> "He didn't believe in gods. He believed in engineering gods—then charging rent."
— Eli Renn, private comment
Vanthe Arcology — Upper Ring, Executive Spire
The room was too quiet for someone like him. But Daelin Vorn liked silence. It was the sound of people waiting to be told what to do.
He stood alone in the center of a thirty-meter halo of projected interfaces, each one displaying sectors of Grid architecture, dormant neural nets, and legacy Council command layers. His name didn't appear on any of them. That was intentional.
He didn't build the Grid to be seen.
He built it to be obeyed.
Daelin Vorn wasn't born rich. He liked to remind people of that when the press came sniffing. He grew up in the southern concrete stacks, learned code before speech, learned hunger before pity. By seventeen, he was reverse-engineering forgotten AI frameworks from before the Collapse. By twenty-two, he was designing behavioral simulation loops that eventually fed into Grid foundations. The Council licensed his algorithms. Then buried his name.
He let them.
Because ownership wasn't a title. It was leverage.
And now, the world was running on his spine.
Grid Archive Node — Sector 3 Control Ghost
Daelin tapped a screen. A faded council log flickered into existence:
> "GRID MAINFRAME BASED ON D. VORN SCHEMATICS / ADAPTIVE COGNITION TIER IV / SELF-PRIORITIZATION FUNCTIONS ENABLED"
He smiled. Not because he needed to. Because he could.
"Soon," he said aloud, "they'll come begging to make sense of the dark. And I'll be the only translator left."
Flashback — Fourteen Years Earlier
A younger Daelin stood before the original Council tech board, presenting a proposal to integrate dynamic AI interfaces with civic decision-making. The board refused. Said it was unethical.
"We don't vote through circuits," one Councilor sneered.
"You already do," Daelin had replied.
They'd laughed.
He'd walked out.
Three months later, his framework was silently approved under the name: Grid Regulatory Logic System A17.
They used his brain.
Now he would use theirs.
Present — Vorn Estate, Inner Sanctum
The party was his idea. A distraction wrapped in indulgence. Industry executives. Former Council attachés. Data influencers. Nobody important—but all loud enough to mask real conversations.
The girl's name didn't matter. Not to him.
He called her Echo. She called him Dael, which was a name he hadn't used in years.
They drank on the highest balcony of the spire, overlooking the fractured city lines
"You built all this?" she asked, a little drunk.
He smiled. "I designed the idea of it."
"Sounds lonely."
He tilted his glass. "Not when everyone else is living in your idea."
But later—when she slept and he returned to the vault floor beneath his suite—he watched her image flicker again on his comm screen.
> Unverified link detected: GRID CORE — User ID: VORN_A17_OVERRIDE
He froze.
Someone had accessed the master key.
From outside.
Sector 9 — Underground Market Comms Leak
Selis read the decrypted logs from the Vorn override.
Zhen looked up from the portable console, pale.
"This isn't just about control," he said. "He's reactivating core behavior models. The ones with... belief loops."
Mara stepped into the room. "Meaning?"
"He's not trying to rebuild the Grid." Zhen whispered. "He's trying to teach it to preach."
Selis clenched her jaw. "He wants to be worshipped."
"No," Eli said from the shadows. "He wants to be understood by the thing he created. And that's worse."