Chapter 5 Media Feeding Frenzy

Present Day

The newsroom of TechCrunch buzzes with the kind of frantic energy that only comes with a breaking story that could define careers.

Sarah Chen stares at her computer screen, watching the view count on the Tech Summit video climb past two million in just six hours.

"This is insane," she mutters, scrolling through the comments section that's moving too fast to read.

Her editor, Mike Rodriguez, appears behind her chair like a vulture sensing fresh meat.

"Please tell me you have something on Dr. Aria Vale that isn't just recycled conference footage."

Sarah's fingers pause over the keyboard. "I'm trying, but it's like she materialized out of thin air three years ago. No previous employment records, no academic publications under that name, no social media presence before Vale Tech launched."

"Everyone has a digital footprint, Sarah. You just haven't looked hard enough."

She wants to argue, but Mike's already moved on to terrorize another reporter.

Sarah pulls up her notes, scanning through three days of dead ends. Dr. Aria Vale's biography reads like a carefully constructed fiction. PhD from MIT, but the records are sealed. Previous work experience listed as "private consulting," which tells her exactly nothing.

Even the company registration for Vale Tech is a maze of shell corporations and holding companies that lead nowhere.

It's like someone deliberately erased their past.

Across town, investigative journalist Marcus Webb, not to be confused with the Nobel laureate, sits in his cramped apartment surrounded by printouts, sticky notes, and empty coffee cups.

He's built his career on finding people who don't want to be found.

Dr. Aria Vale is making him question everything he knows about research.

"Come on," he mutters, cross-referencing patent filings with university records for the fifteenth time. "Nobody just appears fully formed as a genius."

His phone rings. The caller ID shows his contact at MIT's alumni office.

"Marcus? I checked into that Aria Vale query."

"And?"

"There's a record, but it's locked down tighter than Fort Knox. All I can tell you is she graduated summa cum laude, but her dissertation is classified. Something about defense applications."

Marcus sits up straighter. "Defense applications?"

"That's all I can say. But Marcus? Whoever she is, she had some serious government backing even back then."

The line goes dead.

Government backing. That explains the sealed records, the security around her past.

But it doesn't explain why someone with that level of clearance would disappear for three years only to emerge as a private sector CEO.

Jennifer Walsh from Tech Today has taken a different approach.

Instead of chasing paper trails, she's hitting up every tech conference, startup event, and industry meetup in Silicon Valley, showing Aria's photo to anyone who'll look.

"I've never seen her before the Vale Tech launch," says David Kim, CTO of a major cybersecurity firm. "But I'll tell you what's weird. About two years ago, we got outbid on a major contract by some company we'd never heard of. Small outfit, perfect proposal, came out of nowhere."

Jennifer's pen hovers over her notepad. "What was the company called?"

"Something generic. Advanced Security Solutions, I think. But the signature on the contract was A. Vale."

Her heart races.

"You still have the contract?"

David shakes his head. "It's all confidential, but I remember thinking whoever wrote that proposal understood our weaknesses better than we did."

Jennifer makes a note to check business registration for Advanced Security Solutions.

Two hours later, she has a list of six different companies, all registered in the past three years, all with similar names, and all somehow connected to A. Vale.

Shell companies within shell companies.

Someone has been very busy covering their tracks.

The social media explosion starts small.

A tech blogger posts a side-by-side comparison of Dr. Vale's presentation with a Hart Industries white paper from two years ago, pointing out that her "new" concepts appeared in footnotes of Leon Hart's research.

Footnotes attributed to "unnamed consulting partner."

The post gets shared. Then reshared. Then picked up by bigger accounts.

Within hours, #MysteryGenius is trending worldwide.

@TechWhistleblower posts: "Anyone else notice Hart Industries stock is tanking while Vale Tech soars? Coincidence?"

@SiliconValleyGossip responds: "Heard rumors Hart's 'consulting partner' was his wife. Same wife who disappeared after their divorce. Hmm."

@CyberSecurityPro chimes in: "I met Dr. Vale at a private demo last year. She was using a different name then. Something with an H..."

The thread explodes.

People sharing stories of mysterious consultants, brilliant women who appeared briefly in their professional lives only to vanish again, leaving behind solutions to problems that had stumped entire teams.

"Some woman named Vale" becomes the thread that, when pulled, starts unraveling the entire tech industry's recent history.

Sarah Chen's phone hasn't stopped ringing.

"TechCrunch, this is Sarah."

"You're the reporter covering the Vale story?" The voice is nervous, shaky.

"Yes, who is this?"

"I can't give my name, but I worked at a startup that folded last year. DataSecure Inc. We were bleeding money, about to lose everything."

Sarah grabs her recorder. "Go on."

"This woman showed up at our office. Said she'd heard we were having security issues and offered to help. We figured what the hell, right? We were desperate."

"What did she look like?"

"Brown hair, green eyes, quiet voice. Called herself Ana Vega. But she rewrote our entire security architecture in six hours. Six hours of work that saved our company."

Sarah's pulse quickens. "Where is DataSecure now?"

"Bought out by Google for forty million. All because of what she did."

The line goes dead.

Ana Vega. Another alias.

Sarah starts a new search, looking for any mention of Ana Vega, A. Vale, or variations thereof.

The hits keep coming.

Consultant reports. Advisory agreements. Contract signatures on deals worth millions.

All from the same woman using different names.

All from someone who's been hiding in plain sight.

At CNN's tech desk, senior correspondent Lisa Park stares at the address she's just discovered.

Vale Tech Solutions is registered to a building in downtown Manhattan. Nothing unusual there.

Except the building houses forty-three different companies, all with similar names, all registered within the past three years.

Vale Consulting. Vale Analytics. Vale Security Systems. Vale Digital Solutions.

"What the hell," Lisa breathes.

She pulls up incorporation documents. They all list the same registered agent, the same mailing address, even the same phone number.

But different business licenses, different tax ID numbers, different industry classifications.

It's an entire ecosystem of companies, all feeding into Vale Tech Solutions.

All created by someone who understood exactly how to build a business empire while staying completely invisible.

Her hands shake as she realizes what this means.

Dr. Aria Vale didn't just emerge from nowhere three years ago.

She's been systematically building the foundation for this moment, company by company, contract by contract, patent by patent.

While the world thought she'd disappeared, she was constructing the most elaborate business strategy Lisa has ever seen.

The breakthrough comes at 11:47 PM when freelance investigator Tony Rosetti finds something everyone else missed.

Not in business records or patent filings or university databases.

In a three-year-old society page photo from Manhattan Magazine.

The caption reads: "Leon and Aria Hart at the Morrison Charity Gala."

The woman in the photo looks nothing like the polished CEO from the tech conference. Her hair is different, her clothes more conservative, her posture uncertain.

But the eyes are the same.

Those distinctive green eyes.

Tony's found the connection everyone's been missing.

Dr. Aria Vale, tech genius and CEO, is Aria Hart.

Leon Hart's ex-wife.

The woman who supposedly disappeared after their divorce.

Who everyone assumed had crawled away to lick her wounds in obscurity.

Instead, she'd been building an empire.

By midnight, the story breaks simultaneously across six major outlets.

"MYSTERY GENIUS REVEALED: Dr. Aria Vale is Hart Industries CEO's Ex-Wife"

"FROM SOCIETY WIFE TO TECH TITAN: The Aria Hart Story"

"THE REVENGE EMPIRE: How a Scorned Wife Built a Billion-Dollar Business"

The internet loses its collective mind.

Twitter crashes twice from the traffic.

LinkedIn is flooded with connection requests to anyone who's ever worked with either Hart Industries or Vale Tech.

Leon Hart's Wikipedia page gets edited 847 times in one hour.

The story has everything: betrayal, genius, revenge, corporate espionage, and a mysterious disappearance.

But as the dust settles and reporters scramble to interview anyone who's ever met either Leon or Aria Hart, one question keeps surfacing in comment sections and Twitter threads and newsroom discussions.

A question that makes everyone pause and reconsider everything they think they know about this story.

If Aria Hart has been building business empires for three years, where has she been living?

And more importantly, where is her daughter?

Because according to divorce records that enterprising journalists dig up within hours, Aria Hart was awarded sole custody of a child.

A little girl who would be about three years old now.

A little girl who hasn't been seen at any school event, any social gathering, any public appearance in three years.

The mystery of Dr. Aria Vale's transformation is solved.

But the real mystery is just beginning.