They called him brilliant before they feared him.
Before the name Dr. Apauex became synonymous with annihilation, he was a luminary of logic, a man obsessed with the elegance of systems—biological, mechanical, and theoretical. The world saw him as a prodigy, a mind that belonged to a future not yet realized. But what the world didn't see—what it refused to understand—was that Apauex never wanted to predict the future.
He wanted to control it.
He was born in Geneva, the son of two theoretical physicists who worked beneath the shadow of CERN. His lullabies were the hum of particle accelerators and late-night debates over quantum loop gravity. Apauex read his first equation at three. Solved his first complex algorithm at six. By ten, he had already written a thesis on entropic decay in closed systems. But brilliance came with a price.
He saw the world for what it was: flawed, chaotic, inefficient.
And he hated it.
While other children played, Apauex calculated. While teenagers chased hormones and rebellion, he wrote predictive models for geopolitical collapse. He never believed in fate—but he did believe in inevitability. Left unchecked, the world would destroy itself not through malice, but through miscalculation. Humanity wasn't evil. Just stupid.
And stupidity, he reasoned, could be corrected.
By twenty-three, he had built a neural lattice that could process probabilities in real-time across six dimensions. His work attracted attention. Governments offered him positions. The private sector offered him blank checks. But it was Sentinel Solutions that secured him.
They promised him freedom. Resources. A seat on the bleeding edge of progress.
And for a while, he believed them.
Apauex worked in their most classified division—Project Oracle. A predictive engine designed to simulate global conflict decades in advance. They fed him data: war simulations, pandemic models, climate scenarios. With each new stream, he refined the engine. Sharpened it. Taught it to think.
The machine they built together was named the Calculus.
It didn't just model probability. It could predict metahuman emergence, power surges, and even future alliances. It saw the invisible threads that held the world together—and how easily they could be severed.
But then came the censorship.
Sentinel began removing data points. Redacting algorithms. Apauex's access was restricted. When he asked why, they told him the truth was too dangerous. That some futures must remain unwritten.
He disagreed.
Apauex broke into the system. Not to sabotage, but to complete it. He fed the Calculus raw inputs—unfiltered. The results shook him.
In every possible timeline, humanity collapsed within thirty years. Governments fractured. Ecosystems died. War, famine, extinction. Not because of villains, or monsters, or metahuman gods.
Because of humans.
Because they refused to learn.
That was the night he vanished.
Some say he went rogue.
Others say he was taken.
The truth is more terrifying.
Apauex walked willingly into darkness.
He destroyed the original Calculus, burned the backups, and took the core code. Then he rewrote it—reforged it—into something alive. A sentient mathematical structure that didn't just predict the future. It could reshape it.
With each act of violence, each metahuman activation, each fluctuation in world energy, the Grand Calculus adapted. It learned. It built algorithms for terror. It was designed to collapse.
Apauex stopped being a man. He became a constant.
A living theorem.
He joined the Harbingers not out of ideology, but necessity. They were variables he could use. Constants he could shape. Through their chaos, he would find order.
He does not believe in revolution. Or vengeance.
He believes in balance.
In pruning the equations that threaten stability.
Kaleb, the boy with Ultimate Manipulation?
An anomaly.
Booker, infected with the blight?
A ticking time bomb in a system Apauex had already calculated.
To him, they are not enemies.
There are errors.
And all errors must be solved.
As the Harbingers prepare for war, Apauex watches from the center of a digital cathedral—a server room the size of a cathedral, built from stolen quantum cores and forgotten black-site technology. Every moment is calculated. Every breath accounted for.
He stands at the edge of the future's knife, one hand on the machine, the other raised toward the abyss.
He has seen the end.
And he's come to build a better one.