FIGHT C.L.U.B.

My name is Alessandra Moretti, I am 38 years old, and I am the founder and CEO of Apex Dynamics, a multinational tech company worth over two billion euros. My offices occupy the top four floors of a glass skyscraper in the center of Milan, and the view from my private terrace is something most people only see in movies.

I have always chosen my employees with obsessive care. Strong, ambitious women, graduated from Oxford, Stanford, Bocconi. Managers who could stand up to any board of directors, female engineers who solved problems in three hours that others took weeks. I called them “my lionesses”. And they were.

Until three months ago.

At first I thought it was post-pandemic stress, or the usual end-of-year decline. Then I started noticing details.

Martina Bianchi, my Head of Product – 41 years old, two masters' degrees, former McKinsey consultant – who every morning at 8.15 brings a latte to the intern in the design department, a 24-year-old girl with purple hair and a tattoo on her wrist. Not once. Every morning. And as he hands it to her he lowers his gaze slightly and waits for the girl to say "thank you, Martina" with that lazy and satisfied tone.

I saw Giulia Conti, VP Finance, a woman who has negotiated contracts worth 40 million without batting an eyelid, blush and stammer when a junior analyst corrected her report in a meeting. She didn't get angry. He just said “you're right, sorry”.

And then the little things: different postures, lower voices, doors that close slowly, smiles that last a second too long.

Productivity fell by 19%. The numbers never lie.

So, last night, at 2:17, while the city beneath me slept, I did what I always do when something doesn't add up: I hacked into the system.

I used my root access, the one that not even IT fully knows about. I checked network logs, internal servers, hidden domains. And there, among the hundreds of company subdomains, I found one that shouldn't exist.

A site hosted directly on our servers, in the VLAN reserved for classified projects.

URL: internal.apex-dyn.it/echo

No public certificates. No external DNS records. Protected by a firewall that only recognizes the IPs of the office.

I opened it.

The page loaded in less than a second. Black background. A single, elegant white writing in the center.

And there I stopped.

The cursor blinked softly, as if it was waiting for me.

(End Chapter 1)