---- Chapter 4 Essex Page POV: The file arrived exactly three minutes and twelve seconds after | hung up with Althea Roberts. It was a multi-layered encryption, elegant and viciously complex. It took my best Al fifteen minutes to slice through it. Most corporate security systems wouldn't have managed it in a month. | sat alone in my office, a cavernous space overlooking the city that had once belonged to my grandfather. The leather on the chairs was cracked, the mahogany desk scarred with the ghosts of deals made decades ago. The world saw this office, this company, as a mausoleum. They weren't entirely wrong. It was a tomb for my family's old way of doing business. But tombs are excellent places to hide things. | opened the file. It wasn't a prospectus. It was the raw, beating heart of Project Chimera. | scrolled through the code, the architectural diagrams, the predictive models. My breath caught in my chest. This wasn't just a game-changer, as the fawning business news was calling Brittany Huber's cheap imitation. This was a revolution Althea hadn't just built a better logistics system. She had created a limited form of precognition. An Al that didn't just analyze existing data but could accurately model and predict ---- future market shifts, supply chain disruptions, and consumer behavior with a staggering 94% accuracy rate. It was the holy grail. Pierce and Rodgers had no idea what they were holding. They had the blueprint for a fusion reactor and were planning to use it as a toaster. And she was giving it to me. My phone buzzed. It was my head of security. "Sir, we have a problem. There's been a surge of dark-web chatter about Page Corp. Inquiries into our server architecture, our R&D personnel. It started about an hour ago." "It's from Pierce Industries, isn't it?" | asked, my eyes still glued to the screen: "The digital signature is masked, but yes. All signs point to their corporate espionage division. They're getting aggressive." Of course, they were. Crawford Pierce was ambitious, but he was also paranoid. He had the prize, but he needed to make sure no one else had a copy. He was trying to scrub Althea's existence from her own work. "Let them look," | said calmly. "Strengthen the perimeter around Project Phoenix. Everything else... let them see the dust. Let them see the failure. Feed them the bad news." "Sir?" "Just do it," | said, and hung up. ---- For the past five years, | had been playing a long, quiet game. While the world watched the slow, managed decline of Page Corp's public-facing manufacturing business, | had been secretly funneling every last dime of our capital into something new. In a secure, off-the-grid server farm buried under a mountain in Utah, | had been building a technology company. My own quiet revolution. Project Phoenix. We were lean, we were invisible, and we were already immensely profitable, servicing a handful of private clients in the defense and aerospace sectors. The world thought | was a failure because that' s exactly what | wanted them to think. You can't attack what you can't see. Althea Roberts had just seen me. She had looked right through the facade of the bumbling, incompetent heir and seen the truth. And she hadn't come to me for a lifeline. She had come to me with a match and a gallon of gasoline. Her plan was insane. It was reckless. It was brilliant. She wanted to build a new company. | was going to give her an arsenal. Merging her Al with my existing infrastructure.. the potential was terrifying. We wouldn't just be competing with Pierce Industries. We could break them. Erase them. This wasn't just about business. | remembered Althea from industry events. She was always standing slightly behind Crawford, quiet and watchful, her intelligence a palpable force field. ' d seen the way Crawford would speak over her in meetings, taking credit for her ideas with a casual, proprietary ---- air. ' d seen the way Brittany looked at her sister, with a jealousy so toxic it was practically radioactive. They thought they had sidelined her. They had no idea they had just unleashed her. | leaned back in my chair, the old leather groaning in protest. Revenge, she'd called it. A potential byproduct. She was lying. It was the entire point. And | found, to my own surprise, that | was more than willing to help her get it. Crawford Pierce and his legacy-obsessed father represented everything | loathed about the corporate world: the arrogance, the entitlement, the belief that power was a birthright. The phone rang again. An unknown number. "Essex Page," | answered. "It's Jay Parrish. Althea said to call." The kid's voice was young but steady. "I'm in. But you need to know, they're already gutting the code. Huber and Pierce's tech team. They don't understand the core architecture. They're treating it like a brute-force system, plugging in their old data sets. It's going to cause a cascade failure." "When?" | asked. "Hard to say. The system is designed to self-correct, to learn. But they're force-feeding it garbage data. It'll try to adapt, but eventually, the predictive models will collapse. It'll start spitting out nonsense, then it'll start fabricating data to fit its flawed predictions. When it goes, it will go spectacularly. And ---- it will take Pierce's entire integrated network with it." A slow smile spread across my face. Brittany and Crawford weren't just flying a stolen plane. They were flying it straight into a mountain, and they were cheering about the speed. "How long can you stay on the inside without being detected?" | asked Parrish. "A few weeks. Maybe a month," he said. "I can feed you their progress reports. Let you know exactly how fast they're digging their own grave." "Good," | said. 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