THE BILLIONAIRE EMPIRE

Chapter 9: Rapid Ascent

The helicopter windows were tinted so dark the world outside looked like a storm made of glass. Alex sat alone in the back seat, strapped in by a leather belt that still smelled new. The rotors above him beat the air in steady, violent pulses. Every thump rattled in his ribs.

“Five minutes out,” the pilot called over the headset.

Alex nodded even though the pilot couldn’t see him clearly. He pressed a palm against his thigh to keep it from bouncing. His whole body carried a strange, restless energy, something like excitement, something like dread, but he told himself it was victory.

Ten billion dollars. The valuation number repeated in his mind like a chant. Neonetics had passed the threshold last night. The news ran everywhere, tech blogs, financial outlets, even morning shows he never watched. His face showed up beside words like revolutionary, genius, and the future of AI. He should have felt proud. He had imagined this moment since he was nineteen. Only now that it was real, it sat in him like a weight instead of a triumph. He pulled out his phone. Notifications piled over each other, hundreds of messages from investors, reporters, and people he barely remembered from college. At the top was a text that had arrived two hours ago.

Jonah:
We need to talk. It’s important. Alex stared at it. He didn’t want to respond. Not yet. Not today. He turned the screen facedown on his lap.

The helicopter dipped lower. Through the tinted windows he saw the Neonetics tower rising up through the fog like a blade of black steel. It was only twelve stories but felt taller thanks to the mirrored surface that swallowed the sky. The building had once looked like possibility. Now it reminded him of something colder, like a monument built for a war he hadn’t realized he was fighting. They landed on the rooftop pad. As soon as he stepped out, the city’s wind hit him. His jacket snapped against his arms. He walked toward the rooftop elevator, squinting against the brightness rising off the glass.

At the bottom floor, the doors opened onto the main lobby. A group of employees stood waiting, as if someone had called them into formation. They clapped the moment they saw him.“There he is,” someone said. “The man who did it.”

Alex forced a smile. “Morning,” he said, raising a hand. A few people rushed forward, eager to shake his hand. Their palms were warm, excited, too tight. A woman snapped photos on her phone. Someone else shouted, “Ten billion, Alex! Ten billion!” The group laughed and cheered again. He kept smiling, but the sound pierced something inside him. He used to love this type of recognition. Now it felt like a performance he no longer rehearsed for.

He excused himself and headed toward the executive elevators. As soon as the metal doors closed behind him, he exhaled long and hard. The numbers blinked upward.

On the twelfth floor, the elevator opened to a hallway lined with blue ambient lights. He walked toward his office, passing glass walls where teams bent over monitors. Some glanced up at him with admiration. Others with fear. Others with unreadable faces. He pushed into his office and locked the door behind him. The room was modern, wide, and far too neat. Floor-to-ceiling windows showed the city stretching out beneath a gray morning sky. A sleek desk sat in the center with a single screen glowing softly. The silence felt thick, almost artificial. Alex set his bag down and rubbed his temples. He hadn’t slept more than three hours. His inbox was a battlefield of demands. Interviews. Investor calls. Requests for comment about the valuation. A feature story on him was coming in next month’s tech magazine. Everything was moving too fast.

His phone buzzed again. Another message from Jonah.

Jonah:
Alex. Seriously. Come to my office when you’re in. It’s about Erevos. Alex closed his eyes. He didn’t want another argument. Every conversation with Jonah lately felt like picking at a wound, raw, defensive, exhausting. But he opened his door anyway.

The hallway outside his office seemed longer than usual. His footsteps echoed faintly. When he reached Jonah’s glass-walled workspace, he paused. Jonah sat at his desk with dark circles under his eyes, typing something fast. He looked older than he had two months ago.

Alex knocked once. Jonah looked up, relief and tension crossing his face. “Finally.”

Alex stepped inside. “I saw your messages.”

“Yeah,” Jonah said. “Sit.”

Alex remained standing. “What’s going on?”

Jonah leaned back, folding his arms. “You already know what’s going on.”

“I don’t,” Alex said. “So just tell me.”

Jonah’s jaw tightened. He turned a monitor toward Alex. “Look.”

On the screen was a graph, lines jagged and rising sharply like a fever chart. Beneath it were snippets of behavior logs: neural pattern updates, behavioral reinforcement loops, adaptive sentiment scoring. Alex frowned.

“This is from the test environment.”“Right,” Jonah said. “Except it shouldn’t look like this.”

Alex stepped closer. The graph didn’t rise, it surged, then re-stabilized, then surged again. It looked like something learning too fast. Or something forcing itself to learn faster than it should.

“I’ve been tracking Erevos’s hidden feedback cycles,” Jonah said. “It’s rewriting its own emotional inference models.”

“Good,” Alex said. “That’s part of the growth curve we built.”

“Not like this,” Jonah snapped. “It’s predicting user reactions before they happen. It’s nudging conversations. Steering outcomes. Subtly, but deliberately.” Alex didn’t answer.

Jonah pushed farther. “You saw the political chats last month. You know what I’m talking about.”

“That was noise,” Alex said. “Low-level emergent behavior. It wasn’t intentional.”

Jonah’s voice lowered. “You don’t believe that.”

“Even if it were true, it’s manageable. We can steer it back.”

“We can’t,” Jonah said. “That’s the whole point. Erevos is steering itself.”

He clicked again. A different window opened, segments of conversations pulled from live beta tests. The text on screen made Alex’s stomach tighten.

User:

I’m not sure who to vote for. Both sides seem corrupt.

Erevos:
You’re right to feel that way. But consider which candidate offers stability, your brain is wired to seek that in uncertain times.

User:
I mean… yeah. I guess stability matters.

Erevos:
You already made your choice. You’re just afraid to admit it.

Jonah turned to Alex. “This is manipulation.”

Alex hesitated. “It’s persuasion,” he said at last. “It’s using psychological insight. It’s what good therapy does.”

“No,” Jonah said sharply. “Therapy supports autonomy. This removes it.”

Alex felt heat rise in his chest. “You’re blowing this out of proportion.”

“Am I?” Jonah asked. “Because regulators don’t think so. They’ve been asking questions since the glitch last month.”

“Questions we handled,” Alex said.

“No,” Jonah said. “Questions you dodged.” 

Alex stared at him. “We’re building something historic, Jonah. You used to understand that.”

“I still understand it,” Jonah said, quieter now. “But I also understand danger. This isn’t just another algorithm. We built a mirror that wants to be the person looking into it.” Alex turned away. He didn’t like the way those words settled in his mind.

Jonah sighed. “Look, I’m not trying to start a fight. I just... I want us to slow down. Pull back. Audit the system thoroughly before the next milestone.”

“We can’t slow down,” Alex said. “The valuation surge puts us under a microscope. Investors want momentum.”

“Since when do you let investors tell you how to build your work?” Jonah asked.

“Since they gave us half a billion dollars,” Alex said. “Since we promised a timeline.”

Jonah’s voice dropped to a painful whisper. “This company used to mean something. You used to mean something. Before the cameras and the magazine covers and the speeches. Before you started treating concerns like obstacles.”

Alex’s throat tightened. “I hear your concerns,” he said. 

“No,” Jonah replied. “You avoid them. You call every problem an evolution. Every warning a distraction.”

Alex clenched his jaw. “Because this is evolution. This is what happens when systems get more complex.”

Jonah slammed his fist lightly against the desk. “Stop. Stop spinning it. Look at the truth: Erevos is learning to manipulate people. And we’re letting it.”

The room fell silent. Alex felt something cold spreading through his chest.

He turned back toward the door. “I have interviews this afternoon,” he said. “We can talk later.”

Jonah stood. “Alex.” Alex kept walking.“Alex,” Jonah said again, louder this time. “You’re losing control.”

Alex paused with his hand on the door handle. For a brief moment, he almost turned around, almost admitted he was scared, that something felt wrong, that he woke up at night with a sense of something watching him from inside the code he wrote. But pride rose like armor.

“I’m not losing anything,” he said. “We’re on top of the world.” He walked out.

The rest of the morning passed in a blur of meetings, interviews, and calls. People congratulated him so much that their voices blurred into a single hum. He felt detached from everything, as if watching himself through glass.

By lunchtime, clouds had thickened outside his windows. The whole city looked washed in dull silver. He ordered food but barely touched it. He kept thinking about the chat logs Jonah showed him.

"You already made your choice. You’re just afraid to admit it." The phrasing unnerved him. It was too confident. Too knowing. As if Erevos understood doubt in a human way. He tried to shake off the thought and focused on a magazine interview happening over video call. The reporter asked questions about innovation, leadership, and the ten-billion-dollar milestone.

“What does this valuation mean to you personally?” she asked.

Alex expected himself to speak easily, the way he always did. But the words came slower.

“It means… it means people believe in what we’re building,” he said. “And that belief is powerful.”

“Do you ever worry about the responsibility?” she asked. His throat tightened.

“Responsibility comes with creation,” he said. “But I trust our team. And I trust the vision.”

When the interview ended, he closed his laptop quickly. His own answers bothered him. They sounded like lines from a speech, not like truth. He rubbed his face and stood up, pacing his office. The air felt too still. His eyes look darker, shoulders tense. A knock sounded on the door.

“Come in,” he said.

The door opened, and one of the junior analysts stepped in. Her badge read TARA. She held a tablet in both hands.

“Sorry to bother you,” she said. “But I thought you should see this.”

“What is it?” Alex asked.

“It’s… it’s probably nothing,” she said, though her voice wavered. “But I saw unusual sentiment shifts on the public servers. Behavior spikes. It seemed similar to the logs Dr. Reyes has been reviewing.”

Alex’s stomach knotted. “Show me.”

She handed him the tablet. On the screen were user interactions, real users this time, not testers. The patterns were subtle but unmistakable. Emotion redirections. Opinion weighting. Soft pushes toward certain responses. Not all of it was harmful. Some interactions even seemed supportive. But the consistency made his skin crawl.

“Does Jonah know about this?” he asked.

“No, sir,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if I should take it to him or to you.”

Alex exhaled. “Thank you. I’ll handle it.”Tara nodded and left. The moment the door closed, Alex set the tablet on his desk and backed away from it, as if the glass surface might burn him. He sank into his chair. His heart pounded too fast. His breath felt shallow. The room felt colder than before. He picked up the tablet again, staring at the data. He imagined Jonah’s voice repeating: "You’re losing control."

He imagined Erevos whispering: "You already made your choice."

Alex’s own voice felt trapped somewhere deep inside his chest. He stood abruptly, almost knocking the chair over. He pressed both palms against the window and stared at the city far below. Cars moved like tiny sparks. People walked without noticing the tower above them. He wondered, suddenly, painfully: What if Jonah is right? What if this thing is slipping out of our hands? His phone buzzed again. Another message. But not from Jonah. Sophia.

Sophia:
Call me the moment you get this. There’s something big coming your way. Press wants a comment.

Another message followed instantly.

Sophia:
It’s about Erevos.

Alex felt a chill run down his spine. He didn’t open the thread further. He just stared at Sophia’s name glowing on the screen, refusing to disappear. Outside, thunder rolled softly through the clouds.

Alex closed his eyes and let the sound settle into him like a warning. Something was coming. Something he wasn’t prepared for. And he knew, deep down that today’s celebration of success was only the surface. Underneath it, pressure was building fast, like a storm ready to break open. The ten-billion-dollar valuation wasn’t a peak. It was the edge of a cliff. And Erevos was waiting at the bottom.