I swim faster than I need to.
Not because I'm in danger. Because staying still makes my thoughts louder, and right now they don't need encouragement. Water parts around me easily, my body moving on instinct alone, the shoreline slowly resolving from dark suggestion into shape.
The missed call still hovers in my vision.
I surface once, draw in air I don't actually need, and keep moving.
When my feet finally touch sand, I don't stop. I walk straight out of the water, suit dripping,
Bring the interface forward and tap CALL BACK.
It rings.
Once.
Twice.
Then
"Ethan?
Her voice is tight. Not panicked Controlled, the way someone sounds when they're trying not to let a thought slip out wrong.
"Yeah," I say. "I'm here."
There's a pause. I hear fabric shift on her end. A door closing. Privacy.
"I didn't know if you'd pick up," she says.
"I wouldn't have missed it."
That's true. Even if it scares me a little.
"I don't know how to start this," she says.0
And exhales, longer this time.
"They want me to speak again," she says. "Not… not the big stuff. Smaller groups. Youth nights. College outreach."
I lean against a low dune, looking out at the water. "About?"
"You already know," she says, and there's something tired in her voice now. "Purity. Faith. Doing things the right way. Saying no to things before they become problems."
I don't interrupt.
"They say it like it's simple," she continues. "Like it's a checklist. Like if you just don't cross certain lines, you stay… clean."
She hesitates.
"And I don't think that's how people actually work."
I scrape wet sand off my palm absently.
"No," I say. They not
"They want me to talk like I know," she says. "Like I'm sure. Like God is always clear, always present, always answering if you listen hard enough."
Her voice drops. "Sometimes I listen, and there's nothing."
The words hang between us.
Not dramatic. Just honest.
"And when that happens," she adds quietly, "I don't know if I'm supposed to admit it. Or pray harder. Pretend it didn't happen."
I close my eyes.
"They don't want questions," she says.
Want reassurance. And I give it to them. I smile, say the right things, make it sound like faith is this straight line you walk until everything works out."
She laughs once, short and sharp.
"And then I go home and feel like I lied to a room full of people who trusted me."
"You didn't lie," I say.
She scoffs softly. "That's generous."
"No," I correct. "That's specific. Lying is saying something false because it benefits you. You're saying something incomplete because you think it protects them."
There's silence.
"That's… not better," she says.
"I didn't say it was," I answer. "Just different."
She shifts again. I imagine her sitting on her bed, phone pressed to her ear, staring at nothing.
"I don't even know if my faith is mine," she admits. "Or if it's just… inherited. Like a family recipe you never question because everyone says it's sacred."
I feel that land somewhere deep.
"I believe," she says quickly. "I do. I'm not saying I don't. I pray. I feel something sometimes. But I don't know where I end and expectations begin."
Her voice tightens. "And if I say that out loud, people look at me like I'm breaking something."
I think about orbit. About analysts staring at a grainy image and trying to fit it into boxes they already understand.
"They're afraid of uncertainty," I say. "People usually are."
"Say doubt is dangerous," she replies. "That it leads people astray."
"Doubt is how you check whether something is actually yours," I say.
She's quiet for a moment.
"Do you believe in God?" she asks suddenly.
The question isn't confrontational. It's careful. Curious.
"I don't know," I say honestly.
She exhales, a sound that's almost relief.
"Thank you for not pretending."
"I used to think certainty was strength," continue. "Tonight made it pretty clear it's mostly agreement. Enough people deciding to stop asking the same question."
She hums. "That sounds… disappointing."
"It is," I say. "But it's also freeing."
"How?"
"Because it means you're not broken for questioning," I answer. "It means the system just isn't built to handle honesty."
She laughs softly this time. "You always make it sound so clinical."
"That's how I survive things."
"I figured."
There's a pause where neither of us rushes to fill the space.
"I don't want to lie anymore," she says finally. "But I don't want to hurt people either."
"You don't have to do either," I say. "You can talk about uncertainty. About struggle. That's still faith. Just… unfinished."
"They won't like that."
"people rarely do."
She sighs. "Sometimes I think they want a version of me that doesn't exist."
"I know the feeling."
She catches that. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
She doesn't ask for details. I appreciate that.
"I'm glad I called you," she says after a moment.
"Me too."
"You sound different," she adds. "Calmer. Or… further away."
I glance back at the ocean.
"Long night," I say.
She smiles into the phone. I can hear it.
"Yeah," she says. "Mine too."
When the call ends, I stay where I am.
The water keeps moving. The world keeps spinning. Somewhere, people are still arguing over certainty and control and who gets to define truth.
But right now, it's just quiet.
Annie didn't ask me to fix anything.
She didn't want answers.
Just didn't want to lie anymore.
And somehow, after everything that happened tonight, that feels the most real
Acceleration
When the call ends, I don't move right away.
The ocean keeps breathing behind me, waves folding into themselves with the same indifference they've had for millions of years. Somewhere inland, lights flicker on and off, people settling into routines that assume the world is stable and understandable.
It isn't.
And now, it knows that something else exists outside the frame.
They saw me.
Not me not a name or face. But enough. Enough to force questions. Enough to break the illusion that every superhuman phenomenon fits inside a corporate structure with a marketing department.
That's the problem.
Not fear but
Lack of control.
I walk until the sand gives way to stone, then stop again. My mind has finally slowed enough to work properly, not racing, or drifting to Annie's problems just thinking.
The consequences start lining themselves up automatically.
Governments don't panic first. categorize and calculate risk.
Institutions don't ask what something is. They ask who owns it.
And if the answer is "no one," that's when things get complicated.
They don't know I exist as a person.
That's my advantage.
Right now, I'm a data point. Anomaly. File with red stamps and cautious language. They'll argue about origin, capability, affiliation. Some will assume Vought. Others will assume a competitor that doesn't exist yet.
Which means time.
Time, however, is no longer abundant.
I crossed a threshold tonight. Not by flying into space but by forcing the world to notice something it can't immediately explain. That kind of attention doesn't fade. It sharpens.
They will watch the sky more closely.
And eventually, they'll want leverage.
By the time I reach the road, the decision has already formed.
I need to accelerate.
Not recklessly.
Strategically.
The factory lights come on automatically when I step inside. Subterranean levels hum awake beneath my feet, systems syncing to my presence. Servers warm, sensors adjust, the AI unfolding itself from standby into awareness.
It doesn't speak unless I ask it to.
That's deliberate.
I don't need affirmation. Need execution.
Compound V moves to the front of my thoughts.
Not as a miracle or as a curse.
As a tool.
Vought treats it like a divine substance branding it, mythologizing it, wrapping it in narratives about destiny and superiority. That's nonsense. What it actually is, is a messy, unstable biological catalyst that triggers mutations at random and calls the survivors "chosen."v is truly amazing and I don't take away the genius of whoever created it, even though he was ideologically extreme.
There's nothing holy about that.
And nothing optimized.
My scans confirm what I've suspected for years.
Compound V doesn't grant powers.
It removes safeguards.
Destabilizes cellular regulation, amplifies expression pathways, forces evolution to roll dice it was never meant to roll at human speed. Most bodies fail. Some adapt. A few stabilize.
That's not divinity.
Only probability.
Which means it can be improved.
Controlled.
Redirected.
If I understand how V rewrites biology.
I can isolate why certain traits stabilize while others degrade l. Can do what Vought never bothered to do:
Design outcomes instead of gambling on them.
And more importantly
Prevent dependency.
The irony isn't lost on me.
World is afraid of an uncontrolled superpower, and their response will be to tighten control everywhere else. Surveillance. Contracts. Ownership.
I don't want that future.
So I need alternatives ready before they start looking for them.
Technology is the obvious vector.
Not weapons. Infrastructure.
AI-driven systems that outperform existing models so thoroughly they become unavoidable. Medical diagnostics that catch diseases before symptoms exist. Optimization software that quietly replaces outdated human decision loops.
Not miracles.
Tools that work better than anything else.
My brain already runs circles around modern computation. The AI I've built is an extension of that less intelligent, but tireless. It can sift oceans of data, test hypotheses at speed, simulate outcomes that would take human teams decades.
Together, we're already past what Earth is prepared to acknowledge.
The trick is how to introduce it.
I'll start as a company.
Clean. Legitimate. Boring on the surface.
A technology firm that solves problems no one else can. One breakthrough at a time. Enough distance between the product and the person behind it that no one asks the wrong questions too early.
By the time they realize how far ahead the tech really is
It'll be everywhere.
Too embedded to remove.
I stand in the center of the lab, lights reflecting off polished metal and glass, thinking about Annie.
About her standing on stages, pressured to present certainty she doesn't feel.
About me, floating above the planet, becoming something no one voted for.
We're both dealing with systems that hate uncertainty.
The difference is that I can rewrite mine.
I bring up the project timelines and start moving things forward.
V research advances to priority one.
AI deployment scaffolding accelerates.
Corporate front-end planning begins quietly.
They saw something tonight.
Something they can't control.
If the world is going to react to that, I want to be ready not as a god, not as a weapon
But as someone who already built the future they're scrambling toward.
And this time, I won't let anyone pretend it happened by accident.