As I stared at the reward, I knew the system had me. If it was anything other than cold, hard cash, I might have ignored it. But that didn’t change the fact there were several things to be concerned about.

Rogue bounty at 1403 Vinewood Drive, due north.

Threat Level: Low

Time Limit: Until a condition is met.

Conditions: Neutralize or Terminate.

Reward: EXP (S), $10,000

The first obvious issue: I had no idea what the target was or how to identify them. The low threat level was reassuring, but what was that relative to? The SWAT officer could have easily killed me in the hospital garage, and my first quest didn't even have a threat level.

Also, the local user notification didn’t necessarily imply I was the only one who received the message. In fact, it inferred almost the opposite. Enough users that the system limited the alert to those of us in a small radius, either to make sure we didn’t pile into one section of the city, or because it didn’t want us to all kill each other. Moreover, this was only the second quest I’d received after waking up and escaping the hospital. I had to account for the possibility that there were other users who had been grinding for the last two days. Users who actually knew what a bounty was.

Of course, there was the whole issue of how to complete the quest. If I took it seriously, I was hunting a person and might have to hurt them. I stuffed that away to deal with later. It was just easier to treat all this as theoretical. A game I was playing in my head to distract myself from the unpleasant truths that had recently come to the surface. And the cash reward was the perfect carrot.

I had other reservations. It wasn’t a stretch to conclude I had to be one of the weakest early on. No direct attacks, weak Strength and Toughness. I was a glass cannon without the cannon. There were potentially feats I could take to counter this, but that would have to wait for the next level. I didn’t regret the decision to take Double-Blind, that still tracked.

I told myself that this was a one-time thing. I’d go, try to take a look at the bounty from a safe distance. Maybe use the opportunity to level up Probability Spiral a few times. And if it was easy, and there was no direct competitor, I’d try to snake the bounty. But only if. Afterwards, I’d reevaluate and decide if I was losing my damn mind or if there was something to this.

But first, I had stats to distribute.

Strength: 3

Toughness: 4

Agility: 5

Intelligence: 8

Perception: 5

Will: 6

Companionship: 1

<>

I knew from what little information I could find that the Ordinator’s main governing stat was Intelligence. That made it a safe investment. There was an argument to be made that I should wait until I understood the system better to level, but there was a better argument to be made that a fool often dies laden with resources.

So, screw it. I raised Intelligence to thirteen.

Then I immediately lowered it back down to 10 with a sigh. Again, the glass cannon-less cannon dilemma. I wasn’t sure what Will did. But Strength would serve as an excellent litmus test for the delusion. I’d maintained the same level of strength—read: not much—since my early teens. If there was a sudden increase, I would notice it.

I raised Strength to 5, bumped Agility to 6, and kept Intelligence at 10. As much as I wanted to increase Perception, it would have to wait for the next level.

I focused on the prompt.

And my body screamed. It was like every single muscle cramped up at once and started crawling, detaching themselves from my bones and swelling larger. I crumbled to the ground. My right knee—an old soccer injury, raised the level of pain from excruciating to unbearable. I could feel the cartilage shifting, the joint reshaping. And then something happened to my mind. I had clarity. I could detach myself from the pain, and tell myself it was just temporary. I could lie to myself so convincingly that I began to believe it.

Memories previously locked away came flooding back. I remembered small details of books I’d read when I was learning to read. Pictures I’d drawn in crayon. Notes I’d scrawled down during my first lectures in high school.

Then, the headache. A wild, ravenous migraine that felt like it would never stop until every neuron I had was burned out in the impossible wave of agony.

I thought that my mind would break, like I’d suffered a stroke, and it would never be quite the same again. That I’d ruined the only advantage that life had ever given me.

And then… it faded. All at once. The pain was so complete it left me feeling hollow, aching, like I was a vessel drained of vitality and was now nothing more than a vacant shell.

I pushed myself up and staggered. There was someone looking back at me in the mirror I barely recognized. Dissociative disorder is a topic I studied for the MCAT, but I only understood it in theory. I think you can only truly understand it when you've experienced it, a kind of out of body experience in your own skin. Everything looked slightly more distinct and defined. There were round muscles where my shoulders had once been flat, defined mass in my forearms, biceps, and triceps I’d never had before. My clothing fit differently, felt stretched.

A sudden thrill took me. I flexed in front of the mirror and grinned. Improvements that would have taken months of working out and stuffing in calories I couldn’t afford had been implemented in minutes. Painful minutes, but minutes nonetheless.

And then the smile faded as I thought about the implications. If the changes were noticeable to me immediately, they would likely be more than obvious to other people. I needed to be careful. If a couple points increase in Strength had changed me this much, I could only imagine how big the change would be if I had put all five points into Strength.

Users who invested heavily in Strength would be incredibly obvious to anyone that knew them. And the stronger I looked, the less I would blend in.

So, yeah, I wasn’t touching Strength again any time soon. I’d try Toughness next, see if the changes it brought were any less extreme.

If this isn’t a delusion.

The little voice that was so insistent before was much quieter now. It was harder to separate the two possibilities, as if the increase in Intelligence had made me more likely to accept what was happening to me.

I didn’t know what that meant, and decided there was no reasonable way of knowing.

But first, I needed to cover myself. I doubted my mother would be out of her room to notice, but my siblings had just seen me earlier that day. I couldn’t do anything about the extra inch of height, but I could at least wear something baggy to hide my form and nondescript enough that it couldn’t be used to track me down later.

I found my father's maroon hoodie shoved deep in my closet. The white A&M logo had cracked and crumbled off long ago. There was some mild trepidation as I tried it on, preparing myself for the musk of juniper and aftershave. But that scent had long since faded. Probably better not to think too much about that.

You might be wondering why I didn’t wear black, and that’s fair. Black is slimming and doesn’t draw the eye. The exception is, of course, the fact that someone wearing black alone at night might as well be flashing a neon warning sign. Gray would have been perfect, but maroon worked to my purposes. Nondescript, and enough color that it wouldn’t draw attention or give me the sort of profile that people would remember.

I checked myself in the mirror to confirm. The hoodie was large enough that it covered my more defined muscle mass, but I still filled it out more than before, far more than I would like.

I’d spent enough time wishing I wasn’t the physical equivalent of a beanpole that the thought struck me as deliciously ironic, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Then, I immediately winced.

Yes, Matt, let them hear you laughing alone. That’s not even slightly alarming.

As if on cue, there was a knock at the door.

“Come in.”

No answer. Iris. That was good, it meant no one had heard me laughing like an idiot. But it was an obstacle, I needed to go, but the memory of how I’d snubbed her on what could have been the last day of my life stuck firmly in my mind. I reached out and opened the door.

Iris looked up at me, and her eyes immediately narrowed.

Shit.

”What’s up?” I signed to her.

”Growth spurt?” She responded, her fingers moving tentatively, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

Well, at least the Strength gain isn’t a delusion.

I sighed. Iris was the most perceptive member of our family by far. But a few early missteps due to that perception meant she’d learned the value of keeping a secret.

“Yes and no. We can talk about it later. Do you need anything?”

“Ellis is acting weird. He asked me to let him have the room for a bit, and he’s been in there by himself since you took your nap. I don’t mind, but…” Iris looked towards our mother’s room, and I understood her concern instantly.

Mom always locks herself in when she’s in the middle of a bender.

I looked towards the end of the hallway. Iris’s framed paintings lined the walls, accompanied by the occasional family photo. The room that she and Ellison shared was indeed closed.

But my brother was twelve. He was getting to the age where he’d need a little extra privacy. I sighed. Ellison really, really needed his own room.

“Tell you what,” I said aloud, so she could see the confidence in my face. “If he’s still in there when we get back, I’ll talk to him. But it’s not like it is with mom. Sometimes boys just need to be on their own.”

”Like you, earlier?” Iris asked.

“Exactly.” I smiled at her. “Now, I need to run, but I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

She nodded, but I felt her watch me go, eyes boring through my hoodie and into my back.

/////

The first spike of adrenaline hit as I navigated my bike—a gray roadmaster with a rusted chain perpetually stuck in a middle gear—out of the apartment complex and immediately crossed the street in front of a police car parked outside the complex. Doing everything you shouldn’t do, I gawked at it, only belatedly realizing there was no one in the driver’s seat and exactly how stupid that had been. That boost to my Intelligence did something, but it wasn’t going to solve my problems for me.

I watched enough of the news back in the café to know there was a citywide curfew, and I was five minutes shy of violating it. I had to be more careful. Not to mention, it seemed to be strictly enforced—there was a sense of disquiet as I navigated past a stoplight that was always backed up a hundred feet with traffic, now empty and desolate.

The sense of disquiet grew into something that would have normally been panic—I suspected interference from Born Nihilist. But the doubts that accompanied the panic persisted. What exactly was I planning to do? Some unknown entity had dangled money in front of my face, and I’d just leapt after it.

No. I told myself. The plan was solid. I needed further confirmation of what was happening to me, and others like me. I needed an idea of what these other users were capable of. Of what the system wanted from us.

I needed context. As I double-checked the system prompt and ensured that I was close, I reached back up and pulled my hood over my head. Between the curfew and closeness to the system announced location, my plausible deniability was fading fast.

The purple notification light pinged again in the corner of my vision. Interesting, now that I thought about it, something similar happened at the hospital. Could it detect when I was in motion or under duress?

I focused on the notification and it pulled up in a smaller, profile aligned window on the right-hand side. The information for the bounty hadn’t changed, but it had gone up a thousand dollars, and the location had shifted several blocks to the east.

Mentally recalculating, I adjusted my route.

As I rode, I detected a surge of emotion. A mingling of unfamiliar feelings that welled in my chest. Curiosity and excitement, mixed with something else. Anticipation, maybe even hope?

My legs pumped the pedals, and I picked up speed. It was so easy. I wasn’t winded, wasn’t even sweating. The tiny spark of hope kindled into something more. I’d spent my entire life fighting impossible battles. Losing coin flips. Coming up on the raw side of every scenario. But, as my mother repeated incessantly, there was no such thing as bad luck. The numbers always came up in your favor eventually. Maybe this was the start of better days. Nothing about it was ideal, but for the first time I’d been given an advantage. An edge.

Maybe whatever had happened to me could be the first door to a better life.

I’d barely formulated the thought when I reached a crossroad. A dark shape blurred, flying through the air, obliterating my front tire and sending me crashing to the asphalt.