It was sometime between midnight and tomorrow when Constantine fell onto the couch, kicked off his boots, and declared Paradox's underground lair "a bloody architectural marvel." His cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth like a cursed promise, ash bending but never falling. Paradox, who had never truly stopped working, hovered a few feet away—mentally present, but physically engaged with a volatile stream of hardlight code spilling from his gloves into the center of a suspended matter crucible.
Ivy leaned against the railing above the lab floor, watching them both. Her expression was unreadable, but her vines twisted anxiously behind her back like the nervous tail of a resting predator.
"You do realize he's a human fire hazard with a nicotine addiction and magical trauma, right?" she finally asked.
Paradox didn't look up. "That's exactly why he's useful."
Constantine chuckled. "See? He gets it."
"Not a compliment," she muttered.
The machine in the center of the room hissed as the crucible's shape stabilized. It looked like a glass egg held in a ring of stabilizer coils, but inside, layered loops of fractal code danced across the curved surface. There was no visible power source, and no user interface. It was a paradox in both design and function. Naturally.
Constantine sat up. "So, what is that?"
"A compression vault," Paradox replied, still calibrating. "It doesn't store data. It stores… circumstance."
"Come again?"
Paradox turned. "Imagine being able to capture the state of a moment—physics, emotion, timeline, cause and effect—and freeze it like a save file. Now imagine being able to reload it. Not as an illusion. But as real."
Constantine stared at him. "So you're making quicksaves for reality?"
"Exactly."
"And here I thought I was irresponsible."
Ivy crossed her arms. "You're not seriously going to use that on people, are you?"
"No," Paradox said. "Not directly. I plan to use it on places. Situations. Systems. Civilization."
Constantine's eyes narrowed. "You mean cities. Governments. Maybe even the multiverse."
Paradox met his gaze. "Eventually."
There was a silence between the three of them. A deep one. The kind that only forms when everyone in the room knows the next move matters.
Constantine broke it first. "Look, mate. I didn't come here just to chain-smoke and play backup prophet. I've seen a dozen timelines crumble under the weight of some brilliant bastard who thought they could outthink the world. You've got genius, yeah. But genius without pressure is just madness with good PR."
Paradox gave a small smile. "So apply pressure."
Constantine stood, walking to the crucible. "You need someone who understands the stories behind the logic. The myths in the gears. Because the moment you try to rewrite cause and effect without inviting the old things to the table, they will rewrite you."
Ivy tilted her head. "You're volunteering to be our magical ethics advisor?"
"I'm volunteering to keep you from accidentally summoning a demigod with abandonment issues."
Paradox gave it a beat. "Accepted."
By the next evening, the lab had expanded—again. Three new wings were added underground. One for testing 'ghost logic' (a phrase Paradox used only once before Constantine made a joke too dirty to repeat), one for botanical harmonics where Ivy had begun grafting consciousness into certain hybridized plants, and one labeled simply: Forge.
In the Forge, Paradox created things not for the now—but for the future hims. The versions of himself that would need tools for problems no one could yet imagine.
That night, he worked on something strange. A gun, yes. But not a traditional one. The core used compressed memory—the kind of thing you could only build if you thought like Rick Sanchez, imagined like Megamind, and obsessed like Azmuth. He called it the Narrative Disruptor.
"What's it do?" Ivy asked, as she walked in with a drink and two half-bloomed flowers chattering in an unknown dialect.
"It doesn't kill. It edits."
Constantine raised an eyebrow from the stairs. "You mean it rewrites people?"
"No," Paradox said. "It rewrites stories. If someone's charging at you in a heroic redemption arc, this gun makes them think they're on a grocery run instead. If someone's delivering a villain monologue, one shot and they forget what they were talking about."
Ivy blinked. "That's… horrifying."
"Isn't it?" he said brightly.
Constantine looked thoughtful. "You ever consider selling these?"
Paradox turned toward a wall-mounted console. "Already in progress. Quietly launching a shell company. Legal front with off-Earth registration. Working name: Ghostkey Solutions."
Ivy laughed. "You're starting a business?"
He nodded. "If I'm going to reshape civilization, I'll need funding. And if I want to avoid Luthor's attention, I need to make sure I'm five layers removed behind proxies."
Constantine looked impressed. "What's your cover product?"
Paradox flicked on a hologram of a sleek-looking wristband. "It's called a ThoughtMesh. Converts stray ideas into semi-stable blueprints. For artists, writers, inventors. The public version is nerfed, of course. But even that should generate enough hype to keep me beneath the radar and above the profit margin."
"Smart," Constantine admitted.
Paradox looked out the window. "It's only the beginning."
Meanwhile… in Metropolis, Clark Kent sat at his desk, reading a file Lois had dropped on his desk that morning.
It was thin. Oddly so. Just two pages. Both redacted to hell. But the one word left untouched chilled him to the bone.
PARADOX
He looked up and saw something reflected in the window.
Not a person.
A memory.
And then it was gone.
He stood up, cracked his neck, and whispered, "Guess I'm finally joining the story."