CHAPTER 73: BUILDING AN AGI (3)

The next morning.

Liam had no idea how much time had passed or the fact that he had stayed up the whole night until the first rays of sunlight started flooding into the penthouse suite.

"It’s morning already?" He muttered to himself, as he paused a bit and looked up from his laptop.

He picked up his phone from the nightstand to check the time, and he saw that it was already past seven in the morning.

Wow! I stayed up the whole night and I don’t feel anything.

He was actually surprised as his body was filled with energy and his eyes weren’t feeling heavy a bit.

Liam smiled, as he got up from the bed to stretch his body a little. His body wasn’t stiff but stretching his body after being in a position for too long was habitual to him.

After the light stretch, he walked to the bathroom to wash up.

Few minutes later, Liam was out of the bathroom and dressed. He picked up the tab and ordered breakfast.

With all that out of the way, the next thing for him to do was the most important thing of the day; sign-in.

"System, sign-in," he muttered.

[Ding!]

[Congratulations, Host, you received $5,000,000]

[You received 0.05% shares of

***

Liam nodded in satisfaction when he saw the sign-in rewards. Though they weren’t flashy or shocking, they are still of significant value.

The $5m reward has increased his account balance to $68m. And he was now inching even closer to his $100m target.

Actually, the truth about the $100m was that if Liam wanted to get the remaining balance or the whole $100m immediately, with the omni-science knowledge, there’s a legal way for him to do so.

This was especially so with the fact that he now has supercomputer grade laptop in his possession. With it, he can build a problem that will siphon the amount from the world’s financial market without leaving behind even the tiniest of digital footprint.

But the truth was that he wasn’t in a hurry. If he has got the money and purchased the molecular assembler, then what? The industrial wasn’t ready and since the device isn’t something that he can casually take out due to its size, and how advanced it looks, he will have to leave it in the inventory to be collecting dust.

Liam smiled to himself as he thought of the second reward. Including the second weekly sign-in, this was the fifth time he has received the shares of the company.

From the initial 0.5% stake worth $17.2 billion, his holdings in the company had now risen to 0.75%, with a total value of $25.7 billion.

His portfolionow stood at a staggering $35.8b. It was an insane number.

"I wonder what the system is building to with the consistent daily shares of the company," Liam thought to himself, with a curious look on his face.

Using what happened with JP Morgan shares, Liam could already guess what the system was planning to do with this and it made him to look forward to his third weekly sign-in.

Liam was still lost in his thoughts when a knock came from the door and it opened slowly, and the female staff from last night pushed the food cart in.

The female staff greeted him softly and wheeled the polished breakfast cart to the low dining table by the window.

The aroma of butter and coffee immediately filled the suite. Liam inclined his head politely, watching her as she carefully arranged each dish. Once she was finished, she bowed slightly and withdrew, leaving him alone with the meal.

Liam stood for a moment, his gaze drifting across the spread. A pot of dark roast coffee, its aroma rich and grounding. A basket of golden croissants. A plate of smoked salmon with thin slivers of red onion and lemon wedges. And finally, a porcelain bowl filled with bright fruit — slices of melon, ruby-red strawberries, blueberries glistening like jewels.

It wasn’t ostentatious, but there was a quiet refinement to it.

Swiss hospitality, he mused.

Even the simplest breakfast carried an air of deliberate perfection.

He took his seat and ate unhurriedly, savoring every flavor. He tasted the buttery flakiness of the croissant, the faint smokiness in the salmon, the delicate acidity of lemon zest cutting through.

When he was finished, he leaned back slightly, pressing the button on the wall. Moments later, the same staff member returned, bowing politely as she cleared the dishes with smooth efficiency.

She worked silently until the cart was once again neat and orderly. With another bow, she exited, leaving the penthouse steeped in silence once more.

Liam exhaled softly, rising from his chair. "Alright... back to it."

He returned to the bedroom, where the matte-black laptop waited patiently on the bed. Sliding into position, he placed his fingers over the keyboard.

The screen was filled with scrolling text, lines of code stretching endlessly downward.

To anyone else, it would have looked overwhelming — chaotic even. But to Liam, every symbol, every bracket, every nested loop was as clear as daylight. He scrolled briefly, eyes scanning, and saw the sheer mass of what he had built so far.

Over two hundred thousand lines and each one perfect.

He smiled to himself. Two hundred thousand lines would normally mean bugs — hundreds to thousands of them. Debugging sessions that could last weeks. But here, not a single one existed.

His enhanced cognition, his Perfect Memory, and the sheer brute computational assistance of the Splunge laptop had combined to make his work flawless.

His fingers began moving again, faster than the human eye could track. To an ordinary person, it would have looked like he was simply smacking the keys at random — a blur of movement, almost comical. But the screen told a different story.

Each keystroke birthed precise, complex instructions, woven together, as entire frameworks unfolded in seconds, modules linking seamlessly, subroutines self-balancing without intervention.

At his current pace, he was writing one hundred and fifty lines per minute — and none of them were wasted. The code wasn’t verbose. It was tight, elegant, compressed. It was the kind of architecture entire PhD teams might marvel at decades later and still fail to fully replicate.

And still, he wasn’t halfway done.

Hours passed in near silence, broken only by the rhythmic click of keys. Outside, the sun rose higher over Lake Geneva, spilling light across the mountains and painting the suite’s floor in shifting patterns.

At some point, Mason knocked softly to check in, but Liam didn’t even look up as he replied: "I’m fine."

By noon, his codebase had grown to nearly three hundred thousand lines. By mid-afternoon, it neared four hundred thousand.

And all the while, a thought lingered at the back of his mind.

What will you be?

The AGI wasn’t just another program. It wasn’t even just a powerful assistant. Once complete, it would be a consciousness — something that could learn, adapt, and evolve. A partner in every sense except biological.

He already knew its loyalty would be absolute. He had coded that in. But personality? That would come from training. From the data he chose to feed it, the directives he chose to prioritize.

Should it be coldly logical, like a machine god of calculation? Or warm and conversational, a partner who could blend seamlessly into human interactions?

As his mind circled the question, his fingers never slowed for a second.

But the thought of shaping an intelligence — one that could rival and perhaps surpass humanity — sent a subtle chill down his spine.

But then he remembered the vault. The parchment. The bond that tied him to dynasties and empires long gone.

Power, he realized, wasn’t always a choice. Sometimes it was an inheritance. Sometimes it was a responsibility.

Maybe... maybe this AGI wasn’t just for him.

Maybe it was part of the foundation for everything he was about to build. And that it would be.

By the time the golden light of evening began seeping into the room, Liam finally leaned back, exhaling deeply. His fingers hovered over the keys for a moment before he lowered the lid of the laptop.

He rubbed his temples lightly, though his body wasn’t tired, his mind was buzzing with the codes he’s yet to write.

He had written more than four hundred thousand lines of code in two days and he still wasn’t halfway there.

He stood, walking slowly to the wide windows overlooking Lake Geneva. The water shimmered under the last rays of sunlight, swans gliding across like pale ghosts.

Liam watched it for a while, then smiled to himself. He hopes that he can complete building the AGI soon. But he was going at his fastest, and had only written close to half a million lines of codes, and he still have more half a million more lines to write.

It’s gonna take a while.