Matteo hung up the phone. He looked at the cracked holoscreen, then back at Kaelen.

Matteo’s blood went cold. "Yes."

Father Matteo drained the last dregs of synthetic coffee, the bitter taste a poor substitute for grace. His congregation had shrunk to twelve souls, all over seventy. They came not for God, but for the free climate-controlled air.

Matteo believed he was obsolete. Until she walked in.

In the outside world, the news ticker scrolled by. Neo-Miracle Four: Quantum battery achieves infinite charge in Zurich.

Matteo looked at his empty church. The stained glass showed a man turning water into wine—a trick any nano-chemist could now perform. He felt a fraud.

"Don't tell anyone," he said quietly. "If they find out, they’ll try to reverse-engineer it. They’ll call it Neo-Miracle Five, sell it in a bottle, and miss the point entirely."

Kaelen had tried everything. The regeneration patches. The predictive algorithms. She had even bribed a bio-sculptor to grow her a "miracle" of her own. Nothing worked.