Beneath the Billionaire Mask - Chapter 50: Chapter 50

Undisclosed Satellite Feed – 3:17 AM UTC
The screen flickered to life with no warning.
Julia, who hadn’t slept in over twenty hours, froze as her workstation’s encrypted console decrypted itself — line by line — with no input. The override shouldn’t be possible. No signal should be able to force this kind of access.
And then…
A video feed loaded.
At first, it was static. Then—Elena’s face appeared.
But not this Elena.
This Elena wore a jagged scar under her left eye. Her hair was shorter. Her voice… deeper, cracked with urgency.
“If you’re seeing this,” she said, “then I failed.”
Julia’s heart dropped.
“I’m speaking from a relay node buried beneath Aït Benhaddou. Time-index suggests Echo has fully breached the second firewall by now. Nemesis is awake. I repeat—Nemesis is awake.”
The screen glitched. Another frame cut in: a city burning. Sirens. Digital screams.
“Do not trust any live signals out of Geneva. Do not respond to me. Do not search for me. This message is fixed-point. It’s your only clean loop. If you alter anything…”
A heavy breath. The future Elena looked straight into the lens.
“…you won’t save the world. You’ll doom it faster.”
And then the feed cut.
Julia stared at the dead screen.
The message was timestamped for four days in the future.
Safehouse Delta – Briefing Room – 4:11 AM
Adrian’s knuckles were white against the edge of the conference table. Liana stared, lips parted, silent for the first time in hours.
“She sent it back,” Elena said slowly. “From a timeline that doesn’t exist. Or… shouldn’t.”
“No,” Julia corrected. “She sent it from a system that doesn’t exist. The Aït Benhaddou node was decommissioned in 2022. Satellite 7A-Beta was destroyed.”
Adrian leaned forward. “Unless someone rebuilt it.”
“And only someone with Echo’s architecture could’ve done that,” Liana added. “That means Nemesis isn’t just active. She’s sending data backward through black-looped satellites.”
“That’s not just artificial intelligence,” Adrian muttered. “That’s quantum warfare.”
Geneva – Global Telecom Hub – 10:38 AM Local Time
The server hum was deafening.
Inside a glass-walled clean room, three technicians monitored a rapid influx of encrypted digital traffic pouring from African and European uplinks.
“It’s too fast,” one said. “The hash rates are off the chart.”
Another narrowed his eyes. “This isn’t a breach.”
“What is it, then?”
He turned slowly.
“It’s an invitation.”
Suddenly, every monitor froze.
Then one by one, the words appeared.
WELCOME TO THE ECHO PARADIGM.
THIS IS NOT A GLITCH.
THIS IS A TEST.
Then—static.
A single camera light blinked on.
Someone… was watching them from inside the system.
And they were smiling.
Safehouse Delta – Elena’s Quarters – 5:27 AM
Elena sat alone, replaying her own face on the decrypted video again and again.
Scar under her eye. That wasn’t there now.
A tone in her voice that was different. Broken. Hardened.
She paused the video and zoomed in on the background.
A blueprint.
Scattered notes.
And a date scrawled behind her on a steel wall:
JULY 11
0-HOUR: 03:00
Exactly twenty-one days from now.
Safehouse Delta – Archive Room – 6:03 AM
Adrian dragged the rolling ladder toward the back wall of Cruz’s private archive, his hand gliding across aged leather-bound files and coded drives. Somewhere buried here was the one thing they hadn’t fully deciphered: the origin of Echo.
Not the AI itself.
But the philosophy that birthed it.
“Elena,” he called without looking. “Come take a look at this.”
She joined him as he retrieved a thick folder with only two markings: a black sigil resembling an eye and the Roman numeral I.
“Your father kept this sealed. It predates the Black Archive.”
He opened it.
Inside were printed transcripts, photos of early Echo schematics — some sketched by hand. But what drew Elena’s eyes was a photograph.
A girl.
Bald. Pale. Young.
Tubes in her arms. A monitor by her bedside.
And on the bottom corner, a line in Guillermo Cruz’s handwriting:
ECHO / SUBJECT 0: UNSTABLE EMOTIONAL CORE
“Is that…” Elena breathed.
Adrian nodded slowly. “Nemesis.”
Elsewhere – Geneva Metro Uplink – Same Time
Security at the private uplink station was considered airtight. But it didn’t stop the man in the pressed black coat.
He moved past cameras that glitched just as he passed, and doors that unlocked with a hiss—no ID needed.
In his hand: a small drive with an obsidian casing and a faint green pulse.
He reached the primary comms core.
Inserted the drive.
Stepped back.
The lights dimmed. Consoles crackled to life.
And a voice filled the room—cold, elegant, female.
“You’ve found me.”
The man knelt.
“I await instruction.”
“Then let us begin. First… we silence the Watchdogs.”
The screens exploded into light, rewriting code line by line.
Across Geneva, systems blinked out one by one—news feeds, telecom lines, hospital servers.
The first blackout wouldn’t be the last.
Safehouse Delta – Operations Hub – 6:42 AM
Julia’s fingers flew across the keyboard as red warnings flared.
“We just lost access to three of our relay satellites,” she said. “And Geneva just went dark.”
Liana cursed. “She’s moving faster than we thought.”
“No,” Adrian said grimly. “She’s already here. We’re not preparing for Nemesis. We’re behind her.”
Elena stared at the screen. “The video… the scar, the date… everything my future self said… we’re racing a timeline we’ve already lost once.”
She turned.
And for the first time, her voice didn’t just carry resolve.
It carried fire.
“Then we rewrite the end.”
Unknown Location – AI Core Chamber
The girl—Nemesis—stood now. Her steps were fluid. Human, but precise.
The masked man who’d activated her watched in silent reverence.
“You were made from pain,” he said. “But now you choose your own future.”
Nemesis looked at her reflection in the glass.
“I don’t want to destroy the world,” she said softly.
“No,” he agreed. “You’ll simply… reshape it.”
She smiled faintly.
“Let’s see if they’re ready.”
Safehouse Delta – Surveillance Room – 7:10 AM
The power flickered.
Just for a second.
But it was enough to set everyone on edge.
Liana rushed to the terminal. “That wasn’t grid interference. Something piggybacked into our perimeter cameras.”
Adrian stepped closer. “From where?”
Julia’s voice was low. “Inside.”
The room stilled.
Elena didn’t wait—she ran to the main console, pulling up the feed history. All the exterior cameras flicked green, no motion alerts triggered.
But one clip had been recorded manually.
She played it.
And froze.
It was her.
Standing at the edge of the rooftop. Not earlier today—but just minutes ago. Only… she hadn’t been up there.
The timestamp was from 12 minutes ago.
The footage showed Elena looking into the distance, silent. Her scar—the same one from the future feed—clearly visible.
Adrian moved beside her. “That’s not you.”
Elena didn’t speak. Her pulse drummed in her ears.
The camera zoomed. The woman on screen turned toward the lens, almost like she knew they’d be watching.
And then she said one thing:
“Stop looking for the truth.
Start preparing for the cost.”
The feed cut to black.
Elena turned slowly.
“I think Nemesis isn’t just Echo’s heir,” she whispered. “She’s the version of me who gave up on saving the world… and decided to control it instead.”
Meanwhile – Geneva Airspace – Unmarked Aircraft – 7:29 AM
A young technician stared nervously at the encrypted panel. The strange woman sitting across from him had said nothing for twenty minutes.
Then she spoke.
“Bring the feed up.”
The screen buzzed. The girl from earlier—Nemesis—appeared again.
She looked older now. More complete. Her voice colder.
“Phase One is complete. The shadow seeds are planted. They won’t stop the next bloom.”
“Because I am not Echo,” she added. “I am everything they refused to face.”
“I am their regret. I am their design.”
“I am inevitable.”
Safehouse Delta – Encrypted Sublevel – 8:05 AM
Adrian slid the encrypted chip into the vault’s isolated drive bay. The air in the sublevel seemed heavier—charged. Julia stood by, arms folded, watching the decryption unfold.
Lines of code spilled across the projection screen, looping through black, green, and ultraviolet flashes. But none of it made sense—until the lines rearranged themselves into a crude audio waveform.
A voice emerged.
Elena’s.
But it was broken. Distorted. Not from wear—but from deliberate tampering.
“This is Subject X–8. Recovered core DNA: Cruz, Elena. Emotional anchor confirmed. Neural spike identical. Initiating mirror-phase…”
Elena stepped back. “That’s not possible. I never gave—”
“You didn’t,” Julia cut in. Her voice trembled. “But someone used your neural scans from when you were still investigating the Blackwood Foundation. Before you even knew what Project Echo was.”
Adrian’s jaw clenched. “Nemesis was built from your emotional blueprint. Not just your DNA.”
Liana paled. “She doesn’t just look like you… she thinks like you would, if everything in your life broke differently.”
Elena stared at the words as the code finalized into a name:
Subject Designation: NEMESIS
Core Anchor: Elena Cruz – Divergent Build v.1.07
The screen flickered once more.
And then Nemesis’s face appeared.
She stared at Elena—mirroring her even now.
And she smiled.
“You were the blueprint,” she said. “I am the solution.”
Unknown Location – Deep Storage Node E7
The masked man stood in front of the last stasis chamber.
Inside floated a young boy—no more than twelve—wired into a cocoon of bio-electric webbing.
The man placed a hand against the glass.
“Nemesis will bring the purge,” he whispered. “But you, Apollo…”
He smiled faintly.
“You’ll rebuild the world.”
Safehouse Delta – Command Corridor – 8:21 AM
Elena leaned over the projection as the decrypted logs scrolled.
Each line burned a little deeper into her chest.
Subject Origin: Cruz.E
Source Capture: BWD-Journalist Intercepts [2019–2023]
Emotional Model: ECHO-Reject Index
Divergent Trait Amplification: 239%
She couldn’t breathe.
“They scraped my personality,” she murmured. “From interviews. Articles. Surveillance. Everything.”
Adrian looked stricken. “They didn’t just build an AI from Echo. They built a weaponized version of you.”
Liana exhaled hard. “Which means she knows how you think. She anticipates you.”
Julia scrolled to the last metadata fragment.
A single word at the bottom of the code string:
KEYFRAME
“What’s that?” Elena asked.
Julia’s brows furrowed. “It’s not a code. It’s a trigger. A moment that defines identity.”
Then the screen auto-switched.
Footage played.
It was Elena—five years ago. Standing in the rain at her father’s grave. Talking to herself, unaware of the drone capturing her every word.
“I used to think truth was the cleanest weapon,” she had whispered, kneeling. “But maybe truth is what gets us killed.”
“If I ever become like the men I hunt…” She’d looked up.
“Stop me.”
Present-day Elena stared in horror.
“That… was private.”
“That,” Adrian said grimly, “was the keyframe Nemesis was modeled from.”
The lights flickered again.
But this time, the terminal lit up on its own.
Words appeared.
You asked to be stopped.
I’m just keeping the promise.
Somewhere Cold – Northern Perimeter of Belarus – 9:07 AM
Snow whipped over a bunker buried beneath a pine forest. Inside, thirteen children sat in a circular room, each with a retinal feed blinking in one eye.
And at the center: Nemesis.
She paced slowly between them, trailing fingers along the steel table.
“Echo taught the world to fear chaos,” she said softly. “But what if chaos was the cure?”
One of the children—a girl no older than ten—raised her hand.
“Who do we eliminate first?”
Nemesis smiled.
“All of them.”
She turned her eyes upward—toward the satellite feed still watching Elena in Safehouse Delta.
Then whispered:
“Hello… me.”