Valmont Series - Inheritance Code

Chapter 3.4 - Echelon Is Watching

In contrast to his sister, Aiden didn't drift off easily.

Not because he couldn't — Avalon's Suite was designed to command rest, with neural lulls and precision-tuned comfort.

But his mind wouldn't submit.

Curiosity thrummed beneath his skin, sharp and restless.

This wasn't just a room.

This was a system.

A nexus of technology and opportunity woven into architecture.

And he was wired to crack it open.

He hadn't gone straight to bed.

Instead, he settled into a sleek, cocoon-like recliner positioned near the panoramic glass wall, its surface adjusting seamlessly to cradle him the moment he leaned back. The chair felt less like furniture and more like an extension of the room — weightless, adaptive, perfectly tuned to his body.

Outside, there was no whimsical cityscape or glowing skyline to admire.

The view — if it could even be called that — was pure Echelon:

A curated canvas of soft neutrals and translucent data streams, quietly cycling through metrics, research feeds, and academic leaderboards.

Even the colors shifted subtly as he watched — cool gradients and desaturated tones calculated by Echelon's environmental algorithms to reduce cognitive fatigue and sharpen neural clarity.

This wasn't aesthetic.

It was functional elegance, distilled for one purpose: focus.

Aiden could feel it working.

The faint hum of filtered air — laced with micro-ionized oxygen — kept his mind alert yet smooth, tensionless.

His eyes glided across the data effortlessly. No harsh glare. No visual noise.

Even the ambient resonance — not quite music — was tuned to theta waves, calibrating his brain into its optimal cognitive zone.

Not relaxed. Not distracted.

Just perfectly aligned for pure input.

But Aiden's eyes weren't even on the view anymore.

He was already wired in.

His ONYX pulsed softly as he synced his Quantum Slate with a flick of his fingers.

Immediately, the device lit up, casting crisp holographic panes into the air before him. Every module of Avalon's infrastructure came alive in perfect synchronicity — AvaNET's vast network threading through it all like veins beneath skin.

No clunky menus. No lag.

Just instant access.

"Connected," Vox confirmed smoothly, its voice ambient through the Suite as both his ONYX and Slate projected his options.

Aiden's eyes roved across the floating interface. This wasn't a simple dashboard.

It was everything.

Personal Pathways → masterfully engineered advancement blueprints, sculpted by AVNX Core to synchronize individual intellect, House specialization, and preordained legacy arcs — making progress not random, but inevitable.

Veritas → The official social matrix of Avalon, where every profile, achievement, and network link quietly defines one's social standing and visibility. In Veritas, connection is not casual — it is currency.