Chapter 1: The Last Thing He Had to Lose.
At 2:43 p.m., Caleb Maddox discovered the woman he intended to marry was sleeping with another man.
The strange thing was that for several seconds he felt nothing at all. He stood outside a small restaurant with his phone in one hand and a plastic bag containing two bread rolls in the other. It was his one day off from the grill at Big Duke's, and he had spent half of it helping his fiancée find a document. Afternoon sun flashed off the windows across the street. Cars crawled through traffic, and somewhere nearby a vendor argued over a price. The world went on exactly as it had that morning, which struck him as rude.
In his head was a message he had not been meant to see. Vivid as he had first seen it.
Last night was amazing. When can I see you again?
It had appeared on her laptop while she was in the next room taking a call. He had only meant to close the window. Then he had noticed the name, and then the message, and then the photographs, and he had spent the next ten minutes looking at things he wished he had never seen. There were conversations going back weeks, plans to meet, private jokes he had not been invited to, and complaints about him. One of those complaints he had read three times.
"I swear, sometimes I feel like I'm raising a child. Everything is a struggle with him."
He had not read it three times because he failed to understand it. He had read it because he was trying to work out what he was supposed to feel. Anger seemed appropriate. So did humiliation. But the first thing that had actually come to him, standing in the cold light of her screen, was a calculation: he had been working out whether he could afford next month's rent. Apparently, while he had been worrying about their future, she had been arranging a different one.
He locked his phone. The rolls in the bag had gone cold. He started walking.
He let himself into her apartment with the key he still had.
She was on the couch, scrolling through her phone, with a television murmuring in front of her that neither of them had been watching. She looked up. "You're back early."
He closed the door behind him. "Can we talk?"
Something in his voice made her set the phone down. "About what?"
He had rehearsed this conversation all the way over. In one version he stayed calm and demanded an explanation. In another he showed her the messages and waited for her to confess. Now that he was standing in front of her, every carefully built speech seemed pointless.
"Who's Tyler?"
Her expression changed. Only slightly, but he saw it. "Why are you asking me that?"
"Because I found your messages."
She stared at him, and then she stood. "You went through my things?"
"I was looking for the document."
"So you were spying on me."
He blinked. For a moment he wondered whether he had misunderstood the conversation they were having. "I saw the messages, Megan."
"On my laptop."
"Yes."
"And you read them."
"Yes."
She folded her arms. "That's a violation of my privacy."
He waited for the rest. It did not come.
"What about the messages?" he asked.
"What about them?"
"Are you seeing him?"
She turned away and walked toward the kitchen. He watched her pick up a glass and set it down again without pouring anything into it. "You're making this into something it isn't."
"Then tell me what it is."
She sighed. "He's a friend."
"Friends send you messages about how amazing last night was?"
She said nothing, and he nodded slowly. "Right."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Act like you're the victim here."
He almost laughed, though it was not a happy sound. "I found out my fiancée is seeing someone else. What exactly am I supposed to act like?"
"Maybe you should ask yourself why things got to this point."
He stared at her. There are moments when a person says something so revealing that an entire relationship rearranges itself in your mind, and this was one of them. She began listing his shortcomings: his unstable income, his inability to save, the plans he had made and never finished, the promises that things would improve. He listened to all of it, and some of it was true, which was the worst part. His life had not been going well. He had struggled to find stable work, and the money he earned rarely lasted as long as he needed it to. He had spent too much time worrying about the next bill and too little building the future he wanted.
But none of that explained the messages. None of it explained why she had chosen to humiliate him rather than speak honestly.
"You could have left me," he said when she finally stopped. "If you were unhappy, you could have ended it. You didn't have to do this."
"You're acting like everything is my fault."
"I didn't say that."
"You never have to say it. You make me feel guilty every time I want something better for myself."
Something inside him went very quiet. "My parents died, and I had to figure out how to live without them. I've been trying to get my life together ever since. I never asked you to fix it for me."
"Your parents have been gone for years, Caleb."
He felt the words before he understood them.
"You can't keep using what happened to you as an excuse," she went on. "Other people lose their parents and still manage to build something. I can't spend the rest of my life waiting for you to get over everything."
His hands tightened around the plastic bag. His parents had died when he was in his early twenties, much sooner than anyone expects to become an orphan. He had not known how many ordinary responsibilities they had quietly carried until they were gone: the bills, the emergencies, all the small things that become enormous when there is nobody left to ask. He had spent years trying to become someone who could handle all of it. And now the woman he had planned to marry was using that history to explain why she had betrayed him.
"You know what?" he said. "I think we're done."
She looked surprised for half a second. "Fine."
The word came too quickly. He nodded. "Fine."
He turned toward the door.
"Where are you going?"
"Home."
"You basically live here, Caleb."
He stopped with his hand on the handle, and for a moment he almost turned around. Then he remembered the messages.
"No," he said quietly. "I don't think I do."
At 4:06 p.m., Caleb sat alone in his own apartment; apartment is a bit of a stretch; it is more like a hole in a wall - listening to the refrigerator.
It had been rattling for months. Every time the motor started, it shook with a low vibration followed by a metallic clatter, and although he had watched several videos about repairing refrigerators, the problem persisted. He had grown used to it the way a man grows used to a bad tooth. The apartment was small, with a kitchen that opened into the living area and a bedroom barely large enough for the bed and wardrobe. A pile of laundry occupied one corner. An electricity bill lay on the table beside a notebook he had bought the previous spring. One of the kitchen lights had stopped working, and there was a crack in the wall near the window that he kept promising himself he would repair. In the hall closet sat a box of his father's old ledgers, which he had carried through three moves and never once opened.
Small problems, all of them. The kind that became enormous when money was scarce and nobody was coming to help.
He set the plastic bag on the table and took out the rolls. He was no longer hungry, but he ate one anyway. Then he opened his banking app, checked his balance, closed it, and opened it again, as though the number might have reconsidered. It had not.
"Brilliant," he muttered. "Absolutely brilliant."
He had lost his fiancée, and he still had to figure out what to eat tomorrow.
For a while he did nothing. Then he pulled the notebook toward him. He used it for expenses, mostly, and plans, and the occasional observation about people. He turned to a clean page, wrote October 23, and paused before beginning.
Today, I discovered that my fiancée has been cheating on me.
The sentence looked ridiculous. It was not inaccurate. It simply seemed too small for what it described. He kept going.
When I confronted her, she blamed me for everything. My financial situation. My lack of progress. Even the fact that my parents died and I struggled afterwards.
He pressed the pen into the paper. Maybe she's right about some things. He looked at that sentence for a long time, and then he crossed it out. It was not that he believed it was false. He simply did not want to give her the satisfaction of being right about anything.
The refrigerator shook itself awake again, and he waited until it stopped.
I'm tired. I'm tired of trying to explain myself. I'm tired of making plans that fall apart. I'm tired of watching other people move forward while I spend my time keeping my life from getting worse.
The pen hovered.
And I'm tired of being the person everyone can afford to disappoint.
That one stayed. He closed the notebook, and for the first time since leaving her apartment, he felt something close to anger. It was not the hot anger of an argument. This was colder and older, gathered over years from disappointments that had each been manageable and were together exhausting. He thought about his parents, and the jobs he had not gotten, and the people who had made him promises and forgotten them. He thought about Tyler. Mostly he thought about how easily Megan had looked at him and decided he was a failure.
He wanted her to regret it. The thought was ugly, and he did not pretend otherwise. He wanted her to learn what it felt like to lose something she had taken for granted, and he wanted every person who had dismissed him to find out they had been wrong. He wanted, for once, to be the one who decided how a thing ended.
He opened the notebook again and wrote on a fresh page: What happens next?
There were sensible answers. He could find another job. He could move somewhere cheaper. He could spend a year rebuilding, one small improvement at a time. He knew that. But sensible answers required patience, and patience was exactly what he felt he had run out of. He did not want to kill anyone. He did not want to spend his life in prison. He had no interest in becoming a monster just because someone had hurt him. But he wanted revenge, and in that moment he began seriously to consider doing something illegal to get it. It would not be clever, and it would not be grand. It would be a reckless, desperate decision that would hurt someone else and very likely ruin what remained of his own life.
He knew it was wrong. He also knew that knowing a thing was wrong did not always stop a person from doing it.
He picked up his phone. His thumb hovered over the screen, though he could not have said what he meant to do with it.
Then a pale blue rectangle appeared in front of him.
It was translucent, like a pane of tinted glass, and it hung about an arm's length from his face. White text sat in the middle of it.
System message: Connection established.
He frowned at the phone. "Great. Now it's hacked."
He tapped the glass, and nothing happened. He tapped it again, harder, the way people do when they are convinced the problem is the amount of force. The text stayed where it was. It took him a moment to notice that the phone's screen was dark. The panel was not on it at all.
He turned the phone face-down on the table. The panel stayed exactly where it was. He looked left, at the refrigerator, and the panel hung in front of the refrigerator. He looked right, at the stained wall, and it followed his gaze like a smudge on a lens. Finally, he squeezed his eyes shut, and it was still there, white letters on pale blue, printed on the inside of his eyelids.
His breath went shallow. Stroke, he thought. Aneurysm. Something in my brain is broken. The worst thought came right behind it. I can't afford the ER.
He opened his eyes. The text had changed.
System message: Candidate confirmed.
"Not now," he said aloud, to nobody, with his hand over his face.
System message: Voice input is unnecessary. Thought input is sufficient.
He went very still. Okay, he thought slowly. That's not a stroke. A stroke doesn't answer back.
System message: Correct.
He almost fell out of the chair. Who are you?
System message: Initial assessment complete. Absolute Level: 0. Current compatibility: Unclassified.
A humourless laugh escaped him. Of course. Level zero. Why wouldn't it be?
The panel changed again.
System message: Would you like to review available access conditions? Yes / No.
He stared at the blue rectangle floating in his kitchen, and despite himself he laughed, a short, disbelieving sound of the kind that escapes when a situation becomes so absurd that anger can no longer keep its dignity. He was broke, newly single, and apparently being recruited by a malfunction inside his own skull. Wonderful. Though deep down, he was excited, anyone scrolling on the anime side of the internet has heard or seen such content about systems, but he was sceptical - afraid that he was just hallucinating.
Fine, he thought. Show me.
The panel expanded.
System message: Multiworld Access System. Candidate status: Accepted. Initial destination: Available. Destination classification: Survival environment. Local conditions: Incomplete data. Return conditions: Available upon successful connection.
He read the last line twice. Return conditions? The panel offered nothing more, only a single prompt.
System message: Enter initial destination?
He knew how this looked. He was not about to follow an unexplained voice just because his life had gone badly. He looked around the apartment: the rattling refrigerator, the unpaid bill, the notebook open to a page that held the thoughts of a man who had run out of patience and not yet decided what to do with it.
One question, he thought.
System message: Awaiting query.
If I go there, can I come back?
There was a brief pause.
System message: Return access is supported for successfully established destinations.
That isn't a yes.
System message: Clarification: Destination access does not guarantee safety, resource preservation, or reversal of consequences.
He read it carefully. It was not reassuring. Oddly, that made him trust it a little more, because a thing built to lure him would have promised him everything, and this one was warning him that it could not.
He looked at the notebook. What happens next? He had spent years waiting for things to improve.
Yes, he thought.
System message: Initial destination connection beginning.
The refrigerator stopped rattling. The overhead light flickered once.
System message: Allocating initial gift package.
Caleb froze. Gift package?
Four entries appeared one after another, like items on a receipt.
UNIVERSAL AWAKENING. The dominant power system of any world you enter will conform itself to you. No incompatibility. No rejection. No drawbacks.
LANGUAGE MASTERY. You will understand and speak the language of any sentient species, without exception.
WORLD DESCRIPTION. A synopsis of each new destination will be provided on arrival.
DIMENSIONAL TELEPORTATION. You may travel between your world of origin and any unlocked world at any time. No cooldown. No penalty.
He read all four twice. That's a lot of free stuff for a guy with zero level.
System message: Level does not determine compatibility.
That's not comforting either. Then something caught. Wait. "Any unlocked world." Are there others?
System message: Other worlds: Locked. Next unlock: approximately one year.
A year.
System message: Please remain still during transfer.
Wait, what do I—
The apartment disappeared.
The first thing he noticed was the smell.
It did not arrive gradually. It struck him all at once, a wet, sour, rotten thing that crawled straight down his throat. His knees buckled, and he caught himself on his hands, and the pavement under his palms was gritty and warm. He vomited everything he had eaten that day, and then there was nothing left, and his body kept trying anyway.
When he could lift his head, a block of pale blue text hovered at the edge of his vision.
System message: World Description. Apocalypse Earth, Year 2048. In 2045, an asteroid disintegrated in the upper atmosphere. Fragments seeded the biosphere with an unknown microscopic organism. Within eleven months, the infected dead began to rise. Roughly ninety-seven percent of the global population is estimated deceased or infected. Surviving communities are small, fragmented, and hostile. Local conditions: Hazardous.
"Hazardous," Caleb whispered, and coughed. "Great. Thanks."
He sat back on his heels. He was on a suburban street, lined with two-story houses whose lawns had gone to knee-high weeds. A mailbox leaned at an angle. A minivan sat at the curb with its windows fogged by something dark.
There were bodies. He understood that slowly, the way the mind understands what it does not want to. The one near the minivan had been a man and was now a collapsed shape in a ruined shirt, swollen and split, with flies lifting off it in a shifting cloud and settling again. Farther down the road, beside a child's bicycle, lay something small that he decided, very firmly, not to look at. His eyes watered. His stomach tried to empty itself a second time.
The backpack on his shoulders was the only thing that felt real. The system had provided it, and inside he found two bottles of water, four granola bars, a flashlight, and a folding knife. That was all. He had walked into the end of the world with snacks.
He pulled his shirt over his nose and breathed through the cotton, which helped barely. Somewhere behind him, something dragged itself across asphalt. The sound was slow and wet and uneven. Caleb went still and turned his head an inch at a time.
At the far end of the street, a figure stood in the road, swaying. Its head hung at the wrong angle, and its jaw hung lower than a jaw should. It had not seen him. Not yet.
He moved sideways, one careful step at a time, until the nearest house stood between them. The front door hung half open. He slipped inside and pushed it shut, slid down the wall, and pressed both hands over his mouth to quiet his breathing. His heart pounded so hard it hurt.
This is real, he thought. This is actually real.
For several minutes he did nothing but listen. The house creaked. A clock on the wall had stopped at 4:17. A family photograph hung crooked above a dusty sofa, two parents and two kids, all of them smiling, and he looked away from it.
Slowly, something else occurred to him. He was standing in a house with nobody home. Return access does not reverse consequences. He had read that. He had also read, in the back of his mind, the number on his banking app. If he left with nothing, he would return to the same apartment, the same bill, the same rattling refrigerator. He needed something. Anything. The people who had lived here were not coming back, and the thought made him feel sick, but it did not make it untrue.
He crept upstairs, testing each step. The master bedroom was thick with dust, the bed unmade. A dresser stood against the wall with its drawers pulled halfway open, as though someone had searched it long before him. The top drawer held socks and a broken watch. In the second drawer was a small wooden box.
Inside lay a gold necklace, thin and delicate, coiled like something asleep. It caught the light from the window and glowed. He had never held real gold before. It weighed almost nothing. Maybe a few hundred dollars, he thought. Maybe enough for the electric bill. He closed his fingers around it.
And the room darkened.
He had not heard anyone come in. He only noticed the light change, the brightness of the window dimming as something moved behind him. A shadow fell across the dresser, long and not his own. His breath stopped. In the cracked mirror above the dresser, he saw a man, filthy and gaunt, with wide bloodshot eyes, holding an axe high above his head with both hands. He was not infected. He was just a person who had decided Caleb was a threat.
Caleb could not move. He could not scream. He did the only thing his body allowed and squeezed his eyes shut.
Please, he thought. Please, please, please. Get me out. Get me out of here.
There was a sound like air tearing. The smell vanished. The dry, filthy air of the room vanished. When Caleb opened his eyes, he was lying on his bedroom floor, curled around his own knees, staring at the underside of his bed. The refrigerator rattled in the next room.
He did not move for a long time. Then his chest began to shake. It started as a breath that would not come out right, and then a small cracked sound escaped him, and then he was sobbing, loud, ugly, helpless sobs that tore at his throat. He pressed his face into the carpet. His fingers were clenched so tightly around the necklace that the clasp had cut into his palm.
I almost died. I almost died, I almost died, I almost died.
He saw the axe again. He saw the child's bicycle. He smelled it all over again, as though it had followed him home. He cried until the room tilted, until his lungs burned and his head pounded and the edges of the world began to go grey.
A pale blue panel drifted into the edge of his vision, patient as a stain.
System message: Dimensional Teleportation: Emergency return executed. No penalty applied.
He barely saw it. His eyes slid shut, and Caleb Maddox, twenty-eight years old, broke and betrayed and holding a stranger's gold in his bleeding hand, passed out on the floor.
ns216.73.216.88da2
and then Add to home screen.