Novel Full Chapter 628: A Wonderful Party
Chapter 628: A Wonderful Party
While the party ran at full momentum inside, the pictures taken by the guests were making the rounds on the internet.
The first ones hit LucidNet within twenty minutes of the group’s arrival and it was candid shots from across the venue, Liam mid-conversation with the neuroscience candidate, Lucy laughing at something Stacy had said, Yanxia in the gold dress with a small group gathered around her and the particular quality of light catching the fabric in a way that made the image look deliberately composed when it wasn’t.
The captions varied. Most landed somewhere in the same territory.
*Nova Technologies’ CEO, owner and founder. Pre-birthday party.*
*He just walks around like a normal person. He literally just walks around.*
*The AGI is at a party. The actual AGI is at an actual party and she looks like that.*
*Who is the woman in the gold dress. I need this answered immediately.*
The location question was the fastest question people asked and it came mostly from media house accounts, as some of them posted with requests directed at the guests who had uploaded images, asking for the venue, asking for an address, asking for anything that would let a camera crew reach the door before the evening ended.
None of the guests responded.
This was not coordination. Nobody had discussed it beforehand or made an agreement. The decision happened individually, independently, across dozens of people who arrived at the same place through different reasoning and produced the same result.
Some of them had simply looked at Liam across the party venue and done the arithmetic of what getting on his bad side might look like, and had decided that no media house’s request was worth finding out. Others had a simpler calculation — they were currently in the same room as him, and the room was good, and they wanted to stay in it.
The internet noticed the silence and drew its own conclusions.
*every guest has gone quiet about the location and that tells you everything you need to know about the soft power this man operates with*
*they’re not scared. they just don’t want to ruin something that’s working. that’s a different thing and it’s more interesting.*
*nobody is giving up the address. not one person. think about what that means for how he’s conducted himself tonight.*
The Yanxia thread moved separately from the location thread and moved faster.
Someone had replied to an image of her mid-conversation — hands expressive, the gold dress catching the venue light, the small crowd around her visibly engaged — with a single line: *she arrived with Liam Scott and Lucy.*
The reply thread beneath it filled immediately.
*WHO IS SHE*
*she arrived with him and the AGI and nobody led with this*
*the gold dress. I’m not moving past the gold dress until someone explains who is wearing it.*
*someone in the comments said she’s a family member. that’s all we have.*
*FAMILY MEMBER. His family trait comment is haunting me again.*
Inside, none of this had reached Liam’s awareness in any way that mattered. The party had found its rhythm and he had settled into it, and the two hours that followed the birthday toast moved the way good evenings moved — unevenly, with better moments and quieter ones, the floor filling and thinning as the night progressed.
He had two more conversations he hadn’t anticipated.
The first was with a woman named Priya, an architect in her early thirties who had attended because she knew Kristopher through a mutual friend and had not expected to end up standing next to the most talked-about person on Earth explaining load distribution in adaptive structures. The conversation lasted nine minutes. She said afterward to the person she’d come with that it had felt like the most productive nine minutes of her professional life, which she described as both exciting and slightly disorienting.
The second was with a man named Joel who hadn’t been trying to reach Liam at all. He had been crossing the room for a drink and had ended up beside him at the bar by accident, and they had talked for four minutes about a film they had both apparently seen and had differing opinions on, and Joel had held his own in the disagreement and left without fully processing that the disagreement had been with Liam Scott specifically. He worked this out in the car home and did not sleep well.
By eleven, the room had the quality of an evening that had peaked and was now enjoying its own ending. The floor was still active but the conversations had shifted becoming quieter, more settled, as people moving toward their groups of closest company rather than across the room toward new ones.
Kristopher read it correctly and moved to the podium.
He struck his glass once with a fork and the room gathered its attention toward him the way rooms did for hosts who had earned it.
"I want to thank you all again for coming," he said. He had the ease of someone who had been in front of people his whole life and had never needed to perform it. "I had been worried earlier today. With everything that’s been happening — you all know what I mean — I thought the party would be difficult. That it might get away from us somehow." He looked around the room. "I was worried for nothing. Every one of you made tonight exactly what I hoped it would be." He paused. "I didn’t prepare much, and I know that. So forgive me for that."
The crowd responded before he finished the sentence. Several voices from different corners of the room said variations of the same thing — that he had nothing to apologize for, that the evening had been exactly right, that being in the same room as Liam Scott was already more than they had expected when they accepted the invitation.
Kristopher smiled and stepped down.
Liam was already moving toward the podium before anyone prompted him. He had understood what the moment required and had made his decision about it, which was to keep it short and mean it.
He stepped up and looked at the room — at the faces turned toward him, at his friends in their section of the venue, at Yanxia who had turned from whatever conversation she’d been in and was watching him attentively, at Lucy who had her hands folded.
"I want to say thank you," he said. "To Kristopher, for the evening. To everyone in this room for how you’ve conducted yourselves tonight." He picked up his glass telekinetically from the edge of the podium where he had set it earlier. "And to the people who have been here through all of it — you know who you are."
He raised the glass toward his friends’ section specifically for one beat before extending it outward to the room.
The room raised theirs.
He drank and stepped down and the cheer that followed was genuine and warm and slightly louder than the birthday toast had been, which was the right order for these things.
Kristopher materialized at his shoulder as he stepped off the platform.
"Short," Kristopher said.
"It was enough," Liam said.
"It was exactly enough," Kristopher agreed. "That’s what I meant."
The party ran twenty more minutes on its own momentum — the floor filling one last time as the DJ pulled the energy up for a closing run, conversations finishing themselves, the lights came up slightly and the crowd understood the signal.
The goodbyes moved through the space organically. People found each other, said what needed saying, exchanged contact information with the optimism of evenings that had gone well. Several people passed near Liam’s group on their way out and offered a nod or a word, and he received each one with the same even attention he’d given the orbit earlier.
Yanxia said goodbye to the six people, ladies, she had been talking to across the evening with what appeared to be genuine reluctance, which several of those people would describe later as the most unexpectedly moving part of their night.
Lucy had collected what she described internally as fourteen new data points about human social behavior that had not appeared in any prior database she’d accessed, and was satisfied with the evening on those grounds independent of everything else.
The group moved toward the exit together, slightly loose in formation, individual but adjacent.
Outside, the night air was cool after the warmth of the venue. The street was quiet, the small crowd that had gathered earlier long gone.
Liam looked at the group for a moment — all of them slightly warmer than they’d been at the start of the evening, Kristopher with the satisfied expression of a host whose plan had executed correctly, Matt already looking at his phone, Harper standing with his hands in his jacket pockets looking at nothing in particular.
"Good night," he said.
The response came back in the scattered, overlapping way of a group that had been together long enough that goodbyes didn’t need ceremony.
He stood on the sidewalk while the others moved toward their cars, and Yanxia took his arm, and Lucy appeared on his other side, and for a moment the three of them stood in the quiet street with the city moving around them and the party behind them and everything else waiting where it always waited.
"The gold dress was the right choice," Yanxia said.
"I told you," Liam said.