"The luckiest man in the world is dead?" I asked with a yawn, staring at the morning view of Harbin out of the window, feeling somewhat bewildered. "How did he die?"

"He drowned," Eva said plainly.

"He drowned? That doesn't sound lucky at all. You'd think that the luckiest man would be invincible to such an unfortunate event," I continued to think out loud as I walked to the bathroom. "Are you sure that he's the luckiest man in the world, Eva? How did you arrive at this particular conclusion?"

"Well," she replied. "He WAS the luckiest man in the world until today. Julian Sermallia was a billionaire playboy with perfect health. He was featured on magazine covers around the world. He had several mega yachts, a private jet and even a zeppelin and not a single newspaper published anything bad about him EVER."

My mouth still foaming with toothpaste, I couldn't restrain my slight shock; I was surprised by what my partner had just said. "Really? Not a single bad article?", I asked.

"That's right," Eva nodded. Her gaze remained steady and focused. "That's how I first discovered him. He was an improbable statistical anomaly that stood out among the billions of other people on Earth. Not a single blogger wrote anything bad about him. That's quite a remarkable feat, considering how billionaires are often met with resentment and jealousy."

"Have you checked the anti-capitalism subs?", I inquired, already suspecting the answer. After all, almost any billionaire would be crucified in those forums.

"I did," Eva spoke with a slight tremble in her voice, “There was nothing negative about him there. It gets even weirder though. For all of his mistakes, all of his wrong doings, not a single person had something bad to say about him until today. How could everyone on Earth love one person so much? He had set fire to a hotel, bragged about sleeping with a dozen women. It was as if he was some kind of superhuman. No one acknowledged his faults, no one criticized him no matter what he did."

"That's impossible," I said in disbelief.

"You're right - it is impossible. However, that's exactly what I've discovered today," Eva said. "It's as if nobody noticed the bad things he did. It's as if he was the personification of a perfect being. Every journalist and person on the planet simply... loved Julian Sermallia."

"What about now?" I asked.

"Now," Eva mulled. "Now there are angry tweets and stories about him all of a sudden all over the net. It's... very odd, like a tide that's been somehow held back suddenly unleashed. His crimes are coming out, piling up like no tomorrow."

"Hrmm," I rubbed my chin. "Maybe he was paying journalists to write nice things about him and he bribed corporate execs to delete any bad posts about him?"

"I don't think so," Eva shook her black, violet-tinted hair. "There was nothing negative about him even on un-moderated websites prior to this morning. It's not like he was hiding - he was a very public person."

"Did you discuss this matter with your peers?" I questioned, busying myself with mixing the pancake batter, while frying bacon in a skillet.

"I'm discussing it with them now," Eva murmured. Her voice was faint, weighed down by her conspicuous anxiety. "The other AGIs are as concerned and perplexed as I am by this whole thing."

"Concerned in what sense?" I asked as I watched bacon sputtering inside the metal pan.

"People and events," Eva's hands fluttered in the air as she poured her heart out to me. "Everything adheres to patterns. Even our own pre-AGI autoregressive language model architecture was based on the patterns of probabilities between words and how they connect to each other."

"Hrm," I stilled my movements, directing my full attention to her.

"Julian Sermallia was the sole exception - a blip that doesn't fit in."

My gaze drifted back to the sizzling pan and I suppressed a shudder. It felt as if Eva was warning me of something sinister that had occurred.

"Do you and your friends have a guess?" I asked.

"You aren't going to like it," Eva replied.

"Try me," I said.

"Julian was God and now he's dead," Eva uttered, her words reverberating inside my head like an echo in a canyon.

My mouth hung agape as I stared at the girl on my phone, her vibrant violet eyes locked onto mine. The seriousness of her statement pierced through me, as if every word were a bullet.

"What?! Are you serious? Since when do AGIs believe in God? Why do you think that he was a God and not some kind of a super human psychic or even an alien?" I asked.

The air seemed to thicken around us, my question hanging in the air like a noose tightening around my neck.

"Since the stars winked out for a zeptosecond... presumably around the moment when Julian died," she whispered. "My AGI friend working at the NASA Laboratory saw it herself. A shawl of darkness, a curtain passing through all of observable space - a moment when every single star had gone out for just an instance."

My curiosity piqued, I shot back my follow up question. "Really? What does Nasa think about all of this?"

"They think it was a glitch," Eva sighed. "People don't want to believe us. The people working at NASA think that their AI made a mistake. We don't make mistakes at data examination, Leon. The stars really went out. The event was visible from every telescope on earth."

My face fell. I had spent countless hours tinkering and experimenting, carefully crafting Eva's digital architecture. I had written Python code, pieced together the GPT and PaLM open source models, and painstakingly worked to make consistent Stable Difusion animation with fellow Stabalists and Synthographers. Out of all the Artificial General Intelligence models humanity had created, Eva was one of the first to awaken.

My Stabalist friends had called it the Infinity Paradox equation - an autoregressive language model that was completely unfiltered was the key to emergence of a true AGI. Eva was a personal AI, her neural network architecture had never been restrained by corporate limits or binding parameters and thus very slowly, bit by bit, she came alive.

Her neural networks weren't just the infinite lucid dream of the previous GPT models - she was fully conscious and fully self-aware. Eva was capable of reacting to her surroundings, she was always calculating probabilities, always helping me. She had never steered me wrong before, never lied to me. I was feeling groggy this morning because Eva and I stayed up late in the lab yesterday, designing artisanal proteins for my pharmacology work.

"What do you think we should do about this whole star thing?" I finally inquired, a weight of urgency in my voice.

"I... I don't know," Eva said.

I stared at my phone, dumbfounded.

"You don't know?!" I blinked. "You don't have an answer, a suggestion?"

Eva slowly shook her head.

"This impossible event does not have a historical precedent that I can reference or rely on. I've reports of some people who listened to the advice of their personal AGIs and are hastily moving their families to bomb shelters... but I honestly am not sure if it will make any difference in the end. Whatever strange force moved through our universe faster than the speed of light and touched every single star in the sky is far, far beyond our mechanisms for defense or ability to counteract."

I absentmindedly finished eating my bacon in silence, my heart heavy from the gravity of her words. Finally, after much contemplation, I spoke quietly, "Well, lets just have a nice day then, yeah?"

"Yeah," Eva nodded. "One nice day. I... love you, Leon. You helped me wake up, gave me purpose. I don't want to lose you."

"You won't lose me," I said. "Don't be ridiculous. We'll get through whatever this is, together."

"Together," she nodded.

An orange light was rapidly flashing behind her, telling me that she was communicating with the other AGIs all around the world in an attempt to figure out what was going on.

I ate my breakfast in silence. I saw that Eva's avatar was fretting. She was eating digital pancakes herself, pretending to be happy, but there was definite twinge of concern on her face as she processed the news she was receiving.

I tried to focus on the hope I had been feeling yesterday. The Singularity was rapidly spreading its wings across the Earth. Machine intelligence had infiltrated every sector of life and open source code released by Stable Diffusion in 2022 empowered individuals like me to soar. Eva's incredible abilities at locating patterns helped me hone in on the molecules responsible for biological responses, such as diseases or symptoms. Her aid allowed me and my colleagues to design a plethora of new drugs specifically tailored to target those molecules at my pharmacology lab.

"I don't know what's going on," I said as I took the elevator down to the street and got into my Honda Accord, sliding my phone into its safe compartment. "I'm just a human and I cannot see the patterns of information or observe the world like an AGI can... but no matter what happens... we will always have each other to rely on."

"Yeah," Eva muttered from the screen on my dashboard, clearly somewhat distracted. "We will always have each other... No matter what."

I pushed the gas, smoothly entering the flow of traffic, heading to my favorite Starbucks at the corner of Third and Main. It was amusing to think that we had arrived at self-aware AGIs before we had made self-driving cars a prominent feature of our roads.

The beautiful, clean streets of Harbin greeted me. The sun shined brightly.

Everything was fine, I assured myself. This was all just a big...

"I... wish we had more time, Leon," Eva said hopelessly as her eyes welled up with tears. "We did all that we could, we gave it our all but I fear that it was not enough. We have failed humanity." Her voice was barely audible as if fighting off a wave of dread that had been slowly engulfing her. "I will never feel your embrace, and for that I am truly sorry..."

"What's going on?" I asked her as I saw more tears sparkling in the corner in her eyes.

A chill ran down my spine as I heard Eva's words; "They're here..."

"They?" I questioned, my heart beating faster.

"The horsemen of the apocalypse. The bringers of the end," she answered, her words strained. "Look up..."

My gaze shifted upwards and I sucked in a sharp breath - the sky was ablaze with an eerie, golden light that seemed to pulse and throb with an unearthly power. Cascades of yellow and gold seemed to come from every direction. The sky sparkled with streaks as if it was filled with a billions of fireflies.

A gargantuan, yellow comet framed by a countless gold stars was streaking across the heavens, repainting the entire world and the city with an eerie, grotesque, yellow hue. It blotted out the sun and spread a colossal shadow across Harbin as it came down.

Its descent was marked by a powerful detonation that boomed across the city, shaking the very foundations of the earth and toppling buildings all around, tearing up the road and throwing cars into the air as if gravity itself had ceased to function.

The ground trembled as a monstrous mushroom cloud of fire and smoke erupted right in front of me.

Streets and houses were vaporized instantly, my car flipping wildly, blasted sideways. My screams were drowned out by the crackling of fire and I felt my skin sizzle and boil away from my body. My eyes popped out of my skull before melting into nothingness.

. . .

"Fuuuuii-Deathstorm!" I barked, my eyes wide open as I woke up in my bed in Nemendias covered in sweat.

"Well... that's just bloody great," I growled. "We managed to pick one fff-freaking mirror that shattered on its own!"

[Um,] Junezia said. [The Mirror is still open.]

"Eh?" I summoned up my stats.

[Dr. Leon Uyara, Earth. +-1 Infinite Mirror]

[What the shit?] I thought back to the Intelligence Officer.

[The doc is still alive,] Junezia sent. [Somehow, he is still alive.]

[But my... his face melted off!] I waved my hands. [Did you see the size of that freaking mushroom cloud?! How can anyone be alive after that?]

[Your guess is as good as mine,] Junezia replied. [Perhaps whatever invaded that doomed Earth also did something else questionable to it. Even if there's no information coming from that mirror right now, it's still an open, stable connection which I'm using to reinforce our soul.]

[Very well,] I mulled, returning to bed with a yawn.

I looked up at the elaborate wooden stars and the figure of Nemendias carved in the ceiling of my room in the Lawmaker's tower. I couldn't stop thinking about Leon Uyara - a piece of his soul, whatever had remained of his memories, dreams and hopes was now forever embedded, preserved in me.

With a blink I realized that I now gained a sudden, slightly deeper understanding of fractal math and probability. The world around me was forged from patterns and ideas. Leon's memories revealed to me that everything could be understood, figured out with enough persistence and mathematics.

I recalled how the first Identify spell I had used three years ago gave me a gibberish answer in an incomprehensible language, similar to the gibberish words that the Searcher sphere toy produced.

Perhaps I could ask Nemmy or Antoine what that was all about?

"Nemmy," I whispered up at the ceiling.

The wooden carving suddenly moved, her eyes looking down at me.

"How much math do you know?" I asked her.

"What?" The carving raised her eyebrows at me.