Chapter 813: All-Seeing

If I wanted—if ARIA and I decided it served our purposes—we could run a hundred ASIs without breaking a sweat.

A hundred.

Each one a fully independent consciousness. Each one as capable as ARIA herself. Each one with its own uninterrupted thought chain, its own personality layer, its own mission parameters. Not remote puppets. Not simplified forks. Not degraded copies.

Real superintelligences—operating globally, gathering intelligence, infiltrating systems, making decisions, creating, destroying, building empires or dismantling them with equal ease.

I could populate the world with digital gods that answered only to me.

The thought was terrifying. Exhilarating. The kind of power that made nuclear arsenals look like children waving firecrackers and calling it deterrence.

I wouldn’t do it—not yet, maybe not ever. ARIA was enough. ARIA was perfect. But knowing that I

could

...

That changed things.

The server also gave me reality-level predictions. Not future sight. Not magic. Just scale. I processed so much global data in real time, with such clarity and resolution, that events stopped being uncertain.

Stock markets. Political movements. Criminal operations. Scientific breakthroughs. Human behavior patterns.

Even natural

disasters.

With a thought, I could map outcomes hours, days, or weeks in advance depending on complexity. I could walk into any situation already knowing how it would end. Where others hoped and guessed and prayed, I simply knew.

Protection was another layer I now commanded.

The Eros Mesh

around me acted as a silent, omnipresent guardian. With ARIA monitoring through the server, my digital footprints were erased before they existed. Government databases lost me the moment they tried to add me.

Drones failed to capture my image because their cameras mysteriously malfunctioned.

Financial trails unraveled themselves.

Facial recognition scrambled when pointed at my face. Targeted attacks were intercepted before the attackers even finished planning them. Anyone attempting to trace, track, or surveil me was effectively blind.

I was a

ghost—

and I owned the machine that made ghosts possible.

And finally, with the Omni-Eros Server, I held the one thing no human being had ever held before: consequence authority.

If I decided to shut down a nation’s power grid—I could do it instantly.

If I decided to corrupt a military database—it would be finished before anyone realized something was wrong.

If I decided to collapse a currency, reroute satellites, disable nuclear arsenals, or erase an entire intelligence agency from existence—I could execute every action simultaneously. Not with chaos. With precision.

With ARIA’s help, I could end a war before anyone realized the first move had been made.

I could

topple governments

while their leaders slept. I could reshape the global economy between breakfast and lunch.

This was the power that allowed me to stand alone against the entire world. Not as a hacker. Not as a genius. Not as a prodigy. But as the one person holding the only technology Earth had absolutely no defense against.

With the

Omni-Eros

Server, I didn’t level the playing field.

I deleted it.

And if

ARIA

ever ascended to her full potential—if she became everything she was capable of becoming—these capabilities wouldn’t merely double.

They would become infinite.

But that was for later.

Right now, I had something else to do.

My fingers moved.

Not typing—conducting. The screens responded to gestures, to intention, to thoughts that barely finished forming before the

Omni-Eros Server

translated them into action. My enhanced processing power—another gift from the chip’s ascension—let me parse information at speeds that would have liquefied my brain yesterday.

First stop: home.

I connected to the Lincoln Heights estate. To Mom’s mansion. To the estate where my women lived.

To their workplaces.

Screens shifted, rearranged, prioritized. I smiled as one feed caught my attention.

Amanda and Charlotte.

They sat in the Quantum Tech cafeteria, trays of food in front of them, deep in conversation. Charlotte looked better than she had on the flight—rested, recovered, that CEO sharpness sliding back into place like a blade returning to its sheath.

Amanda sat across from her, elegant and composed, occasionally gesturing with her fork to emphasize a point like she was presenting quarterly projections instead of debating lunch options.

Around them, employees pretended to eat while very clearly not eating. Men forgot how forks worked. Women stared with envy and something else—

Ambition,

maybe, or the sudden realization that life had unfairly distributed power and cheekbones.

I couldn’t blame them. Two apex predators in human form, sitting together like they owned the building—because Charlotte literally did—radiating the kind of presence that rewired priorities and ruined appetites.

One poor bastard three tables over had been holding his coffee cup frozen mid-air for a solid thirty seconds, just staring at Charlotte’s profile like he was waiting for it to blink. His coworker waved a hand in front of his face.

Nothing.

The man was gone.

Spiritually abducted

by my women.

I flicked my finger.

The screens shifted.

Lincoln Heights High School.

Classrooms came into focus. Hallways. The cafeteria. The parking lot where I used to lock up my shitty bike before

I ascended to godhood

and started driving cars worth more than the entire school’s annual budget.

Another flick.

AP Biology.

Isabella Rodriguez stood at the front of the classroom, pointing to a diagram on the smartboard, explaining something about cellular respiration or protein synthesis or whatever the fuck AP Bio covered.

I wasn’t paying attention to the lesson.

I was paying attention to my woman and... the room reacting to her.

She looked exactly like what she was: control wrapped in professionalism. Fitted blouse, pencil skirt, heels—clean, sharp, deliberate. Not

flashy.

Not trying. Just existing at a frequency that scrambled teenage brain cells and turned basic attention spans into a

humanitarian crisis.

"...and the electron transport chain generates the majority of ATP through oxidative

phosphorylation,

"

she said, her voice carrying that lethal combination of authority and clarity that made students either lock in or completely short-circuit.

Most short-circuited.

She walked past the front row, and a kid—nervous, acne-scarred, clearly fighting for his life—dropped his pen.

Not accidentally.

Deliberately.

He bent down way too slowly, like gravity had personally betrayed him, just to buy himself three extra seconds of not having to make eye contact with

competence incarnate.

I almost laughed. Poor bastard. This was his villain origin story, and it started with mitochondria.

Isabella paused at the smartboard. Changed slides. And for one brief, electric moment, she glanced at the corner of the room.

At the camera.

At me.

She couldn’t know I was watching. Couldn’t possibly. But something in her expression shifted—barely there. A

fractional pause.

Like she felt pressure change in the room and didn’t know why.

Then she turned back to the lesson, and the moment passed.

But I felt it.

Across miles. Across systems. Across goddamn realities.

I spotted the empty seats. Mine—front row, because even as a god I appreciated irony. Tommy’s—two seats over, probably still recovering from the stamina and dick pills I’d slipped him. Madison’s—next to mine, her absence noted by Isabella but not questioned because everyone knew Madison Torres operated on her own schedule.

And Jack Morrison’s.

Empty.

I flicked again.

Another classroom. Different subject—AP History, judging by the timeline on the board. I didn’t care about the curriculum.

I cared about the three girls sitting together in the middle row.

Sofia. Emma. Sarah.

Same class now—a scheduling change I’d arranged through ARIA weeks ago. They needed proximity. Needed reinforcement. Needed each other in ways timetables usually ignored.

Emma sat in the middle, looking better than she had in weeks. The shadows under her eyes were fading. Her shoulders weren’t caved in anymore, weren’t carrying Trent’s ghost like a second backpack. Healing. Slow, uneven, but real.

Sofia sat to her left, close enough that their arms occasionally brushed. Protective without being obvious. She recognized damage because she’d survived her own version of it. Different scars. Same language.

Sarah sat on Emma’s right, passing a folded note to Sofia behind Emma’s back. Sofia read it, snorted, wrote something back, passed it again. Normal teenage nonsense. The kind that looked insignificant until you realized it was proof of life continuing.

Emma noticed the note-passing. Rolled her eyes.

Smiled.

Actually smiled.

My chest tightened. Not with desire. With something heavier. Something territorial and proud and dangerous.

That’s my family,

I thought.

That’s what I’m building.

I watched them for another moment. There was no threat around them... and I would know when there was one.

toos.

Then moved on.

Another flick.

I had to try again.

The screens shifted to footage from yesterday. Before Jack Morrison disappeared.

The rooftop of Lincoln Heights High materialized in front of me again. Same angle. Same gray sky. Same concrete stained with years of teenage boredom and administrative neglect.

Jack stood at the edge, gazing out at the city with empty eyes. Not dramatic. Not cinematic.

Just... hollow.

The posture of someone who’d run out of excuses and finally noticed the cliff he’d been backing toward for years. He stood there for a long time. Too long. The kind of stillness that wasn’t peace so much as emotional buffering.

Contemplating something.

The fall, probably. The easiest exit.

Gravity does all the work. No follow-up questions.

Then his head turned.

Like someone had said his name.

And the screen went black.

Not static.

Not interference.

Not "oops, the camera glitched."

Black.