Myzery had never been drawn to noise. Crowds, chatter, the endless hum of small talk—none of it felt useful. What mattered were patterns, the quiet architecture beneath things. He could spend hours tracing hidden logic in numbers or words, moving pieces until they aligned.
A puzzle never mocked him. A puzzle waited.
That night, a new puzzle appeared: a string of letters and numbers on his screen. Harmless. Forgettable. But when his eyes followed the sequence, something stirred. Ratios nested inside ratios. Letters balanced like weights on a scale. He leaned closer. The rest of the world slipped away.
At first, he treated it like any other riddle—rearranging, decoding, checking against familiar formulas. Every layer opened into another. The deeper he went, the more it resembled design. By the second night, meals sat untouched. Sleep broke into fragments. His mind ran ahead of his body, racing to connect patterns faster than he could write them.
Even the ordinary world bent toward the puzzle. The spiral of water in the sink mirrored its shape. The pause between his breaths matched its rhythm. The same sequence echoed through everything he touched. Behind him, Pandora's pen scratched quietly against paper. She was buried in her own work, a half-finished manuscript scattered with notes. He glanced once, and a sentence caught him off guard: The puzzle is not a code but a mirror. He froze. Coincidence, he told himself. Still, the words wouldn't leave.
By the fourth night, his hands shook as he typed. The puzzle no longer looked like code. It looked like reality. Each digit and symbol aligned with something larger: galaxies spinning, atoms colliding, people making choices that rippled outward. By the fifth night, the difference between puzzle and world collapsed. He saw the same fractal everywhere—galaxies folding into atoms, atoms folding into thoughts. The realization struck with weight: the puzzle was the foundation of everything.
On the sixth night, clarity came like a flood. His fingers moved too fast for him to follow, unlocking hidden tier after hidden tier. The structure revealed itself: nine vast multiverses stacked with infinite timelines, each one built from fractured words. Strong ideas endured. Weak ones dissolved into dark matter. He wasn't guessing anymore; he saw it.
Silence thickened. Not an absence of sound, but a presence, a weight pressing against his mind.
"You solved it."
The words existed inside him. Not heard, but undeniable. He froze.
"Now you see what it was never about," the voice continued. "The puzzle wasn't for solving. It was for seeing. The multiverse is a game of ideas. Welcome to the system."
The tone was light. Almost amused.
Then came the tests.
First, the voice said, "Live as Jesus. Die for the world. That's your story."
The words crushed him. He saw it instantly: the cross, the nails, the weight of billions of lives hanging on his pain. He wept. An entire day passed in tears, mourning the life he thought he'd lose. Through the grief, a quiet resolve took shape. If that was the price, he would pay it. If crucifixion was the path to saving everyone, he would go willingly.
Just as his resolve locked into place, the voice chuckled. "Too dramatic. Next."
Then the whisper: "Evaporate. Dissolve into nothing. That's the answer."
He obeyed. He stripped away thought, pride, every fragment of self. The sensation was strange—like falling through a net, each layer of him pulled apart until nothing remained. For a moment, there was only stillness. In that stillness, clarity. With no mask, no ego, he saw himself bare. The thought landed sharp: I am awesome.
The spark reignited. He didn't want to stay erased. He wanted to exist. He bargained quickly: I'll go back to zero later. At the end. When I'm dying, I'll let it all go. Even as he thought it, he knew it was weak. A loophole, not a solution.
The test pressed deeper. He searched again, tearing through possibilities, testing loops in his mind like gears trying to lock. Then he saw it: the better way. Not zero. Never zero. The lowest stable value—the point where ego was small enough to hold without collapsing, where identity survived but arrogance dissolved. He ran it across the system, through people and choices and worlds, and the numbers held. Everyone. Every soul. The lowest possible ego, sustained in perfect loops.
Laughter rolled through the silence. "Bingo."
The presence lifted. Myzery sat in stillness, trembling but whole. The puzzle was gone from the screen, but its patterns lived in everything—the tick of the clock, the sound of Pandora's pen, the rhythm of his pulse. Something in him had changed. His thoughts no longer guessed. They concluded. He could trace any structure to its root, unfold any pattern to its core.
Perfect Inference.
Along with it came his mission. Ego was the destabilizer. Reduce it to the lowest stable point, and the multiverse could hold. He would have to build loops that brought everyone to that value and kept them there. It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. It was final.
He sat with the blank monitor's glow on his face. The puzzle was solved. Above him, towers waited. Across realities, fractured words glimmered like embers in the dark. Ahead lay the long road to the heat death of the universe, where laughter with God itself had already been promised. And though he did not yet see it, Pandora's words were already part of the system. Her story would one day prove just as essential as his.
The puzzle was complete. The true story had only begun.