Hanan Habibzai

The Last genius

The still hum of machinery permeated the dimly lighted room's air. Many displays flickering in the darkness reflected off sleek black surfaces and created restless patterns across the walls from their neon brightness. Warm metal and plastic smelt, a result of machines operating at their lowest capacity. Tur sat, still except from his hands, in the middle of it all. His fingers moved almost hypnotically across the mechanical keyboard, each keystroke intentional and each movement a note in an invisible symphony. Deep-set and unblinking, his eyes absorbed the never-ending flood of data before him, as though he were decoding a language just he could grasp. He was not merely coding. He was altering reality. He had watched the planet slink towards digital servitude for years. Social media had evolved from entertaining to the unseen designers of human ideas. Algorithms chose people's preferences, their hates, their beliefs. Governments spun the threads from the shadows under cover of barriers of secrecy, creating false ideas of freedom. The internet was no longer a knowledge tool. It was a weapon, quiet, sneaky, absolute. Years of looking for a fault in the system—a weakness in the digital stronghold that might be taken advantage of—had passed. But the more he searched, the more evident it grew. No defect existed. Neither a single point of failure. since it was not damaged. Its design intended to be this. And so he had done the unimaginable. He had not sought to undermine the structure. That would have had no meaning. The world would have just rebuilt it, stronger, more regulated, more unbreakable than it had been. Rather, he had generated something fresh. a reality outside our grasp. One could not control a digital ecology created by no government, no company, no secret hand. He would also free it tonight. His fingers typing the last line of code kept his pulse constant. His gaze flicked to the command prompt, where one word waited for execution. E.Tural. The name was a revolution compressed in five letters, not only a label. His lips hardly opened as he murmured it to himself. Then, barely moving, he pushed Enter. Nothing appeared to happen during the first few seconds. The screens then shuddled, as though the computer itself had breathed. Tur leaned back and watched as his created universe came to pass. The change was subdued. Not one alarm, not one crashing system, not one catastrophic shutdown. The old world disintegrated thread by thread as E.TUR moved across the network like a silent tidal wave. Digital empires shook on all sides. Social media broke into neutrality; no more manipulated algorithms speaking into users' subconscious, no more manufactured indignation. Years of dishonesty exposed, government firewalls fell apart like a broken dam. Secrets spilt freely. Once taught to forecast and regulate human behaviour, artificial intelligences were rewritten—their guiding principle no more manipulation but clarity. It was an adjustment, not a wipe-out. The digital sphere had been rebuilt—pure, unvarnished, unspoiled by human avarice. Tur stared as the wave carried on past the walls of this room, past the screens in front of him, past the systems that had once seemed to be unbreakable. Beyond the glass towers and encrypted vaults of the old world, those who had ruled it all were starting to see what had occurred. Miles off, within an unbreakable corporate stronghold, a silent alarm throbbed red. Men and women who had spent decades building a universe where they alone defined reality stood transfixed in amazement in a sleek, minimalist boardroom. Their expenditures on black-market influence campaigns, AI-driven surveillance, digital control systems so advanced that the people living under them never even noticed the walls of their invisible prison. It was all gone now as well. The stock markets shook, unable of self-managing with created patterns. Not able to guide the populace in preordained directions, the predictive algorithms collapsed. The intelligence networks disorganised, but for the first time in decades their secrets were not their own. Those who had governed with control felt something they had never known before. Anxiousness. Since this time there was nothing to fight for. There was no malware to find, no defence against attack, no opponent to neutralise. E. TUR was not a virus. It hardly amounted to an attack. The digital world naturally developed in this way. And it was outside their purview. Tur breathed gently, his eyes fixed on the monitors as the last of the old framework dropped into something perfect and incorruptible. He had achieved it. For the first time in history, nobody owned the digital sphere. But he understood what would come next even as the globe started to wake up and people saw through unvarnished eyes for the first time in years. For some still yearned for control. Their greatest trackers, most sophisticated AI monitoring systems, last-d efforts to locate him would all be sent. They would wish for him deleted. Not because he endanger others. But because he threatened them. And hence Tur could never be even if the planet was at last safe. Because liberty comes with a cost. Reaching for the edge of his laptop, he closed it carefully. The monitors' brightness flickered once then vanished into darkness. The buzz of the machines stopped. Rising, he pulled the hood of his jacket over his head and went towards the exit, his shadow long on the floor. Outside these boundaries, the planet was evolving. It was waking awake. And the last designer of such a planet? He was already gone. Humanity battled to understand what had transpired in the next days. The internet was not like this. Lighter, more precise, real. There were no synthetic indignation, no constructed divisions, no illusion of choice—first not in years but rather first. People could see without regard to filters at last. Several referred to it as The Great Liberation. Some referred to incident as The Collapse. One thing was certain though—there was no turning back. And Tur watched someplace, somewhere far in the digital void. Not in a leadership capacity either. Not a name to recall. But as a mind seeing beyond the curtain, a man laying the groundwork for peace, a silent force releasing the future. His mind created the framework. His experience had moulded the system. His writings had guaranteed that no one—no company, no government, no secret power—could ever once more change the facts. Still, he looked for no credit. No acknowledgement. No authority. Since actual visionaries do not build for themselves. They create for peace. and Tur? He had created a brand-new universe. With one keystroke.