Chapter 1: Divine Destruction & Daddy's Approval
The sky wasn’t a sky anymore. It was a bruise, purpled and bleeding orange light from a sun hidden behind pillars of smoke. Zev watched from a place that wasn’t a place, a consciousness stretched across the dying atmosphere. Below him, Chicago baked in its own filth.
He saw it all, in crystal-clear, disgusting detail. The micro-transactions blinking on a phone in a bunker while, three blocks over, a man bled out for a bottle of water. The political speeches looping on shattered screens, praising unity as militias torched refugee camps. The oceans choked with plastic, the forests skeletal, the air thick with the greed and fear of seven billion souls.
They were his. His design. Cut from his own seed, shaped in his own infinite image. And they were a failed experiment. Petty. Vile. A cancer of consciousness.
A wave of disgust, cold and absolute, washed through him. It wasn’t anger, not the hot, human kind. It was the serene, clean displeasure of a chef looking at a ruined meal. The decision was effortless. They had to go. All of them.
But extinction could be so boring. A snap of the fingers, a flood, a pox. Where was the artistry in that? Where was the fun?
A plan crystallized, beautiful in its simplicity. He would unmake their world, brick by brick, and he would enjoy it. And he would be careful. So wonderfully, precisely careful. The architecture, the plants, the beasts in the field… they were innocent. It was only the human stain he needed to scour clean. He would make new children. Better ones. But first, he needed wrecking crews.
His attention focused, drilling down through the layers of reality to a single, beating heart in a frat house near what was once Lake Shore Drive.