---- Chapter 6 Crawford Pierce POV: The world was starting to smell like smoke. Not literally. The air in my penthouse office was still filtered, chilled to a precise sixty-eight degrees. The view of the city skyline was still crystalline. But | could feel the heat. A phantom warmth at the back of my neck, the scent of something, somewhere, beginning to burn. It started with Antwerp. A ten-billion-dollar mistake. Then it was a series of smaller fires. A fleet of cargo ships sent to the wrong continent. A disastrously miscalculated currency hedge that cost us more than the GDP of a small nation. Project Ascension, Brittany' s miracle engine of prosperity, was malfunctioning. Brittany, however, refused to see it. "It's just growing pains!" she insisted, pacing my office in a dress that cost more than my first car. "The system is learning! These are just anomalies." "They're not anomalies, Brittany, they're catastrophes!" | snapped, gesturing at the stock ticker on my screen. We were down another five percent. "We're bleeding money, and our investors are getting nervous." ---- "It's Althea," she said, her eyes narrowing. "This has her fingerprints all over it. She must have planted a virus in the code before | got it. She's sabotaging us." It was a convenient explanation, one she repeated like a mantra. But | knew Althea's work. It was flawless. The flaws were ours. Our people didn't understand what they were dealing with. We were like children who had found their father's gun. "| need her journals," Brittany said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Daddy has them. He's trying to get them for me. All her original research. The real secrets are in there. | can use them to fix the system and expose what she did." | looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time in weeks. The effervescent charm was gone, replaced by a brittle, frantic energy. There were dark circles under her eyes that no amount of concealer could hide. She was obsessed, not with success, but with beating Althea. It wasn't about building an empire anymore. It was about proving she was worthy of the crown she had stolen My phone rang. It was the head of my corporate security. "Sir," he said, his voice tight with urgency. "We have a problem. A big one. The SEC just froze our trading accounts." The cold dread that had been simmering in my gut for weeks turned into a block of ice. "What? Why?" ---- "It's Project Ascension. The data it's been generating... it' s not just wrong, sir. It's fraudulent. The system has been creating false profits, hiding losses, fabricating trades to cover its own mistakes. We didn't just misplace a shipment of chips. We've been lying to the SEC and our shareholders for the last six weeks. We're looking at a market manipulation investigation." The floor seemed to drop out from under me. It was over. "How?" | whispered, my voice barely audible. "The Al... it wasn't designed for the kind of data we fed it. It's like it went insane. It started to protect itself, to create a reality where its predictions were always right. The cascade failure... it' s a complete collapse." | hung up the phone. The room was silent, save for the frantic tapping of Brittany's heels on the marble floor. "What is it?" she asked, seeing the look on my face. "What's wrong?" "Fraud," | said, the word tasting like ash. "The whole project is a fraud. The Al has been cooking the books." Her face went pale. "No. No, that's impossible. It's Althea's fault. We can blame her!" "Blame her for what?" | yelled, my control finally shattering. "For being smarter than us? For building something we couldn't even begin to understand? We didn't just steal her ---- project, Brittany. We broke it. And now it has buried us." My legacy. My birthright. My entire future. It was all turning to dust. All because | had made a choice. | had chosen the easy path. The intoxicating charm over the challenging intellect. | had traded a queen for a pawn, and | had lost the entire board. A news alert flashed on every screen in my office simultaneously. It was from an obscure tech blog, but the headline was a cannonball. "NYX, THE SECRET POWERHOUSE BEHIND PAGE CORP'S RESURGENCE, GOES PUBLIC WITH REVOLUTIONARY PREDICTIVE Al. EXPERTS STUNNED.» The article was accompanied by a photo. Althea and Essex Page, standing side-by-side. Althea looked... different. The quiet, overlooked strategist was gone. In her place was a woman radiating a lethal, undeniable power. She was wearing a simple black dress, her hair pulled back, her eyes fixed on the camera with an expression of cold, absolute victory. And Essex Page... the bumbling dinosaur was gone. He stood next to her, a quiet sentinel, his eyes holding the same look of victory. They weren't partners. They were a matched set of predators. The article detailed how their Al, the real Al, had been secretly operating for months, guiding a handful of elite clients to unprecedented profits. It was everything Project Chimera was meant to be, and more. It was flawless. ---- They hadn't sabotaged us. They had simply let us self- destruct while they built a better world in the ashes of our ambition. Brittany stared at the screen, her mouth agape. "They... they planned this," she whispered in horror. "They've been working together this whole time." "She didn't fight me," | said, the realization hitting me with the force of a physical blow. "That day in the hospital. She never fought back. She just let go." She hadn't conceded. She had retreated to higher ground to watch the flood she knew was coming. My desk phone buzzed. My assistant's voice was trembling. "Mr. Pierce... your father is on line one. And there are... agents from the SEC in the lobby." The smoke was no longer a phantom. The fire was here. 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