CHAPTER SEVEN: THE GOD THAT BLEEDS CODE
(Point of View: Paku Shinomiya .. Mr. P)
You don't survive being a genius in a world built by believers.
You learn to lie.
You learn to smile at the right moments. Stutter when you don't have to. Pretend the room isn't already solved the moment you walked into it. Do it long enough, congratulations you full of bullshit.
Once, long before he became "Mr. P," Paku Shinomiya didn't wear lab coats with jokes scrawled on the back. He didn't drink coffee like it was penance. He didn't laugh about his own death.
Back then, he wore black priest robes.
And he was a devout man.
Until the Church asked him to basically to kill his son.
...
Twelve Years Before the Rupture : The Central Cathedral of Reiken, Vault 13.
The child screamed.
Elian's body arched against the restraints, his tiny frame glowing with golden sigils, his veins like molten threads under paper-thin skin.
Above him, three bishops in robes the color of ash stood over the baptism chamber, chanting in the language of so called heaven... a language Paku once thought he understood.
Paku stood behind the glass, fists clenched so hard his fingernails cut into his palms. He watched his son writhe.
"He's too young," he whispered.
Akane... his wife... stood beside him. Fierce, beautiful, unbending even with tears streaking down her face. She gripped his arm tightly, fingers bruising his flesh.
"They said it will make holy right, his grace," she choked. "They said he'd be chosen."
"They said a lot of things."
On the other side of the chamber, Akira Kagami.. the man who would one day call himself Zero... watched silently. His hands folded. His face unreadable. He abit odd that day, different from Akira I knew who bore kindness, empathy.
Paku hated him in that moment.
Not because Akira was cruel.
But because Akira seemed to have believed this is the right way.
...
That night, Paku broke into the cathedral server.
It took thirty-two seconds.
He bypassed the Church's encryption keys, rerouted the firewall through a false transdimensional loop, embedded a logic bomb in the purification code.
He didn't even blink as the last line executed.
"If they baptize him again," he muttered, "they baptize a virus."
On the terminal screen, his final line of code burned in white:
Elian dies, or the world breaks.
I'm betting on the world.
The next morning, they came.
The bishops. The black suits.
They didn't come to reason.
They came to erase. To Purify and bring about a new dawn.
Paku and Akane ran.
They made it halfway.
Akane died shielding Elian from a blast of holy light.
The boy disappeared.... not dead, not alive swallowed by the rupture between realms.
And Paku?
He lived.
But something in him shattered.
And he never wore religious robes again.
...
Present Day : Mr. P's Lab, Eden.
The clones were arguing again.
Clone 14 was lecturing Clone 9 about heat shield configurations on the backup Luther chamber.
Clone 7 sat in the corner muttering about how "coffee is a human right" over and over again.
And Paku... Clone 2.. watched from his desk, cold espresso in one hand, expression flat.
"You know," he muttered to no one, "people think the clones are jokes."
Clone 9 glanced up, puzzled. "We're not?"
"No," Paku said softly. "You're contingency."
"For what?"
He sipped his drink, grimaced at the taste, and answered:
"For when I forget which version of me is still sane."
Clone 7 belched loudly.
Paku tapped his temple with two fingers. His head flickered faintly, code running through invisible circuits stitched into his cerebral cortex.
Five parallel streams of thought ran at once, interweaving like a symphony:
1. The probability Zero would trigger the Ascension Rite early.
2. The likelihood Luther had begun seeing Naomi in hallucinations.
3. The divine-mortal frequency coordinates where Elian might still exist.
4. The drone feed returning from Zone 0.
5. A sixth thought, still unfinished, still circling his mind like a predator.
He stopped.
That sixth thought…
It landed. Heavy as thunder.
"Rei's moving again," he whispered.
He slid from his chair, walked across the room to a mirror.
Not glass. Soul-glass. One of the few things he'd stolen from the Church before everything burned.
It flared with faint violet light.
Rei Kagami's signature bloomed in the reflection... down in the lower sanctum, right where he shouldn't be.
"Of course," Paku said softly. "Looking for Naomi's file. You always were the curious one."
He didn't warn security.
Didn't stop him.
Let him look.
Let them all look.
They thought the game was a puzzle.
They didn't know Paku Shinomiya no longer lived in puzzles.
He was the labyrinth.
...
Flashback : The Week After Akane's Death
He didn't cry.
Didn't scream.
He built.
He barricaded himself in an abandoned warehouse, wires wrapped around his fingers like veins, his skin raw and burning, the air thick with ozone.
In seventy-two hours, he birthed the first Luther prototype... a neural shell assembled from fragments of Elian's sanctification code, wrapped in stolen angelic matter. Thinking if maybe, just maybe if am able to link Elian's soul with something. Will I be able to track down.
It failed.
It screamed for nine hours before it melted.
Prototype Two exploded on the table.
Prototype Three begged him to end its life and sobbed when he granted the request.
Prototype Four whispered "Father ?"before it burned out.
But Prototype Five…
Didn't speak.
Didn't scream.
It simply watched him.
And he knew. He was getting closer.
He recorded himself then, his voice hoarse and thin:
"If you build a god to save your son… and that god fails… did you just build a monster?"
"And if that monster weeps… did you make a mistake? Or did you give birth?"
Even now, he didn't know the answer.
So he kept building.
And when he no longer trusted himself to make the call… he cloned himself.
Once. Then again. Then again.
At first, they were disposable. Backups. Simulators.
But one became his conscience.
One, his doubt.
One, his rage. And another his sadness.
They stopped being clones.
They became mirrors.
Because he no longer trusted what he saw in his own reflection.
...
Present Day : Eden.
Paku sat on the edge of his workbench, watching the monitors.
Luther was meditating on screen. But his shoulders trembled. His breath was uneven.
He wasn't praying.
He wasn't thinking.
He was breaking.
"Naomi," Paku whispered to the empty room.
"I'm sorry."
A pause.
He reached for a scalpel on the table, turned it in the light.
"You asked me to save him. I tried."
His reflection stared back at him from the blade... lined with exhaustion, sunken with guilt.
He smiled.
A hollow, brittle thing.
"I think I built his killer instead."
A knock at the door broke the silence.
One of the clones peeked in, nervous.
"Sir… the Observer Council wants to know if you've delivered the Luther reboot module yet."
"Tell them I died."
"They said that last time."
Paku waved vaguely toward the door.
"Then tell them I died more meaningfully this time."
The clone retreated.
He stayed there a while longer, sitting on the desk, staring at the scalpel in his palm, then set it down.
He stood, walked to the mirror on the wall, and stared at his own reflection for what felt like a long, long time.
The smile never reached his eyes.
"Time to lie to the gods again," he murmured.
And the reflection... faintly, almost imperceptibly... smiled back at him.
...
END OF CHAPTER SEVEN