Chapter 9: The Crunched Circus

Haki stood in the Government Labs—Crunched Labs, a Yoctotech nightmare that made his own meticulously chaotic workspace feel like a Zen garden by comparison. But to one being in particular, this was more than just chaos—it was sacrilege.

"Wait... aren't those—"

Acca's voice cracked with disbelief. The moment he recognized the Yoctotech he had pioneered, rage flickered through his circuits. After uncountable years of scientific stagnation at the femtoscale, he had finally dragged the world into a new era. Not only had he birthed Yoctotech—he had skipped the entire atto and zepto scales altogether, IN HIS "TINY-BY-COMPARISON LAB"!!! leaping straight into the unthinkable: the yocto scale.

The place was chaos—scientists stumbling over wires, Yoctobots dodging bureaucrats with oversized egos, holo-screens glitching like an old arcade game. The Andromeda-Milky Way crash was only 364 days, 14 hours away, according to his AI chip's relentless countdown. Haki wasn't here to save these overworked clowns. He was here to crack existence itself.

'Quantum circus!' he thought with a smirk. 'Bet they'd pray to a drone if it blinked at the right frequency.'

The Quantum Matrix experiment—his shot at riding the cosmic wave like a surfer on an intergalactic tsunami—was why he'd come to this hellhole. His own lab couldn't handle the Matrix's power draw, so he'd made a deal with the Council: reactors, no questions asked.

Three weeks ago, Haki stood in his spire lab, a sleek fortress of Yoctotech humming under Neo-Atlantis's synthetic aurora. The Quantum Matrix blueprint flickered on his holo-screen, its lattice demanding ten zettawatts—enough to power a small hive. His reactors whined, red-lining at half that.

'Star-crash,' he thought, lips twitching. 'My lab's choking on my own genius.'

Acca's nerdy voice piped up, glasses glinting. "Power capacity insufficient. Risk of cascade failure: 82%."

'Glitch it, Acca,' Haki shot back. 'I'm not frying my setup for a test run.'

He needed bigger reactors—Council reactors, buried in Crunched Labs. The thought soured his mood. Dealing with technocrats was like debating a sim with bad code. But the Matrix, his shot at anchoring his consciousness through the collision's chaos, wasn't negotiable.

Haki stormed into the Council's spire-chamber, a dome of Yoctotech pomp.

Councilor Taz, all pico-woven smarm, grinned like a knockoff villain. "Your Matrix sounds… ambitious," Taz said, voice oily. "Why our reactors?"

"Because mine can't handle it," Kevide snapped, robe swishing. What a Quantum clownshow!

"Yours can. Ten zettawatts, no blackouts. I get access, you get to pretend you're saving Neo-Atlantis. No questions."

Kevide's magnetic voice purred. "Own these worms or step off." Haki ignored him, staring Taz down.

A councilwoman, Dr. Lira, frowned. "And if it spikes our grid?"

"Then fix your grid," Haki said. "Deal?"

Taz's smirk twitched. "No questions… for now." The Council nodded, their ambition outweighing their spines.

'Amateurs,' Haki thought, striding out. 'They'll choke on this favor.'

Or so he thought…

Big mistake! Now he was babysitting their so-called "experts," half of whom thought "quantum" was just a buzzword for more funding.

In his mind, Acca and Kevide's thoughts flickered like a quick exchange. They were both opinions with legs.

Acca's nerdy voice pinged in his head, "This facility's efficiency is 43% below optimal. Their neural lattices are outdated by a century."

Haki snorted. 'Glitch it, Acca. They're lucky I didn't bring my own bots.'

Dr. Vren, a wiry scientist with a permanent scowl, hovered nearby, her nano-optic eyes scanning the Matrix console with clinical precision.

"Hmph! Your lattice design," she said, voice sharp enough to cut diamonds,

"…risks destabilizing our anti-matter traps. One misfire, and half this quadrant's gone."

'Star-crash! She's got a point, not like I didn't know that though…' Haki thought, tuning her out as Hell Dave jumped in.

Hell Dave: "Let's burn this lab to the ground!"

'Let's just pretend to hear her out, okay?' Haki interrupted the mad individual.

Dr. Vren crossed her arms, undeterred. "You're pushing the grid past its limits. Fix your specs, or we're all ash."

Haki waved her off without looking. "Then don't let it misfire. I'm not here to blow up your toys."

Dr. Vren's scowl deepened, but she turned back to her console, muttering about reckless geniuses.

Across the lab, Councilor Taz, a sleazy official wrapped in pico-woven suits and a smile that screamed "used anti-grav vehicle salesman," schmoozed with techs, relishing his position like a man who thought he was the main character in a B-rated sci-fi flick.

'Kevide's got competition,' Haki mused.

Kevide's velvet voice slithered into his thoughts. "That fool's presence is an insult. Outshine him or step off."

"Relax, Batman," Haki shot back. "I'll own this room without your cape. Besides, he's just a side character."

As if on cue, Heavenly Dave's voice thundered into his mind, dark and ominous. "Can you two narcissistic quantum fuckers shut the hell up? Sigma this, sigma that."

Haki laughed under his breath. "I think that's the first time I've heard you swear, Heavenly. How cute… well, if we're not counting the other 408 times you've slipped up. Maybe stick to the script for once, yeah?"

An anxious junior tech, Milo, scurried over, his holo-pad sparking in his hands like it was trying to escape. "Uh, bro—I mean, sir—Haki?—your lattice specs are… wild. Like, consciousness-binding wild. You sure this isn't… sorcery?"

Haki's lips twitched. 'Kid's got guts, asking in that manner.'

"Sorcery is for sim-monks, Milo," Haki drawled. "This is science. Now, fix your pad before it fries your eyebrows."

'…and before I end up dead,' he continued in thought. If he didn't fear any person in this world, then his mother wasn't a person…

The Matrix wasn't some obscure legend—it was a lattice designed to anchor Haki's consciousness, keeping him intact through the chaos of the universe's final collision. Inspired by a forgotten novel's "Ritual of Unbeing," Haki had stripped the mystical nonsense away and turned it into a quantum beast: neural patterns mapped, encoded, and stabilized through Yoctotech.

The catch? The power surge could fry circuits worse than a solar flare. No one had warned him about that little detail, right? And, oh yeah, the probability of dying was over 67%.

"We've experienced worse…" Acca muttered, embarrassed.

"Hmph! And whose fault was that?" Heavenly growled in response.

Hell Dave's voice was a low, guttural rumble. "Tch! Build it or burn this junkheap down!"

Heavenly Dave shot back with a sigh. "Balance, not destruction. Anchor the soul, not the chaos."

Their constant shifts—Hell's obsidian form, Heavenly's alabaster glow—played out like a battle in Haki's mind, each one driving him toward brilliance—or spiraling him down into madness.

'You two should get a holo-show,' Haki thought dryly.

'Oh! I know, it would be… Fire vs. Zen: The Cosmic Smackdown…' He ended his thought.