RWD: 5.01

5.01

“The prophet’s words are shaped by those who follow, and in their devotion, they remake his truth.”

—”THE WISDOM OF MUAD’DIB” BY PRINCESS IRULAN

The fabricated warmth of the Hebert apartment clung to him like a second skin, a sweet, cloying film of sugar and manufactured domesticity. Danny had insisted on pastries. A gesture of gratitude, a plea for normalcy—a variable Paul had not included in his evening's calculations, and one that had cost him forty-seven minutes. Yet even as he calculated the delay's impact on his schedule, Paul recognised the necessity of maintaining these social bonds. Danny Hebert's trust was a valuable asset, one that required careful cultivation.

When Paul finally took his leave, amidst Danny’s brief but earnest farewell, the cool night air was a welcome solvent. The street was quiet, save for the distant hum of a city bus rounding a corner, its headlights cutting through the dusk like a blade through cloth. He adjusted the straps of his backpack, heavy with components retrieved from the warehouse base, and made for the vehicle as its doors swung open.

He found a seat near the back, settling into the worn upholstery as the vehicle lurched into motion. Through the grimy windows, the city rolled past as its residents settled in for the night. The journey was a void, a space for the mind to retreat from the performance of the self. He let the persona of ‘Greg Veder’ recede, the mask laid aside. Beneath it, there was only the quiet, humming engine of analysis. Paul’s thoughts drifted to the Simurgh then. The Endbringers actions remained an anomaly, a dissonant chord in the symphony of causality he was attempting to compose. A reaction to him? Almost certain. The weight of her attention was a pressure at the edge of his limited Mentat-driven prescience. But the nature of that reaction, the shape of the coming reprisal, was a maddening blank in the casual planes. She was a god-engine of immense complexity, and he had, through means obscure, drawn her baleful eye.

As usual, Paul disembarked two blocks from his residence and walked the remaining distance, the rhythm of his steps even, controlled. The lights of the Veder apartment were a warm yellow rectangle against the dark brick. Inside, he could hear the low murmur of voices, the clatter of cutlery. He let himself in.

The scene was precisely as his predictive models had suggested. Martha Veder stood at the stove, a floral apron tied around her waist, stirring a pot that smelled of garlic and tomatoes. Tom was at the kitchen table, scrolling through his phone, a textbook lying closed beside him.

"Greg? That you, honey?" Martha called from the kitchen.

"Yeah," Paul replied, hanging his jacket on the hook beside the door. The apartment carried the familiar scents of home cooking and floor wax, overlaid with the faint fragrant tang of freshly laundered clothes.

“You are late,” Tom noted without looking up from his phone.

“I was at Taylor’s,” Paul replied. A simple fact, delivered without inflexion. “Mr. Hebert insisted I stay for pastries.”

Martha turned, a wooden spoon in her hand, a teasing glint in her eye. "Well, aren't you just the polite houseguest." She turned back to the stove, then cast a sideways glance in Paul’s direction. "So, how are things progressing with Taylor? You two seem to be spending quite a lot of time together lately."

Paul deflected with ease. “Just friends, Mom. You know that.” He leaned against the counter, his posture casual as he added: “I’m not eating tonight. Already full. Mind if I head upstairs?”

Martha waved him off, though her gaze lingered. “I suppose that means there'll be more leftovers for your father. Go on, but don’t stay up too late—you’ve got that big test tomorrow, remember?”

“Yeah,” Paul nodded before finally retreating to his room. He locked the door behind him as he entered and drew the blinds. From his backpack, he retrieved the components he had requisitioned from the warehouse: a custom-printed circuit board, several shielded microprocessors and cabling, a heatsink milled from a beryllium alloy,  spools of hair-thin fiber optic cable, and high-power antennas designed to bounce encrypted signals off a nearby relay station hidden in an apartment Paul recently purchased down the street.

For the rest of the night, while the city slept and the Veder family dreamt their small dreams, Paul worked. The process was a meditation. His hands moved with the unhurried certainty of a surgeon, his tools a soldering iron and precision screwdrivers. He stripped the machine down to its frame, his movements economical, silent. He replaced the motherboard, grafting in the new processors designed to remotely interface with a climate-controlled server farm in Arizona. Existing circuits were modified with micro-scalpel precision, pathways rerouted, bandwidth expanded exponentially. Heat sinks were bonded directly to components running vastly hotter than any consumer-grade device should.

The work was meticulous, demanding. The hours bled into one another, marked only by the shifting quality of the darkness outside his window. As the first hints of grey lightened the sky, however, Paul finished. 

Nearby, in one of the neighbouring rooms, he heard the floorboards creak softly. Martha, rising to start the day. 

With only minutes to spare. He reassembled the tower, ensuring every screw was returned to its original place, every panel aligned properly. The machine looked unchanged externally – the same beige casing, the same monitor. To the casual observer, nothing had changed.

That matter concluded, he turned his attention to tidying the place. He wiped down the desk meticulously, disposing of solder snippets and packaging into a small, plastic bag destined for disposal. The faint scent of hot metal and flux dissipated as he opened the window a crack, letting in the chill, damp air of a Brockton Bay morning.

At six-fourty-six, a sharp rap on the door. “Greg? Time to get up. The exam’s at nine. Don’t want to be late.” John’s voice, solid, dependable.

“’M up,” Paul grunted, pitching his voice to sound thick with sleep. He waited a full minute before moving, then began the ritual of morning preparation. The shower was hot, the steam a temporary shroud. He dressed, pulling on the simple clothes laid out the night before. Downstairs, the smell of coffee and toast filled the air. Martha handed him a foil-wrapped sandwich. “For the road. You’ll need your energy.”

Tom came down the stairs moments later, his own school uniform crisp, his hair still damp. He received a similar offering for breakfast, and they all moved toward the door. John was outside, topping up the car’s radiator with a jug of water. It was an old sedan, but reliable. A symbol of the family’s comfortable, if not extravagant, financial stasis.

They settled into the car, the engine turning over with a familiar rumble. John dropped Martha off first at the hospital where she worked as a pharmacist, a brief kiss exchanged through the open window. Then, they were driving south, away from the industrial ruin of the north and toward the more affluent district that housed Immaculata High.

“Weird to think you’ll be done with high school before me,” Tom mused from the back seat, breaking the comfortable silence. “Guess that’s the perk of getting superpowers, huh? Maybe I should try triggering.” He laughed, a careless, youthful sound.

The words hung in the air. Paul met his brother’s eyes in the rearview mirror. His own were flat, unreadable. “I would not wish the reasons for it on you, Tom.”

The humour vanished from Tom’s face. The realisation dawned, a shadow crossing his features. Powers came from trauma. Anyone who had ever done even a cursory research on powers knew that. It was the fundamental, brutal truth of their age. “Shit. Greg, I’m sorry. That was stupid. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine,” Paul cut in, his tone dismissive but not unkind. “Doesn’t bother me.”

The atmosphere in the car grew heavy, thick with unspoken things. Tom fidgeted, clearly regretting his words. After a long moment, he spoke again, his voice softer, hesitant. “You ever… wanna talk about it? Your trigger, I mean. What happened?”

Paul was silent for a long count, letting the request settle. He could see the variables: Tom’s curiosity, John’s parental concern, the need to anchor the ‘Greg’ persona in a believable narrative of trauma and rebirth. A lie was necessary. The truth was an alien concept this world was not prepared for. Greg Veder had triggered. That much was true. The boy’s mind, brushing for a microsecond against the totality of Paul’s own ancestral memory and prescient awareness, had fractured. A key turning in a lock that was never meant to be opened. Paul had felt the boy’s consciousness shatter into existential terror before it was subsumed. He had then, with his mastery of Pranu-Bindu, located the budding Corona Pollentia and deliberately stunted its growth, freezing the trigger event in a state of permanent, impotent stasis. Greg Veder was not a cape. Not yet; his potential sacrificed for Paul’s stability.

But that was a truth that served no purpose. He would give them a different one. A true one, from a certain point of view.

“It was a single moment,” Paul began, his voice low and dismissive, as if recounting a tedious illness. He stared out the window at the passing city. “A sudden realisation of scale. Imagine seeing the world not as a solid thing, but as a confluence of possibilities. Every action, every word, branching into a million futures, a billion, a trillion. And seeing your own place in it—an infinitesimal speck. The sheer, crushing weight of that insignificance.”

A pause.

“I saw the scope of it, Tom. The vast networks of cause and effect stretching across time and space. I saw how small we all are, how insignificant our individual lives become when measured against the cosmic scale. And I saw what was coming—the patterns that most people can't perceive, the trajectories that lead to endings nobody wants to acknowledge. The visions of what was, what is, and what could be. That sudden expansion of awareness—it breaks something inside you. The part of your mind that was comfortable with ignorance, with simple explanations and easy answers. What grows back is different. Harder. More focused on the essential rather than the trivial. My… abilities… are simply the scar tissue that formed afterward. A way for the mind to rationalise the abyss.”

Paul fell silent. The explanation was, to a great degree, true to the catalyst, if not the mechanism. It was enough. He could see in the rearview mirror that Tom was no longer curious, but sombre, unsettled. John’s hands were tight on the steering wheel.

They arrived at Immaculata’s wrought iron gates. Tom hesitated, his hand on the door handle. The weight of the conversation still lay on him. Paul leaned forward and gave him a light smack on the back of the head.

“You are taking it too seriously,” he said, his tone shifting back to something approximating the old Greg. “Get out. Go learn something. I’ll be fine.”

The abrupt change startled Tom, but it worked. The tension broke. A small, grateful smile touched his lips. “Yeah. Okay. Hey… good luck on your test, man.”

“Thanks”

Tom nodded, then climbed out of the car, his backpack slung over his shoulder. He disappeared into the flow of uniformed students.

John pulled away from the curb, the car merging back into traffic. He drove for several minutes in silence, his gaze fixed on the road ahead. He had been quiet through the entire exchange, a passive observer.

“Are you really okay, Greg?” he finally asked, his voice low.

Paul turned his head from the window to look at his host’s father. He saw the concern etched in the lines around the man’s eyes, the quiet strength that had weathered years of parenting and adult anxieties.

“I am fine,” Paul said.

Another long silence. John seemed to weigh the words, to search them for the hollow ring of a lie. He found none. He gave a single, decisive nod, an acceptance. The matter was closed.

They drove on, heading for the bridge that would take them out of Brockton Bay and toward the exam center in Boston, leaving the city and its troubles behind them. For now.