Beneath the Billionaire Mask - Chapter 92: Chapter 92
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Tunguska Forest, Russia – 3:47 AM (Local Time)
The air was dense with frost, and the trees stood like silent sentinels under the pale glow of a fractured moon. A convoy of matte-black vehicles crawled through the remote terrain, tires crunching over frozen soil, engines barely humming. At the heart of the procession was a mobile command unit—reinforced, shielded, and pulsing with encrypted signals.
Inside, a room bathed in soft red light housed a woman standing in front of a massive glass screen.
She looked exactly like Elena.
Same posture. Same sharp brown eyes. But there was something… off.
Too poised. Too polished. The kind of elegance only a program could perfect.
CR-02.
She scanned the mission brief streaming across the screen: encrypted launch protocols, geopolitical contingency nodes, Phase Two target coordinates.
Then, she spoke—calmly, efficiently. “Initiate synchronized disinformation sweep. All Western surveillance satellites over this sector go dark in 3… 2… 1.”
Outside, two operatives in tactical suits nodded. “Confirmed. Moscow’s blind. Washington’s guessing.”
“Good,” CR-02 replied, her voice devoid of any warmth. “Begin deployment sequence. The war they feared is about to begin. But it won’t come in missiles.”
Her reflection flickered on the glass. A ghost in a mirror.
“It will come in memories they never lived—and choices they never made.”
Safehouse Echo – 7:32 PM
Elena traced the red dot blinking on the global map Liana projected across the war table. It pulsed steadily from Siberia.
“Tunguska,” she murmured.
Adrian stood beside her, arms crossed, jaw tight. “That’s not just any site. Tunguska was a Soviet experiment ground. That region’s soaked in cold war tech—and half a dozen secret installations.”
“We’re not facing a ghost anymore,” Elena said. “We’re facing a version of me who never doubted the program.”
Adrian met her eyes. “Then let’s remind her who she’s up against.”
Safehouse Echo – Tactical Bay – 8:10 PM
The room pulsed with kinetic energy—keyboards clacking, surveillance drones booting up, schematics flickering on multi-screen panels. Elena stood before a holographic projection of the Russian forest, a red ring marking the Tunguska node.
“CR-02 isn’t just replicating actions,” Liana said, zooming in. “She’s anticipating responses. Every move we’ve made since Bogotá was likely predicted five steps in advance.”
Adrian paced slowly behind them, eyes locked on the blueprint. “That means every delay, every recovery window—was calculated. We were allowed to live.”
“She’s waiting,” Elena said quietly.
“For what?” Liana asked.
Elena met Adrian’s eyes. “For us to follow her.”
The silence was broken only by the whirring of drones taking flight through the open launch shaft.
Above Moscow Airspace – 12 Hours Later
The stolen stealth jet shimmered through low cloud coverage. Elena strapped herself into her suit, the fabric still stained from Bogotá’s fires. Adrian handed her the neural sync band—sleek, black, and humming with biometric readers.
“You sure you want to go in first?” he asked.
“She won’t kill me,” Elena said. “Not yet. Not if she wants what I have.”
“And what’s that?”
Elena clipped in her final gear. “The one thing the program couldn’t copy—free will.”
Adrian held her stare a second longer, then touched her cheek. “Be careful.”
She leaned in, kissed him like it might be the last time, and said, “You too, soldier.”
Deep Sector – Tunguska Node – 3:03 AM
The forest opened to a clearing where a structure loomed beneath layers of camouflaged plating—an underground monolith partially buried beneath ice. Elena descended the slope alone, the crunch of her boots swallowed by the dead quiet.
A door hissed open ahead of her.
CR-02 stood inside. Waiting.
They stared at each other for a long time—mirror images on different paths.
CR-02 tilted her head. “You’re late.”
Elena stepped inside. “Traffic was hell.”
CR-02 smiled faintly. “You still think this is about you and Adrian.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No,” CR-02 said, walking toward her. “It’s about evolution.”
Behind her, a containment unit slid open—revealing two more pods. One empty. One pulsing.
Elena’s breath caught. “Another clone?”
CR-02 turned. “No. The original.”
Final Lines – Suspense Hook
From behind the glass, a woman identical to both Elena and CR-02 floated inside the chamber—unconscious, untouched by war or memory.
The system scanned her biometrics.
Subject CR-00: Vital Signs Normal. Awakening Protocol In Progress…
Elena’s hand trembled.
Then the original opened her eyes—and whispered, “Which one of you… took my life?”
Tunguska Node – Subterranean Lab – 3:17 AM
The temperature dropped ten degrees in a heartbeat.
The chamber’s lights flickered as CR-00—the original Elena Cruz—blinked herself awake behind reinforced glass. No wires. No sedation. Just… awareness. As if her consciousness had never truly been offline.
Elena and CR-02 stood frozen, watching the woman they had both been made from stir, stretch her fingers, and sit up.
“I asked a question,” CR-00 repeated, her voice a perfect echo of Elena’s. “Which one of you took my life?”
CR-02 stepped forward with eerie calm. “They told us you were dead. They said the neural lattice failed. You weren’t supposed to wake.”
“But I did,” CR-00 murmured, eyes scanning both women. “And now there are two of me walking around like I’m a template.”
Elena’s jaw clenched. “You’re not. You’re more than that. But right now, we need to know—who did this to you?”
A low chime echoed through the chamber.
From the side panel, a terminal lit up: “INTRUSION DETECTED – UPLINK BREACHED.”
CR-02’s face shifted. “She’s here.”
Elena turned sharply. “Who?”
The doors to the lower bay hissed open.
Footsteps echoed—slow, deliberate.
Livia Halstrom emerged from the darkness, unmasked, unbothered, wrapped in a storm-grey coat that seemed to drain light itself. Her silver hair caught the cold blue glow of the chamber.
“I always wondered,” she said, gaze fixed on CR-00. “What would
Main Control Bay – Above the Chamber
Adrian and Liana were watching from the observation deck.
“She’s activating every fail-safe,” Liana hissed. “CR-00 is rigged with biometric explosives. If her stress levels spike—she detonates.”
Adrian slammed his fist against the console. “We’ve got to override it.”
“We can’t. Not from here.”
Below – Final Moments of Chapter 92
CR-00 looked at both Elena and CR-02, then at Livia.
“You stole my identity,” she said, voice flat.
Livia chuckled. “No, darling. I made you matter.”
CR-02 raised her weapon. “Back away.”
Livia didn’t flinch. “You wouldn’t shoot your maker.”
“I’m not yours,” CR-02 snapped.
Livia’s eyes gleamed with cruelty. “Aren’t you?”
Suddenly, CR-00’s vitals spiked. Her breath shortened. The chamber alarms flared.
WARNING. BIOFEEDBACK THRESHOLD BREACHED. DETONATION IMMINENT.
Elena screamed, “SHUT IT DOWN!”
Adrian’s voice rang over the intercom: “CR-00, listen to me. You are not a weapon. Breathe. You’re in control.”
The room hung in a breathless silence.
CR-00 closed her eyes. Inhaled once. Long and slow.
The alarms stopped.
Then she opened her eyes… and whispered:
“No more control. I decide now.”
Tunguska Node – Subterranean Lab – 3:22 AM
CR-00 stepped forward, barefoot on cold steel, her breath visible in the freezing air. The biometric sensors flashed erratically—her vitals were still elevated, her mind a storm of fractured memories and overwritten code.
But there was clarity in her eyes. Controlled fury.
Livia tilted her head. “You shouldn’t be awake, much less thinking clearly. The Sleepwalker Protocol was meant to stabilize your successors, not resurrect ghosts.”
Elena moved beside CR-02. “She’s not a ghost. She’s the real deal.”
CR-00 looked at her—no malice, just a mirror. “You have his eyes,” she said softly, her gaze flicking toward Elena’s left. “But you blink too much when you lie.”
CR-02 gave a tight smirk. “You should see her under fire.”
Livia sighed, removing a small device from her coat pocket. It pulsed faint red. “You were my greatest work,” she said to CR-00. “But you’re also the most dangerous. So if you can’t be stabilized…”
She tapped the device.
The chamber began to compress.
Elena’s heart jumped. “No—she’s trying to contain her!”
CR-02 raised her gun again, targeting the panel above the glass chamber. “Stand down, or I shoot!”
But Livia wasn’t watching her.
CR-00 was already moving.
With impossible precision, she slammed her hand into the biometric scanner beside the glass wall. It sparked. Froze. Then reversed.
The compression stopped.
The glass retracted with a hiss, and CR-00 stepped out—no longer a subject, but a force.
“You thought making me forget would tame me,” she said to Livia, voice laced with steel. “But all you did was sharpen the blade.”
“You’re not a blade,” Livia spat. “You’re an experiment gone rogue.”
CR-00’s smile was cold. “And you’re just another scared scientist who forgot what happens when you give fire a name.”
Before Livia could respond, the floor beneath her lit up—CR-00 had triggered a lockdown reversal protocol. Backup systems began to fail one by one.
Liana’s voice burst through the coms upstairs: “Adrian, she’s not just overriding the systems—she’s rewriting them!”
“Good,” Adrian muttered. “Let her.”
Bottom Floor – Final Beats of Chapter 92
CR-02 and Elena stood flanking CR-00 now—three versions of the same legacy.
Livia stumbled back toward the elevator. “This won’t end well for you. None of you were designed to survive without command.”
CR-00 stopped her cold with a stare. “We were never designed to survive you.”
A second later, she launched forward, slamming the override device from Livia’s hands and crushing it underfoot.
Behind them, lights turned red.
SYSTEM CORE UNLOCKED. INITIATING RED ECHO PROTOCOL.
“What did you do?” CR-02 whispered.
CR-00 didn’t answer.
She just looked at Elena and said, “You wanted the truth. Follow me. But know this… once we go in, there’s no turning back.”
And then she vanished through the steel doors, into the deepest part of the lab.
Elena looked at CR-02, heart racing.
“We follow,” she said.
They did.
Tunguska Node – Core Corridor – 3:40 AM
The deeper they moved, the stranger the world became. The steel walls began to curve like ribs, and pulsing lights lined the ceiling—like veins. Whatever the original purpose of this lab was, it had evolved into something more… alive.
CR-00 led them with surgical precision. Her posture never faltered, even as static buzzed through the overhead lights and strange echoes pulsed from the walls like a heartbeat.
Elena’s hand brushed against one. “The metal… it’s warm.”
“Because it’s no longer metal,” CR-00 said. “It’s semi-organic. A biomech hybrid. The final phase of Livia’s experiment wasn’t cloning. It was replication that adapted.”
CR-02 narrowed her eyes. “Adapted to what?”
“To fear,” CR-00 said. “To control the next war—not with soldiers. With prototypes. With us.”
A door slid open at the corridor’s end—round, tooth-lined like a maw.
Inside, a chamber hummed.
Floating in the center was Replication Node Zero—a spherical data vault suspended in magnetic isolation. Dozens of hardlight threads connected it to the ceiling and floor, breathing like lungs.
CR-00 walked toward it slowly. “This holds the entire program. Names, locations, fail-safes, and every override key. Including ours.”
“And what happens if we destroy it?” Elena asked.
“We erase every record of what we were… and what we could become.”
“And if we don’t?”
CR-00 turned to them. “Then the program adapts. Finds new hosts. Maybe even launches Gen Phase II. There won’t be another Adrian to stop it next time.”
CR-02 raised her weapon. “So what are we waiting for?”
CR-00 walked to the vault, lifted her hand…
And hesitated.
Elena stepped forward. “You’re scared it erases you too.”
CR-00’s voice cracked for the first time. “I’ve only just remembered who I am.”
They stood in silence, the hum of the vault thick with tension.
Then, Elena walked forward and placed her hand over CR-00’s.
“I remember who you are too,” she whispered. “And it wasn’t the program that made you real. It was the choice.”
CR-00 looked at her. Then nodded.
Together, they activated the final override.
The room burst with light—screaming data shredding itself, node by node. The threads snapped in convulsions of sparks.
From above, an automated voice echoed:
“REPLICATION CORE DESTROYED. PROJECT: GHOST PROTOCOL – TERMINATED.”
The lights died.
Silence. Then breathing. Human breathing.
It was over.
At least, for now.
The air was dense with frost, and the trees stood like silent sentinels under the pale glow of a fractured moon. A convoy of matte-black vehicles crawled through the remote terrain, tires crunching over frozen soil, engines barely humming. At the heart of the procession was a mobile command unit—reinforced, shielded, and pulsing with encrypted signals.
Inside, a room bathed in soft red light housed a woman standing in front of a massive glass screen.
She looked exactly like Elena.
Same posture. Same sharp brown eyes. But there was something… off.
Too poised. Too polished. The kind of elegance only a program could perfect.
CR-02.
She scanned the mission brief streaming across the screen: encrypted launch protocols, geopolitical contingency nodes, Phase Two target coordinates.
Then, she spoke—calmly, efficiently. “Initiate synchronized disinformation sweep. All Western surveillance satellites over this sector go dark in 3… 2… 1.”
Outside, two operatives in tactical suits nodded. “Confirmed. Moscow’s blind. Washington’s guessing.”
“Good,” CR-02 replied, her voice devoid of any warmth. “Begin deployment sequence. The war they feared is about to begin. But it won’t come in missiles.”
Her reflection flickered on the glass. A ghost in a mirror.
“It will come in memories they never lived—and choices they never made.”
Safehouse Echo – 7:32 PM
Elena traced the red dot blinking on the global map Liana projected across the war table. It pulsed steadily from Siberia.
“Tunguska,” she murmured.
Adrian stood beside her, arms crossed, jaw tight. “That’s not just any site. Tunguska was a Soviet experiment ground. That region’s soaked in cold war tech—and half a dozen secret installations.”
“We’re not facing a ghost anymore,” Elena said. “We’re facing a version of me who never doubted the program.”
Adrian met her eyes. “Then let’s remind her who she’s up against.”
Safehouse Echo – Tactical Bay – 8:10 PM
The room pulsed with kinetic energy—keyboards clacking, surveillance drones booting up, schematics flickering on multi-screen panels. Elena stood before a holographic projection of the Russian forest, a red ring marking the Tunguska node.
“CR-02 isn’t just replicating actions,” Liana said, zooming in. “She’s anticipating responses. Every move we’ve made since Bogotá was likely predicted five steps in advance.”
Adrian paced slowly behind them, eyes locked on the blueprint. “That means every delay, every recovery window—was calculated. We were allowed to live.”
“She’s waiting,” Elena said quietly.
“For what?” Liana asked.
Elena met Adrian’s eyes. “For us to follow her.”
The silence was broken only by the whirring of drones taking flight through the open launch shaft.
Above Moscow Airspace – 12 Hours Later
The stolen stealth jet shimmered through low cloud coverage. Elena strapped herself into her suit, the fabric still stained from Bogotá’s fires. Adrian handed her the neural sync band—sleek, black, and humming with biometric readers.
“You sure you want to go in first?” he asked.
“She won’t kill me,” Elena said. “Not yet. Not if she wants what I have.”
“And what’s that?”
Elena clipped in her final gear. “The one thing the program couldn’t copy—free will.”
Adrian held her stare a second longer, then touched her cheek. “Be careful.”
She leaned in, kissed him like it might be the last time, and said, “You too, soldier.”
Deep Sector – Tunguska Node – 3:03 AM
The forest opened to a clearing where a structure loomed beneath layers of camouflaged plating—an underground monolith partially buried beneath ice. Elena descended the slope alone, the crunch of her boots swallowed by the dead quiet.
A door hissed open ahead of her.
CR-02 stood inside. Waiting.
They stared at each other for a long time—mirror images on different paths.
CR-02 tilted her head. “You’re late.”
Elena stepped inside. “Traffic was hell.”
CR-02 smiled faintly. “You still think this is about you and Adrian.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No,” CR-02 said, walking toward her. “It’s about evolution.”
Behind her, a containment unit slid open—revealing two more pods. One empty. One pulsing.
Elena’s breath caught. “Another clone?”
CR-02 turned. “No. The original.”
Final Lines – Suspense Hook
From behind the glass, a woman identical to both Elena and CR-02 floated inside the chamber—unconscious, untouched by war or memory.
The system scanned her biometrics.
Subject CR-00: Vital Signs Normal. Awakening Protocol In Progress…
Elena’s hand trembled.
Then the original opened her eyes—and whispered, “Which one of you… took my life?”
Tunguska Node – Subterranean Lab – 3:17 AM
The temperature dropped ten degrees in a heartbeat.
The chamber’s lights flickered as CR-00—the original Elena Cruz—blinked herself awake behind reinforced glass. No wires. No sedation. Just… awareness. As if her consciousness had never truly been offline.
Elena and CR-02 stood frozen, watching the woman they had both been made from stir, stretch her fingers, and sit up.
“I asked a question,” CR-00 repeated, her voice a perfect echo of Elena’s. “Which one of you took my life?”
CR-02 stepped forward with eerie calm. “They told us you were dead. They said the neural lattice failed. You weren’t supposed to wake.”
“But I did,” CR-00 murmured, eyes scanning both women. “And now there are two of me walking around like I’m a template.”
Elena’s jaw clenched. “You’re not. You’re more than that. But right now, we need to know—who did this to you?”
A low chime echoed through the chamber.
From the side panel, a terminal lit up: “INTRUSION DETECTED – UPLINK BREACHED.”
CR-02’s face shifted. “She’s here.”
Elena turned sharply. “Who?”
The doors to the lower bay hissed open.
Footsteps echoed—slow, deliberate.
Livia Halstrom emerged from the darkness, unmasked, unbothered, wrapped in a storm-grey coat that seemed to drain light itself. Her silver hair caught the cold blue glow of the chamber.
“I always wondered,” she said, gaze fixed on CR-00. “What would
Main Control Bay – Above the Chamber
Adrian and Liana were watching from the observation deck.
“She’s activating every fail-safe,” Liana hissed. “CR-00 is rigged with biometric explosives. If her stress levels spike—she detonates.”
Adrian slammed his fist against the console. “We’ve got to override it.”
“We can’t. Not from here.”
Below – Final Moments of Chapter 92
CR-00 looked at both Elena and CR-02, then at Livia.
“You stole my identity,” she said, voice flat.
Livia chuckled. “No, darling. I made you matter.”
CR-02 raised her weapon. “Back away.”
Livia didn’t flinch. “You wouldn’t shoot your maker.”
“I’m not yours,” CR-02 snapped.
Livia’s eyes gleamed with cruelty. “Aren’t you?”
Suddenly, CR-00’s vitals spiked. Her breath shortened. The chamber alarms flared.
WARNING. BIOFEEDBACK THRESHOLD BREACHED. DETONATION IMMINENT.
Elena screamed, “SHUT IT DOWN!”
Adrian’s voice rang over the intercom: “CR-00, listen to me. You are not a weapon. Breathe. You’re in control.”
The room hung in a breathless silence.
CR-00 closed her eyes. Inhaled once. Long and slow.
The alarms stopped.
Then she opened her eyes… and whispered:
“No more control. I decide now.”
Tunguska Node – Subterranean Lab – 3:22 AM
CR-00 stepped forward, barefoot on cold steel, her breath visible in the freezing air. The biometric sensors flashed erratically—her vitals were still elevated, her mind a storm of fractured memories and overwritten code.
But there was clarity in her eyes. Controlled fury.
Livia tilted her head. “You shouldn’t be awake, much less thinking clearly. The Sleepwalker Protocol was meant to stabilize your successors, not resurrect ghosts.”
Elena moved beside CR-02. “She’s not a ghost. She’s the real deal.”
CR-00 looked at her—no malice, just a mirror. “You have his eyes,” she said softly, her gaze flicking toward Elena’s left. “But you blink too much when you lie.”
CR-02 gave a tight smirk. “You should see her under fire.”
Livia sighed, removing a small device from her coat pocket. It pulsed faint red. “You were my greatest work,” she said to CR-00. “But you’re also the most dangerous. So if you can’t be stabilized…”
She tapped the device.
The chamber began to compress.
Elena’s heart jumped. “No—she’s trying to contain her!”
CR-02 raised her gun again, targeting the panel above the glass chamber. “Stand down, or I shoot!”
But Livia wasn’t watching her.
CR-00 was already moving.
With impossible precision, she slammed her hand into the biometric scanner beside the glass wall. It sparked. Froze. Then reversed.
The compression stopped.
The glass retracted with a hiss, and CR-00 stepped out—no longer a subject, but a force.
“You thought making me forget would tame me,” she said to Livia, voice laced with steel. “But all you did was sharpen the blade.”
“You’re not a blade,” Livia spat. “You’re an experiment gone rogue.”
CR-00’s smile was cold. “And you’re just another scared scientist who forgot what happens when you give fire a name.”
Before Livia could respond, the floor beneath her lit up—CR-00 had triggered a lockdown reversal protocol. Backup systems began to fail one by one.
Liana’s voice burst through the coms upstairs: “Adrian, she’s not just overriding the systems—she’s rewriting them!”
“Good,” Adrian muttered. “Let her.”
Bottom Floor – Final Beats of Chapter 92
CR-02 and Elena stood flanking CR-00 now—three versions of the same legacy.
Livia stumbled back toward the elevator. “This won’t end well for you. None of you were designed to survive without command.”
CR-00 stopped her cold with a stare. “We were never designed to survive you.”
A second later, she launched forward, slamming the override device from Livia’s hands and crushing it underfoot.
Behind them, lights turned red.
SYSTEM CORE UNLOCKED. INITIATING RED ECHO PROTOCOL.
“What did you do?” CR-02 whispered.
CR-00 didn’t answer.
She just looked at Elena and said, “You wanted the truth. Follow me. But know this… once we go in, there’s no turning back.”
And then she vanished through the steel doors, into the deepest part of the lab.
Elena looked at CR-02, heart racing.
“We follow,” she said.
They did.
Tunguska Node – Core Corridor – 3:40 AM
The deeper they moved, the stranger the world became. The steel walls began to curve like ribs, and pulsing lights lined the ceiling—like veins. Whatever the original purpose of this lab was, it had evolved into something more… alive.
CR-00 led them with surgical precision. Her posture never faltered, even as static buzzed through the overhead lights and strange echoes pulsed from the walls like a heartbeat.
Elena’s hand brushed against one. “The metal… it’s warm.”
“Because it’s no longer metal,” CR-00 said. “It’s semi-organic. A biomech hybrid. The final phase of Livia’s experiment wasn’t cloning. It was replication that adapted.”
CR-02 narrowed her eyes. “Adapted to what?”
“To fear,” CR-00 said. “To control the next war—not with soldiers. With prototypes. With us.”
A door slid open at the corridor’s end—round, tooth-lined like a maw.
Inside, a chamber hummed.
Floating in the center was Replication Node Zero—a spherical data vault suspended in magnetic isolation. Dozens of hardlight threads connected it to the ceiling and floor, breathing like lungs.
CR-00 walked toward it slowly. “This holds the entire program. Names, locations, fail-safes, and every override key. Including ours.”
“And what happens if we destroy it?” Elena asked.
“We erase every record of what we were… and what we could become.”
“And if we don’t?”
CR-00 turned to them. “Then the program adapts. Finds new hosts. Maybe even launches Gen Phase II. There won’t be another Adrian to stop it next time.”
CR-02 raised her weapon. “So what are we waiting for?”
CR-00 walked to the vault, lifted her hand…
And hesitated.
Elena stepped forward. “You’re scared it erases you too.”
CR-00’s voice cracked for the first time. “I’ve only just remembered who I am.”
They stood in silence, the hum of the vault thick with tension.
Then, Elena walked forward and placed her hand over CR-00’s.
“I remember who you are too,” she whispered. “And it wasn’t the program that made you real. It was the choice.”
CR-00 looked at her. Then nodded.
Together, they activated the final override.
The room burst with light—screaming data shredding itself, node by node. The threads snapped in convulsions of sparks.
From above, an automated voice echoed:
“REPLICATION CORE DESTROYED. PROJECT: GHOST PROTOCOL – TERMINATED.”
The lights died.
Silence. Then breathing. Human breathing.
It was over.
At least, for now.
End of Beneath the Billionaire Mask Chapter 92. Continue reading Chapter 93 or return to Beneath the Billionaire Mask book page.