Read Novel Full Chapter 641: The Irony Of The Situation
Chapter 641: The Irony Of The Situation
The three-block radius of the localized electromagnetic failure was absolute. Inside that invisible boundary, every digital lens retracted, every screen went black, and every broadcasting rig failed simultaneously.
But the fourth block was not affected. Nor was the fifth, nor the high-rise office windows situated just outside the immediate drop zone of Liam Scott’s annoyance.
Because of this simple geographical mathematics, the footage of Liam’s exit from the JP Morgan headquarters hit LucidNet before the paralyzed reporters standing on the immediate pavement even realized their equipment had rebooted.
The uploads did not come from people staring out of fourth-floor conference rooms across the avenue.
The angles varied, the resolutions differed, but the sequence of events was captured in flawless, overlapping redundancy.
In the footage, the heavy glass doors of the bank slide open. Liam steps out into the chaotic, humid New York morning. The crowd surges. The blinding, strobing wall of camera flashes erupts. Liam stops and he raises his right hand.
What he did after wasn’t shown clearly because of the limitation of phone’s cameras.
In the videos recorded from the fourth block, the audio captures a strange, resonant frequency. Instantly, the strobing flashes from the media perimeter extinguish. The physical ripple of confusion moving through the press corps is entirely visible.
Then, Liam simply bends his knees. The air around him and the woman shimmers briefly, bending the light like a heat mirage.
A fraction of a second later, he is gone, leaving a silent, vertical blur that the human eye cannot track and that consumer-grade cameras capture as a single, smeared frame of ascending motion.
The crowd were left staring upward in absolute, deafening silence.
The 6.8 billion active users on LucidNet did not need time to process the footage. They had spent the last two weeks adjusting to a reality where the impossible was simply scheduled programming. The reaction was instantaneous, massive, and entirely overwhelming.
*Frame by frame breakdown. Look at the timestamp 0:14. He snaps his fingers. Watch the media pit. Every single camera flash dies at the EXACT same millisecond. He just EMP’d a three-block radius with his bare hand because they were being too loud.*
*The restraint. I need everyone to understand the restraint. He can rearrange matter at the atomic level. He could have turned their cameras into actual dust. Instead, he just put them in time-out.*
*I’m an aerospace engineer. The acceleration required to move from a static standing position to beyond visual range in a single frame without creating a concussive shockwave that would level the street... the physics are not just broken, they are being actively mocked.*
*Nobody is talking about the girl in the gold dress! She is literally asleep on his back while he breaks the sound barrier!*
*It’s the day after his nineteenth birthday. He probably had a late night. He’s just running errands with the family.*
The cultural obsession with Liam was not occurring in a vacuum. It was the compounding result of an ecosystem that had entirely enveloped the globe. Every day, the terrestrial population interacted with the infrastructure of his empire.
The countdown to the launch of LucidNet Finance was actively ticking, a looming, ninety-day sword of Damocles hanging over the head of every corrupt institution, sovereign wealth fund, and government fiscal office on Earth.
And then there was the clinical trial at Lunar Base Sanctuary. Only two days prior, the World Health Organization observers had leaked an unauthorized, heavily redacted summary of the final phase.
The first batch of volunteers were slated for release in the coming weeks. Their recoveries were not just complete; they were biologically flawless.
The medical nanites were no longer a theoretical miracle; they were a finalized, proven product about to hit a world desperate for healing.
Because of this omnipresence, Liam was no longer viewed simply as a CEO or a billionaire. To the general populace, he was a living, breathing paradigm shift.
But to the major governments and corporate conglomerates of the world, he was a walking, untrackable strategic nightmare.
Since the livestream where he had publicly unmasked himself, every intelligence agency on the planet had redirected unprecedented resources toward monitoring his movements. The satellites were calibrated. The signals intelligence facilities were on high alert.
And yet, barely fourteen days after that livestream, and less than twenty-four hours after his highly publicized nineteenth birthday, he had bypassed every single early warning system on the North American continent.
He had flown through sovereign airspace in broad daylight, landed in the middle of the busiest financial district in the world, walked into the headquarters of the most powerful private banking institution on Earth, walked out, disabled thousands of electronic devices with a gesture, and vanished into the stratosphere without triggering a single radar array.
In the Situation Room in Washington, analysts were frantically reviewing the civilian uploads, trying to reverse-engineer his flight path, his velocity, and the exact mechanism of the localized EMP. They found nothing. The tracking systems had picked up nothing. It was as if he had simply been edited out of physical space.
But the governments did not need radar to know where he had been. The destination was entirely public. He had visited JP Morgan. He had visited Whitlock.
For the intelligence agencies and the financial regulatory bodies, this was an aggressive, terrifying variable.
Liam Scott did not take casual meetings. He did not do PR tours. If he had personally flown to JP Morgan the morning after his birthday, it meant a piece had been moved on the board.
It did not take long for the bureaucratic machinery to react.
Exactly nine minutes and forty-two seconds after Liam’s vertical departure from the pavement, the secure, encrypted terminal on Whitlock’s desk chimed.
Whitlock, who was currently standing by his floor-to-ceiling window, looking down at the media circus far below, slowly turned around.
He walked over to his desk and tapped the screen. The email was from the Treasury Department, cc’ing the National Security Council and the Director of the FBI.
It was dressed in the polite, formal language of federal oversight, invoking systemic risk protocols and domestic market stability frameworks. But beneath the bureaucratic phrasing, the message was desperate, frantic, and entirely transparent.
The United States Government formally requests an immediate, comprehensive summary of the topics discussed during your unscheduled meeting with Liam Scott. Due to the extreme market sensitivity surrounding Nova Technologies, full disclosure is required within the hour.
Whitlock read the email twice.
He looked at the words domestic market stability and felt a strange, detached sense of humor bubble up in his chest.
The government was worried about market stability. They were worried about fluctuations in stock prices, or perhaps an early leak regarding the release date of the medical nanites. They thought they were playing a game of terrestrial economics.
They had absolutely no idea that the boy who had just left this office was planning to formally control seventy percent of the Earth’s surface.
They did not know about Nova Reclamation. They did not know that the global energy sector, the waste management industry, and the international carbon market had effectively just been sentenced to death.
They did not know that the concept of nuclear waste was about to be atomically erased, or that the deep-sea trenches were going to become the sovereign territory of a lunar corporation.
If Whitlock replied to this email with the actual truth, the global markets wouldn’t just fluctuate. They would completely collapse within thirty seconds of the NSC reading the brief. The panic would be absolute, biblical, and entirely uncontainable.
Whitlock let out a long, slow breath. He reached for his keyboard, his fingers hovering over the keys.
He thought about the FinCEN audits that had harassed the Bellemere Family Office. He thought about the leak campaigns, the congressional hearings, and the sheer, exhausting friction the government had tried to apply to Liam’s terrestrial anchor.
And then he thought about the choice he had made eight months ago, the bet he had placed, and the absolute certainty that the nineteen-year-old flying back to the moon was the only entity that actually mattered in the coming century.
Whitlock began to type. His response was legally flawless, perfectly cooperative, and entirely devoid of any actionable intelligence.
Dear Secretary,
Mr. Scott’s visit was entirely personal in nature. He stopped by briefly to exchange pleasantries following his nineteenth birthday. No financial products, strategic initiatives, or market-sensitive operations regarding Nova Technologies were discussed or planned. JP Morgan remains fully committed to complete transparency regarding our institutional partnerships.
Sincerely, Whitlock.
He hit send.
He knew it wouldn’t stop them. He knew the subpoenas would likely follow, that the pressure would escalate. But as he looked back out the window at the empty sky, Whitlock realized he no longer cared.
The terrestrial governments were fighting for control of a world that no longer existed. The board had already been flipped. Liam Scott was just waiting for the pieces to land.