The hotel room felt smaller after the stage.
It wasn't, of course. Same patterned carpet, same bland paintings on the walls, same hum of the air conditioner. But after standing in front of a crowd of hundreds and bending them with nothing but my voice, the quiet seemed tighter, like the air itself had drawn in on itself.
I sat by the window with the violin on the table next to me. The city outside was loud, though muffled through the glass—traffic, sirens, the occasional shout. My mother's body was folded neatly on the bed, her chest rising and falling like clockwork. She looked asleep, but she wasn't. She couldn't be.
The wish energy still buzzed faintly in the back of my mind. During the performance, it had crashed down on me like a storm surge—thick, invisible, undeniable. I could feel the weight of it, heavy and real, like a second gravity pressing on my shoulders. Stronger than the first audition,
For now, I needed something else.
I pulled the geometry textbook closer, flipping past the sketches I'd made in the margins. I had already gone through everything up to the end of the high school curriculum in the weeks leading to this. Math, chemistry, physics, history—it was all in place now. The basics. Foundations.
The kind of things people always waved off as "general knowledge." But I'd come to understand that general knowledge was the ground floor of everything else. You can't build an arch without the base stones. You can't build a machine without knowing what friction does to a gear.
I rested my chin in my hand. The question was where to go next.
Engineering had been circling in my mind for days now. The idea of pulling apart the physical world, not with magic, but with human tools and logic. Mechanical engineering first, maybe. The way engines worked, the balance between force and heat. Bridges, buildings, airplanes.
And then software engineering. Code. I'd read the basics already—zeros and ones, the strange dance that made machines move. It fascinated me in a quiet way. Words and numbers, strung together, commanding something else to act.
A system of puppets.
I smirked faintly at the thought. Humans had built their own way of tugging strings.
The truth was, I liked the idea of creation. That was the root of it. I'd spent lives tearing down, breaking, unraveling. The pursuit of destruction always left the same taste in the mouth—dust, ashes, silence. But creation was different. Creation left echoes. Not because of legacy or humanity's need to remember, but because it added something to the universe that wasn't there before.
I liked that.
A new thought had been circling my mind: virtual reality. Something that would take the raw idea of human escapism and give it a shape as big as a world. Like the OASIS in Ready Player One—a boundless digital frontier where people could live, work, play. For me, it wasn't about saving the world or making humanity happier. It was the architecture of it that mattered. The thought of building a new layer of reality out of pure code and machine.
If nothing mattered, then building something was just as valid as breaking it. More entertaining, even.
I flipped open a notepad and started sketching—lines, circles, crude diagrams of machines. A lever. A crank. A piston. The shapes were simple, almost childlike, but they had weight.
I thought about something I had read earlier: how engines were nothing more than carefully controlled explosions. Fire in a box, pushing a piece of metal back and forth until it turned a wheel. Simple in principle, yet powerful enough to move ships across oceans.
Humans weren't clever because they had fire. They were clever because they had found ways to trap it, cage it, and make it push in one direction.
It was almost funny.
I drew another piston, then labeled it with messy letters. The notes didn't matter much right now; the act of writing did. Each mark on the page carved the idea deeper into me.
Mechanical engineering branched outward in my mind. Airplanes—lift, drag, thrust, weight. Bridges—tension and compression, how concrete cracked if you didn't shape it right. Buildings that scraped the sky, made possible only because someone understood how to spread weight across steel beams.
Then there was software. Invisible, but no less real. I thought about operating systems, about lines of code that could run for years without a mistake if written well. About how a few instructions could ripple outward into entire worlds—video games, simulations, networks.
There was something strangely elegant about the fact that both fields—machines and code—were really just about controlling chaos. Fire harnessed in cylinders. Electricity pushed into patterns. Nature bent, reshaped, made to obey.
I tapped the pen against the notepad. If I followed both paths, they would meet somewhere ahead. Machines that weren't just mechanical, and programs that weren't just numbers. Systems where hardware and software locked together like two halves of a puzzle.
Robotics, maybe. Artificial intelligence, someday.
But that was just the starting point. In the Marvel world, engineering didn't stop at gears and circuits. It became armor that could shrug off missiles. A digital intelligence that could run a corporation, or build a suit mid-flight. Stark wasn't a magician; he was an engineer who refused to stop at the lines ordinary people accepted. He made science bend the way others bent will.
And why stop there?
Science fiction had already drawn blueprints for futures far beyond Stark's garage. Dyson spheres to harvest the light of entire stars. Orbital elevators that stitched ground to sky. Nanomachines that could rewrite matter grain by grain. Megastructures that could cradle planets.
All of it was possible. Not today, not tomorrow. But possible.
And if it was possible, then it was mine.
I leaned back in the chair, stretching slightly. My genius burned at a different pace now. In the past, I had measured learning in decades. Patience had been my rhythm. But now? With this mind, with this clarity, I could devour knowledge faster than most people could skim headlines. I could climb to Stark's level in a fraction of the time it had taken him.
That wasn't arrogance. That was arithmetic.
The only real question was where I wanted to stop.
I thought about robotics again. About AI. About weaving mechanical bodies and digital minds together. About how far the chain of creation could be pulled before the puppets began to dance on their own. People liked to worry about whether machines could become human. I didn't care. The line didn't matter to me. Humans were just machines of another kind anyway.
I thought bigger.
Space. Starships. Structures the size of continents, cities drifting in orbit. Engines powerful enough to bend spacetime itself, to claw at the edge of faster-than-light travel. Cosmic engineering—the kind of projects that would turn planets into tools and galaxies into clay.
I smirked faintly at the thought. Creation scaled well. From pistons on paper to Dyson spheres. From lines of code to entire simulated realities. There was no upper limit.
And the beauty of it was simple: none of it mattered. Not in the end. The stars would die, the galaxies would collapse, and everything would dissolve back into entropy. Cosmic nihilism didn't erase the fun of the climb—it made it sharper.
The climb was the point.
The violin on the desk caught the light from the lamp. I brushed my fingers over the strings absently. Art and science. Two directions, one toward order and one toward expression. Both forms of creation. Both worth pursuing.
Maybe tomorrow I'd start with coding. A simple program, perhaps. Something that blinked text on a screen, obeyed an instruction. From there, the steps would spiral. Virtual reality would need both halves—machines to run it, code to weave it. A toy world built from zeroes and ones, layered over the real.
A reality made by me.
The city outside honked again. A car alarm shrieked, then fell quiet. I closed the notepad and set it on top of the violin case.
The world was noisy, but the noise didn't matter. Not when I could shape silence into song. Not when I could turn lines on paper into machines. Not when I could sketch worlds that might one day exist, not because humanity needed them, but because I wanted to see them.
I stood, moved to the window, and pressed my palm against the glass. The city lights blurred under my hand.