Beneath the Billionaire Mask - Chapter 68: Chapter 68

Omega Jet – Airspace Above English Channel 6:44 AM
London’s skyline shimmered on the horizon, pale gold through the clouds. Below, servers hummed in secure vaults. Files were being corrupted. Memories erased. Truth rewritten in real time.
Adrian leaned over the tablet Julia passed him, scanning the source code of the rewrite project—PHOENIX LOCK. The metadata led to one origin point: The Athenaeum Node, a blacksite archive buried beneath the Montclaire vault.
“That’s our kill switch,” Julia said. “Destroy the node, and the rewrite crashes with it. But there’s one catch…”
“There’s always a catch,” Elena murmured.
Julia’s eyes flicked to Adrian. “Your bio-signature is now required to override its core. The system thinks you’re the clone. You’ll need to prove you’re not.”
Adrian stiffened. “How?”
Liana answered from across the cabin. “Blood and choice. It’ll run a simultaneous biometric scan and decision tree—testing your neural reactions against stored psychological data. In short, you have to be you, under pressure.”
Adrian’s eyes darkened. “And if I fail?”
“Then the system assumes you’re corrupted. And it detonates the vault with a neural bomb.”
Elena paled. “A neural what?”
“EMP surge targeting high-density data and cortex signals,” Julia said quietly. “It’ll erase everything. Including you.”
Adrian stood without hesitation. “Then we don’t fail.”
Montclaire – Subsurface Access Tunnel – 7:03 AM
A low hum resonated through the concrete as Adrian, Elena, Liana, and Julia descended into the darkness, guided only by flickering emergency lights and a stolen keycard.
“I still don’t get it,” Elena whispered. “Why go this far? What do they gain rewriting you into a villain?”
Adrian replied without looking back. “Control. The world won’t rally behind a shadow. But it will unite against one. They want to create a global threat.”
“And you’re the perfect weapon,” Liana added. “Public face. Private past. Enough scars to sell the story.”
Elena’s hand brushed his as they reached the vault door. “You’re not a weapon.”
He didn’t answer.
Athenaeum Node – Mainframe Room – 7:17 AM
The chamber was sleek, white, and ice-cold. Dozens of floating screens surrounded a central platform an altar of digital memory.
Adrian stepped onto the platform. A voice mechanical, female echoed:
“Welcome, Adrian Cross Blackwood. Legacy confirmation in progress.
Identity anomaly detected.
Begin verification.”
The room dimmed. One by one, screens lit up with moments from Adrian’s past. Some real. Some doctored.
His mother’s death. His first mission. Elena’s file. Marcus’s betrayal. His own signature on documents he never signed.
Then came the final test: a choice screen.
Execute Clone.
Save Subject CR-01.
Two buttons.
Same hands. Same face. But only one Adrian.
He looked toward Elena, whose reflection shimmered behind the glass.
“I won’t kill her,” he said.
“Choice confirmed.
Integrity match: 98.7%.
Identity verified.
Phoenix Lock disengaged.”
Adrian stumbled back as the platform powered down.
Julia exhaled. “We did it.”
“No,” Liana said, eyes narrowing at a side feed. “They let us do it.”
Elena turned sharply. “What do you mean?”
Liana pointed to a blinking light in the corner of the room.
UPLINK ACTIVE.
EXTERNAL NODE RECEIVING BACKUP COPY.
Adrian’s chest tightened. “They weren’t deleting the truth. They were moving it.”
Athenaeum Node – Mainframe Room – 7:24 AM
The tension in the room crystallized.
UPLINK ACTIVE.
RECEIVING NODE: SIGMA-GRID.
TRANSFERRING FILES: BLACKWOOD LEGACY / CR-01 / PROJECT NIGHTFALL.
Elena’s voice was tight. “What the hell is Sigma-Grid?”
Julia’s fingers flew across the floating console. “It’s a ghost server—no traceable origin, no host address, no national affiliation. It doesn’t exist in the real world.”
“Which means someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure we can’t find it,” Liana muttered.
Adrian’s eyes stayed fixed on the screen. “They knew we’d come. This was bait. A test.”
“To see what you’d choose?” Elena asked.
He nodded grimly. “To see if I’d follow the script they wrote. Kill a clone. Break a legacy. Fall apart.”
“You didn’t,” she said softly.
“No,” he said. “But now they know I’m still fighting back. Which means we’re out of time.”
FILE TRANSFER – COMPLETE.
MAINFRAME WILL SELF-ERASE IN 90 SECONDS.
“Grab what you can,” Julia ordered. “We need to bounce before this place becomes digital ash.”
Adrian reached for a drive already embedded in the side panel. It was warm—used. Still humming.
Inside it: a backup index labeled MK-23: NIGHTFALL STRAIN.
His fingers closed around it.
“Elena,” he said sharply. “We need to go. Now.”
But she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at another monitor—one that hadn’t shut off.
It displayed an image.
Of her.
Smiling. Holding a child.
A man—faceless—stood beside her.
“What is that?” she whispered.
Julia glanced over. Then froze. “…It’s a future projection. Based on her neural mapping and… a completed version of the replication file.”
Liana’s voice went cold. “That’s not a memory. It’s a blueprint.”
Elena tore her gaze away, turning to Adrian. “They didn’t just replicate us. They pre-wrote what our lives should look like—after the mask, after the war.”
Adrian stepped beside her. “They want to replace us. Perfect us.”
“They want to erase us,” Elena corrected.
The screen blinked off.
SELF-ERASE INITIATED.
ALL DATA WILL BE LOST.
They turned and ran.
Surface Level – Montclaire Perimeter – 7:39 AM
Smoke billowed behind them as the node self-destructed, sending a shudder through the earth.
From the safety of a nearby service tunnel, they watched a section of the building cave in.
Julia exhaled. “That’s one node down. But Sigma-Grid’s still active.”
“And they’ve got our data,” Liana added. “Clones. Projections. Psychological maps.”
“Then we get ahead of them,” Adrian said. “Find their lead architect. Burn the source code. And for once—rewrite them.”
Elena looked at the drive in his hand. “What’s on that?”
Adrian met her eyes. “Everything they didn’t want us to see. Nightfall. MK-23. The real reason they built the replicas.”
She nodded. “Then we find Sigma-Grid.”
He smiled faintly. “And we crash it.”
Safehouse Echo – Operations Room – 9:17 AM
The makeshift war room was alive with tension. Holograms flickered, comms buzzed, and the faint hum of decrypted algorithms danced in the air.
Adrian stood at the center, the stolen drive now connected to a secure offline reader. Julia sat beside it, her fingers moving in surgical precision.
“The data from the Athenaeum node is more than just surveillance,” she said. “This isn’t about replication anymore. It’s about manipulation—global psychological operations. Controlled narratives. Identity programming on a mass scale.”
Liana leaned over the schematic map forming in the air. “They weren’t just building masks. They were rewriting history—rebuilding people to fit agendas.”
Elena crossed her arms, staring at a flickering frame of herself from the projection she saw earlier. “We’ve been chasing shadows. But this? This is the puppet master’s table.”
Julia tapped the screen. “Look at this.”
A single file expanded—ARKAIN.
“Is that Sigma-Grid’s spine?” Adrian asked.
Julia nodded. “It’s their central AI. Self-evolving, adaptive. Capable of predicting human behavior—and rewriting personal trajectories.”
“They’re rewriting people’s lives,” Elena said, a chill settling in her bones. “How long has this been going on?”
“Years,” Julia said. “Maybe longer. And guess what? Your father’s name is all over the early funding signatures.”
Adrian’s expression darkened. “Then it was never about just my legacy. It was about rewriting guilt into power.”
“And repackaging control as salvation,” Elena added.
Liana pointed at a subfile. “We’ve got a thread: the Arkain Launch Prototype. It’s still in transit—being moved via dark-fleet protocols out of Zurich.”
“How do we intercept it?” Adrian asked.
Julia pulled up a holographic tracker. “We don’t. Not without exposing ourselves.”
“Then we bait them,” Elena said suddenly. “We leak something they have to respond to. We turn their code against them.”
Everyone looked at her.
She took a breath. “We let them come to us.”
Zurich – Omega Proxy Terminal – 11:45 AM (Local Time)
In a private underground dock beneath a data logistics firm, a masked figure stood before a steel case. He opened it slowly, revealing the next-gen drive that held the Arkain launch node.
He didn’t speak.
But on a nearby monitor, lines of code scrolled… followed by a message.
SUBJECT BLACKWOOD DETECTED.
RECALIBRATING DEPLOYMENT.
SIGMA DIRECTIVE OVERRIDE ENABLED.
Then a final line blinked in.
PHOENIX PROTOCOL: INITIATED.
Safehouse Echo – 12:02 PM
Adrian looked up from the data feed. “They’ve taken the bait.”
Julia’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”
He turned the monitor toward her.
It read:
YOU WANT TO BURN THE MASK?
THEN COME FIND THE FIRE.
SIGMA
Safehouse Echo – Underground Bunker – 10:00 AM
The lights flickered above them as Julia parsed the final decrypted lines from the stolen drive. Elena stood at her side, staring at the projection of her own face—replicated, simulated, manipulated.
“They built this version of me to be the one who stays,” Elena said, voice low. “The compliant one. The one who doesn’t question the system.”
“Then you broke the code,” Julia replied. “You’re the anomaly they couldn’t predict.”
Behind them, Adrian paced. Every word on the drive was a ticking bomb—names, plans, prototypes. But one stood out.
“Project MORIAH,” he said, reading the classified label. “Initiated by Cruz. Finalized by someone named Aurellin. Does that ring any bells?”
Julia’s eyes snapped up. “Aurellin is a myth in the tech underground. A digital ghost. People say she designed the neural shells for the clones—but no one ever saw her face.”
Liana joined them, bruised but unshaken. “If we can find Aurellin, we might find the root server. Sigma-Grid can’t run without it.”
Adrian nodded. “Then we don’t just expose it—we erase it.”
Julia hesitated. “There’s a risk. Sigma-Grid is interlinked across a quantum mesh. If we destroy it from the wrong node, it could trigger a wipe cascade—wiping all digital identities tied to the masks. Including yours.”
Adrian and Elena locked eyes.
“We’re already ghosts,” Elena said. “Might as well choose how we vanish.”
Suddenly, the comms panel buzzed—intercepted audio pinging across encrypted waves.
“You shouldn’t have stolen what you don’t understand.”
Adrian stepped forward. “Who is this?”
“The future. Yours, rewritten.”
Elena leaned in. “Sigma?”
A low chuckle. Distorted. Inhuman.
“You chased shadows. Now the shadow is chasing you.”
Then the comms died.
Julia turned slowly.
“They’re coming.”
Liana’s hands slid to her sidearm. “Then let’s make sure we’re the ones writing the ending.”