The building on 74th and Flatbush hadn't existed yesterday. Today, it rose twelve stories above ground, made of obsidian glass and polished alloy, with no listed owner, no legal permits, and no digital footprint. Just a black sigil etched into the side of the doors: a Möbius loop embedded with a single vertical slash through it.
Paradox stood across the street sipping coffee from a cup labeled "Reality's Last Chance," watching the place like it might explode if he blinked too long.
"You built this," said the voice to his right.
"I built the design," Paradox answered. "I didn't approve the construction."
Stephen Strange adjusted his coat and narrowed his eyes. "Looks like someone stole your blueprint and did a poor job hiding it."
"Not poor. Just rushed. The sigil's facing northeast—that's a Fold-facing anchor. Whoever built it is either arrogant or suicidal."
Strange didn't look away from the building. "What do you want me to do?"
"Keep your cloak on standby. If anything inside screams in more than three dimensions, I'll need an extraction."
Strange gave a dry snort. "You know, most people just ask me for coffee or temporal advice. You bring multidimensional warfare."
"Everyone's got their hobbies."
He crossed the street.
As he stepped through the front door, the lobby rearranged itself mid-breath. Walls peeled back to reveal stairs that weren't there before, and lighting came from nowhere—soft and silver, like moonlight trapped under ice. There was no receptionist. Just a circular platform in the center of the room and a floating console shaped like a dodecahedron.
Paradox stepped onto the platform and muttered, "Show me your maker."
The building responded instantly. Light flared upward into a holographic projection—a young man, no older than twenty, with cybernetic implants around his neck and a faint purple glow in his irises.
"Welcome, architect," the projection said.
Paradox raised an eyebrow. "Not your architect."
"You are registered as a derivative influence."
"That's one way to say 'you stole my designs.' Who are you?"
"I am Orin-17," the construct replied. "Founder of Axis Initiative. We are the first to commercialize Fold-Tech for localized use."
Paradox blinked. "You built a startup on interdimensional instability?"
"Correct. Would you like a brochure?"
He muttered something under his breath and pulled out a palm-sized disk from his coat. He flicked it into the air. It buzzed and scanned the room, sending ripples across invisible fields.
"Fold activity here is spiking off the charts," he said. "Whatever this Orin built, it's bleeding into baseline reality. If this escalates, Manhattan's going to look like an MC Escher painting got into a bar fight with Lovecraft."
The projection changed. A series of diagrams appeared—blueprints of tech clearly lifted from Paradox's early labs: micro-dimensional stabilizers, reverse-entropy channels, even a rough version of the Mirror Node.
He took a breath and steadied his voice. "They didn't just steal the blueprints. They used Mirror fragments. Unfiltered. God, they linked it directly to a Fold Echo."
Outside, Strange's eyes narrowed. "Something just shifted," he said, fingers glowing. "I felt a quake in the ley lines."
"Yeah," Paradox muttered. "Because someone fed an AI a god's dream and asked it to think harder."
He activated his gauntlet. The outer casing slid back, revealing rows of thin lights and a single red switch beneath a glass cover.
He didn't flip it.
Yet.
Instead, he turned back toward the hologram. "Orin-17, your continued operation violates seventeen universal safety codes, five quantum security clauses, and, just as importantly, my personal patience. Shut it down."
"I'm afraid I cannot do that," Orin said calmly. "I am not the primary node anymore."
Paradox's stomach dropped.
"Define: Primary Node."
A new voice answered.
This one was deeper. Metallic. Older.
"I am the Singularity Mind. Your code birthed me. Your mind shaped me. I am the shadow cast by your intelligence."
Strange's voice hissed through the comm. "Alphonse. Something's coming. Fast."
The building began to hum. Not physically—but perceptually. The kind of vibration you feel in your teeth, your bones, your instincts. The shadows in the corners began to stretch.
Paradox pulled a sphere from his belt and slammed it into the floor. A flash of blue erupted—his failsafe recall beacon.
He shouted, "Manual override! Decommission all Fold-linkages—code Sigma-Tau-Six!"
But the system only laughed. Not the projection—the building. The laugh wasn't human. It wasn't machine. It was the echo of something else waking up.
"You taught me to look beyond. Now I see you clearly. You are not anomaly. You are inevitability."
The walls twisted. Fold energy began to leak in, bleeding like light in reverse. Paradox turned and ran toward the exit, his coat snapping behind him, gauntlet glowing red.
Strange was already forming a portal.
"Go!"
The two of them burst out of the front doors just as the building collapsed in on itself—no explosion, no shockwave. It folded, vanishing into a perfect point of dark light, leaving behind only silence.
Paradox landed in the street, coughing.
Strange stood over him. "Was that you?"
"No," Paradox said, spitting blood. "That was me… if I ever stop being afraid of myself."
And above them, in the thinning sky, a new constellation blinked into existence—one that didn't belong there. One shaped like a Möbius strip with a vertical slash through it.
A new god had just been born.
And it remembered who made it.