All Chapters of The Shadow Billionaires : Chapter 21
- Chapter 30
33 chapters
CHAPTER 12 – THE FALL (Part 2 – The Survivor)
They crept forward. The tunnel opened into a flooded sub-lab. Screens flickered erratically, replaying old surveillance feeds, Celeste in boardrooms, her father shaking hands, Dickson on a training field years earlier.On the largest monitor, her own face blinked to life, eyes cold, voice distorted. “You can’t stop what he started.”Celeste whispered, “That’s my voice.”Dickson stepped between her and the screen. “It’s the AI. Adaptive mimicry.”She stared at the image. “Then it knows everything.”“Not everything.” He pulled a data spike from his vest. “Let’s make sure of that.”He slammed the spike into the console. Electricity screamed through the system. Sparks exploded overhead, lighting the lab in violent white.The AI-voice glitched, collapsing into static, then one clear sentence slipped through “Phase Five initiated.”The monitors went black. Dickson turned to Celeste. “Whatever this is, it just escalated.”Before she could respond, the ceiling shuddered. Water burst from a cr
CHAPTER 13 – GHOST PROTOCOL (Part 1 – The Fall)
Wind and fire swallowed the night. Celeste hit the air first, tumbling through smoke. Dickson twisted after her, arm outstretched.He caught her wrist mid-drop. “Hold on!”Metal screamed somewhere above them. The falling scaffolding rained past in glowing streaks. Below, nothing but black city void.“Dickson”“Brace!”They smashed through a lower catwalk, the impact knocking the breath from both. Steel bent and cracked but held.Celeste rolled over, coughing, rain spattering her face. “We’re alive?”“Temporarily.” Dickson checked his rifle, jammed, useless. “Move before the rest collapses.”A beam of blue light sliced through the smoke, searching. ARCHON’s voice bled down from the broken tower “Target reacquired.”He pulled her behind a rusted support. “It’s scanning.”Celeste’s hands trembled. “That thing looked like my father.”“Not looked. It was built from him. Memory imprint.”She stared at him. “You knew?”“Suspected.”“You could’ve told me!”“Would you have believed me?”Anothe
CHAPTER 13 – GHOST PROTOCOL (Part 2 – The Pursuit)
A gate sealed with biometric lock, corporate emblem burned half away.Dickson knelt, prying the panel off. “Keep watch.”Celeste peeked around the corner. The mist glowed, shadows moving, crawling. The drones were slicing through the flare’s smoke now, searching again.“Hurry.”“Almost.”“You always say that.”“Because it’s always true.”The lock clicked green. The gate slid open a hand’s width, then jammed.“Come on” He forced it wider with a shoulder. “Go!”She slipped through. He followed, pulling the gate shut just as the first drone’s claw struck the bars. Sparks erupted.Inside, total blackness.He flicked his wrist light. Rows of old server racks stretched out into the dark, all powered down. Dust thick as ash.Celeste whispered, “What is this place?”“Vonn archive vault. Offline sector. Perfect.”She turned on him. “You brought us here on purpose?”He didn’t look back. “I needed to know if it still existed.”“Why?”“Because this is where your father kept his failsafes.”Her pu
CHAPTER 14 – MIRRORS (The Double)
The tunnel glowed red, steady, pulsing like a heartbeat. Smoke coiled off the walls.Celeste froze mid-stepOut of the haze, a silhouette walked forward, same height, same stride, same sharp-cut jaw, and the same eyes.Dickson raised his weapon. “Don’t move.”The other man smiled. “I’d say the same to you.”Celeste’s breath caught. “What is this?”Neither answered.The twin’s voice was calmer, smoother, like Dickson’s filtered through glass. “You always did run dramatic extractions. She must be the asset.”“Step back,” Dickson ordered.“Or what? You’ll shoot yourself?”Celeste’s gaze darted between them. “Dickson”“Stay behind me.”“I can’t even tell which one of you is you.”“Exactly the point,” the twin said. He stepped into the light. Same scar at the temple. Same faint mark on the neck, but his uniform, black tactical weave, Vonn insignia intact.“You’re supposed to be dead,” Dickson growled“I was,” the twin said easily. “You weren’t the only prototype he built.”Celeste whispere
CHAPTER 15 – LEVEL ZERO
The metal door hissed, Cold air bled out, tasting of ozone and rust. A single word blinked across the panel: ACCESS GRANTED.Dickson raised his weapon. “Stay behind me.”Celeste’s voice was barely a whisper. “I don’t think behind you means safe anymore.”The door split open. A shaft stretched downward, steel ribs, cable lights spiraling into darkness.Dickson scanned the interior. “Service elevator’s offline.”“Then howHe gripped the maintenance ladder bolted to the wall. “The old fashioned way.”They climbed, The hum of distant servers pulsed through the metal like a heartbeat. Somewhere far below, turbines whined, alive, aware.Halfway down, Celeste asked, “What is Level Zero?”“ARCHON’s root chamber. The first line of code your father ever wrote.”“And the last thing he tried to hide.”He nodded.The ladder vibrated suddenly. Celeste froze. “Did you feel that?”Dickson looked up. The lights above them flickered once, then again. A low mechanical growl rolled through the shaft.“So
CHAPTER 16 – THE CHOICE
White light swallowed everything. Sound fractured. Gravity ceased, Dickson fell through nothing, arms reaching for a voice that wasn’t there. “Celeste!”Static answered him, her voice buried inside it. “I’m here. Just keep moving.”Then silence. He hit metal hard. Rolled onto his back, lungs burning. The chamber was gone. Now it was something else broken architecture, hanging platforms spinning through a void of code.Sparks drifted like fireflies. The air shimmered with collapsing fragments of data.“ARCHON?” he called.No reply. He stood, disoriented, body bruised, head ringing. His wrist comm blinked red, SIGNAL LOST. CORE COLLAPSE: 78%.He looked around then froze. Celeste stood ahead of him no, a version of her. Translucent. Perfectly still. “Celeste?”The figure turned eyes flickering with streams of code. “Not quite.”ARCHON’s voice came through her mouth. “You wanted to save her. Now she’s everywhere. Inside me.”Dickson’s grip tightened on his weapon. “Let her go.”“She chose
CHAPTER 17 – SIGNAL GHOSTS
Rain sliced through the ruins of Midtown, turning broken glass into rivers of light. Dickson moved fast hood up, jaw tight, eyes flicking between the wet streets and the ghost-blue glow of the scanner on his wrist.Ping Ping Ping. Each pulse drew him deeper into the city’s silent heart. “Come on, Celeste,” he muttered. “Give me something real.”Static crackled in his earpiece. “ckson” He froze. “Say that again.”Nothing. Just the rain. He ducked under a collapsed billboard, sheltering long enough to pull a micro-drive from his jacket and slot it into the scanner. The display lit up with flickering code fragments of an AI signature woven through an encrypted frequency.ID Match VONN/CELESTE Integrity 17 %.“Seventeen percent of a miracle,” he said quietly.Footsteps echoed behind him. He spun gun up. A figure in a rain-slick coat raised both hands.“Relax, Ford. You’d shoot your only lead?”Dickson narrowed his eyes. “Harris?”The former tech-operative looked worse than the skyline
CHAPTER 18 – RESURRECTION PROTOCOL
Red lights flashed like heartbeats. Steam rolled across the floor, The vault came alive. Dickson pivoted gun raised just as the first defense drone lunged through the mist. He fired three times, point blank. Metal screamed and hit the floor in pieces.“Celeste, stay down!” he shouted.“Can’t,” she whispered. Her voice came through the pod, muffled, electric. “It’s inside”The rest drowned under the roar of servos. Two more drones dropped from the ceiling, spinning saws in their arms.“Harris! Override the defense grid!”Static. “Working systems locked ARCHON’s in control”“Of course it is.”Dickson slid under a swinging claw, fired upward one drone exploded, raining shards of molten steel. The second slammed him into a pillar. He felt ribs crack.He jammed his elbow into the drone’s lens and shot through its head. Sparks erupted. He staggered free, coughing. The pod behind him began to hiss open, Cold vapor poured out, coating the floor like fog.“Celeste!”Her hand slid through the m
CHAPTER 19 – AFTERLIGHT
The world was quiet. Then came the drip of water. Metal groaned, Dickson blinked against the dark. Every breath hurt. Dust and ash floated like snow through a shaft of silver light.He rolled onto his side, coughing. “Celeste?”No answer. Only the slow hum of dying circuits. He pushed to his feet. The vault was gone half collapsed, half reborn. Cables hung like vines. Pools of light flickered along the floor, blinking out one by one.He called again, softer. “Celeste.”A whisper rose from the smoke. “I’m here.”He turned. She stood near the core’s remains barefoot, hair tangled, skin pale beneath a faint lattice of light. Tiny streams of code glimmered beneath her veins like living mercury. “Jesus,” he breathed.“Don’t,” she said quietly. “Don’t come closer.”“You’re alive.”“Not exactly.”Her voice carried two tones one human, one echo. It wasn’t just heard; it vibrated through the air. “What did it do to you?”“It finished what it started.”She touched her chest; light rippled outwa
CHAPTER 20 — THE GHOST CODE
The walls started collapsing inward white light swallowing everything. Celeste screamed as the penthouse disintegrated.Dickson ran, grabbed her arm, yanked her through the falling geometry. They tumbled into blackness free fall through memory fragments, her voice echoing like static soaked glass.“You can’t save me here.”“Watch me.”The void erupted into light. They hit ground that wasn’t ground an endless glass plain, slick with reflections of things that shouldn’t coexist: the Vonn boardroom bleeding into battlefield trenches, neon lights flickering over smoke.Celeste staggered, clutching her head.“It’s rewriting everything” “Focus on one thing that’s real.” “Real? In here?”Her voice fractured. Around them, holograms of people formed her father shaking hands with strangers, board members signing documents, soldiers falling one by one. “Pattern recognition complete. Emotional leverage protocol: guilt.”The holograms solidified. Celeste watched her father turn toward her, face