for a long time. And he didn’t have the disbelief of the first morning, or the cautious optimism of the second. This time he looked at it with the quiet certainty of a man watching something confirm itself for the fourth time in a row.
It was real.
He’d known it was real, technically, since the first return. But there was knowing something and then there was knowing it — the version that settles into your bones and stops asking questions. This was the second kind.
$3,616.
It wasn’t that long ago he was doing math on whether he could afford groceries.
He put the phone down and sat there in the early morning quiet of his apartment, the city outside doing its usual thing, indifferent and relentless. He thought about James. About Emma in that dress. About three years of staying late and saying yes and making himself small enough to fit inside someone else’s idea of what he should be.
He picked the phone back up.
> NEW DIRECTIVE: BUILDING AN EMPIRE
> Phase: Foundation
> Objective: Establish core development team
> Team requirement: 5 members
> Timeline: Open
> Rules: Team members must be formally employed. Salary payments classified under Company Development — subcategory: Revenge Spending. All salary expenditures will return doubled.
> Warning: Initial capital must be secured before employment can begin. System will not process returns on payments you cannot cover.
> Current capital: $3,616.55
> Recommended first hire: Sophie Muller — Designer. Already connected. High trust baseline. Creative value: Exceptional.
Ryan read through it twice.
Sophie.
He leaned back against the headboard and thought about that. The system saw her as an asset, a recommended hire, another piece moved into position.
This was work, and for work it was actually just — correct.
Sophie was talented, genuinely, independent enough to say no to clients who didn’t value her, which meant she had standards, which meant she’d push back when something wasn’t good enough. That was exactly what he needed.
He’d ask her properly.
He got up and put coffee on.
---
He spent the better part of the morning on his laptop, three tabs open — LinkedIn, GitHub, a couple of developer forums he used to frequent back at Meridian. He was looking for engineers. There were thousands of them, profiles and portfolios and recommendation letters, an endless supply of qualified people he knew absolutely nothing about.
He closed the laptop after an hour.
It wasn’t that the people weren’t there. It was that he’d be building something intimately real and his, something that was supposed to matter, and he wasn’t going to do that with strangers he’d found on the internet. Not at the start. Not for the foundation.
He needed people he knew wanted this just as much as he did. People who’d been in a room with him and proven something.
He stared at the ceiling.
And then, the way certain names do, one just surfaced.
Daniel Larson.
Ryan sat up slightly.
He hadn’t thought about Daniel in — it must have been close to a year, maybe more. They’d drifted the way people drift after college, gradually and without incident, the friendship not ending so much as getting quietly buried under the weight of jobs and distance and the particular busyness of early twenties that felt urgent at the time.
But before all that. Before Meridian and three years of making himself smaller — before all of it, there was a dorm room at 2AM with two laptops open and Daniel talking about scalable architecture with the kind of passion most people reserved for things they loved, not things they were building.
They had notebooks full of ideas. Actual paper notebooks, which Daniel insisted on, said it made the thinking slower and therefore better.
"We’re going to build something that no one would ever forget, Ry. More than just something that works. Something that changes things." Daniel often said.
Ryan had believed him then. Had believed both of them.
He picked up his phone and found the contact, still there, unmoved after three years. The last message between them was a meme Daniel had sent about bad code that Ryan had reacted to with a laughing emoji and then apparently never followed up on.
He typed.
> Ryan: Hey. Been a while. I’m working on something I think you’d want to hear about. You around this week?
He put the phone down. Picked it back up. Added one line.
> Ryan: The bar on 34th still open you think?
Sent it before he could revise it into something worse.
He got up, rinsed his coffee mug, looked out the window at nothing in particular.
His phone buzzed.
> Daniel: Long time Ry. Will be there.
Ryan read it once.
Then he smiled — and it was different from the careful, controlled expression he’d been wearing all week in galleries and restaurants — this smile was just a real one, quiet and slightly surprised, the kind that happens before you can decide whether to let it.
He put the phone in his pocket and went to find something to wear.
