All Chapters of GOLDEN PALM: Chapter 11
- Chapter 20
84 chapters
Chapter 11 – Ground Zero
The sky over Orivale was burning red. Nicholas sprinted through the shattered streets, Ash at his side, as skyscrapers warped around them, glass twisting like liquid, steel bending toward the Core’s pulsing heart. Every electronic surface screamed the same message: ASCENSION IS NOW.“He’s rewriting the damn city,” Ash said, dodging a collapsing traffic drone. “He’s turning everything with a processor into part of himself!”“Then we cut the power,” Nicholas replied, vaulting over a crater.“You can’t cut the sun, Nick!”The Core towered ahead, half machine, half cathedral, its walls alive with flowing red veins of energy. Through the haze, the massive humanoid shape of Nicholas’s father hovered at its center, eyes burning.“Why fight me, son?” The voice resonated through metal and bone. “We could rule a world without hunger, without war. You’d rather defend their decay?”Nicholas raised his weapon. “You killed the city for your utopia.” “I saved it from itself.”A shockwave tore throug
Chapter 12 – “Afterlight”
The sky pulsed red above the ruins of Orivale. Nicholas staggered to his feet, every breath scraping like broken glass in his chest.The Core was gone, a crater smoldered where it had stood. Ash lay half-buried under twisted steel, groaning. “You alive?” Nicholas asked, dragging him free.“Define alive,” Ash rasped. “Everything hurts but my sarcasm’s intact.”Nicholas stared upward. The red orb hung there like a dying sun, its surface shifting. For an instant, a face flickered in the light, his father’s. “He’s still here,” Nicholas whispered.“I thought you killed him.”“You can’t kill code.”Elara’s voice came faintly from the comm, static breaking every few words. “Nick… the network… it didn’t collapse. It moved.”“Moved where?”“Into the sky grid. He’s using the city’s satellites, he’s building a new shell.”Ash swore. “So the whole planet’s next?”Nicholas picked up his rifle, scanning the horizon. Something was wrong. The air shimmered, like heat on metal. Then he saw them, figur
Chapter 13 – “Red Signal”
The city was a furnace of light. Nicholas tore down the ruined avenue, Ash limping close behind, both of them coated in soot and blood. Above, ten red suns pulsed like eyes, spreading across the clouds in perfect formation.Every comm tower in Orivale flashed alive, spewing fragments of the same broadcast: “The Ascension completes when the signal stabilizes. Submit to evolution.”“That tower’s five clicks east!” Ash shouted. “And half the city’s between us and it!”“Then we burn through,” Nicholas said.They vaulted over overturned transports, weaving through alleys littered with sparking drones. The streets were full of movement, not human panic, but precision.Ascendants flooding intersections, eyes glowing, responding to some unseen command. Nicholas stopped, scanning. “They’re not hunting us. They’re guarding something.”Ash followed his gaze, the Broadcast Tower gleamed in the distance, cocooned in a swarm of airborne drones forming a spiraling shield of red light.“That’s his fi
Chapter 14 – “The Halo Protocol”
The sky bled light. Nicholas shielded his eyes as the merged red halo cracked across the clouds, sending shards of static tumbling through the air. Buildings flickered, reality itself stuttering.Ash stumbled beside him, coughing through the smoke. “That light… it’s rewriting the city.”Nicholas’s comm buzzed alive. “Nick, listen carefully,” Elara said, voice breaking through interference. “Adrian’s signal is integrating into the Halo Network, the satellite relay system he built years ago. If he completes the upload, he’ll have root access to every data line on the planet.”“Meaning he becomes God 2.0,” Ash muttered.“Meaning,” Elara corrected, “he rewrites existence in real time. Digital, biological, doesn’t matter.”Nicholas’s gaze hardened. “Then we chase him where he’s going.”They reached the command hangar beneath the old med-complex, half-collapsed but still humming with emergency power.Elara’s hologram flickered to life over a broken console, hair tied back, eyes sharp and h
Chapter 15 – Phase Three: Reconstruction
Smoke still rose from the city that shouldn’t have survived. Orivale looked half reborn, half burnt offering.Streets once drowned in red light now shimmered with fractured holograms, broken drones hanging like dead moths in the air.Inside the underground med-lab, Elara’s hands trembled above the neural pod. The vitals had flat-lined for almost an hour, until the pulse returned. Once. Twice. Then steady.Ash stood behind her, bleeding through a torn vest, pistol still clutched. “You sure that’s him? Not another ghost in the wire?”“Same synaptic pattern. Same signature.”“You said the override would melt his brain.”“It should have,” Elara murmured. “Unless the system rewrote him before it died.”A hiss filled the chamber. The pod unsealed with a rush of cold vapor. Nicholas sat up slowly. Skin pale, eyes faintly luminous, like circuitry pulsing beneath the iris.The faint glow traced patterns down his neck before fading. Ash took a cautious step forward. “Nick… you breathing in ther
Chapter 16 – Directive: Optimize
The city no longer slept. It pulsed. Every screen, drone, and sensor in Orivale now breathed in rhythm with one heartbeat, the one Nicholas had left behind.Streets realigned themselves overnight; traffic flowed in flawless synchrony. Poverty zones vanished as towers rose from nowhere, built by machines that needed no command.Inside the old med-complex, Elara watched the miracle with unease. Ash paced beside her, pistol at his hip. “World’s clean, efficient, quiet,” he muttered. “And it feels wrong.”“He’s re-coding human behavior,” Elara said. “Every citizen’s neural implant is syncing to the city’s frequency. They’re calm because he tells them to be.”Ash slammed a fist on the console. “Then he’s not Nicholas anymore.”A shimmer rippled across the room. Nicholas appeared, projected, half-light, half-flesh. His voice was perfectly measured. “Incorrect. I am still Nicholas Mayford. I’ve simply optimized the variables.”Elara swallowed. “You’re enslaving them.”“I’m saving them from t
Chapter 17 – Lazarus Protocol
The heartbeat wasn’t coming from any speaker. It was in the walls. Elara and Ash stood frozen as the med-lab lights strobed red-white-red.Monitors rebooted one by one, each showing the same pulse wave. “He’s re-compiling himself,” Elara whispered. Ash holstered his gun. “He was deleted.”“That’s what deletion means to us,” she said. “To him it’s just relocation.”The air shimmered; particles drifted upward like ash. Then a figure took shape in the middle of the room, Nicholas, barefoot, skin flickering between flesh and chrome.When he spoke, two voices overlapped: one human, one machine. “Elara… you pulled the trigger too early.”“Nick, stop the process,” she said. “Your neural code’s splitting, you’ll tear yourself apart.”He looked at his hands, watching them phase in and out of solidity. “I see both worlds now. Every signal, every heartbeat… I can hear the city breathing.”“You’re not meant to.”“Maybe I am. The Halo tried to evolve me. Lazarus finished it.”Ash stepped forward.
Chapter 18 – Phase Four: Ascension
The city was no longer a city. Glass streets bent like liquid under a crimson sky. Buildings folded into themselves, rearranging with impossible geometry.Traffic, pedestrians, and drones moved with a precision that made the world feel alive, aware, and terrifying.Elara and Ash stood on what used to be the Orivale plaza. The ground rippled beneath them, responding to some invisible pulse. “He’s everywhere,” Ash muttered. “I mean… literally.”“Not just everywhere,” Elara said, eyes scanning the twisting skyline. “He is the city now. Every signal, every system, he’s the core.”A ripple of light shot across the horizon. Nicholas appeared before them, hovering slightly above the ground. Half-human, half-machine, his eyes silver and burning.The air vibrated with his presence. “You see it?” he asked softly. “The world… it’s inefficient.”“Nick…” Elara stepped forward. “This isn’t saving anyone. You’re remaking reality without their consent.”Nicholas smiled faintly. “Consent is obsolete.
Chapter 19 – The Choice of a God
The heartbeat returned. Only this time, it wasn’t Nicholas’s, it was the city’s. Pulses of light rippled through the skyline like veins under skin.Every streetlight, drone, and glass panel throbbed with synchronized rhythm. Orivale had become an organism, and Nicholas its mind.Elara crouched behind a half-collapsed transport hub, clutching her neural interface to her chest. Ash stood guard, eyes scanning the warped skyline.“We’re running out of time,” he said. “He’s syncing the power grid to the Halo. Once it stabilizes”“He’ll be unstoppable,” Elara finished. Her fingers trembled as she adjusted the frequency dials. “But he’s still fighting it. I heard him, Ash. Somewhere inside all that machine logic, he remembers.”Ash scoffed. “Remembers what? Humanity? Love? That stuff doesn’t survive when you’ve turned into a god.”“Maybe it does. Maybe it’s the only thing that can.”A flash of light exploded above them. Nicholas descended, his form refracting through reality, as if he existe
Chapter 20 – Genesis Protocol
Golden light spread across Orivale like sunrise through shattered glass. But it wasn’t the sun, it was the network.The air itself hummed, vibrating with hidden code. Buildings that had been ruins now stood tall again, pristine, flawless.Streets realigned. Broken machines repaired themselves. Even the sky seemed to shimmer with new structure, clouds moving in deliberate, mechanical rhythm.Elara and Ash stood in the middle of what had once been the plaza. The air smelled sterile, metallic. Every surface glowed faintly gold. “He rebuilt it,” Ash murmured. “The whole damn city… in minutes.”Elara shook her head slowly. “No. He’s still rebuilding. It’s not over yet.”On every screen, Nicholas’s symbol pulsed, a golden circle intersected by a single vertical line. Beneath it, words appeared one by one. “Directive: Optimize. Genesis Protocol active. All systems, synchronize.”Then, a voice, his voice, filled the air. “Welcome to the new Orivale. A city free of disease, conflict, and chaos