Fate's Choice: Livestream at the Start Summoning Billions of Ravens

John looked up and gazed at both sides of the street.

Morgan Stanley.

Goldman Sachs.

Citibank.

JPMorgan Chase.

All the alloy roller shutters of the seventeen buildings were locked to the ground, their reflective metal surfaces casting distorted images of the streetscape and his own small figure in a cleaning uniform.

He had been inside all those buildings.

Instead of going through the main entrance, they took the freight elevator up from the garbage compression station on the B2 floor, pushed their cleaning cart through a corridor paved with Brazilian cherry wood, and vacuumed the carpet right at the feet of the million-dollar traders.

8:07 this morning.

Human Resources Department, Morgan Stanley.

What was that white female manager's name again?

Peggy.

Pamela.

Can not remember.

On her desk sat a five-inch framed photo of herself and a golden retriever on Hampton Beach. The scarf around the dog's neck cost more than John's entire cleaning uniform.

"John, I regret to inform you that due to departmental restructuring..."

She described the dismissal in a very nice way.

Architectural adjustments.

John cleaned toilets at Morgan Stanley for eleven months.

He was never late.

Not even once.

Six hundred and seventeen US dollars.

That's all that's left in my bank account.

The rent next month is 850.

My daughter Mila's school lunch fee is still two weeks overdue.

Last month, his ex-wife Catherine sent a demand letter through her lawyer, saying that if he did not pay the outstanding child support, she would apply to the court for enforcement.

Six hundred and seventeen US dollars.

He now holds a coin in his hand, while the rules tell him that there are 640 billion dollars hidden in the building across the street.

The Goldman Sachs building has 42 floors.

Solomon's Swarovski telescope was still held in front of him, and through the lens, the Latino janitor was craning his neck, staring at the Morgan Stanley sign.

"He got it."

Chief Information Officer Paul Keating picked up his broken glasses arm from the carpet, tried to put it back together, and then gave up.

"David, who is this person?"

"Who cares who he is?" Solomon put down his binoculars and rummaged in his shirt pocket for the Iridium phone that he could never get through to. "A homeless man who finds a coin, what kind of trouble do you think he can cause?"

Keating walked to the window.

Looking down from the 42nd floor, the glint of light from the coin was completely invisible; only John's blue-gray uniform stood out starkly against the gray-white sidewalk.

"He's heading towards Morgan Stanley."

"What's it to us?" Solomon tossed away the fifth unreachable satellite phone. "Let Simon and the others worry about it."

Morgan Stanley Building.

Inside the locked building, 3,400 employees were scattered across 62 floors.

Thirty-eight layers of global fixed income department.

Vice President Richard Connor stood by the window on the Broadway side, holding a glass of espresso that had gone cold.

He was not trapped.

As the 60-second countdown began, he was in his private cigar room on the tenth floor of Chelsea Football Club across the street, discussing a cross-currency swap offer with the head of Deutsche Bank's Asia-Pacific region.

He saw the entire process of the roller shutter closing clearly.

"Richard, what are you looking at?" A Deutsche Bank employee approached.

Connor did not answer.

His gaze was fixed on the person in the cleaning uniform downstairs.

wrong.

He knows this person.

Last Wednesday night, he worked overtime until 2 a.m. When he came out of the break room, he bumped into this Latino man who was mopping the floor.

The other person nodded at him, but he did not respond.

He wasn't deliberately arrogant; it's just that the existence of this cleaner had never left any trace in his mind.

The cleaner is now walking towards the Morgan Stanley Building, clutching a shiny coin in his hand.

He read the rules that had just been broadcast on the giant Nasdaq screen, word for word.

Anyone with over $1,000 in bank deposits will die if they touch this place.

[With the target conglomerate facing up, forcibly absorb all of its cash reserves.]

Richard Connor's Citibank private bank account balance is $23.7 million.

His annual salary is 6.8 million, with year-end bonuses calculated separately.

Morgan Stanley's global assets exceed $600 billion.

The cleaner is walking toward six hundred billion dollars.

Connor pulled the Glock 19 from his waist.

Cigar shop regulars knew he had a habit of carrying a concealed carry permit with him at all times. The New York City concealed carry permit, along with the application and lawyer fees, cost him $42,000.

He smashed the French windows with the brass handle of a cigar cutter.

The broken glass fell from ten stories before hitting the ground.

A gust of wind blew in, dispersing the bluish-gray smoke that had accumulated in the cigar room.

Someone from Deutsche Bank shouted something behind him, but it was drowned out by the wind.

Connor held the gun with both hands, his left hand supporting his right wrist, adopting the standard Weaver grip.

The angle of view from the tenth floor to the ground is about 65 degrees, and the target is in the middle of the sidewalk, a little over 120 meters away.

The Glock 19's effective range is fifty meters, but Connor doesn't care.

He consistently ranked among the top three at the Long Island Shooting Club.

Pull the trigger all the way down.

The sound of a 9x19mm Parabellum bullet being fired echoed three times between the buildings.

The bullet flew for about 0.15 seconds, covering a distance of 120 meters.

The warhead's kinetic energy vanished into thin air at a height of less than a meter above John's head.

The copper jacket of the bullet softened, collapsed, and liquefied in mid-air. A drop of molten lead fell directly above John's head, hitting the vitrified pavement ten centimeters outside his left foot with a thud, splashing up a tiny metallic flower.

John glanced down at the drop of lead.

Then he looked up and looked back in the direction of the trajectory.

The tenth floor.

Broken French windows.

A white man in a three-piece suit is holding a gun.

John recognized him.

Early Wednesday morning last week, he nodded and greeted this person at the entrance of the break room.

The other person's gaze didn't linger on him at all; they walked straight past him, completely ignoring his presence.

John looked away.

He wasn't angry.

Anger is an emotional response that requires energy, and a person with only $617 left in their bank account doesn't have the extra energy to be angry.

Connor fired four shots from behind the window on the tenth floor.

Four drops of molten lead landed in a row at John's feet, their splashes almost perfectly aligned.

With eleven rounds left in his Glock magazine, Connor threw down the gun, grabbed his phone, and dialed an internal line.

"Jerry! Jerry, you fucking listen to me!"

The internal telephones in the building are still working.

When Gerald Phillips, the security chief trapped in the B1 security command center of Morgan Stanley, answered the call, the first thing he heard was Connor's panting.

"Turn on the Worston system."

"What?"

"The laser anti-missile testing system in the six-story server room! The one with independent power supply! Project Worthton!"

Phillips' hand paused for two seconds.

Worston is one of three directed energy weapon test platforms that Morgan Stanley pre-installed on the exterior of the Pentagon after winning the contract in 2019.

It has an independent solar-powered module and a localized control panel, and it does not connect to the external network or upload to the cloud.

When this thing was installed, Phillips personally signed a confidentiality agreement.

"Richard, are you crazy? That thing's output power..."

"open!"

Phillips swore in an Irish slang term.

He opened the inconspicuous power distribution cabinet in the corner of the server room, inside which was a separate industrial control panel and three physical levers, with a nameplate bearing the Worston Defense Contract Number affixed to the top.

Push the lever to the top.