From his seat on the couch, at the end furthest from Suman, Omar asked, “Okay, so what's this about?”

“This is about the ticket in the envelope I gave you,” Suman said, and then pointed vaguely to the envelope that Omar was sitting on. “Have you taken a good look at it yet?”

“No, I haven't, because I don't see out of my ass,” he thought to himself.

Then, while grunting unnecessarily, Omar leaned to the side and pulled out the envelope. After removing the card, he contemptuously tossed aside the now empty envelope.

After a cursory glance at the card, he waved it a few times as though it was on fire. From his initial impression, it was just an unremarkable piece of aluminum foil covered in numbers and lines. It was light and thin, like a piece of paper, and it felt like he could crumple it up into a ball and toss it into the garbage, which is what he immediately tried to do. However, no matter what he did, the metal card would not bend or even slightly yield to his efforts.

“It won't bend,” Suman added helpfully and matter-of-factly. Omar took this as a personal challenge and redoubled his efforts.

He grunted and strained while trying to leverage the bulk of his upper body strength. He tried pressing it against his knee, pinning it against the hard surface, and when that failed, he resorted to bashing it until his leg jerked reflexively.

Suman smiled, gently, and in amusement over Omar's antics, until Omar put the card in his mouth and, rather audibly, bit down on it. Now Omar smiled, or at least he tried to, when he saw Suman's smirk turn into a look of confusion. Really, it was lopsided and barely a smile, on account of the metal sticking out of his mouth.

With the same effort he'd been using thus far, Omar continued trying to bend it, but to his disappointment, it still would not bend. Just as he was about to give up, he noticed that the metallic taste was rather strong and slightly salty, but with a hint of something else.

When Omar removed it from his mouth, part of the metallic card glistened wetly with his saliva, and it was all Suman could to do suppress looking on in disgust.

Then Omar licked the metal card—twice—and said, “It tastes funny,” before he began wiping it off on his jeans.

Meanwhile, Suman skipped right past “disgust” and went straight to “mouth-gaping revulsion,” while being too stunned to actually say anything.

Suddenly, Omar had a troubling thought that gave him pause. This was just as well, since the card was mostly dry now, although it had been wet enough to leave a damp spot that visibly darkened his blue jeans. The chemistry of anti-freeze and lead salts came to his mind, which he knew were toxic despite their pleasant taste.

He'd nearly failed out of machine shop in high school because of his repeated attempts to drink anti-freeze. “How did you even get this?” his teacher would ask, thinking that his student had found where it was hidden. Omar usually did, though it wasn't necessary. Consequently, the issue had been resolved when he was banned from smuggling anti-freeze into school, and his parents began regularly sweeping his room, as though it were an illicit recreational drug.

“That was funny,” he thought, when reflecting upon the memory. “I wasn't actually going to do it. Not really. Well, … except for that first time.” Machine shop was his most hated class, second only to physical education, solely because he couldn't just sit and pretending that he was listening.

“Hey. This isn't poisonous or something, is it?” he asked, waving the now dry metal card at Suman. “Or venomous,” he added, even though he knew the difference.

“What?… No … ,” Suman said with quiet disbelief. After a moment, he caught himself and tried to give a delayed, but much more confident, professional response. “No!” he squeaked. “I mean, ‘no.’ The ticket is not toxic.” His already deep voice came out an octave deeper.

Omar gestured with what would be the first of many noncommittal shrugs.

“Why does he call it a ‘ticket?” he wondered, idly. Only now did he actually try looking at it instead of trying to break it.

It was about as long as a credit card, but narrow enough that it could almost plausibly be an oversized “ticket” of some sort. The “ticket” was a mostly dull gray metal card with “1:23 pm” etched, or reverse etched, onto it so that the letters and numbers shone with reflected light.

“Hah,” he thought, amused. “One-Two-Three. It might actually be around 1:23 pm or something.” There weren't any clocks in his living room, so he did not bother trying to confirm it.

Just as Omar was about to ask about the significance of the numbers, he flinched in surprise. There, on the ticket, right before his eyes and next to his thumb, the three suddenly became a four.

“Wow! I thought that the numbers were permanently etched onto the metal.” he thought in amazement. Rubbing his thumb over the surface, the ticket felt completely smooth.

Out loud, he said, “That's sort of cool,” but with less enthusiasm. Then, looking up at Suman, he began to ask, “How did it—” but Suman interjected with, “Yes. The current time is now 1:24 pm.”

That wasn't what he was going to ask, even though he admitted to himself, at first, that it was probably the next question he might've asked. For some reason, being interrupted by the answer to his second question, annoyed him even more. “Maybe I wasn't going to ask that question,” he thought, defiantly. Then he changed his mind. “Actually, now that I think about it, I probably wasn't going to … have had asked that question, … I mean, I wasn't planning on—never mind!” he scoffed, before ending the thought with, “I know what I was thinking.”

It was technically true, that he knew what he was thinking, even though he was trying to, retroactively, make this untrue.

Suman, oblivious to Omar's internal monologue, noticed the scoff. “Is he some sort of idiot? He hasn't even looked at the other side yet,” but right after Suman finished this thought, Omar flipped the ticket over.

Briefly, Omar's eyes narrowed before they grew wide in astonishment.

Omar let out a strange and drawn out, “Wuuaaa … ,” that Suman thought might've been the beginning of either a “what” or a “wow.”

Just like the other side, most of the surface was a dull gray metallic color, but now the shiny reversed etching was fully animated.

Instead of displaying the actual time, which he now had to admit that it might've been, this side of the metal “ticket” showed a shiny seven-pointed star slowly rotating about its axis while the words, “Reality Break,” zoomed across the middle from left to right.

Suman could just barely hear Omar, who sat hunched over with his face almost pressed up against the ticket. “It's a septogram. … No, wait. Or was that, ‘heptagram.’ Yeah,” he decides, mumbling quietly to himself. “A seven-pointed star is a heptagram.”

Both are technically correct, at least in locales where Latin and Greek roots are commonly used.

Now that he could get a proper look at it, he realized that the animated parts, of the otherwise dull gray metal ticket, weren't just shiny; the crisscrossing lines of the heptagram were just barely thick enough that he could see his own reflection in its mirror-perfect finish.

In terms of quality, the heptagram's animation was simply flawless, however, it was the animated text that made the ticket truly amazing. It said, “Reality Break,” in block letters with a similarly shiny etching effect, except that it also had the faint rainbow pattern of anodized titanium. The words moved quickly across the length of the card compared to the much more slowly rotating heptagram.

Once more, Omar useless rubbed his thumb over the surface, because he'd ought to feel something. The difference in texture looked stark and quite obvious, and yet the entire surface was completely smooth.

Bending over even further, he strained to see what happened when the mirror-perfect lines met the rainbow colored letters. When he caught it, the resulting overlap was easy to see. The heptagram's unanodized lines won out when they passed over the letters' anodized-like rainbow pattern.

His mouth hung open in astonishment, his mind spun at the impossibility of it. When a drop of spittle threatened to fall from his lips, he closed his mouth and covered it with his hand. Now he felt remorse for the way he so thoroughly abused the ticket.

Despite the technological sophistication of the ticket, the actual design of the moving words seemed deceptively juvenile and haphazard. The small, finer details, however, revealed that it too was meticulously designed. For instance, while the phrase “Reality Break” rushed across the ticket, Omar could see that the letters were slanted in a cartoonish depiction of fast movement. And then, whenever it stopped over the center of the heptagram, the letters bounced forward a little bit before righting themselves. There was even a cute little outline of a cloud that followed the letters, and another that briefly appears in front when it stops. With the anodized color effect, they looked like rainbow colored puffs of smoke.

Omar held the metal ticket inches in front of his right eye, trying in vain to catch a glimpse of individual frames, segments, or pixels of the animation. As far as he could tell, the animation was smooth and continuous.

All the while, Suman sat quietly enough that he could hear Omar mumble, “Amazing!” or “Wow. … That's just, wow … ,” and several variations thereof.

This continued for a few minutes, with Omar remaining completely oblivious of his own mumbling for the entire time. Over and over again, he watched the simple animation do the impossible.

“It seems so real,” he thought, before correcting himself. “What am I saying? This IS real. Hah, wow. I actually have to keep reminding myself that I'm watching this on a tin foil thin piece of metal, rather than as some weird video on my cellphone.”

Meanwhile, in a window that only he could see, Suman received two System Notifications via his interface's virtual heads-up display.

The first said,

Quest Update for:Explain the Situation He Likes It!

Description:

You delivered the ticket to the passive, Omar Raji, and observed his reaction. The result is, he really likes it! You should probably tell him how it's actually used before he tries to have sex with it. We'll just leave it at that for now.

Earned Rewards: 10 CP, received; bonus rewards, deferred. Unlocked: new quest goal.

He knew better than to outwardly respond to the game's system messages, as that only seems to encourage them.

The other System Notification said,

New Quest Goal for:Explain the Situation Explain The Offer

New Goal:

Explain the situation to Omar about the offer and what it means.

Standard Rewards: 20 CP (contribution points). Bonus Rewards: ???

It was more or less what he expected. Even the wording was the same as when he'd done something like this before. With a thought, Suman tagged the notification as “Accepted” and “Active,” but then barely noticed as the Quest Log icon, a small stylized book of the same name, appeared just long enough for his tagged notification window to minimize itself to, before immediately disappearing.

Eventually, an awestruck Omar finally asked, “How is this even possible?” while he sat, still hunched over, watching the animation. Tearing his gaze away from the impossible piece of living artwork, Omar looked up to Suman with a pleading expression and asked, “How does this—How did they even DO this?”

Suman, who had a smug expression, shrugged silently. “‘Who made it?’ would have been a better question,” Suman thought. Even though he knew who made it, Suman couldn't even begin to understand how they did it. “For them,” he knew, “this was child's play. They had technology far more advanced than this. Heck, they are more advanced technology.”

Up until now, although Omar looked sort of attentive, he seemed completely indifferent to the world around him. Back when Suman asked Omar if he had looked at the ticket, it was obvious to him that Omar knew he was sitting on the envelope, but simply didn't care. Before Omar even began to properly examine the ticket, Suman half-expected him to suddenly get up, without saying a word, and then return to his bedroom to take a nap.

However, now that he had something interesting to focus on, Omar's demeanor shifted slightly. To Suman, he seemed to be more awake and yet somehow also more relaxed than he had been. Given that Omar was almost half-asleep when he first arrived, Suman wasn't sure how anyone could appear more relaxed than that. Even though Suman found his own observation to be confusing and self-contradictory, he still didn't think he was wrong.

After the silence dragged on for a few moments, Omar finally asked, “I didn't realize we had this sort of technology.” He spoke somewhat plainly, but his posture suggested that he was still beyond amazed. His legs were pressed tightly together while the ticket sat perfectly suspended between both legs.

Suman cleared his throat with a cough and said simply, “We don't.”

Omar knew that he was meant to ask the obvious follow-up question, so instead he said, “I get to keep this,” in a half-question, half-statement. “You sure I don't have to sign for it?”

“Yes, Mr. Raji, that is still your property, and no, I am still not a deliveryman.” There was a slight edge to his voice at the end. Immediately, Suman felt a little bad for being so harsh. “Omar wasn't the one who accepted this quest,” he told himself.

Remembering his own disastrous registration, Suman thought to lighten the mood. “You know,” Suman began, using his best friendly smile, “when I got my ticket, I tried scratching it with a pair of scissors, but it didn't even leave a mark.”

Omar gasped, dramatically. It was a literal gasp of the sort that would've been interpreted as sarcastic in any other context. With his face frozen in a mask of ghastly horror, Omar looked accusingly at Suman as though he just admitted to urinating on the Mona Lisa. “How could you?!” he said in a hoarse stage whisper, roughly, as if he was losing the power of speech. Clutching his ticket tightly, like a baby against his chest, Omar looked at it with a reassuring gaze that said, “I won't let him hurt you.”

For his part, Suman laughed his proverbial ass off. Tears even fell from his eyes and he started wheezing, desperately, as he attempted to speak or gesture something. “You—Hyaaaa, hahaha, … you were like—hahaha …”.

The tears were enough that he had to wipe his face using a sleeve of his shirt. His laugh wasn't quite deep enough for his size, but every now and then it would be.

Despite himself, Omar found Suman's laughter to be somewhat infectious. While attempting to glare menacingly at the laughing man, Omar couldn't help but smile; the pressure behind his anger deflating quickly. Being honest with himself, Omar had to admit that his overreaction was probably amusing, despite the embarrassment. “But still … ,” he thought “why would anyone do that?” He stayed silent, while Suman laughed it out, thinking it was “well-earned,” at least, “it was, this time.”

“It didn't—Hya, hya, hya … ,” he said between breaths, the last vestiges of his laugh making him spasm sporadically. “It didn't scratch; I was told it wouldn't.” The joviality that had so enraptured him, died much too quickly as he finished speaking. He said, in a tone that was now eerily solemn, “And I believed him.” Suman had the distant look of someone lost in their own memories.

The swift change in Suman's mood is what finally made Omar laugh a bit. “Heh, heh, heh. I see,” he said, even though he didn't. Sometimes Omar could be a real asshole, without even trying.

⁂

“Well then, Mr. Raji—” Suman says with a clap.

“Suman,” he said, by way of interruption, “just call me ‘Omar.’ Okay?” After the tall man had almost died of laughter in his living room, the formality of using his last name seemed out of place.

Suman raised an eyebrow at the assumed familiarity, but nodded just the same. “Sure. Okay Omar, so—” he began to say, before Omar interrupted him again.

“Well then, what are you?”

Suman could only respond with a bewildered, “What?” while thinking, “What the heck is he talking about?”

“If you're not an—uhn-uhn-man—” Omar grunted and waved vaguely, “then what are you?”

The slightly accusatory tone of the question made Suman a tad defensive. As a result, his mouth started talking before his brain was ready. “I am a … ,” he began, but stalled for just a moment too long.

“—A ‘contractor’,” Omar added helpfully, with finger quotes, and a “gotcha” smile. Omar liked to think about himself as someone who paid attention to important or interesting details. It was just that, usually, most details were neither interesting nor important.

Closing his eyes, briefly, in an effort to collect himself, Suman sighed visibly. “My official title is ‘instructor’,” he said finally. His tone, one of regret and resignation.

“Instructor of what?”

“That actually comes with special instructions and an offer,” he said, while pointing to the ticket.

“Oh great,” Omar thought, “he's either selling something or he's some sort of travel agent.”

In his deliberate attempt to appear polite, Omar waited patiently while staring unflinchingly at Suman. This was Omar's way of acting as though Suman had his full attention. However, the effect was ruined by Omar's obviously doubtful expression.

Suman picked up on this immediately and said, with a grunt of frustration, “Uh … the offer does not have anything to do with money, religion, or any sort of subscription or service.” Pausing to think for a moment, Suman held his chin with a ponderous expression and scratched at a goatee that Omar thought made him look like a pirate. “Actually,” he began, “the offer could result in a new source of income, should that be something that you want, but that is the closest this has to do with anything money related.”

“Uh-huh. Sure. Whatever. Why don't you just hurry up and tell me what you're offering.”

While glaring at Omar, flames of untold violence flared briefly behind Suman's eyes before he spoke. “As I was about to say,” he began harshly, the embers of rage still cooling, “you have been invited to register as a player in the game ‘Reality Break’.” His tone was ultimately congratulatory, but in much the same way that one might say, “Congratulations! I'm not going to kill you after all.”

“Oh, okay,” Omar said somewhat disappointedly. “That's a bit anticlimactic,” he thought, before asking, “What sort of game is it?”

A notification window appeared in Suman's HUD.

Quest Update for: Explain the Situation Offer Given, but What's This?

Description:

You did it! You told him about the offer. Hold on. Is that a question? Perhaps we should call in a professional.

Earned Rewards: 30 CP, received; bonus rewards, deferred. Unlocked: new quest goal.

With a glance, he saw that it didn't have any useful information, and so he immediately closed it.

Suman smiled and tilted his head before he said, “It's a multiplayer augmented reality game with quests, rewards, and skills. You know, like one of those MMORPGs, except that it's in the real world.”

Omar was quite familiar with online role playing games, and gaming in general.

Growing up, he would always have the latest games and the newest console systems, despite his tendency to smash them to bits when a game proved too difficult. After awhile, his parents began to get suspicious, and Omar feared that they would learn about his explosive anger. It wasn't that his parents were oblivious to this, but rather that this was just one of the many peculiar habits of their odd son.

To this end, Omar gradually developed rules that allowed him to continue playing games while keeping his anger a secret. These rules governed how he interacted with people online, his style of gameplay, and other conditions that he needed to satisfy before he could even start playing. One such rule, for example, was that while he was playing a video game, he either couldn't have direct access to his gaming equipment—like consoles and monitors—or, in the case of game controllers, he needed an ample supply of replacement devices and parts. In many ways, his rules were restrictive, but ultimately they made his gameplay easier, more fun, and less troublesome.

As for augmented reality games, Omar knew of them in passing, but had never actually played one. Based on his understanding, they attempted to bring online gameplay into the real world using cellphone cameras with GPS, or goofy glasses that were often expensive.

Suman received another notification window. He minimized it, not even bothering to open it, because the title, “New Quest Goal for, ‘Explain the Situation’: ‘More Details’ ,” made the point clear enough.

“Augmented reality games suck,” Omar said with instant disinterest.

“Oh, I agree. The ones that currently exist for the general public are pretty lame.”

“Some mildly interesting augmented reality games pop up over the next few decades—usually after there has been some sort of breakthrough in digital eyeware technology—but that stuff never catches on. People who normally don't wear glasses are generally not interested in doing so, and those who do, don't want to go around wearing safety glasses all the time.”

Suman waved his hand dismissively as he spoke.

“Anyways, … the AMIs have had millions of years to perfect their cybernetic interface, so we get a virtual heads-up display that we can use anytime, but without those stupid glasses.”

Omar nodded along encouragingly, even though he stopped paying attention as soon as Suman agreed with his last comment. His subconscious mind, however, was much smarter than his conscious mind, and it alerted him to something important.

To Suman, Omar's incessant nodding and strange responses made him seem even more unusual. “Okay … ,” he thought to himself. “Is Omar extremely slow or something, or does he just have something against asking obvious questions?” Just as Suman decided to probe a little further, Omar spoke.

“Excuse me,” he said, with a polite but neutral tone. “Can you say that again?”

That wasn't, at all, the reaction that Suman had expected. Omar sounded polite to a degree that was at odds with absolutely everything Suman had so far observed. Yet, it sort of looked like Omar was following along, albeit in his own odd way.

Suman asked, “Which part? The bit about the cybernetic interface, or the stupid glasses?” but Omar simply started nodding again.

“What the hell?” Suman thought to himself.

He quickly opened the last notification window that he had minimized and read it. While he did that, Omar continued nodding.

New Quest Goal for: Explain the Situation More Details Omar asked a question! Coincidentally, you answer questions like that for a living! Wow, that's convenient. So go do that. Do we need to spell it out for you?

New Goal:

Provide Omar with enough background information so that he can make an informed decision to either accept, reject, or leave the offer for later consideration.

Standard Rewards: 60 CP (contribution points). Bonus Rewards: ???

“Whatever. I just have to answer his questions and give him enough info to make an ‘informed decision.’ Since he's obviously not interested in listening to me, which, I suppose, is his problem, then I'll just info dump him and let him decide if he wants to listen or not.”

Seeing that Omar was still nodding, Suman said, “Of course. Well, the AMIs are Artificial Machine Intelligences that first arrived on Earth in the distant future after humanity had already gone extinct,” affably, and with sarcastic honesty.

“Oh, and in case you were wondering,” he said to Omar, who was only wondering if “rice sandwiches” existed, “there's probably nothing we can do about that, as everyone has tried already.”

“Did I mention the part of about traveling through time?” Suman asked, and then gave Omar a moment to respond.

Somewhat vaguely, Omar noticed that the noise had stopped. This triggered him to respond, reflexively, with one of his tried and true canned responses, “Uhm, … go on.” Through years of experimentation, he'd perfected a tone that made his canned response sound as though it could be an uncertain question, an emphatic statement, and/or both at the same time.

“When you register as a player, you will gain access to the chronopause, and thus have the ability to travel through time, which is, by the way, two-dimensional.” Despite waiting for a moment, Suman did not receive a notification telling him that he had completed the quest. There wasn't even an offer of another part in the chain quest, which would not matter as he wasn't going to accept it.

Since the New Quest window was still open, Suman tagged it with, “WTF!?” before closing it. As soon as he did that, he finally received an update to the quest.

Quest Update for: Explain the Situation Explained, and yet Chronoactivity Unchanged?

Description:

Something ain't right here. Your explanation had no effect on his chronoactivity levels. How are you not creeped out by this?

Bonus Rewards: Deferred. Unlocked: new quest goal. New Quest Title: the quest Explain the Situation is now called Informed Decision.

With a minor effort of will, Suman added his interface's inbuilt “chronoactivity” detector to his HUD. Three different measurements appeared, with one measuring the local background level of chronoactivity, and then one for Omar, and another for himself. Omar's reading was more precise then it ought to be from this distance, but that hardly surprised him. However, what did surprise him was the actual measurement itself, which was enough to make Suman curse quietly to himself.

“Damn, they're right. An explanation like that should've pushed Omar at least half-way towards his threshold. Heck, for some passives that would have been enough to make them permanently chronoactive. Instead, he's barely above the local background level.” Based on what he saw from the chronopause, Suman knew ahead of time that this discussion wouldn't have been enough to push Omar over his “threshold.”

“Uhm, … go on,” Omar said again, reflexively.

Immediately after Omar finished speaking, Suman received the next notification.

New Quest Goal for: Informed Decision Try Again Okay, … let's try that again. Explain it better, and give him the offer again. Isn't this the sort of thing you do for your regular job? (you know, that job we pay you for, and spent all that time training you.)

New Goal:

Provide Omar with enough background information so that he can make an informed decision to either accept, reject, or leave the offer for later consideration. Actually, because we expect better from you, all standard quest objectives now require an increase in chronoactivity of at least 210% of background. Bonus rewards will be given if he remains passive, but only up to 90% of his projected threshold.

Standard Rewards: 60 CP (contribution points). Bonus Rewards: ???

Suman's eyelid began twitching spasmodically, which then made him wonder about the impact Omar's mental health was having on his own mental health. For his own sake, Suman opted for a less subtle approach.

“Maybe he's a visual thinker or something,” Suman said, in reference to Gardner's discredited theory of multiple intelligences. As evidenced by Omar's continued nodding, it hardly mattered to Suman that he was thinking out loud.

“Subtlety is lost on this one,” he said. “Or maybe just words in general. So, I think a demonstration is in order.”

For his part, Omar continued nodding and said, “Uhm, … go on.” The tone and pitch he used while saying that was eerily identical.

⁂

Suman pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and grabbed it with both hands. “I think a demonstration is in order,” he said much more loudly, just before he broke his phone.

At least that's what Omar initially thought.

“Why did you just break your phone?” he asked suddenly.

“Really?” Suman replied, somewhat surprised. “That was enough to bring you—” he began, before Omar cut him off.

“What was enough?” he asked. “Are you talking about your cellphone, because I've never seen one that breaks so easily. Whatever you're trying to do would be more believable if the phone cracked instead of snapped. Also, if you are going to break cellphones, I recommend using iPhones instead. Those are definitely more fun to break, but only if you use something like a baseball bat. Are you trying to sell bats or durable cellphones?”

Suman gave him a quizzical look before he undid his prior action and showed Omar his lock screen. “See,” he said, pointing the smartphone's screen at Omar. “I didn't break it.”

Omar nodded along again as he began to zone out. This time, Suman saw the transition as it happened. He still felt clueless as to what was really going on, but for the moment it was clear to him that Omar was neither slow, nor opposed to asking obvious questions.

As it turns out, even though both of Suman's observations of Omar were mostly true, they were woefully incomplete.