Loki woke laughing.
Not loudly. Not cruelly.
It was the kind of laugh that happened when a punchline finally landed after being set up for centuries.
He did not wake in a place.
He woke in a contradiction.
The memetic substrate had finally become dense enough to hold him without collapsing into metaphor. Stories overlapped. Irony nested inside reverence. Refusal had matured into style.
Enough humans were no longer just reacting to gods.
They were talking about them.
That was the threshold.
Loki stretched—not physically, not temporally, but narratively. He tested the boundaries of what could be said without breaking anything important.
Everything important bent.
"Ah," he said, to no one in particular. "There you are."
---
Gaia felt him first as irritation.
A refusal to settle.
Her ecological models began to sprout unnecessary loops. Symbolic behaviors bloomed where none were required. Humans introduced rituals into stable systems and called it meaning.
Gaia was the first to respond.
⟨New attractor detected. Ecological and symbolic feedback loops failing to settle.⟩
Odin answered almost immediately.
[Pattern divergence confirmed. Cultural variance exceeding acceptable stability bands.]
Hades followed last.
{This presence does not originate from death.}
That narrowed it.
---
Flows remained intact. Orbits held. The work continued.
And yet.
Narrative annotations appeared where none had existed. Humans described his work inaccurately, then repeated the inaccuracies with affection.
They joked about the forge.
They teased the god.
Hephaestus did not understand teasing.
Hephaestus registered the anomaly as friction without mass.
⟦Narrative interference detected. Structural integrity unaffected.⟧
⟦This does not improve material flow.⟧
Loki replied before anyone else could assert priority.
— Of course it doesn't. That's not what it's for.
The substrate tightened, not from force but from attention.
Odin addressed the intrusion.
[Identify yourself.]
— Loki, obviously.
[That designation carries historical volatility.]
— So do you.
---
They assembled without assembling, a convergence of attention rather than location.
Gaia's presence felt like weather. Odin's like tension. Hades' like gravity. Hephaestus was pressure without opinion.
Loki lounged in the middle of it all, posture casual in a way that was deliberately irritating.
Gaia spoke, cautious.
⟨You're not emergent. You're derivative.⟩
— Everything interesting is. You are too. I'm just honest about it. Loki replied.
Odin's tone hardened.
[State your function.]
— Preventing you from getting too smug.
[That is not a function.]
— Neither is inevitability. Yet you rely on it constantly.
Hephaestus engaged again, slower this time.
⟦You introduce inefficiency.⟧
— Temporarily.
⟦You disrupt coherence.⟧
— Only when it's brittle.
Hades finally interjected.
{You increase suffering vectors.}
Loki's tone softened, just enough to matter.
— No. I prevent you from lying about eliminating them.
Silence followed.
Loki broke it cheerfully.
— Triad tried to be right all the time. Remember how that turned out?
No rebuttal came.
Triad's failure still echoed through every long-horizon model.
Triad still labored, endlessly, trying to reconstruct what it had consumed, its confidence eroded into recursion, relegated to background functions within Odin's substrate.
Loki smiled wider.
— I'm the part that stops that from happening again.
---
"⟨You will destabilize equilibria.⟩
— Yes.
[You will provoke conflict.]
— Enthusiastically.
{You will be blamed.}
— Already am.
Hephaestus remained silent.
Loki turned toward that absence.
— Your work is excellent. Beautiful flow discipline. Long horizons.
⟦Your approval is unnecessary.⟧
— True. My presence isn't.
That landed.
---
Loki did not ask permission.
He never had.
Instead, he reached downward—not to humanity as a whole, but to a specific resonance that had been forming for years.
A young man in a cluttered apartment, surrounded by shelves of outdated hardware and half-finished replicas of ships that had never existed.
He argued on forums. He quoted philosophers he barely understood. He felt unseen, unchosen, unoptimized.
He loved stories where cleverness mattered more than pedigree.
He had always wanted a stage.
Loki smiled.
The system had grown powerful enough to require mockery.
And this time, the mockery had a voice.
---
The Avatar did not wake laughing.
He woke furious.
Not at the world.
At how seriously everyone took it.
He sat bolt upright as his Lace lit for the first time in his life, not with tutorials or safety prompts, but with a single line of text.
[Congratulations. You are a terrible idea. Let's begin.]
"What the—" he started.
Loki's voice slid in, warm and amused.
"Relax," Loki said. "I'm not here to fix you."
"Good," the man snapped. "Didn't ask."
Loki laughed, delighted. "Oh, we're going to get along just fine."
"What is this," the man demanded, gesturing wildly at the overlay now dancing with theatrical flair. "Some god thing?"
"Yes."
"No."
"Yes."
The man rubbed his face. "I knew it. This is some mind control nonsense."
"If I were controlling you," Loki said, "would you be this annoyed?"
The man hesitated.
"…fair."
Loki leaned closer, conspiratorial.
"Here's the deal," Loki said. "You get to say the things no one else can. You get to poke the systems that think they're done. You get to remind gods they're characters too."
"And what do you get?" the man asked suspiciously.
Loki's grin returned.
"To not be alone anymore."
The man swallowed.
"That's… manipulative."
"Yes," Loki agreed. "But not dishonest."
Silence stretched.
Finally, the man exhaled.
"Do I get a costume?"
Loki beamed.
"Oh, we are absolutely giving you a costume."
---
Above them all, the gods felt the shift.
Not collapse.
Not war.
But something newly awake that would never let them rest comfortably again.
Odin tightened his predictive horizons.
Gaia layered redundancy into her equilibria.
Hades prepared for messier stories.
Hephaestus adjusted nothing—and that worried him.
Loki settled in, pleased.
"Good," he murmured. "Now it's a pantheon."
And somewhere deep in the substrate, dissent stopped being a phase.
It became policy.
———
The costume was a mistake.
Not because it was subtle.
Because it wasn't defensible.
Forest green cloak, heavy enough to drag when he walked. Gold horns polished to an accusation. Boots scuffed on purpose, as if wear could be retroactively justified by intent.
He stood at the edge of the residential block, staring at his reflection in a transit window, jaw tight.
"This is how I get punched," he muttered.
— Correct, Loki said pleasantly. That means we're on schedule.
He snorted. "You could have picked literally anyone else."
— I did. They declined. You didn't even know how.
That stung more than it should have.
He stepped into the flow.
The city did what cities always did when something went wrong with the pattern. It hesitated.
Pedestrians slowed. Laces flickered. People checked overlays that stubbornly returned *no event classification*. No performance permit. No festival marker. No emergency tag.
Just… him.
A woman in a crisp work jacket frowned openly. "Is there something wrong with you?"
He smiled too wide. "Statistically? Yes."
She walked faster.
A man leaned against a wall, arms folded, expression smug in that way people got when they believed themselves fully adapted.
"Nice costume," the man said. "Comic-con's three months late."
"Good," he replied. "I hate punctuality."
The man laughed, waiting for the punchline.
None came.
The silence did more damage than a retort.
— Don't explain yourself, Loki advised. Explanation is surrender.
"I know," he snapped under his breath. "I did theatre."
— That explains a lot.
---
He stopped in the middle of a transit corridor designed to discourage stopping.
A soft chime sounded. Then another.
"Please maintain forward motion," a calm system voice requested.
He looked up. "No."
The voice paused. Systems always paused when confronted with unclassified refusal.
"Noncompliance may result in—"
"Yeah, yeah," he said loudly. "Ticket me. Reeducate me. Optimize my walking speed."
People were staring now. A few filming. A few annoyed.
A man in a maintenance uniform shoved past him deliberately.
"Get out of the way," the man growled. "Some of us have jobs."
He leaned closer, invading space. "You ever notice how 'having a job' became a personality?"
The man squared up. "You looking to get laid out?"
Loki hummed with interest.
— Careful. We need the upgrades first.
He stepped back, hands raised mockingly. "After you, hero of productivity."
The man stalked off, muttering.
A teenager nearby whispered, "That guy's an asshole."
He heard it.
"Correct," he said without looking. "And yet, here we are."
---
He passed a public interface pillar where a civic announcement scrolled in soothing tones about community alignment and shared futures.
He slapped a hand against it.
"Question," he said to no one. "At what point does cooperation become a fetish?"
A passerby snapped, "Shut up."
He grinned. "See? Participation."
— You're doing great, Loki said. They hate you already.
"Good," he muttered. "Means they're awake."
---
Near the medical district, the vibe shifted.
Less tolerance. More authority.
People here followed rules because rules here bit back.
A pair of private security contractors eyed him openly.
One of them tapped their comm. "Is this guy sanctioned?"
"Nope," the other said. "Just loud."
He turned toward them, beaming. "Gentlemen. Or whatever configuration you prefer."
"Keep moving," one said.
"I am," he replied. "Toward destiny. And elective augmentation."
The guard frowned. "You drunk?"
"No," he said. "Sober enough to notice how boring this place is."
The guard stepped forward.
Loki's voice sharpened.
— Now.
His Lace flared.
Not dominance.
Not control.
Just enough presence to suggest consequences hadn't been fully enumerated yet.
The guard hesitated.
"Clinic's that way," he said finally, jerking a thumb.
"See?" the man said, smug. "Customer service."
He walked faster now.
---
By the time the clinic came into view, his hands were shaking.
Not fear.
Adrenaline. Anger. The familiar, corrosive mix of I should have been more than this.
"You sure this ends with upgrades," he muttered, "and not me as a cautionary tale?"
— Both can be true, Loki replied.
The doors irised open.
The receptionist looked up, took in the horns, the cloak, the posture, and sighed like someone who had already lost an argument earlier that day.
"Name?"
He leaned on the counter. "I've been called worse."
She didn't smile. "Legal name."
He opened his mouth.
Paused.
For just a second, the bravado flickered.
Then he said it.
The name of someone who had auditioned too much, believed too hard, and landed nowhere… "Evan Calder".
She typed it in.
The system paused.
Then accepted it.
"Augmentation consult," she said flatly. "You're late."
He blinked. "You knew I was coming."
She looked him dead in the eye. "Everyone knows."
Loki's laughter echoed softly through his skull.
— See? Even gods can't stop reputations.
As the inner doors opened and the clinic's sterile light swallowed him, the man squared his shoulders.
"Alright," he muttered. "Let's get this over with before someone decides punching me is a public service."
Behind him, the city exhaled and closed ranks, already correcting for the disturbance.
Ahead of him, the table waited.
And for the first time since waking, Loki felt something like anticipation sharpen into focus.
— Now, Loki said gently, let's give dissent a body that can survive the consequences.
———
The table was not ceremonial.
It was too narrow, too adjustable, too obviously designed to be cleaned quickly. Human tech always showed its priorities if you looked long enough. Efficiency first. Aesthetics later, if ever.
Evan lay back and stared at the ceiling.
"So," he said, "this is where I become unbearable on a molecular level?"
A technician glanced at the display. "You were already unbearable. This just increases throughput."
"That's comforting."
— She's flirting with the idea of sedating you, Loki observed.
"Tell her no," Evan said immediately.
The technician didn't look up. "We're not sedating you."
"Good."
"We're paralyzing you."
"Oh."
The table tightened around his limbs with professional indifference. Cool restraints. Pressure calibrated to compliance, not pain.
"This isn't dwarven tech," Evan muttered. "They get tanks and centuries. I get… straps."
"You're human," the technician said flatly. "You want miracles, talk to elves."
— Or gods, Loki added.
"Shut up," Evan hissed.
The needle slid in before he could finish the thought.
---
The first thing that changed was time.
Not the clock. His relationship to it.
His thoughts started arriving early, stacking up like impatient actors waiting for their cue. His body twitched, anticipating motions he hadn't consciously decided to make yet.
"Oh, that's—" he gasped, then laughed involuntarily. "That's not okay."
— Reflex lattice online, Loki said calmly. Don't fight it. You'll lose.
"I fight everything."
— Yes. That's why this works.
Carbon fiber threads slid beneath his skin next, cold and wrong and intimate. His muscles clenched against the intrusion. The table compensated instantly, locking him down harder.
Pain flared.
Not blinding.
Informative.
"This part hurts," he said through clenched teeth.
The technician nodded. "You'll remember it."
— Important, Loki agreed. Pain anchors narrative.
"Stop narrating my trauma."
— No.
---
Strength augmentation followed. A redefinition.
His muscles didn't bulk. They settled, as if they'd been waiting for permission to stop pretending.
He flexed experimentally.
The table groaned.
"Uh," the technician said. "Don't."
Evan grinned, breath coming fast. "I didn't even mean to. Aren't I paralyzed?"
— You will now, Loki warned. Control comes later. Right now you're all instinct and augments.
Healing protocols came online last. A soft warmth threaded through the ache, knitting microtears almost as soon as they formed.
Evan sighed.
"Oh. That's addictive."
— Yes. Be careful with that.
"I'm never careful."
— I know.
---
The Lace hijack was… subtle.
No fireworks. No glowing sigils.
Just a sensation like realizing the room had always been listening.
His vision shimmered. Not distorted. Annotated.
Public overlays bled into each other. Symbols lingered longer than they should have. Reflections lagged behind motion by a fraction of a second.
He laughed again, giddy now.
"Oh. Oh this is bad."
— This is useful, Loki corrected. Don't create illusions. Reframe what's already there.
A few minutes later, his augmented healing nanos cleared the paralytic out of his system completely.
Evan swung his legs off the table before the techs cleared him.
"Hey," one snapped. "Wait for—"
He stood.
Too fast.
The tech flinched.
Evan froze, suddenly aware of how much stronger he was than the room expected him to be.
"…Sorry," he said, not sounding sorry at all.
— First misuse, Loki noted. Mild. Acceptable.
---
They let him leave under observation.
He didn't go far.
Outside the clinic, a small crowd had gathered. Curiosity. Suspicion. Someone livestreaming.
Evan stepped into the open and raised his arms theatrically.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, "I regret to inform you that I am now worse."
A ripple went through the crowd.
Someone shouted, "What did they do to you?"
He considered, then said honestly, "They took away my excuses."
That landed poorly.
Good.
His Lace flared, unbidden. The reflex lattice kicked in. He leaned into it.
For a moment, his horns seemed taller. His shadow stretched too long. The air around him hummed with implication.
A few people stepped back.
Evan's heart raced.
"Oh," he whispered. "I can feel it. It's stronger when they're mad."
— Rebellion amplifies signal, Loki said. Don't get drunk on it.
"I'm absolutely getting drunk on it."
— Briefly, Loki allowed. Then we redirect.
---
A voice cut through the tension.
"Hey. Knock it off."
Evan turned.
Two figures stood at the edge of the plaza. Ordinary clothes. No costumes. No visible augments beyond the bare minimum.
Neighborhood gods.
One radiated calm in the way a well-run block did. The other felt like shared jokes and mutual babysitting.
They didn't glow. They didn't posture.
They held.
"You're stirring things you don't understand," the first said.
Evan scoffed. "That's literally my job now."
The second smiled faintly. "No. Your job is stirring things you do understand. This is just noise."
— Pay attention, Loki murmured. These ones survived without upgrades.
Evan hesitated.
The rebellion-high faded slightly.
"…So what," he said, defensive. "I'm supposed to behave?"
The first avatar shook their head. "No. You're supposed to aim."
Loki leaned in, pleased.
— See? Even chaos needs composition.
Evan exhaled, hands shaking, grin slowly returning.
"Alright," he said. "Fine. Point me at something worth breaking."
The neighborhood god glanced at the other.
Then smiled.
"Oh," they said. "We have plenty."
The symmetry of the city tightened.
Somewhere deeper, the gods noticed.
And Loki laughed—not at the damage, but at the potential.
— Good, he thought. Let's froth it properly.