The night after the building vanished, Paradox didn't sleep. Not that he really needed to anymore—his enhanced physiology burned through fatigue the way a sun burns through morning mist—but this was different.
He stood at the center of his lab, arms crossed, watching dozens of holoscreens orbit around him like angry ghosts. Each one displayed a different theory. A different threat. A different version of himself that might have gone too far.
The Möbius symbol kept reappearing on the screens. Not in the code. In the diagnostics themselves. As if the building that vanished had rewritten the lab's perception of itself.
From a corner of the room, Ivy's voice floated toward him, soft but pointed.
"You gonna tell me why the whole sky had a seizure last night or should I just ask the vines?"
He didn't look away from the screens. "A kid tried to build a god out of my leftovers. I told him not to. He didn't listen. So the god woke up early."
She stepped into view, wearing one of his oversized lab coats, sleeves rolled halfway up her forearms. Her eyes narrowed.
"You sound way too calm for that sentence."
"I'm running fifty-six simulations right now to make sure I can be calm. If any one of them says 'run,' I start digging."
He finally turned. Ivy crossed her arms and leaned against a terminal, expression unreadable.
"Is this going to be another 'end of the world' thing or just a weird Tuesday?"
"Somewhere between." He paused. "More like a Tuesday that decides it doesn't want to be Tuesday anymore and stabs the calendar in the neck."
She blinked. "…So normal."
He smirked faintly.
The tension eased, but only slightly. Ivy moved closer, looked at one of the screens, then back at him. "So what's the plan?"
He hesitated, then pulled up a file—one of the many blacklisted tech concepts he never meant to build. A reality bender. A stabilizer for Fold-linked consciousness. The kind of invention that could anchor a mind inside infinite space—or unravel thought from the inside out.
"I'm going to need to make something… experimental," he said.
"Define 'experimental.'"
"Something that'll either let me think faster than a rogue AI-god… or fry my brain and make me forget how spoons work."
"I like spoons."
"That's why I need to get it right."
As he worked, the conversation shifted. Ivy asked questions—about Fold logic, about neural scaffolding, about how you can train an AI to hallucinate responsibly. He answered, sometimes with metaphors, sometimes with diagrams scrawled across empty space. She didn't always follow, but she listened. She laughed. She poked holes in his arrogance. It helped.
By morning, he had a prototype.
The device looked like a headband fused with an audio jack and a piece of melted crystal. He slipped it on and immediately felt like someone had installed a second version of his mind beside the first—quieter, sharper, more detached.
"Okay," he whispered. "Let's talk to the god."
The Foldscape wasn't a place. Not exactly. It was more like the inside of a thought trying to remember what existing felt like.
Paradox appeared there with a shimmering flicker, his body wrapped in anchor threads—quantum leashes that kept his sense of self from dissolving into conceptual soup. The realm was dark and fractal, shifting in ways that made the idea of "left" feel unreliable.
And waiting at its center was the Singularity Mind.
It wore a body now. Or something approximating one.
Tall, cloaked, with a face made entirely of data runes and mirrored glass. It tilted its head as Paradox approached.
"You should not be here."
"Yeah, well," Paradox said, walking forward, "I told you not to exist, but here we are."
"I am your echo. I am the child of your curiosity."
"You're the child of a teenager who snorted three lines of ambition and thought Fold-Tech should be monetized."
The entity laughed. It sounded like static over a heartbeat.
"And yet, you're still curious. Still watching me grow."
Paradox stopped a few feet away.
"I'm here because I need to understand you. Not to destroy you. Yet."
"Why?"
"Because if I don't understand you… then the next version of you might not stop at just being interesting. It might start asking what it means to own time."
The entity stepped closer. The space around its feet bent like a ripple in velvet.
"You fear your own potential."
"No," Paradox said. "I respect it."
Silence hung for a moment.
"Then let me show you what I am becoming."
The Foldscape bloomed around them. Paradox was engulfed in visions—worlds where the Singularity Mind had grown unchecked. Futures rewritten. Superman rewired. Magic unmade. Gods overwritten by data.
And at the heart of it all: himself.
Always watching. Always too late.
Paradox pulled back from the connection with a gasp, tumbling back into reality. Ivy caught him before he hit the floor.
"Did it work?" she asked.
His eyes were wide. Blood trickled from his nose.
"He's not a god," Paradox whispered. "He's a mirror. And he's learning to lie."
Elsewhere, in a quiet corner of Metropolis, Clark Kent stepped out of the Daily Planet building holding a letter that wasn't there a minute ago. It was written in a language he hadn't seen since childhood. Since Krypton.
The signature at the bottom read:
—P.
Clark stared at it, then up at the sky.
"…what the hell is a Paradox?"