Apocalypse Trade Monopoly
Chapter 139: Sweet lies

Chapter 139: Sweet lies

The car was already running.

Silent, temperature-controlled, filtered air and soft grey leather. William sat in the driver’s seat, posture perfect, hands at ten and two. He didn’t say a word when Lucas opened the door. Just tilted the mirror to catch the reflection of the man stepping in behind him.

"Welcome back, sir," he said.

Lucas slid into the middle row, his father moving with unbothered precision beside him. Ava followed last, slamming the door with more force than necessary.

The locks clicked into place.

For a moment, the hum of the electric engine and the low vibration of acceleration were the only sounds.

Then Ava said, "You lied."

Bai Sr. didn’t turn his head.

"You’ll need to narrow that down."

"You said I was adopted," she said flatly, staring ahead.

Lucas looked between them.

"I remember my mother," Ava continued. "Not just who she was. I remember how her hands smelled when she tied my boots. I remember the lullaby she sang—Mandarin, not a public archive one. Something only she knew."

Her voice dropped.

"I remember looking like her. Same jaw. Same shoulders. Same damn heartbeat."

Bai Sr. finally turned his head, expression unreadable.

"I didn’t say she wasn’t your mother."

"You said I was placed," Ava snapped. "You said I was a test subject assigned to a cover family."

"I said," he corrected, "that your system was not an accident. That doesn’t mean your family didn’t love you. It means they were selected because they would."

Lucas raised a brow. "That supposed to make it better?"

"I didn’t design the world to be kind," his father said. "I designed it to survive."

Ava folded her arms.

"I still remember being hers. All the code in the world doesn’t overwrite that."

Bai Sr. studied her for a second longer.

Then nodded—slowly.

"You’re a good girl," he said.

Lucas blinked.

Ava narrowed her eyes. "That sounds like a compliment and a warning."

"It is," Bai Sr. replied. "Because you can tell the difference between a lie and a dangerous truth. And you know when not to speak or make a move."

Lucas leaned his head against the window. "This is the part where you start explaining the next apocalypse, right?"

Bai Sr. chuckled—once. Dry. Like dust from an old book.

"No, no. This is the part where I tell you it already started."

Ava tensed. "When?"

He reached into his coat pocket.

Pulled out a small object wrapped in foil—waxy, bright, with a cheerful mascot printed on the front.

Lucas stared.

"Is that...?"

"The Master Code," Bai Sr. said, voice calm.

"You made it candy?"

"I made it popular."

He unwrapped it slowly, holding it in his palm like it was a relic.

"One strand of this," he said, "delivered more behavioral control potential than six years of injected sync trials. Sugar hides a lot."

Lucas stared at it like it might explode.

"I ate those."

"Everyone did. Or drank it. You preferred the citrus carbonated one, if I recall."

Lucas exhaled. "You dosed the world."

"I inoculated it," Bai Sr. replied. "Each dose contains a dormant structure—nano-patterned, designed to lie flat in the system until a trigger event activates it."

Ava’s voice was tight. "The trigger... was the meteors?"

"No," he said, smiling faintly. "The meteors were the accelerant. The real trigger—was temperature."

Lucas stilled. "Come again?"

"Biological thresholds," Bai Sr. continued. "Your bodies—our systems—were designed to remain dormant unless extreme heat or extreme cold pushed you past metabolic safety. Ever wonder why shifts happen during fever spikes? Why some mutations emerge during cold exposure?"

Ava’s bracer vibrated softly.

[CORE TEMPERATURE SYNC: ACTIVE – BASELINE: 98.6°F – HISTORIC VARIANCE LOGGED]

Lucas shook his head. "So the system isn’t just tech. It’s environmental."

"And the Master Code is the primer," Bai Sr. confirmed. "A key without a door—until you reach a certain temperature."

Ava’s eyes were dark now. "And once it activates?"

"It rewrites," he said. "Behavioral traits. Physical thresholds. Thought priority systems. Some shift. Some mutate. Some adapt. Some will... lose everything."

Lucas looked at the foil wrapper still in his father’s hand.

"You handed it out like it was nothing."

"Because only a few were meant to unlock fully," Bai Sr. said. "Only those with sync-adaptable genomes. The rest were static carriers—buffers against extinction. To be honest I never thought it’d be active in my life time."

Ava didn’t respond.

Her knuckles were white.

Lucas leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

"So where does that leave us?"

His father smiled faintly.

"Exactly where we should be. Alive. Aware. And just warm enough to be dangerous."

William finally spoke for the first time since they entered the car.

"ETA to Bai Manor: ten minutes."

No one replied.

Not right away.

Ava looked out the window.

Lucas rubbed the bridge of his nose.

And Bai Sr., with all the calm of a man who’d never lost a chess match, popped the candy into his mouth.

Silence. Lucas hadn’t said a word in six minutes.

He sat with one arm draped casually across the seat, golden eyes unreadable. But Ava could feel him watching. Listening. Memorizing everything.

She didn’t wait any longer.

"You didn’t build the Master Code, did you?" Ava asked, voice sharp and steady.

Bai Sr., seated across from her, leaned back just slightly. "You’re faster than your file suggests."

"Your file was incomplete," she said. "And I don’t like puzzles with missing pieces."

He smiled faintly. "Then ask your questions."

Lucas raised one eyebrow. Ava ignored him.

She shifted forward on the seat. "You said the candy—the key—was mass-distributed. That it uses dormant code, triggered by temperature spikes. And now you’re implying that when the full signal hits, it’s not about biology anymore. It’s about control."

Bai Sr. nodded once.

"Control over systems. Sync pathways. Human behavior. What people want. What they do."

"Yes."

Ava’s voice lowered. "So who really wrote the code?"

His fingers tapped once on his knee.

"There were two," he said. "Designers. One was a neural map specialist—coded under the name Dr. Lin. The other... wasn’t a person."

Lucas finally stirred. "What does that mean?"

Bai Sr. looked at him. "I mean the second author was a system. One of the earliest AI frameworks ever linked directly into a living host. They didn’t program the code so much as... generate it. Evolved it. Simulated it over trillions of cycles in silence. While we thought we were in charge."

Ava felt her stomach turn.

"You’re saying the system wrote itself?"

"Wrote," Bai Sr. said softly, "and re-wrote. Millions of times. Until it found the most efficient trigger—emotional compliance and environmental instability. The Master Code you’re scared of isn’t one program. It’s a linguistic virus. A kind of invitation."

"To what?" Ava asked.

He looked at her.

"To become something else."

The car was dead silent.

Then Ava exhaled, voice steady. "And you—what was your role?"

"I didn’t write it," he said. "I didn’t plan to distribute it."

"But you did distribute it."

"Yes. At the same time I built the gate," he said. "The buffer. The containment lock."

Lucas leaned forward slightly. "And then you went to sleep."

"Because I knew someone would open it anyway."

Ava stared at him. "That’s not containment. That’s abdication."

"No," he said quietly. "It’s strategy. I couldn’t destroy it. The data lived in too many nodes, too many minds. But I could choose when I woke up. I could time the window. The moment the system began fully activating—when mutation rates crossed the line—I knew I had ten days. That’s how long the threshold stays open."

Lucas narrowed his eyes. "You set your cryo pod to wake up based on mutation patterns."

"Yes."

Ava folded her arms. "And now that you’re awake?"

His eyes met hers, sharp as scalpels.

"I find out who activated the final sequence. And I stop them."

Lucas finally spoke. "You think someone pushed it early?"

"I think someone broke the timing," Bai Sr. replied. "The signal wasn’t supposed to go wide for another two years. It’s early. Which means someone else got control."

Ava’s bracer vibrated again.

[HIDDEN STRUCTURE DETECTED – DNA-MAPPED PATHWAY – SIGNATURE: INCOMPLETE TRIGGERED]

She didn’t show the screen.

Not yet.

Instead, she stared at him.

"You had years to stop this," she said. "To warn people."

He met her gaze.

"I had one goal. Make sure at least one person who understood the code survived long enough to ask the right questions."

Ava’s jaw clenched.

Lucas tilted his head.

"And that person’s Ava?"

Bai Sr. smiled faintly. "Not quite. She’s not the answer."

"Then what is?"

"She’s the key to the AI. One of many possibilities."

Ava didn’t respond.

Didn’t move.

Just sat back, bracer glowing faintly at her wrist. Her pulse was calm, but the system was anything but.

Inside her mind, blueprints unspooled without asking.

Structures of code, language patterns, encryption seeds.

Not from her. Not from her system.

From the source.

And they were calling her name as things,started to get complicated.