A couple of days after introducing the VaultPay stand-in team to Gumua's government, Tyler began to reflect on how quickly things had escalated behind closed doors.
He had expected pressure from the country's central figures—but not that soon.
Still, he wasn't caught off guard. Instead, he acted.
Tyler overhauled VaultPay's backend architecture and created a node-based transaction system.
On the surface, it looked like just another scalability improvement. But in truth, it was a mechanism for invisible influence.
To explain it simply—each "node" functioned as a separate channel or pipeline. Transactions routed through them could be tracked, customized, and, more importantly, weaponized.
Most users interacted with public nodes—the ones handling routine activity like merchant payments, peer-to-peer transfers, or government subsidies.
But Tyler's real genius lay in the private nodes—hidden behind the compliance layer, invisible to auditors, untraceable to standard logs.
These channels quietly generated micro-dividends, funneled directly to stakeholders he chose.
So, when David told the ministers they'd get "a slice of every transaction," he wasn't bluffing. The system had already been built.
Here's how it worked:
First, VaultPay assigned fake infrastructure tags:
"Infrastructure Operations Contract – Region 2"
"Digital Oversight Partner – Rural Connectivity"
"Node Allocation: Compliance Shadow 5A"
These were just names—ghost contracts attached to hidden profit-sharing addresses.
Second, as millions of transactions flowed through VaultPay each day, Tyler's system peeled off a small percentage—say, 0.05% from all Region 2 transactions—and routed them to the associated private node.
That node, in turn, was linked to one or more anonymized wallets—belonging to the ministers, their proxies, or third-party shells.
Third, the system's fake audit trail framed these payouts as:
Logistics expenses.
Regional vendor fees.
Subcontractor support.
Tech servicing reimbursements
On paper, everything looked clean. Routine. Boring.
The result? These elites received consistent income, every week, every month—without a single red flag.
The money never showed up as bribes, never triggered alerts, and could be laundered again through foreign shell companies if needed.
Because VaultPay controlled both the routing and metadata, nothing looked out of place.
And for Tyler, that was the entire point.
By giving these powerful men a personal stake in the system, he gave them a reason to protect it. They would defend VaultPay with their reputations, their agencies, and their budgets.
It was never pitched as corruption. On paper, they were just "advisors," "regional partners," "digital transformation contractors."
But Tyler's endgame? Control.
Because he owned the node architecture, the routing logic, and the backup ledgers.
He could cut off their flow with a single keystroke.
He could redirect the income, shut down their access, or show them fake data that made everything seem fine—while starving them dry behind the scenes.
To them, VaultPay looked like a golden goose. But in truth, it was a collar—a leash disguised as a reward.
They would fight to keep it alive, never realizing it was the very tool he would use to control their country's economic bloodstream.
...
After ending the call with David, Tyler leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowing as the gears in his mind spun forward. The deal had been sealed—at least in principle.
VaultPay had just been granted its entry point into Gumua. But getting approval was only half the battle. Now came the real work: infrastructure.
He opened a new tab on his laptop and began cross-referencing his asset files, cloud integration logs, and infrastructure blueprints.
Despite its elegant code and modular design, VaultPay wasn't some lightweight web application that could run on rented VPS space or third-party clouds.
It needed a base. A body. A physical brain.
And that meant a data centre.
For Tyler, the need wasn't just technical—it was philosophical.
Structurally, VaultPay had been built to house three separate ledger systems, a cloaked routing network, and a compliance camouflage layer that mimicked regulatory protocols.
These features didn't just require processing power; they demanded dedicated resources. Shared infrastructure was too risky—one breach in one client's segment could compromise the entire flow.
Every transaction VaultPay handled was fractured, reassembled, encrypted, and disguised. And those processes ran simultaneously, generating data logs, shadow records, dummy metadata, and encrypted backups.
To run all that in real-time—without delay, without trace, without failure—he needed a server environment built from scratch, on sovereign soil, with full physical control.
But more importantly, Tyler understood the personal significance of the move.
VaultPay was the core of his empire. Not just a money-moving app, but a gateway to power.
And power could never be rented.
You couldn't lease sovereignty. You had to build it with your own hands, rack by rack, fiber line by fiber line.
David, as always, was one step ahead. He had already started looking for a location for the data centre.
Once the location was finalized, the next phase would begin: hardware deployment.
Tyler thought about this, as he pulled up the infrastructure breakdown sheet and began reviewing the list of requirements again:
Tier-2 server racks with thermal insulation.
Cold/hot aisle containment systems.
High-capacity cooling units.
Triple-redundant power units.
Physical security cages and biometric access locks.
Multi-path fiber optic uplinks.
Hardware-encrypted firewall appliances.
This wasn't overkill. It was necessity.
David had already been given clearance to bring in external IT contractors. They would be flown in discreetly under a third-party logistics partner—foreign nationals with experience in enterprise infrastructure deployment, not local hires.
Tyler made that decision early on.
He didn't want to risk local leaks. No gossip. No planted devices. No one who might be bribed by a foreign embassy or suspicious journalist.
These men were professionals. Anonymous in the industry, expensive, and loyal to the NDA contracts more than any cause.
They would handle the physical installations:
Mounting server racks.
Wiring the fiber backbone.
Setting up internal mesh switches.
Calibrating cooling systems.
Deploying backup batteries and failover units.
Installing biometric access controls and magnetic-lock doors.
This wouldn't just be a data centre. It would be a fortress.
...
After the physical setup, David would move to the third phase: national integration.
Tyler had emphasized this personally during their last call.
"Get telecom on board. The biggest one. Offer revenue share on rural coverage expansion."
VaultPay would require bandwidth—massive, uninterrupted, and secure.
That meant partnering with a local telecom giant to lay high-speed fiber directly into the facility, complete with redundant routing through separate exchanges.
But even that wasn't enough.
The data centre had to be electrically sovereign too.
No ordinary power lines. No dependency on the unstable grid in rural zones.
Tyler wanted direct connection to Gumua's national grid—preferably with solar backup and an isolated diesel generator stack.
"Tell them we'll use it to power a future public services hub," he'd said. "Make it sound like it's for national development."
David had understood.
These were the moves that mattered—the ones made before the cameras came in.
The completion timeline was three weeks.
That was the window David had given himself—and Tyler had agreed.
It was tight, nearly impossible. But they thrived in the impossible.
By week one, the land had to be secured and pre-cleared. Permits acquired. Excavation started.
By week two, hardware had to be flown in, assembled, tested, and stress-run.
By week three, final hookups, telecom connections, and a dry run of VaultPay's node had to be completed.
It was a race.
But David had already filed paperwork under a government digital modernization grant—one of the side programs linked to the NGO initiative.
Everything would appear legitimate.