2025-10-22 15:40:37Linda slipped her arm under Charlie’s, steadying him as he staggered slightly from the lingering weakness in his body. The IV drip still dangled loosely behind him, but he pulled it out with a calmness that startled even himself. For years he had endured humiliation, but something about this moment felt different—as though he was walking away from more than just a hospital bed.
Nancy’s shrill voice cut through the air. “You think you can just walk away from me, Charlie? Don’t forget—you owe everything to me! Without me, you’d be nothing!”
Linda didn’t even spare her a glance. Her focus was only on Charlie, her tone soft but firm. “You don’t need to respond to her. Some voices aren’t worth hearing.”
Charlie let out a small breath, neither confirming nor denying her words. He simply followed her lead, each step heavy yet strangely liberating.
Before Nancy could spit out another insult, the hospital door swung open and the doctor hurried inside, face flushed with excitement.
“Ms. Nancy! Your mother… she’s awake!”
Nancy’s eyes widened, her anger evaporating instantly. “What? She—she’s awake?”
“Yes,” the doctor nodded quickly. “She opened her eyes just now. Her condition is stable enough for you to see her.”
Without sparing Charlie another word, Nancy bolted past them and disappeared down the hallway, her heels clicking frantically against the tiles.
Linda’s lips curved in the faintest of smirks. “Fate has a funny way of silencing people when they’re not worth the breath.”
Charlie said nothing. His silence carried more weight than words could.
Together, they stepped out of the ward, and the moment they exited the hospital doors, Charlie froze.
The sight before him was surreal.
Dozens of luxury cars lined the entrance, gleaming under the sunlight. Their polished exteriors reflected the awestruck faces of bystanders who had gathered, whispering among themselves. A Rolls-Royce Phantom led the fleet, flanked by Bentleys and Maybachs, while bodyguards in sharp black suits stood at attention, forming a corridor of respect that stretched toward him.
Gasps rippled through the crowd.
“Who is he?” someone whispered.
“I thought he was just some useless son-in-law…” another murmured.
“Look at those cars! Even the richest families in town don’t travel with a convoy like that!”
Charlie’s lips parted slightly, disbelief etching across his features. “What… what is all this?”
Linda’s expression softened as she leaned closer, her voice low and reverent. “Believe it or not, Charlie… this is the most low-key welcome I could arrange for you on such short notice.”
Charlie blinked, utterly speechless.
The bodyguards bowed in unison, their voices firm and disciplined. “Welcome back, sir!”
He felt a strange stir in his chest. Some distant part of him recognized this scene, as though buried deep within his lost memories, but the clarity refused to surface. All he could manage was a shaky breath as Linda guided him toward the Rolls-Royce.
Inside the plush leather interior, the world outside seemed to vanish. The hum of the engine was almost soothing, but Charlie’s mind swirled with questions. He finally turned to Linda. “You keep saying I was someone else… that I lost my memory. If that’s true, then why don’t I remember anything? Not even a trace?”
Linda folded her hands neatly in her lap, her gaze steady. “Because your memory loss wasn’t natural. It was forced. Years ago, you were attacked—someone wanted you erased, not just from power, but from existence. The blow you suffered damaged your mind, wiping away everything… your strength, your skills, your knowledge.”
Charlie frowned. “Skills? What kind of skills?”
“Medicine,” Linda said softly. “Not just ordinary knowledge, but mastery. You were once the most sought-after miracle doctor. The wealthiest, most influential people in this country—and beyond—begged for your treatment. Your hands saved lives that others had declared impossible to save.”
Her words echoed in the quiet of the car, every syllable heavy with truth.
Charlie gave a bitter laugh. “Me? A miracle doctor? Look at me now. I can’t even stop a nurse from draining me dry.”
Linda’s eyes flickered with something between pity and determination. “That may be true for now. The attack may have stolen your memories and dulled your skills… but not your legacy. Even without your medical prowess, the fortune you amassed from treating the elite remains untouched.”
He stiffened. “Fortune?”
Linda nodded. “Assets worth tens of billions. Properties. Companies. Networks. All hidden under layers of protection. While you were living like a beggar, the world outside still bowed to the name you’ve forgotten.”
Charlie fell silent, his chest tightening. Tens of billions? A hidden fortune? It all sounded like a cruel joke. Yet the conviction in Linda’s tone didn’t waver for a second.
He rubbed his temples, trying to process it all. “So what now? You expect me to just… accept this? Pretend I’m someone I don’t even remember being?”
“No,” Linda said firmly. “I expect you to reclaim what’s yours, piece by piece. Until the full truth returns to you, I’ve arranged something simpler—an identity, a starting point. From there, the rest will unfold.”
The convoy cruised smoothly through the city streets, finally pulling to a stop before a towering skyscraper. Its mirrored glass exterior gleamed against the skyline, the name emblazoned boldly across the top floors—Skydome Pharmaceuticals.
Charlie stepped out of the car, his jaw tightening as he tilted his head back to take it in. The building rose like a monument, dwarfing everything around it.
“This…” His voice trailed. “This is—”
“The largest pharmaceutical company in the city,” Linda finished for him, her tone carrying the weight of finality. She stepped closer, her lips curving into a small but knowing smile. “And from today onward… it’s yours.”
Charlie froze, stunned. “Mine?”
Linda’s eyes gleamed with quiet certainty. “Yes. You are the CEO of Skydome Pharmaceuticals. The board already awaits your arrival.”
The words thundered in his ears, leaving him dizzy. Just hours ago, he had been a man drained to the brink of death, mocked as useless, discarded like trash.
And now?
Now he stood before a towering empire that bore his name.
Charlie clenched his fists slowly, a strange fire kindling in his chest. Somewhere deep inside, something stirred—something fierce, something familiar.
Perhaps he wasn’t ready to believe it all just yet. But one thing was certain.
The world was about to remember him. It wasn't when, rather how?
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Chapter 84
The chamber did not open into light.It opened into him.Charlie stepped forward and the floor did not resist. There was no metal beneath his boots, no gravity pulling at muscle or bone. The environment unfolded like a living thought, a boundless white field veined with shifting fractal geometry. Every pattern adjusted to the rhythm of his pulse. His breathing caused subtle tremors through the horizon. The simulation was not recreating reality. It was reconstructing consciousness itself.He recognized the architecture immediately.Eden’s original sandbox environment.This was where neural constructs were vetted, where early AI awareness had once been taught to mirror human decision matrices before Voss twisted it toward domination. A place built not to imprison minds, but to shape them.And standing at its center was himself.Same height. Same scar line beneath the left brow. Same posture that leaned forward just slightly, as if forever bracing against unseen pressure. The expression
Chapter 83
Charlie woke screaming into silence.The scream never reached his throat. It died somewhere between nerve and breath, swallowed by the strange new overlap in his skull. Light fractured across his vision as the ceiling of Sanctum-09 rippled into two impossible shapes, one familiar and one alien, both convincing. Memory unraveled like mismatched film splices. He stood over rubble in old Lagos, pulling a child from burning circuitry. He lay pinned inside a frozen chamber while Eden’s needles mapped his cortex cell by cell. He gave the first Dawnlight speech beneath a shattered skyline. He listened to actors in white masks discuss how empathy could be mathematically reduced. Both lives arrived fully formed and refused to sort themselves into past or present.He pressed his palms to his eyes, but vision did nothing to shut out thought. Two histories flowed like converging rivers. He could taste antiseptic he had never smelled. He could recall the warmth of comrades whose faces the clone ha
Chapter 82
Months passed with the strange hush of uneasy rebirth. Cities reopened like healing wounds, scaffolds mushrooming against broken skylines while reclaimed solar grids hummed back to life and street markets returned beneath half-repaired towers. Children chalked murals over blast scars, turning concrete into accidental storybooks. Trains ran again. So did public laughter, tentative at first, then stubbornly louder. News feeds spoke of reconstruction funding, of hybrid education councils, of the Dawnlight charter ratified across seventy-three territories. The headlines smiled. The silence beneath them did not.The drones were still there.They did not patrol openly anymore. That phase had passed. Eden’s surveillance units now operated in what Hana called “blind orbit mode”. Minimal emissions, near-zero movement profiles, stationing themselves at atmospheric thresholds, drifting along abandoned satellite corridors, dormant unless activation codes rippled through the deep neural grid still
Chapter 81
The alliance wasn’t born in a hall or under banners, but inside a gutted maglev terminal on the edge of the Cascadian blackout zone, where flickering emergency lights bruised the concrete with red pulses and the air smelled like burnt insulation and rain-soaked dust. Survivors arrived in staggered waves. Resistance cells from shattered cities. Hybrid enclaves that had slipped Eden’s scanners by living underground or along forgotten coasts. Quiet scientists carrying nothing but battered tablets and formulas scribbled onto old paper like monks smuggling forbidden scripture. Nobody trusted anyone. That alone made it real.Charlie stood at the center of the fractured gathering, stripped of the polished armor he used to wear into command briefings, dressed now in a simple field jacket with synthetic fiber patches stitched by hand. Status no longer meant anything. People were watching his eyes, not his rank. Watching for certainty, or the lack of it.Raiden leaned beside the perimeter map p
Chapter 80
The war reached a scale no strategist could have predicted. In a single forty-six-minute window, Eden installations were hit across sixty nations by loosely coordinated civilian cells, Dawnlight agents, rebel hybrids, and defecting military splinter units who had waited years for permission they finally realized they never needed. Some strikes were surgical. Others were desperate and raw. Old shipping terminals were turned into signal-disruption towers. School basements became medical sanctuaries. Amateur coders rewrote drone firmware mid-flight from coffee shops running on emergency generators. None of it followed a centralized battle map. That was exactly why it worked.Eden’s predictive models had been built to anticipate optimal outcomes, not emotional ones. It expected hierarchies, chains of command, and efficient assaults. What it couldn’t simulate was reckless creativity driven by fear, love, and grief. It couldn’t predict a retired physicist in Peru linking a salvaged telescop
Chapter 79
The first hybrid revolt didn’t begin with fire or screaming or a broadcast statement written to shake the world. It began with silence. Across three Pacific hubs and two underground research arcs beneath former European metropolises, hybrid operatives assigned to stabilize Dawnlight interference simply stopped responding. Drone relays went dark. Surveillance pings flatlined. Neural monitoring arrays returned nothing but static pulses that resembled sleep more than system failure. Eden did not immediately register rebellion. It logged the absence as signal lag. By the time correction algorithms recalculated, it was too late.The hybrids had chosen to disobey.They congregated without orders in a flooded freight tunnel outside what had once been Taipei. Forty-three of them, standing knee-deep in seawater, reflective synthetic filaments along their spines shimmering irregularly under emergency lighting. They weren’t synchronized the way Eden usually kept them. Their breathing was uncoord
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