Part XXXIV - The God in the Grid
The silence in the garage was a dense, ringing thing. Marcus stared at the two small fingers Isaiah held up, his mind—so adept at logistics—utterly failing to compute the input. Maria's hand was still flat on the multiverse map, as if the sheer force of her will could hold back the impossible reality it represented. The beautiful, terrifying drawing was a declaration of war on their limitations.
It was Maria who broke first. She knelt, bringing herself to Isaiah's eye level, her voice a low, pleading whisper.
"Mijo," she began, her tone gentle but strained. "I understand. It's brilliant. But we can't. We have a promise to keep with Gary. We have a deadline for Chapter 4."
Marcus, jolted back to reality, scrambled for a notepad and pencil. He needed the solid, unforgiving logic of numbers to fight back against the sheer force of the boy's vision. "He's right, Isaiah," he said, his pencil scratching furiously. "Look. Best case, after paying our debts and buying supplies for the next run, we have maybe six thousand dollars left. That's our buffer. That's our life insurance." He drew a line on the page. "Paper for a full run of Chapter 4 will cost two thousand. Ink, another thousand. That leaves three thousand, and we haven't even talked about distribution or paying ourselves. We are running on fumes."
He turned the notepad so Isaiah could see the stark, simple math. "We don't have the money to launch a second book. We don't have the time. If we split our focus now, both will fail. It's impossible."
For the first time since his rebirth, Isaiah's core team had given him a hard, unequivocal "no." He looked from Maria's pleading face to the numbers on Marcus's notepad. He processed their refusal not as disobedience, but as a failure of imagination. They saw obstacles. He saw a logistical problem requiring a more forceful solution.
He gave a single, slow blink. Then, without a word, he turned and walked out of the garage, leaving a tense and utterly frustrated Maria and Marcus in his wake. His silence was more powerful than any argument, an act of supreme, unshakable confidence in his own directive.
He walked directly to a supply box in the hall, retrieved a fresh stack of paper and his box of crayons, and then proceeded to his real office: the living room floor. He arranged his tools with meticulous care and entered a state of pure, focused creation. The world outside his small circle of concentration ceased to exist, the low, stressed murmur of their voices from the garage fading into irrelevance. His hands, driven by the seventy-eight-year-old mind, moved with a speed and precision that defied his age.
First, he established the divine hierarchy. With bold, decisive strokes, he drew a majestic, equine creature, a glowing golden wheel encircling its powerful body. He labeled it in his childish scrawl: ARCEUS, The Original One. Next to it, he drew a second figure: a small, childlike being with an unnervingly blank expression, floating in a void between two attendants. He labeled this one with a single, chilling word: ISAIAH.
Then, having established the gods of his new world, he created the entry point for its inhabitants. Three more drawings followed in a flurry of color and inspiration. The first, a creature with a large plant bulb on its back. The second, a small lizard with a flickering flame on the tip of its tail. The third, a tiny turtle with a hardened shell. Bulbasaur. Charmander. Squirtle.
He worked for hours, the floor around him becoming a gallery of a universe being born. When the last drawing was finished, he laid all five out in a careful, deliberate grid. The work was done. The proof of concept was complete. And then, the crushing weight of his body's limitations returned, and he curled up on the rug amidst his creations and fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.
The afternoon had bled into a tense, defeated evening. From the garage, the muffled sounds of Maria and Marcus's voices rose and fell—frustrated arguments, weary sighs, and the scratching of a pencil calculating numbers that would never add up. Finally, as dusk settled outside, the garage door opened.
Maria and Marcus emerged, not side-by-side, but with a weary distance between them. The argument had been circular and stressful, each of them attacking the problem from a different angle, but the wall of Isaiah's directive had proven unbreakable. Marcus ran a hand over his face, looking at Maria with an expression not of anger, but of shared, exhausted defeat. It was the look of a brother-in-arms, not a lover, acknowledging that their combined logic was no match for the force in the other room. She gave a small, tired nod in return. The debate was over. They had lost.
They entered the living room, ready to try and reason with Isaiah again, but stopped dead in their tracks.
They found him asleep on the floor, his small chest rising and falling in the even rhythm of any other three-year-old. And surrounding him, laid out like sacred offerings, were five new masterpieces.
They saw the starters first. The designs were charming, brilliant, and—as Marcus's mind instantly calculated—insanely marketable. They weren't just characters; they were a phenomenon waiting to happen. Then their eyes moved to the other two drawings. They saw the majestic god-creator, Arceus.
And then they saw the childlike king of all reality, explicitly labeled with Isaiah name.
The argument was over. The numbers, the deadlines, the logistical impossibilities—they all dissolved into irrelevance. They were confronted with the terrifying, undeniable truth of the being they were dealing with. He was not just creating a world; he was creating a new mythology with himself as its supreme being.
Maria looked from the drawing of the little god-king to the face of her sleeping son, his expression peaceful and innocent. Marcus slowly knelt and picked up the drawing of Charmander, the paper feeling both impossibly light and crushingly heavy in his hands.
Their job was not to question the impossible. It was to find a way to make it real. The price of their survival, they now understood, was a permanent end to their normal lives. They were in the full-time business of building worlds.