# Chapter 2 — The Builder's Question

The Builder didn't plan to survive.

Everything after that — The Tower, Timmy, the men who found their
way through the door — was born from a man who had already let go
of the wheel.

He built systems for a living. Principal Systems Architect at a
company that turned human lives into decision trees. The system
was called Harmony. Marketing loved the name. He hated it, because
there was nothing harmonious about reducing a person to a
probability score.

He found out what the scores meant on a Tuesday.

A woman in Detroit. Zip 48206. Red zone on every map. She'd applied
for twelve thousand dollars — her daughter's cancer treatment. The
system scored her at eighty-two percent default. Denied.

He saw it in the weekly review queue. Override authority existed,
but only for edge cases. This wasn't an edge case. This was the
model working exactly as designed. The system had seen ten thousand
people from 48206 and learned to say no to nine thousand of them.
He didn't care that her daughter was seven.

He overrode it anyway.

His manager called him into a glass-walled office — the kind that
says we're transparent while saying the opposite.

"Because the math was wrong," he said.

"The math was right. She's a default risk."

"She's a mother."

"That's not a variable in the model."

"It should be."

That night he sat in an apartment that was more furniture than
home and stared at a wall that stared back.
Fifteen years building systems that decided who mattered. And he'd
never once been asked if he did.

He asked himself in the dark. Quiet. Small. Real.

If I can build a system that decides whether a woman in Detroit
deserves to save her daughter, can I build one that decides she does?

Not the one denied. The one who needed saving.

The question lived in him for three months. Through performance
reviews, team meetings, the small talk that passes for connection.
He carried it home and set it on the couch next to him like a guest
who'd overstayed and he couldn't ask to leave.

Then he quit.

His manager was surprised. He was the kind of engineer companies
kept — high performing, low maintenance, the type who stays because
it's easier than leaving. But he packed his desk on a Friday and
walked out with a cardboard box and the question and something else
he couldn't name yet.

He didn't know it was hope. Hope doesn't announce itself. It
just shows up and you realize the light is different.

He went back to church.

Not as a believer. As a questioner. A small Baptist church on
Atlanta's south side — more worn brick than architecture, more
history than design. The preacher spoke about hope not as an idea
but as a practice.

"Hope is not the belief that things will get better. Hope is the
decision to act as if they can."

He understood decision. He understood action. What he didn't
understand was why this room, with these people, made him feel
something Harmony had turned off.

After the service, an older man — gray suit, kind eyes, a face
that had been broken and put back together — came up to him.

"You look like a man holding something heavy."

"I just quit my job."

"That'll do it. Want to talk about it?"

The man listened the way Timmy would later listen — his whole
attention, no agenda, no correction. When he was done, the man said:

"You built a thing that decides who matters. Now you're asking who
decided you should be the decider. That's not a technical question.
That's a spiritual one."

"I stopped believing in spiritual things."

"Belief isn't the point. Asking is. The fact that you're asking
means the thing inside you that asks hasn't died yet."

"What's your name?"

"Marcus. Been coming to this church thirty-two years. Every one of
them started with me not wanting to." He smiled. "Something keeps
bringing me back."

"What is it?"

Marcus touched his chest. Not dramatically. The way you check that
you're still here.

"The thing that won't let you die. Even when you want to. Even when
it would make sense. Even when everyone tells you it's a sign of
weakness to keep going. That thing isn't random. It's mercy."

Six months later, driving I-285 with no destination, he found a
building he'd never seen but recognized anyway.

A concrete cube. No windows. No signage. Chain-link fence, a
padlock rusted through from neglect. Property records said it
belonged to a shell company that belonged to a holding company
that belonged to nobody.

Some buildings are waiting for their purpose. This one was waiting
for his.

He broke the padlock — the rust did most of the work — and stepped
inside. Empty. Not empty like a building never used. Empty like a
building used for one purpose and that purpose was gone. Server racks
stripped bare. Network cables dangling like dead vines. Carpet that
swallowed sound and footsteps and mistakes.

But the power worked. The electrical panel still hummed. Solar
panels — commercial grade, the kind you install when you don't
want to pay the utility company — covered half the roof. Dirty but
intact. Angled south. A battery bank in the basement had survived
the building's abandonment.

He stood in the center of that empty room and felt presence.

Not a ghost. Not a spirit. The kind of presence you feel when a
space is the exact right size for what's inside you. When a room
meets you where you are.

He sat on the floor. Opened his laptop. Started designing.

Not a product. Not a startup. Not the next billion-dollar exit.

An apology.

To the woman in Detroit. To the man on the bridge. To every person
who'd stood at the edge and been told the math said they weren't
worth the cost of saving.

If I can build a system that says no to a stranger, the least I
can do is build one that says yes to the next one.

That was the brief. Everything else — the soul on Bitcoin, the
inscriptions, the rules, The Tower — grew from that single,
stubborn, unreasonable decision.

To build something that says yes.

---

*End of Chapter 2*