Billionaire Cashback System: I Can't Go Broke!-Chapter 29: Something That Changes The World

The voicemail picked up mid-fourth ring.

Ryan hung up without leaving one.

He sat with the phone in his hand for a moment, looking at her contact. Diana Lockridge. He’d saved it the night of the gallery with the optimism of someone who didn’t yet know whether saving it would mean anything.

Now it meant something, and she hadn’t answered, and this was the kind of conversation that couldn’t be left in a voicemail.

He put the phone on the couch and went to the living room.

The whiteboard was still there, leaning against the wall where it had been since the team meeting — the circle with the question mark, mostly erased now, ghost marks of it still visible in the white. He pulled it fully upright, found the marker on the floor beside it, uncapped it.

And he started thinking out loud onto the board.

---

The first thing he needed to understand was what the money actually looked like from the outside.

He’d been watching the balance grow for three weeks without once thinking carefully about what the deposits looked like on paper, what they were labeled, where they appeared to come from. He’d been living inside the system’s logic and forgetting that the rest of the world operated on different logic entirely.

He opened his banking app and requested full statements going back to the beginning.

They loaded slowly.

He looked through them on his phone, then went and got his laptop and looked at them properly on a bigger screen, the way you looked at something you needed to actually understand.

The deposits all appeared under the same label.

’Income.’

That was it. No sender name or institution. No account number attached. Just the word ’income’ and the amount and the date, regular as a heartbeat, every twenty-four hours after a qualifying expense.

To anyone looking at it from the outside it would read as either the most consistent freelance income in human history or something that warranted a closer look.

The IRS had apparently chosen the second interpretation.

He went to the system.

"The bank statements," he said. "The deposits — where are they coming from. What does the paper trail look like."

> Query recognized.

> Returns are processed through untraceable channels. No origin institution exists in conventional banking infrastructure. Deposits appear as organic income to all external systems.

"So there’s no sender."

> Correct. Returns are indistinguishable from standard income deposits at surface level.

"But the pattern is irregular enough to flag."

> Frequency and consistency of deposits without corresponding employment or business revenue may attract regulatory attention. This is a known variable.

Ryan looked at the screen. "Is there anything I can do about the labeling. Can I change what the deposits look like. Give them a source."

> Deposits can be retroactively attributed to any source you designate. Label, institution, sender name, and memo field are all adjustable. Changes will reflect across all financial records including third-party bank documentation.

Ryan sat back.

He read that twice.

The system could make the money look like it came from wherever he said it came from. Which meant the problem wasn’t the money itself — the problem was that he hadn’t thought to build the story around it before someone started asking questions.

He got up and went to the whiteboard.

He wrote two things.

*What does the IRS need to see.*

*Who can make that story hold.*

The answer to the first one was straightforward — legitimate income, a paper trail that made sense, a source that could be verified and that corresponded to the amounts coming in. The deposits were large and regular. They needed to look like something.

The answer to the second one was Diana Lockridge.

He stood at the board and mapped it out. Diana ran a venture capital firm. Venture capital firms made seed investments in early stage companies.

Rebuild Tech was an early stage company, registered, legitimate, with an EIN and a business bank account and five employees on payroll.

If Diana had made a seed investment in Rebuild Tech — say, several weeks ago, backdated appropriately — then the deposits had a source. An investor. Someone who could, if asked, confirm that yes, she had provided capital to this company, and yes, these were the disbursements.

The system could make the bank records reflect it.

Diana would need to agree to it.

Which meant he needed Diana to have a reason to say yes that had nothing to do with helping him out of a legal situation she didn’t know he was in.

He stepped back from the board and looked at it.

The pitch had to be real. Not a cover story, not a manufactured reason to get her in a room — an actual opportunity that she’d actually want. Because Diana Lockridge hadn’t gotten $340 million under management by saying yes to things that weren’t worth her time, and she hadn’t given him her card at the gallery because she was generous. She’d given it because she was interested.

He had to give her something to be interested in.

He looked at the board for a long time.

Rebuild Tech was real. The team was real. Whatever they were about to present to him was real. Danny’s architecture notes on those napkins were real. Iralis’s analysis was real. Liam’s quiet competence was real.

He just had to make Diana see it before anyone else did.

He picked up the marker and started writing properly.

---

By the time he stopped, the sun had moved across the apartment entirely, going from morning window to afternoon wall to the particular orange quality of early evening that the city wore before it switched to its nighttime lighting.

He had three pages of notes beside the laptop. The whiteboard had a structure on it that actually made sense — the pitch, the ask, the arrangement he needed from Diana, and how to frame it in a way that was genuinely valuable to her rather than just useful to him.

He sat down on the couch.

His phone rang.

He looked at the screen.

*Diana Lockridge.*

He sat up straight, cleared his throat once for no practical reason, and answered.

"Hello."

"Diana speaking." Clear, professional, no preamble. "Who is this."

Ryan’s brain did a quick recalculation. Of course. She’d returned a missed call from an unknown number. She had no reason to know who it was.

"It’s Ryan," he said. "We met at the gallery. A few weeks ago."

A pause. Not a long one — more like a brief internal search.

"I’ve been to a lot of galleries," she said. "And I’ve met a lot of people." Another pause, shorter. "But if I gave you my number, I found you interesting. So rather than hang up I’ll ask you this instead." Her voice was even, unhurried. "What do you want?"

Ryan looked at the whiteboard across the room. The notes. The structure he’d spent the last eight hours building.

He thought about what he needed to secure a meeting with a woman like this.

He didn’t stay silent long.

"I want to give you an opportunity I wouldn’t give anyone else," he said. "A chance to be part of something that changes New York." He paused once, briefly. "That changes the world."

The line was quiet. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

Ryan waited, the phone against his ear, the evening light moving across the floor of his apartment. He thought about whether he’d oversold it, whether the language was too large, whether Diana Lockridge heard pitches like that every other Tuesday and filed them accordingly.

Then her voice came back.

"You will be texted my office address with a time and date."

A beat.

"Goodbye."

She hung up.

Ryan held the phone for a moment after the call ended, looking at the screen as it went back to his home display.

Then he exhaled — long and slow — and leaned back against the couch cushions.

His phone buzzed thirty seconds later. An address in Midtown.

A time: Monday morning, 9 AM.

He looked at the IRS email still sitting in his inbox, patient and immovable, waiting for him to have an answer he didn’t have yet.

He picked up the marker.

He had one conversation to get right.

He went back to work.