All Chapters of The Billionaire Scientists’ System:Ten Geniuses. One Mission: Chapter 61
- Chapter 70
80 chapters
Chapter 61 — Shadows Among Titans
The air within the Aethelstan's war room no longer cooled by its climate systems, but by the ice forming between the ten men there. The holographic table, which was normally a canvas of blueprints of salvation, now displayed a crime scene. The feed was from "Nexus One," the South American test city, their second attempt after New Eden. Or what was left of it.Smoke wafted from the wreckage of the primary power distributor. Not the tidy, controlled smoke of overloading, but the black, oily smoke of flames. The structure, a wonder of Ibrahim's bio-integrated energy conduits, was a twisted, melted work of art.The blast was directed," Voss remarked, his tone level, a dramatic contrast to that being displayed on the screen. He manipulated the hologram, bringing it into focus at the center. "The explosive was not of a military grade. It was a binary chemical agent, stable unless mixed, and was directly deposited at the intersection location of the primary and secondary coolant lines. The r
Chapter 62 — The Missing Money
The sabotage at Nexus One had been an injury to their body. The missing money was an injury to their soul.It was discovered not by some melodramatic intimation, but by a quiet, bewildered query from one of Mirza's accountants. A routine liquidity test on an order for boron-doped silicon for the solar spires had resulted in red. There wasn't sufficient money. The accountant, suspecting a technical mistake, dug further. Then he blanched and called his superior.Mirza's comm-link to Adrian had been a tutorial in contained, frozen rage. "Kane. The treasury. You need to see this. Now."The "Smart City Treasury" was not a regular bank account. It was a revolutionary new financial tool, a blockchain-based, quantum-encrypted ledger that would be the safest possible store of value on the planet. It was the aggregated operating capital of New Eden, Nexus One, and the rest of the start-up ventures—a record-breaking war chest, funded by the collective resources of the ten Titans. Or at least, it
Chapter 63 — The False Savior
The vacuum which the missing money and the suspension of Vale had left was a vacuum, and nature, more so political nature, abhors a vacuum. Into the tense silence walked Lucien Drax.He did not ascend quietly, as a tide rising, but with the calculated boom of a media bombshell. He was a footnote in financial circles one day, a wealthy recluse with asteroid mining and research AI interests. Next, he was on the cover of every major newsweekly, his face—wiry, silver-haired, bespectacled with essentially laughably bright eyes—smiling out from monitors on the planet.His interview on the influential news program Global Spotlight was a masterclass in narrative theft."For too long, the story of this so-called 'urban revolution' has been misgiven," asserted Drax, his deep, rich voice warm and soothing, even easing the most skeptical interviewer. He reclined among a library of real, leather-bound books, a respite from the cold futurism of the Scholars' laboratories. "The vision, the first cap
Chapter 64 — Betrayal Confirmed
The struggle with Lucien Drax had been a battle fought in the make-believe field of public opinion, a duel of rumor and shadow to which Adrian was oddly unsuited. He was a man of concrete problems and quantitative solutions. Faced with a lie wrapped in the cloak of truth, he was paralyzed. That paralysis was shattered a week later, to be replaced by a cold, purging anger.It began, as it usually did, with Maya. While the universe bickered back and forth between the competing versions of Kane and Drax, she had been hard at work doing what she did best: diving into the deep water of the digital. She'd put in a passive, wide-band sniffer, a digital dragnet cast into the encrypted oceans that surrounded their activities. She wasn't looking for anything specific, just misplaced readings. Ghosts in the machine.She found one.It was a signal stream so faint it was tantamount to a quantum whisper. It utilized a sophisticated variant of the same piggybacking protocol Riley had used, but one t
Chapter 65 — Collapse Protocol
It began with the lights. Not the city-wide spectacle of the cyber-attack, but a soft, sickly flicker. The soft, omnipresent light of the streets faltered for an instant, then returned, but now pulsed with a soft, irregular rhythm, like a dying heart. It was the first, soft cough of a terminal illness.Adrian stood inside the command center, the System's new, foreboding message burned into his eyes.> Integrity Breach Found.> Risk of Project Collapse: 64%> Reason: Induced Cascading Systemic Failure.Sixty-four percent. The percentage was a chill in his heart. It was not a prediction; it was a diagnosis.Then the pressure of the water decreased. The elegant sweeps of water from the public fountains, emblem of their abundance, faltered, becoming a miserly, pitiful trickle. In the homes, the haughty whir of the hydro-sonic shower ceased and failed. A hum of bewilderment, combined with the initial hints of terror, coursed through the city. They had survived attacks before, but this was
Chapter 66 — The Evacuation
The noise was the worst. Not the dying whine of collapsing systems or the distant, sickening crunch of a structural pillar collapsing. It was the sound of two million humans losing their faith. A low, constant moan of fear and betrayal that seemed to echo through the very core of New Eden itself. The city was dying, and its dying breath was humanity.The command center was a tomb of frantic movement and despair. The sphere of holography pulsed an unwholesome, monotonous red. The chance of collapse had stabilized at an abhorrent 94%. There would be no recovery. The chain-reaction failures Kaelen had engineered were too deep, too ingrained in the city's lifeline. New Eden was shuddering, and the only antidote was to turn it off.We have to call for a full evacuation," Voss stated, his voice cutting through the chaos. It wasn't a request. It was a systems-level analysis. "The structural integrity of the residential modules is collapsing by the minute. The northern agricultural spire is f
Chapter 67 — The Ghost in the System
The Aethelstan was a ghost ship, its corridors echoing with the silence of defeat. The atmosphere that had once been so full of intent to build something new hung heavy with the embers of what they had lost. Adrian floated through it like a ghost, the eerie sheen of the System's 11% chance of survival leaping at him out of the corner of his eye. Eleven percent. The number was a tombstone.He found Zane, not in the opulent war room, but a smaller secondary com center buried deep in the ship's belly. It was a space of raw utility, walls lined with humming server racks and blinking diagnostic screens, far from the gaudy holograms of the main deck. Zane was surrounded by a pile of used coffee bulbs, bloodshot eyes fixed on a waterfall of code cascading down a primary monitor.We've been doing it all wrong," Zane stated, not looking around, his voice a harsh rasp. "We've been looking for a traitor. A person. We've been comparing keycodes, access logs, and financial records. We've been play
Chapter 68 — The First Death
Aethelstan's silence was no longer the quiet of concentration, but the hush of an infirmary. The ship, once a living nerve center, was now a convalescent ward recovering from a fever dream of collapse and betrayal. The order to stand down, to not believe in the very System that had brought them to this point, had come like a shadow over all things. The work continued, but it was the hollow, mechanical performance of soldiers digging trenches after the battle was already lost.Adrian walked through the gloomy corridors, his own thoughts a toxic cloud. The Ghost in the System had rendered him immobile. Every move, real or imagined, was a risk. Every decision is a landmine. He was doubting the color of the light from the overhead fixtures.It was in just such an atmosphere of frozen terror that silence was broken by the sound more terrifying than any alarm: a single, strangled shriek from deep in the science wing, and then a flat, deep silence.Adrian's blood congealed. He knew, with a c
Chapter 69 — The Titan's Funeral
They would not bury Dr. Hiro Tanaka in New Eden's wounded earth. They could not send his corpse plummeting into the bleak, cold void, something too reminiscent of the hollowness within them. Instead, they held his funeral on the one sacred spot: the central observation deck of the Aethelstan. The enormous viewport polarized to a faded, twilight blue, the infinite starfield beyond a somber backdrop for the conclave of broken giants.There wasn't even a coffin. Tanaka's body had been treated with respect in accordance with his own, forgotten wishes, warehoused in a personnel database. His life was only marked by a sparse, unpleasant hologram—a rotating, wireframe copy of his last, unfinished surgical bot, its delicate arms frozen in a gesture of offering.The nine other Titans were in a loose semicircle. They were not dressed formally, but in the practical, faded uniforms of scientists and engineers, the uniform of their deceased brother. The silence was thick with more saying than coul
Chapter 70 — Betrayer's Echoes
The grief for Hiro Tanaka was a glacial stone in Aethelstan's belly. But grief was something they couldn't afford to luxuriate in feeling; it was a fuel. It was an analytical tool. During the lead-up to the funeral, the vessel was a crucible of pent-up, simmering rage. The emotional shift in world opinion was observed, but it was a faraway, conceptual weather front. The storm was one of data and inference inside.Zane and Voss worked in an isolated server room, a virtual oasis now severed from the rest of the network. They were performing an autopsy on the killing, tracing the ghost's electronic path around Lab 7. The killer had been clever, taking advantage of the hacked channels of the System, but the act of killing itself, the physical act of the data spike, required a special signal—a "bullet" that had to be fired from a specific "gun."The neural overload command was too specific, too surgical,' Voss breathed, his fingers moving in a blur across a holographic keyboard, ripping th