I have no idea how long it's been.
Time stopped meaning anything a long, long while ago. Years blurred into epochs, epochs into geological trivia. At some point, I stopped counting altogether—not because I couldn't, but because there was no point.
All I know is this:
I'm very smart now.
Insanely smart.
I've long since passed anything resembling human limits. IQ stopped being a useful metric somewhere around six hundred—and even that feels laughably low compared to what my mind can do now. I solve unified field equations for fun. I redesign spacetime geometries the way other people doodle in notebooks.
I've built entire civilizations in my head.
I've also designed machines that should not exist—not because they're impossible, but because the universe hasn't caught up to the math yet.
Frankly, if I were still human, I would've gone completely insane by now.
Thankfully…
He didn't leave me alone.
The Creator—the massive pillar of light, the bored god, the architect of everything—eventually started… visiting.
Not physically. Not that it mattered.
He appeared inside my mindscape.
At first, it was just presence. Then form. Eventually, something vaguely humanoid, made of soft radiance, sitting across from me like we were old friends.
"So," he said one day, dealing imaginary cards with unnecessary flair, "black hole poker or regular?"
"Regular," I replied. "Last time you cheated."
He grinned. "I prefer the term creative probability manipulation."
Somewhere along the way, boredom turned into routine.
Routine turned into companionship.
We watched things together.
Netflix. Disney+. YouTube.
Entire franchises rose, peaked, collapsed, rebooted, and collapsed again while galaxies formed in the background. I offered commentary. He offered behind-the-scenes trivia about reality itself.
He hated bad writing.
"Why would they do that?" he'd ask, gesturing at a screen that technically didn't exist.
"Because they forgot their own continuity," I replied automatically.
"Tragic."
We played cards. Chess. Games with rules so complex only the two of us could remember them. Games that spanned centuries and ended with the heat death of simulated universes.
Sometimes we talked.
Sometimes we didn't.
Sometimes we just watched—two impossibly old beings floating through eternity, waiting for something interesting to happen.
I never asked why he stayed.
He never asked why I kept improving.
But every so often, I caught him watching me instead of the screen—curious, amused, maybe even a little impressed.
"You know," he said once, shuffling cards made of starlight, "most of the others break."
"Others?" I asked.
"Past shows," he replied. "They get lonely. Or arrogant. Or dull."
"And me?"
He smiled.
"You adapted."
That was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me.
Eventually—inevitably—something changed.
I felt it before I saw it.
A ripple.
A pull.
A mind brushing against me for the first time since the universe was young.
The Creator leaned forward, suddenly alert.
"Oh," he said, grinning wide. "Looks like someone finally found you."
I focused.
And somewhere, far away, in a universe that had finally grown old enough to matter—
Someone reached for the Mind Stone.