The First Sin’s Echo

The lecture hall’s doors hissed shut behind Jin, but Professor Veyra’s parting words clung to him like static: “Starting tomorrow, we assist the researchers. Don’t be late.” Students flooded the neon-lit corridor, their chatter dissolving into the hum of anti-gravity trains outside. Jin gripped his tablet, its screen still scorched with the Codex’s glyph—a jagged eye, or a key, or both.

He barely noticed the floating holograms advertising “Chrono-Tours to Ancient Babylon!” or the drone sweeping past with a tray of stim-packs. His mind reeled. That figure he’d seen in the Codex’s glyphs—wings like fractured event horizons, eyes like dying stars. Had it… looked back?

“Earth to nerd!”

A weight slammed into Jin’s back. He stumbled, nearly dropping his tablet as he spun. Rhea stood there, her shaved scalp tattooed with glowing circuits that pulsed mockingly. She tossed a protein bar wrapper at him. “You’ve been walking like a sleepwalker bot. Finally cracked from staring at dead people’s scribbles?”

Jin scowled. “Unlike you, some of us care why the universe is ending.”

“Ooh, edgy,” Rhea snorted, falling into step beside him. The corridor arched into a skybridge, its transparent floor revealing the city’s chasm-like depths below. “Face it—Veyra’s sending us on a glorified scavenger hunt. Time travel? Codex ghosts? Next she’ll say the Collapse is caused by God’s daddy issues.”

Jin ignored her, thumbing his tablet awake. The glyph pulsed, and for a second, the skybridge’s lights flickered—red, like the Collapse void on Veyra’s timeline.

“I’m going to Professor Ilun’s lecture,” he muttered. “The Linguistics Dept. cracked another Codex fragment. They’re presenting on… angels and demons.”

Rhea gagged. “Ugh, mythology hour? Pass. I’ll stick with hard science.”

“According to the Codex, they’re not myths.” Jin quickened his pace, the glyph’s whisper—“Seek the First Sin”—echoing in his implant. “They’re engineering. Tools the Creator used to build reality. Or break it.”

Rhea raised an eyebrow but followed.

Professor Ilun’s Lecture Hall was a cavernous dome, its walls embedded with shifting holograms of ancient texts—Gilgamesh’s tablets, the Vedas, the Codex fragment itself. The air smelled of ozone and incense, a bizarre mix of futurism and mysticism.

“—and thus,” boomed Professor Ilun, a frail man whose augmented vocal cords made him sound like a thunderclap, “the Codex’s latest translations reveal a chilling parallel. The angels, or Malakim, were not ‘beings’ as we conceive them. They were… algorithms. Self-replicating codes tasked with sculpting matter from cosmic clay!”

A hologram flared: a geometric entity with wings of fractal light, its body a lattice of equations.

“Demons,” Ilun continued, “were corrupted code—errors spawned when angels tried to rewrite the Creator’s design. A glitch… that still spreads.”

The hologram warped. The angel’s wings melted into jagged shards; equations unraveled into chaotic glyphs. Jin’s tablet buzzed violently.

“This ‘Corruption,’” said Ilun, “is the Codex’s name for the Collapse. A cascade failure seeded at creation. Humanity—”

“Is the patch,” Jin whispered, unaware he’d spoken.

Rhea side-eyed him. “The what?”

But Ilun nodded. “Yes! Humanity was the Creator’s ‘patch’—hybrid code to debug the system. But we were too late. The Corruption had already infected us.”

The hologram zoomed in on human DNA. Twisted around it were blackened glyphs.

“Our sins,” Ilun spat, “are not moral failures. They’re symptoms. The First Sin, according to the Codex, was—”

Jin’s tablet screamed. A glyph—a serrated spiral—blazed. The holograms flickered.

And suddenly, Jin wasn’t in the lecture hall.

He stood in a void.

Before him loomed the figure from his vision—wings of fire and shadow, its body a lattice of broken code. At its feet pulsed a crystalline heart, crackling with the same black glyphs as human DNA. Above it stretched a tree, colossal and alien, its branches gnarled like fractured spacetime. Golden leaves shimmered with unnamed constellations, and its fruit—if they were fruit—glowed like dying stars.

“The First Sin was not yours,” the figure intoned, its voice fracturing Jin’s bones. “It was hers.”

An image flashed: a young girl, no older than twelve, her hands trembling as she clutched a Codex fragment. “I can fix it,” she whispered. “I can edit it—”

“YOU CANNOT,” roared the figure. “THE CORRUPTION IS INHERENT.”

The heart’s crystal cracked.

Jin floated in a sea of primordial darkness. A voice—neither male nor female, ancient and infinite—echoed:

“Before time, there was water. An ocean without shores. A void without form. From it, the First Light erupted—a spark that birthed stars, galaxies… and the Tree of Eternity.

The angels were forged as architects, their wings equations, their voices symphonies of order. But in their pride, they sought to perfect the design. They spliced their code… and birthed chaos.

The Corruption spread—a shadow that gnawed at creation’s edges. To mend it, the Creator shaped humanity: fragile, adaptive, a hybrid of clay and stardust. But you arrived too late.

The Corruption had already seeped into your DNA. Your wars, your greed, your sins—echoes of a flaw older than your species.

The Collapse is no accident. It is a test.”

The void dissolved into a starscape.

Jin watched civilizations rise and fall—Babylonian towers crumbling, Sumerian ziggurats swallowed by sand, satellites orbiting a dying Earth.

*“You are not the first. The Codex has been found before. By those who thought themselves saviors…

…and became destroyers.”

The girl’s face flickered again, older now, her eyes hollow as she etched glyphs into her own skin.

“—JIN!”

Rhea’s fist slammed his arm. He gasped, back in the lecture hall. Students filed out; Ilun’s holograms dark.

“You okay?” Rhea’s smirk was gone. “You looked… dead.”

Jin stared at his tablet. The spiral glyph split the screen. His shirt clung to his back, drenched in sweat.

“Well?” Rhea prodded. “Gonna share with the class, or—”

He shoved past her, bile rising in his throat.

“Whoa, drama queen,” she called after him.

Jin staggered into an empty corridor, leaning against the glass wall. The city’s neon sprawl blurred below. His tablet chimed—a message from an unknown sender:

LAB 7. TONIGHT. BRING THE GIRL. —A FRIEND

Rhea’s shadow fell over him. “Well,” she grinned, circuits flaring pink, “guess mythology hour just got interesting.”