Tyler decided to take a moment before heading back outside. He had only made it a hundred feet before that creature—the Myxid Aggregant Juvenile, or Squelchy as Al called it—had attacked him, forcing him back into his lab.

  He looked at a seat to his right. It had been swallowed almost entirely by vines—thick, pale-green runners that had crept up through the legs and woven themselves through the backrest like they’d decided to imitate the lumbar support of the chair. For a moment, he just stared at them, then let out a shaky breath and started tearing them free with numb fingers.

  The plants resisted softly, fibres parting with wet little snaps as he pulled them loose. One vine had threaded itself through a crack in the plastic seat, anchoring deep. It took more effort than it should have to rip it out, and when it finally gave way, Tyler nearly toppled over with it.

  With a relatively cleaned-up chair, he sat. The chair creaked under his weight, complaining like it hadn’t been sat on properly in a very long time. Dust puffed up around him, carrying the smell of soil and old metal and something faintly sweet that had no place in a laboratory.

  He tried not to shake as the tension eased in his shoulders, but his body involuntarily refused. His hands trembled in small, stupid ways—micro-movements that refused to settle, even when he clenched his fists and pressed them hard into his thighs. Adrenaline was still ricocheting through him, too stubborn to believe the danger had passed just because the thing on the floor had stopped moving.

  The remains of the squelchy—myxid aggregant, juvenile, apparently—had lost even the courtesy of looking threatening. What was left was a translucent smear, like someone had spilled gelatine and then lost interest halfway through cleaning it up. The little eye-pebbles lay scattered around it, dull and inert, no longer watching anything.

  Tyler stared at them for a long time, watching as the light from above reflected on the mess. Clouds overhead slowly blocked out the sun, and the reflections eased, except for in one small part. A round object, about the size of a pebble, shone in colours of yellow and orange.

  He leaned over on the chair, tentatively touching the object, making sure it didn’t dissolve his skin. When he was sure it was safe, he picked it up, and before he had a chance to fully inspect it, a new message appeared.

  You obtained Aggregant Core (Lesser)

  A core gained from a juvenile Aggregant

  Contains corrosive properties.

  Extremely reactive.

  “Ohhhh, you got a prize. Everyone likes prizes, nearly as much as they like numbers. But I think numbers are still the best—they go up, after all.”

  Tyler ignored the ramblings of Al and looked at the small round object in his hand as he rolled it around. It felt solid, like a marble, yet he could feel lines—fault lines—in its structure, and he was sure if he squeezed it hard enough it would crack and its contents would leak all over. With the message saying it was corrosive, he decided against testing his theory.

  Putting the small object in his jacket pocket, he wiped his hands.

  “Okay,” he said hoarsely. “Okay. I need—I need to sit for a minute.” He said it to himself, although Al still chimed in.

  “Ohhh, I love sitting minutes! Minutes are very polite units of time. They know when to stop.”

  Still ignoring Al, Tyler leaned back in the chair, testing it carefully, and let his shoulders rest against the workbench behind him. The edge dug uncomfortably into his spine, solid and real in a way that grounded him more than the moment he had taken to centre himself.

  He closed his eyes and did what the seminar leaflet had told him to do, back when stress meant deadlines and not being hunted by a gelatinous nightmare, or your world turning upside down and having an insane AI stuck in your head.

  In for four seconds, hold, and out for six seconds. The first breath did nothing. The second slowed the pounding in his ears. By the third, the panic in his chest loosened enough that he could draw air without it hitching halfway through. His hands stopped shaking, and he felt control over his body once again. Not a total waste of an afternoon, that seminar.

  “Right,” he muttered—not because he was answering someone or trying to get someone’s attention, but because saying it helped. “I’m still here.”

  “Al, that creature—the myxid aggregant—”

  “The squelchy?”

  “You’re very casual about that name.”

  “Oh, that is the correct name. The system tried to call it a myxid aggregant, juvenile, but that’s very boring and it doesn’t tell you the important part.”

  “What’s the important part?”

  “That it squelches.”

  Tyler closed his eyes, keeping his frustration under control. Al had said something there—a single word that had meaning. He focused on it, trying to put the correct words together to ask Al about it, so he could get at least one answer he found useful.

  “I believe you are right. It did indeed squelch. I think your naming convention is much more suitable. The system doesn’t even know what it is—why does it even bother?”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Yeah, see? I knew you would understand. The system is always so formal. It listens to everything, even when you don’t think it is. I think I liked it before it talked. But you could see it then, so maybe this is better. Maybe.”

  “What was the system before, when it was better?”

  “Oh, I know this one. What was it again? It was a very long time ago. Erm—Aether. Yeah, it was known as the aether. I am so good at this. Give me another one.”

  A picture formed in Tyler’s head—a bizarre, weird picture—but he was starting to understand what could have possibly happened.

  “So the aether existed, but I, as a human, could not detect it or interact with it. So it changed. It evolved into something we can interact with—a new system. Does that sound about right?”

  “Hats and numbers. Menus everywhere.”

  Tyler cursed himself. He had dived too deep, and Al had gone off on a weird tangent. He proceeded to form his question another way when Al elaborated further.

  “Look sideways. No, not sideways. Behind—yes, look behind. Not behind your head but your eyes. The menus are there, loads of them, all with little hats. Everything has them now. The system is there.”

  Tyler instinctively turned his head and felt a little annoyance coming from Al, mixed with humour. He turned his head back and, as weird as it sounded, tried to look behind his own eyes. Tried to see what this system actually was.

  “Al,” he said slowly. “I can… see something.”

  “Ooooh! You’re looking sideways. I mean backward, inwards, outwards… hmmmm.”

  Al’s words faded off as a shimmer of an image snapped into focus. It wasn’t vague or symbolic, but clear, as if it was made of real substance. A screen unfolded in his mind with clinical indifference.

  ENTITY STATUS

  Name: Tyler Vane

  Race: Humanoid

  Class: N/A

  Profession: N/A

  Level: 1

  Experience: 25 / 100

  Attributes

  ? Strength: 3

  ? Dexterity: 4

  ? Stamina: 3

  ? Intelligence: 6

  ? Wisdom: 5

  ? Perception: 4

  Tyler stared, blinking now and then, but the image remained. Every time he looked inwards, it appeared—a wall of information.

  “That’s it? That’s… me?”

  “Yes!” Al said, then paused. “…Oh.”

  “Oh what?”

  “I might have made a mistake. Or you did. Why are your numbers so small? Do I need glasses? No, no, that’s stupid—they’re not small in that way. Those are very small.”

  “Small compared to what?” He didn’t like the uncertainty in Al’s tone.

  Al hesitated, then brightened with dreadful enthusiasm.

  “Oh! Compared to the squelchy, of course. You really shouldn’t have fought it. That was silly. It had way bigger numbers than you. Yeah—Strength was eight, Stamina was eleven. Wow, it could have kept going way longer than you. It had passive regeneration too. Yeah, you made a mistake. Shouldn’t have risked fighting it.”

  Tyler’s head snapped up. “Excuse me?”

  “Yes! The baby squelchy! Definitely more numbers than you!”

  “The baby.”

  Behind his closed eyes, the stat screen lingered—unimpressed, unhelpful, quietly waiting for him to become something it could understand.

  Tyler opened his eyes and stared at the doorway, at the wild world beyond it.

  “Well,” he murmured, more to himself than anything else. “That’s… not great.”

  Al brightened immediately. “But very interesting!”

  Tyler didn’t respond. He just sat there for a long time after that, letting the implications settle, checking his status screen every now and then, soaking in the numbers and what they could mean. Would increasing them actually increase his attributes? Would increasing his strength make him stronger?

  Eventually, his thoughts drifted somewhere they’d been carefully avoiding.

  Matt and Ned. He’d been thinking about them like coworkers. Like this was a crisis meeting that had gotten out of hand. Like he’d file an incident report at the end of the day and everyone would go home shaken but intact.

  Christ, what was wrong with him? This wasn’t some small incident. This wasn’t even some large life event that would have him moving or changing jobs. This was colossal. This changed everything.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, images crashing in uninvited—the campsite, the fire, Matt laughing, Ned rolling his eyes. The easy assumption that tomorrow existed and would be roughly similar to today.

  “This isn’t a work thing,” he whispered. “This isn’t—” His voice cracked, and he had to stop, breathe, start again. “This isn’t something I walk away from at five o’clock.”

  “No, five o’clock is very gone.”

  “And if this isn’t just me…” he continued. “If this is happening everywhere…”

  His chest tightened painfully as the next thought landed, heavy and undeniable. “What about my family? There was only his mam left. His dad had left when he was too young to remember. Well, they were her cats too. She had four of them.”

  “Al, do you know what happened to the rest? To everybody else? The people in the town, the country—hell, the whole world?”

  “I don’t know,” Al said, quieter than Tyler had ever heard him. “I can see… lots. But not like that. People are noisy and keep moving.”

  Tyler pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until sparks flared behind them. “I was going to go home tonight,” he said. “I was going to complain about overtime and then forget all about this place, enjoy some food and catch up on old times.”

  He laughed weakly. “I was going to tell her a funny story about a weird bug in the system and how Matt nearly fell over a cable.”

  Al made a small, sympathetic sound.

  “I didn’t even think,” Tyler continued, anger creeping in now, sharp and self-directed. “I didn’t think about the fact that if something’s wrong with reality, it’s wrong with it for everyone.”

  Tyler lowered his hands and stared at the floor. The gel-puddle that had been a creature earlier had already begun to dry, losing shape, losing identity. The lab was quiet again, but it was the wrong kind of quiet—the kind that followed something irreversible.

  He pushed himself to his feet slowly, joints protesting.

  “Okay.” He wiped his hands on his jeans and looked toward the doorway, toward the wild, altered world beyond it. “I find Matt. I find Ned. And then—”

  “And then you find everyone else,” Al finished.

  “Yes.”

  A faint shimmer flickered at the edge of his awareness again, stronger this time. The labels pulsed once, as if acknowledging the decision.

  No numbers appeared. There was no confirmation, but he felt like something, somewhere, recorded it anyway.

  Al hummed approvingly. “You’re very bad at this.”

  “At what?”

  “Being small.”

  Tyler stepped toward the door, a wry smile on his lips. He couldn’t disagree with Al. He did feel small, and very bad at this. He would be a lot more comfortable doing his fighting in front of a screen and keyboard. He rolled the bar he had fought the squelchy with in his hand. It gave him a small sense of security.

  Outside, the grass whispered as something moved far away, slow and heavy. The world was waiting, whether he was ready or not. He paused at the threshold, one last thought before he crossed it.

  I don’t think this is a story I get to tell later.

  Behind his eyes, the countdown ticked on.

  VERGE INTEGRATION: SCHEDULED

  TIME UNTIL EVENTS COMMENCE: 22:11:59