Jerusalem, 33 AD. The city was a pressure cooker of zealotry and Roman order. Enki, using the identity of a Greek philosopher named Alexandros, felt the tension like a coming storm. He was there to observe another would-be messiah, another data point in the long, sad history of human hope colliding with imperial reality.
He heard the rumors of the teacher, Yeshua. The healings. The talk of a kingdom not of this world. It was intriguing, but he had seen charismatic leaders before. They all ended the same way.
He was in a tavern near the Damascus Gate when the sky turned black. Not a storm cloud, but an absolute, unnatural darkness that swallowed the sun whole. The air grew cold. A profound, deafening silence fell over the city, broken only by the sound of terrified whispers. Enki stood, his heart hammering not with fear, but with a historian's fervor. He rushed to his lodgings, his mind racing. Atmospheric anomaly? Solar eclipse? The data didn't fit. This was different. This was a silence that screamed.
He recorded it meticulously in his Scrapbook. "Cosmic Dissonance. Jerusalem. Midday. Total blackout. Duration: three hours. Cause: Unknown. Effect: Primal terror."
Three days later, the city was buzzing with a new, impossible rumor. The body was gone. The tomb was empty. The word they used was "Risen."
Enki went to the tomb himself. The stone was rolled away. The burial clothes were there, empty. The air inside was... clean. It felt like the White Place.
In his mind, he felt the cold, psychic scan of the Ikannuna. He saw their verdict flash, a data-stream only he could perceive: *ANOMALY 33-JUDEA. CAUSE: THEFT (PROBABLE). STATUS: DISMISSED.*
They had logged it and filed it away. A statistical outlier. A glitch.
Enki stood in the empty space, the hair on his arms standing up. Theft? It didn't feel like a theft. It felt like an explosion from the inside. It felt like a victory.
But he was the Witness, not a believer. He could not trust feelings. He logged it as the Ikannuna had: "Unverified Anomaly. Body of Yeshua of Nazareth missing. Predominant contemporary theory: theft by disciples."
He closed his Scrapbook, the entry feeling utterly inadequate. A question had been asked of the universe, and he had only recorded the silence that followed.