Read Novel Full Chapter 607: The Situation They All Found Themselves
Chapter 607: The Situation They All Found Themselves
JP Morgan Chase. New York.
Whitlock read the article once, set his phone face down, and sat with it.
Then he picked it up and read it again.
The equity positions. The real estate. The aviation assets. The two vehicles manufacturers had publicly stated could not exist. The $735 billion figure sitting at the top of a verification process Bloomberg had described as exhaustive, which had produced no origin for any of the capital behind it.
He had known about the Bellemere Family Office and that it was not a standard operation.
But he had not known the full number and he had to sit with it for a moment.
Then his phone rang. It was a Senior counsel from the Senate Banking Committee. He looked at the number and let it ring.
Twenty minutes later, he got a call from Treasury.
He understood immediately what the next seventy-two hours looked like.
JP Morgan was sitting at the intersection of two separate things that the government had just noticed in the same night.
The first was the publicly announced wealth management partnership with Lucid creators — that announcement had moved the bank’s market cap and had been in every financial publication.
The second was the Bellemere Family Office, a private client relationship that Bloomberg had just put on the front page of every newsroom in the world.
Nobody had confirmed any connection between those two things. The government didn’t need confirmation. They needed only to notice that JP Morgan was the only named financial institution in any public record with relationships touching both sides of the same night’s news. That was enough to make the bank the first door anyone knocked on.
He called his general counsel at home.
"We are going to receive subpoenas," he said. "Possibly by morning. I want the full legal team in at six. I want our position on client confidentiality prepared before any of those calls get returned."
"How many calls so far."
"Two. There will be more before sunrise."
A pause. "Do we cooperate."
Whitlock looked at the Bloomberg article. At the wall Bloomberg had found and stopped at.
"We follow the law," he said. "Exactly the law. Nothing beyond it."
He ended the call and looked at the ceiling.
The bank had done nothing wrong. The Bellemere Family Office was a legitimate private client. The Lucid creator partnership was a publicly announced, fully documented institutional relationship. There was no confirmed link between Liam Scott and Nova Technologies in any public record. Bloomberg had placed them in proximity and left the question open.
The government was not going to leave the question open.
And JP Morgan was the only door they knew how to knock on.
***
Nvidiā. Santa Clara.
The emergency call had been running for forty minutes when the head of government affairs said what everyone had been circling.
"The Senate Commerce Committee is going to call us," she said. "Probably this week. Possibly tomorrow."
The room understood why before she continued.
Nvidiā was the most strategically significant semiconductor company in the world. Its chips underpinned AI development, defense infrastructure, and the computing architecture of every major government’s critical systems. A 3% position held by an unknown eighteen-year-old with $735 billion and no documented wealth origin was not a footnote in a national security conversation. It was the conversation.
"The position is passive," the general counsel said. "There’s no board representation, no activist filing, no request for technology access and no communication of any kind."
"That won’t matter," she said. "The question isn’t what he’s done with the position. The question is what he could do with it. And the second question — which Washington is already asking — is whether this person is connected to Nova Technologies."
The room shifted.
The connection was not confirmed. It was not in any public record. Bloomberg had established Liam Scott’s wealth profile and established Nova Technologies’ existence in the same night, and the circumstantial case was visible to anyone looking — same seven-month timeline, portfolio sectors mapping exactly onto Nova Technologies’ operational domains, the same pattern of everything verifiable and nothing explainable. But circumstantial was not confirmed. No government body had confirmed it and no filing had confirmed it.
None of that was going to protect Nvidiā from a committee that had already connected the dots and wanted answers.
"If the connection is real," the CFO said carefully, "then we have a 3% position held by the person behind a company that has demonstrated fabrication and engineering capability that no known supply chain can account for. A company operating from a lunar base." He paused. "The national security framing doesn’t just write itself. It writes itself in capital letters."
"And if the connection isn’t real," the head of government affairs said, "we still have a 3% position from an eighteen-year-old with $735 billion and no explainable source. Which is its own national security question."
The CEO had been quiet through the full briefing.
"What do they actually want," he said.
"Information. Who he is. How the position was established. Whether there has been any contact or communication beyond the registry documentation. Whether Nova Technologies — and they will ask about Nova Technologies by name — has ever approached Nvidiā for any purpose." She paused. "They want the wall Bloomberg found. They want us to tell them what’s behind it."
"We don’t know what’s behind it."
"Then we become the story," she said. "A company holding a 3% position from a source nobody can account for, in the most sensitive sector in the national security conversation, that has no answers for a congressional committee. That’s the headline we’re trying to avoid."
The CEO looked at the room.
"Get our Washington team on the phone at six," he said. "Before theirs calls us."
***
Eli Līlly. Indianapolis.
The call with the board chair reached the government question at 3 AM and the chief strategy officer had arrived there two hours earlier.
"The FDA," the board chair said. "That’s the first call we get."
She had known it was coming since 1 AM when she had first mapped the full shape of the problem.
The medical nanite clinical trial was operating on the moon, outside every regulatory framework on Earth. One hundred patients. Conditions spanning bilateral amputation, ALS, late-stage cancer, neurodegenerative disease. All showing recovery outcomes no pharmaceutical intervention had ever produced. And it was going on with no FDA oversight, no EMA involvement and no regulatory body from any jurisdiction had any visibility into what was happening at Lunar Base Sanctuary.
That had been tolerable when Nova Technologies was simply the most extraordinary company in the world.
It became a different matter when Bloomberg placed a man with $735 billion and no documented wealth origin next to that company in the same night’s news, and that man held 3% of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
The connection between Liam Scott and Nova Technologies was not confirmed in any public record. But the FDA was not going to approach the question that way. They were going to approach it the way every regulatory body approached an unknown variable attached to something they had no oversight of. With the assumption that the worst case was the operating case until demonstrated otherwise.
"They’re going to ask us what we know," she said.
"We know what the observer reports show," the board chair said. "Same as everyone else."
"That’s the problem. We hold a shareholder whose possible connection to the trial is entirely circumstantial and we have no more information than a journalist. The FDA is going to find that very difficult to believe."
The board chair was quiet.
"There is a second problem," she said. "If the trial results hold — and the observer documentation strongly suggests they will — we are looking at a technology that does not compete with our pipeline. It replaces the conditions our pipeline treats." She said it plainly. "Our largest revenue lines exist because chronic conditions cannot be reversed. If they can be reversed, we are not looking at a competitor. We are looking at the end of the treatment model those revenue lines are built on."
"He holds 3% of us and may be the person building the thing that does this to us."
"Yes. And whether he invested in us because he needs our infrastructure to survive what comes next, or whether the position is something else entirely — we don’t know. We have had no communication from the Bellemere Family Office. Not one contact." She paused. "But the FDA is going to ask whether we knew what was coming. And the appearance of knowledge, when you hold the position and the timeline is what it is, is indistinguishable from knowledge when a committee is deciding what to investigate."
"Get legal."
"Legal has been on since 1 AM," she said. "The question they cannot answer is how we demonstrate the absence of a conversation that never happened."
***
Nētflix. Los Gatos.
The co-CEO had been awake since the Bloomberg article and by 3 AM had read the Lucid Studio terms three times and arrived somewhere she hadn’t expected.
She had set the government question aside early because it felt secondary to the strategic threat. By 3 AM it felt like the only question.
Nētflix held a 1.5% position from the same shareholder, the same timeline, the same pattern. And Nētflix was a streaming platform that had spent twenty years and billions of dollars building a content distribution infrastructure that LucidNet had matched and exceeded in six months with 6.8 billion users spending ten hours a day on a platform built around fully immersive reality.
The government question was not complex. It was simple and it had no good answer.
Was there any arrangement.
It doesn’t have to be formal or documented. Anything at all. Even a conversation, a context or any reason an eighteen-year-old with $735 billion and no documented wealth origin would hold 1.5% of his primary competitor while building something that consumed its core value proposition.
The honest answer was no. There was no contact. No communication. Nothing.
But the honest answer produced the worse question.
If there was no arrangement, why did he buy 1.5% of Nētflix while building something that made Nētflix’s distribution infrastructure obsolete? Was it meant to be a passive financial position that had simply sat there while his platform grew to ten times Nētflix’s user base.
The FTC was going to ask that question. The DOJ was going to ask that question. Every regulatory body with a mandate touching media consolidation or platform competition was going to ask that question.
And the answer — genuinely, honestly — was that nobody knew.
Which meant Nētflix was in the same position as every other company in the Bellemere portfolio. Holding a stake from someone whose connection to Nova Technologies was entirely circumstantial and entirely obvious, with no communication to point to and no explanation to offer, sitting between a government that needed answers and a person who had demonstrated, across seven months, that leverage ran in one direction.
She added two lines to her 7 AM message.
Also bring subscriber growth projections for the next eighteen months. We need to be honest about what we’re looking at.
And get our outside counsel from the DC office on the call. We need to understand our regulatory exposure before anyone from a government body makes contact.
She set the phone down.
Every company in the Bellemere portfolio was now sitting at the same intersection. On one side, a man with $735 billion, no documented origin, and a possible connection to the most consequential company in the world.
On the other end, governments that could not tolerate the existence of what Bloomberg had described and were going to use every available pressure point to find answers.
The companies were the pressure points.
Not because they had done anything wrong, or because any connection had been confirmed. But because they were the only doors anyone knew how to knock on. And the knocking had already started..