Leo awoke to the gentle warmth of three suns on his face.
For a moment, the old panic flared—the gut-wrenching certainty that he had overslept, that his alarm hadn't gone off, that he was already late for a job he hated. He jolted upright, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
Then he saw it. The endless turquoise ocean, the soft purple sand, the impossible, alien sky. He wasn't in his cramped, gray apartment on Earth. He was in paradise. The frantic thumping in his chest slowed, replaced by a wave of profound, bone-deep tranquility. It hadn't been a dream. He was free.
He had no idea how long he'd been asleep. A day? A week? It didn't matter. Time was a concept for people with deadlines.
He stretched, a long, luxurious motion, feeling decades of tension finally release from his muscles. The sand was comfortable, but he was a man of infinite resources now. He deserved better.
He closed his eyes and imagined the most comfortable bed he could conjure. A massive, cloud-like mattress, sheets woven from something softer than silk, and a dozen pillows, each perfectly calibrated for maximum support. With a faint shimmer in the air, the bed materialized before him on the sand, an absurd monument to opulent laziness.
Leo smiled, crawled into his new creation, and promptly fell back asleep.
A thousand light-years away, Arthur Penwright nearly choked on his tea.
"Incredible," he whispered, his eyes glued to the high-fidelity feed on his wall. He watched as Leo, the object of his intense academic focus, spontaneously generated a bed that would have cost more than a small starship.
Arthur frantically typed notes into a datapad. "Subject demonstrates advanced spontaneous matter creation, seemingly for the primary purpose of 'comfort optimization.' A possible link between existential peace and direct environmental control? The implications are staggering."
For three weeks, Arthur had been observing. He had watched the Anomaly sleep, sunbathe, and occasionally wander down the beach before returning to sleep some more. It was fascinating, but it wasn't enough. Watching a man nap, even a cosmically significant man, was providing limited data. To truly understand the phenomenon, Arthur needed to know its origin.
He funneled a hundred million credits—a pittance from his now near-infinite bank account—into a new project. He hired the top three information brokerage firms in the galaxy, giving them a simple, impossible-sounding task: scour the public and private archives of the entire Terran Federation for any and all recorded appearances of a man matching the Anomaly's description and unique energy signature.
The data requests went out like a shockwave, pinging servers on bustling trade hubs like Port Zenith, sifting through the dusty police archives of backwater mining colonies, and even accessing the passenger logs of luxury starliners. For days, there was nothing.
Then, he got a hit. A low-level data broker from Port Zenith, a sprawling commercial station known for its black markets and loose regulations, sent him an encrypted file.
Subject: Archive Match Found. Sector 9 Security Cam Footage.
Arthur's heart hammered in his chest. He loaded the file. The image was grainy, stamped with the time-code of a few weeks prior. The perspective was from a cheap security camera mounted on the corner of a grimy, steaming noodle stall. The scene was chaotic. Amid the bustling crowd, a firefight had erupted between a local gang and station security.
And there, standing at the counter as if nothing was happening, was Leo.
He looked… different. Tired. Thinner. His clothes were worn, and a deep, weary exhaustion was etched onto his face. He was clearly from a time before he'd found his paradise.
As Arthur watched, a stray plasma bolt, a brilliant blue-white streak of energy hot enough to melt through a ship's hull, flew directly toward Leo's head.
Arthur flinched instinctively, but on the screen, Leo didn't. He didn't duck, he didn't raise a shield, he didn't even seem to notice. With the casual grace of someone avoiding a puddle, he took a single, lazy step to the side. The lethal bolt sizzled past the spot where his head had been a nanosecond before, melting a grotesque hole in the wall behind the counter.
Leo paid the vendor, took his container of noodles, and walked away, disappearing into the crowd without a backward glance.
Arthur stared, his mouth agape. It was perfect. It wasn't a show of power; it was a show of complete, utter, and absolute indifference. It was proof that the Anomaly's invulnerability wasn't a conscious act, but a fundamental state of being.
This was too important to keep to himself. This was a paradigm shift in the understanding of existence itself. His Institute needed to publish.
With trembling, excited fingers, he drafted his first research paper. He embedded the noodle shop video as the centerpiece, his "Exhibit A." He gave it a suitably academic title:
On the Nature of Serene Detachment: A Case Study of Anomalous Apathy
He uploaded the paper to the OmniNet, the vast, interconnected web of the multiverse. With a final, decisive click, he hit the "Publish" button.
The clip of the man who couldn't be bothered to dodge a plasma bolt began to spread.