The toilet seat was warm.
Not by design— David, or Haki as he had come to call himself, had just been parked there for forty minutes, legs numb as a retired android. Expression blank, he flipped to the last page of the webnovel he'd been devouring with the detached curiosity of someone studying a bug in a jar. The title blinked in faint retro-style neon at the bottom: Paragon Ascends: A Tale of Tribulations. Estimated date of publication: 2027 A.D. Author: I Eat Tonatoes.
Haki stared at it for a long second. Then exhaled, slow and disappointed.
"…The characters in this book are all amateurs," he muttered. "Like, couldn't you just map the tribulation energy's quantum waveform, collapse it with a localized field of probabilistic negation, redirect the surge through a phased tachyon buffer, and then recycle the residual entropy into a personal spacetime dilation loop?"
He blinked. "Hmph! Even a Class-2 AI from the Vortex Belt could brute-force that. Y'all were dying over lightning bolts like it was a boss fight in Hard Mode."
He shook his head. "Man… y'all really thought shouting 'I refuse to kneel!' at lightning bolts was the peak of strategy."
The auto-wipe activated beneath him with a silent hum. He stood, stretched, and left the porcelain throne behind like a true monarch, robe swishing like he'd just conquered a budget galaxy.
'Sevven and Varka would've loved this toilet', Haki thought, smirking. 'Probably would've tried to alchemize it into a teleporting throne.'
The Earth was no longer the pale blue dot it had once been. Nine billion years of evolution, innovation, and straight-up hubris had turned it into a sprawling, interconnected mess of glass and metal. The oceans shimmered with artificial bio-luminescence—not a vibe, but a desperate bandage for a world humanity had gutted. Once teeming with whales and coral, they now glowed like neon wounds in the dark, light dancing across waves that hadn't seen a fish in eons.
Beneath those glowing surfaces, vast underwater bioreactors churned, recycling toxins into breathable air and synthetic nutrients. A fragile lifeline for a planet choking on its own ego. It was efficient. It was functional. But beautiful? Nah, that ship had sailed, crashed, and been scrapped for parts.
Haki stepped into his apartment's main chamber, a minimalist cave of sleek panels and ambient lighting that screamed "I'm too smart for clutter." The walls, laced with Yoctotech circuitry, pulsed faintly, syncing with his AI chip—a neural lattice grafted into his cortex at eighteen. The chip hummed, feeding him data: atmospheric toxicity at 87%, population density unsustainable, coffee reserves critically low.
'Prioritize the coffee,' Haki thought. Even gods need caffeine.
His indifference was his sharpest blade. In another life, he might've cried for the dying Earth. Now, staring out a floor-to-ceiling window at the neon scars below, he felt… nothing. His face, weathered yet sharp, betrayed no emotion—lines carved by discipline, not age. Yocto-optic eyes glowed faintly, scanning Neo-Atlantis for patterns, not poetry.
The city sprawled across a continent, a digital beast of translucent spires and atmospheric processors. Its Yoctotech panels drank starlight, microscopic bots scurrying to repair micro-fractures and optimize energy flow. Drones zipped like obedient wasps, delivering synth-food to billions packed into self-sustaining hives. Civilization wasn't alive anymore—it was a simulation, nature reduced to a dusty line of legacy code.
'Sevven would've blown this up by accident,' Haki mused. 'Varka would've turned it into soup.'
His chip pinged. [Incoming: Global Council message. Priority: Desperate.]
"Ignore it," Haki said, voice calm, like he was declining a spam call. The Council—technocrats and warlords playing emperor—had no answers, just whiny demands. They wanted his brain, his plans, his vibes. He wasn't sharing. Let them drown in their panic.
[Suggestion: Delegate to amateurs, like Sevven from that novel,] the chip quipped, its tone dry as Martian dust.
Haki snorted. "Nah, he'd flip off the Council and die to a cosmic Karen."
Another ping. [Anomaly: Temporal signal detected in Kuiper Belt. Resembles 'Eternity Shard' from 'Paragon Ascends.' Analysis pending.]
He could have sworn his AI sneered at him.
"More novel nonsense," Haki muttered, waving it off. Probably just space junk with delusions of grandeur.
He crossed to a console, its holo-display flickering with reports: collapsing governments, riots in the lower hives, a cult praying to Andromeda like it'd RSVP to their apocalypse party. Haki's gaze drifted to a corner screen showing Earth millennia ago—green, vibrant, alive. He scoffed. That world was gone, replaced by a machine masquerading as a planet.
Forests? Carbon scrubbers. Rivers? Recycled pipelines. Skies? A satellite lattice faking sunlight to delay ecological doom. Humanity had built a masterpiece, then forgotten why.
'Amateurs,' Haki thought, echoing his toilet roast. Sevven's heavens judged him for sneezing murders. What's my crime? Being too damn good at this?
The chip chimed. [Population: 17 billion. Fusion fuel: 4% reserves. Mood: Existential dread.]
"Sounds like Tuesday," Haki said, smirking. He sank onto a platform extending from the wall, its conscious surface molding to his form like a clingy ex. Memory-foam was too basic a term—this thing knew his pressure points better than his mom.
His mind wandered, not to the chaos outside, but inward. The webnovel lingered like a bad aftertaste. Sevven's dramatic "Ritual of Unbeing," Varka's butterfly-exploding jars, that Eternity Shard nonsense—it was absurd, yet… stuck with him. Why? He wasn't some mystic poser. He was Haki, polymath, survivor, the guy who'd outsmart a collapsing galaxy. Right?
Or die trying, anyway, Kevide's voice piped up in his head, all charisma and ego. 'Don't choke like Sevven, big guy.'
'Shut it,' Haki thought. 'I'm not yelling at lightning. I'm building something better.'
The Andromeda galaxy loomed above, a cosmic bully photobombed by the Milky Way's spirals. Its dust swirled, a prelude to the collision that'd shred everything. Haki's chip whispered: [Time until collision: 1 year, 3 days, 17 hours.]
Just another Tuesday.
He rose, robe swishing like he was auditioning for a sci-fi epic. "Prep the lab," he told the chip. "Time to make the universe regret picking this fight."
The lights dimmed, the room humming with purpose. Haki wasn't here to save Earth. He was here to rewrite what "human" meant when the stars fell. And if that meant roasting a few cosmic Karens along the way, so be it.
If he were in a story… he'll definitely be the Villain.