The hallway outside Klause's classroom still hummed with leftover chatter, but Tahir barely
heard any of it. His mind was wound tight around the professor's last words —
reverse-engineer, don't rush the core, feed it controlled variations.
He stepped outside into the cooler evening air and immediately pulled out his phone.
After three rings, Yassir picked up.
"Hey man," Tahir said, lowering his voice, "been trying to reach you."
"What's up? Sorry — couldn't make it to today's lecture. How was it?"
"It was good," Tahir replied. "New professor. Sharp. Talks like he's building machines from
questions."
"Heh. Sounds dangerous."
They talked for a minute — broken lab equipment, project rumors, the usual. But Tahir's tone
eventually shifted.
"Listen… can we meet? I need to talk to you about something."
"Sure. Tomorrow morning, CS Section Library. I've got a few procedures to finish."
"Deal."
The call ended, leaving only the soft wind threading through the trees.
Tahir took the long way across campus.
The abandoned wing — once silent, emptied of everyone but dust — looked different today.
Men in plain security jackets lingered near the broken gate. Drones drifted above the rooftops.
Trucks rolled in and out through the service road, hauling crates sealed with Union-coded
labels.
He stayed back, blending into the flow of students.
So they noticed.
Or maybe they always knew something was missing.
He studied the movement, the tight formation of guards around the loading area. This wasn't
cleaning — it was retrieval.
I wasn't the only one who walked out with something that day. If Yassir took anything too… I
need to know. And soon.
His eyes drifted toward the sealed wing, the memory of the old man, the drives, the dust-laced
silence.
And this bot… it's not just data. It's leading me somewhere. August 1990, huh.
He turned away and continued walking, letting the noise of campus swallow him.
Back in his room, the stillness felt heavier. The blinds filtered the orange evening light into thin
stripes across the wall. Tahir tossed his bag aside and set the whiteboard upright beside his
desk.
The monitor still glowed faintly with last night's prompt:
WHAT HAPPENED ON AUGUST 1990?
He exhaled through his nose. "We're still on that."
He replayed fragments of the old video, Qasimir's voice echoing in his head — confident,
unnervingly calm. Then he looked at the scribbled list on the board:
– Have you ever questioned reality
– Deconstructing the idea of life
– The Five religions
– How to ascend
– Fill the seat of the Lord
– Simulation theory
"If I want to understand Mutaz," he murmured, "I have to work backward from this."
He sat down and typed:
what does it mean to question reality?
The response arrived with the softness of a spoken sentence.
|| To question reality is to strip away the version of life you inherited,
and build a truer one on your own terms.
Tahir blinked, absorbing the cadence.
Definitely not predefined. Not robotic.
what is true?
A pause — then:
|| If I may speak freely… truth is ascension.
To reach the end is to understand the path.
To go beyond it is to know the truth.
"That's a massive leap," he said aloud, rubbing his forehead.
He leaned back, tapping the pen against the desk.
It's biased toward Mutaz's ideas. Not answering from a script — thinking. This could be
revolutionary. A human-like system from 1990?
But unease pressed in.
If I keep pushing… someone might notice. Once I crack the next repository, I'll decide where I
stand.
He leaned forward again.
what does quasimir mean when he talks about the beginning?
The reply came gently, like someone explaining a familiar story.
|| From what I understand, Quasimir Mutaz accepted the orthodox
historical beginning — but interpreted its meaning differently.
Think of it this way: if the beginning branches into many directions,
what would you expect the end to do?
Tahir typed:
that the end would converge into a singularity?
|| More or less.
Your thought process resembles Mutaz's view.
One addition: he believed the Creator is the singularity —
binding both the beginning and the end.
Tahir's breath stilled.
The ideas on the whiteboard — ascension, creation, beginnings, ends — folded inward, aligning
themselves like pieces of a much older pattern.
A pattern he wasn't sure he was ready to see.
He stared at the screen, the green glow reflected in his eyes.
The machine waited quietly.
The truth waited with it.
And for the first time, Tahir felt the weight of the path he had stepped onto — a path Mutaz had
begun decades before him.
In the vast sprawl of Majeb's capital, in a district of glass towers and old stone terraces, the city
of Wihda hummed like a sleeping giant.
Inside one of its quieter quarters, behind an unmarked door on the sixth floor of an
unremarkable building, a man sat alone in a room that looked almost painfully ordinary.
He looked no older than his early thirties.
Tall — a clean six feet.
Long black curls brushed his shoulders, softening the sharpness of his features. His clothes
were simple: a white shirt rolled to the elbows, black trousers, thin-framed glasses perched low
on the bridge of his nose as he read from a small, weathered book.
Anyone passing by would have assumed he was just another upper-class academic, another
well-spoken citizen with refined habits and quiet hobbies.
But that wasn't true.
Not even close.
This was the man who had mobilized the long-forgotten desert forces — the tribes erased from
official military records — and brought them back to Majeb under a single banner.
The man who had united two ancient, opposing religions under one shared doctrine, turning
centuries of fracture into a single voice.
The man preparing to negotiate with the Union — the sole powerhouse that dictated the pace
of the modern world.
This was Quasimir Mutaz.
The name whispered in both reverence and fear.
March, 1996.
A dry breeze slid through the cracked window as he turned the final page.
The soft sound of the book closing settled into the silence like a verdict.
Whatever was written inside those pages… whatever proposal had been placed before him…
whatever future had been offered to tame his ambition —
One thing was certain.
Quasimir Mutaz refused.