Omar was still on his couch, unconscious, but only barely so. While floating peacefully on the edge of a dreamless sleep, a voice in Omar's head said, “Done!” loudly enough to startle him into awakening.

He sat up abruptly and mumbled, “WH—WHAT—what! Huh? … Uh, …” while looking around for the source of that annoyingly loud voice. “Who said that?!” he asked out loud to an empty room, but there was no reply. It was his living room, he realized, illuminated by the white light of his venetian blinds as they did a poor job of blocking out the afternoon sun.

Knowing that he was alone again, Omar guessed that one way or another, the annoying voice he heard was probably all in his head. His mind was clear once more, and of the tortuous pain he'd only recently recovered from, all that remained was a vague and hazy memory that might as well have happened to someone else.

He dusted his hands, which felt dry and chalky, brushing them against each other and then wiping them on his pants. With all the wild kicking and thrashing he did in that brief time, the new towel gifted to him by Suman still would have ended up out of view on the floor.

The “Please wait while we finish reconfiguring your nervous system …”.

message still hung in the air before him, but with a few additional periods and the word, “Done,” appended to the end. Omar cringed and shivered slightly when he thought about the message's intrusive and unsettling implication. And yet, remarkably, he actually felt relatively normal, if not somewhat refreshed. If he didn't know any better, Omar might've mistakenly assumed that he'd just awoken from a pleasant nap, rather than the sudden and forced unconsciousness that apparently came with having his nervous system “reconfigured.”

When the unsettling words finally disappeared, Omar inspected his hand again, and then his arm, searching for any scarring or lingering evidence of his recently horrific—but not particularly bloody—wound. It was clearly apparent that everything looked as normal as he felt; that is, “normal” for Omar, who, by any objective measure, wasn't normal in the slightest. He then vividly remembered the hideous skin-crawling abominations of the many, many bulging black veins he'd seen along his forearm. At the time, he simply looked upon it with curiosity, as if it had been just a minor oddity, like an unfamiliar mole on his skin. There was nothing to such an extent that Omar had to remind himself that his painful ordeal had actually happened.

His olive skin appeared to be absolutely normal and unmarred, and no matter how hard he looked, there wasn't even a single spot of blood anywhere to be seen. The blood or the lack of blood was the detail that Omar had the hardest time trying to understand. Even if it hadn't been enough, Omar did see some blood during his AMI finger torture session. However, the blood and all of the hard evidence of that traumatic experience were simply gone. In all, it made Omar feel like he was at the scene of the perfect crime.

“Whatever,” he thought to himself. “It was probably just alien computer time-travel magic stuff, or something.” He shrugged as if he'd understood that his dismissive and overly simplistic thought had more issues with it than a library's worth of magazines.

He didn't understand this at all.

As explanations went, “alien computer time-travel magic stuff,” was far more than Omar needed to finish processing his lingering thoughts and emotions regarding certain recent events. The lack of evidence that had perplexed him only moments ago, was now rather convenient for Omar, who shrugged and moved on as if he hadn't just awoken from the most traumatic thing he had ever experienced in his entire life.

Before he could even think about what to do next, a translucent blue box appeared in his field of vision. It was a message window from his new cybernetic interface, and he'd been half-expecting something like it to appear.

Based on a vague suspicion of his, Omar waited until he heard the same female voice from earlier, which said, “Thank you for choosing to play Reality Break!” which was the same as the written message in the window.

“That's pretty convenient,” he thought to himself. “It saved me the trouble of doing it myself,” he added, referring to how his interface read the message for him.

Omar reached down to pick up the seat cushion he'd inadvertently kicked to the floor, and after returning it to its proper place on the couch, he dusted his hands off again as if he'd just finished cleaning his entire apartment.

The message window soon disappeared, but then it was immediately replaced by a new larger window with a similarly long message. Omar assumed, correctly, that the voice in his head would once again read it for him, so he didn't bother reading it himself.

You may now begin the tutorial.

Please be aware that during the tutorial process, certain features of your interface will be unavailable while the system optimizes itself to your neural circuitry.

This reminded Omar of some recent event that he'd decided not to think about.

Before he realized it, he said, “Hey,” out loud, somewhat weakly, but with a mix of anger and concern. “Leave my nervous system alone.”

Omar was quite adamant that he shouldn't be forced to relive something that he didn't want to think about. However, despite his protests, there was no response, and after the window seemed to linger for a few awkward seconds, he doubted that there ever would be.

It was just him there, with a new machine in his head, which meant that there was no one to receive his abusive complaints. Some mildly psychotic impulses followed, but because he wasn't a complete idiot, he immediately suppressed them. Omar knew that his favorite way of dealing with irritating machines would be somewhat inappropriate here.

“Welcome!” appeared at the top of the next window with “An Introduction to Reality Break” on the line below it. Even though words floated unavoidably within his field of vision, Omar could in fact avoid reading them. However, this wasn't because he hated reading, or anything like that. He was actually an avid reader and a fan of science fiction and fantasy books.

Nonetheless, Omar will make this more difficult than it needs to be, even though that is exactly the sort of thing he is trying to avoid.

⁂

In the years since he first began using his “behavioral deception,” Omar developed oddly specific patterns of thought and peculiar behavior that emerged inadvertently from an unusual collection of incentives and disincentives. His parents were the most common source of these strange incentives and disincentives because, as they discovered, it was simply the best way to raise their mildly psychotic idiot of a son. For example, while growing up, his parents regularly resorted to bribing Omar into reading what he'd call the “boring stuff.” Typically, the “boring stuff” referred to any and all textbooks, plus any other types of instructional material, which had initially been at Omar's normal grade level, but then progressed well beyond that.

Even before he entered high school, Omar's parents had at least figured out that their strange son was capable of extraordinary things, but only if he was properly bribed, manipulated, or carefully tricked into doing so.

After his diagnosis—both diagnoses—his parents saw less and less of the frustratingly annoying Omar, and more of these new stranger versions of him that were, blessedly, much easier to live with. These other versions of Omar were still Omar, they'd decided early on, rather than some alternate versions of his personality. If anything, his parent's saw that these other versions of their son either had no personality, or were in the midst of developing fake personalities that imitated what they knew their son secretly thought of as “normal.”

It was an old concept, this idea of “other versions” of Omar, but his parents used it on occasion, even knowing that it was likely incorrect, because they simply did not have a full picture of what was happening. Rather than there being other personalities and versions of Omar, his parents correctly recognized that it was mostly just a bunch of his weirdly consistent, strange behavior. Often this strange behavior would be somewhat mechanical, but it could change abruptly if met with the right stimulus.

Over the years, by observing patterns in his new behavior, his parents reasoned that Omar had some sort of ability to shut off the parts of his brain that made him particularly annoying and difficult to live with. In much the same way that the annoying version of Omar was burdensome to everyone around him, his parents figured that those parts of his brain were just as burdensome to the rest of his mind. This didn't explain why he was sometimes capable of superhuman feats of cognition, but to them that was okay because this model at least gave them something they could work with and use.

Omar understood that his parents were tricking and manipulating him, but this was mainly in the sense that he knew they still thought he had ODD, even though they would whole-heartedly deny this when asked. Despite his own efforts to paint his original diagnosis as being unimportant or irrelevant, Omar knew that he had ODD, and he knew that others knew this too. From his perspective, the original diagnosis resulted in him being severely punished with special education, which was in addition to the usual everyday persecution he believed he received. Omar wasn't entirely wrong about this, as some of that persecution was quite real.

In his high school years, some of the adults in Omar's life would abuse their position of authority in acts of petty defiance against Omar's open secret, which itself dealt with the consequences of Omar's pathologically defiant nature. Worse than that, they'd do this while completely missing the irony of their own actions. While it was true that they had cause which justified their own actions, technically, so did Omar. To them, Omar was this annoying snot-nosed student with, “special needs,” who required strange, “accommodations,” which he received in addition to the awards they gave him for being some sort of genius. They knew the truth, in that, rather than being a genius, Omar was really just an astoundingly manipulative idiot. As a result, they bullied him and looked at him with obvious disdain because, after all, they weren't entirely wrong either.

Omar's behavioral deception sometimes reinforced this impression, which would often worsen his “persecution.” However, it also warded his bullies off, and eventually stopped the bullying altogether. Still, maintaining it all the time proved to be somewhat exhausting for him.

⁂

What had started with the mere “casual laziness” of his childhood matured into a “practical habit” during his adolescence. By the time he became an adult, laziness had become one of Omar's defining core principles, like a deeply rooted conviction of what was necessary for his everyday life.

According to this core principle, reading something that was being read to him would be doing “more than what is absolutely necessary,” and that would simply be “wrong.”

And here he was with this new, super high-tech cybernetic interface, that he'd just confirmed had some sort of automatic text-to-speech feature. Naturally, he expected to take full advantage of this in much the same way one might expect to breath without thinking about it.

However, like most literate adults, Omar will tend to reflexively read words and short phrases that appear before him.

This created a troublesome problem for the strange man. The act of reading unnecessarily was effortful and wrong, but to some extent, so too was the act of trying not to do something that was basically a learned reflex.

However, rather than attempt to resolve this troubling issue, Omar will just assume that the problem will “work it self out.”

To be clear, none of this amounted to anything more than a moment's hesitation with a mild sense of wrongness. Omar understood all of this instinctively, and with nearly as much deliberate thought, he brushed it aside.

⁂

After a slight delay, the window was populated by a numbered list of seven bullet points, with all but the first item grayed out. Omar read this but then sighed. “I have a voice in my head that can do the reading for me,” he said quietly to himself; and in his head.

Welcome!

An Introduction to Reality Break

1. Warnings and Disclaimers

2. Wait. Did you say that time was two-dimensional?

3. What is Reality Break?

4. Okay … so what do I need to do?

5. Skills and Basic Character Stats?

6. How do I win?

7. Then what's the point of this?

It was the list of topics for the introductory lecture, Omar guessed, but every topic other than the first, was written as a question. In his infinite wisdom, Omar concluded that based on these questions, the upcoming lecture wasn't going to be very informative, even though he could not actually answer any of those questions.

A new window titled, “Warnings and Disclaimers” appeared atop of the prior window, and below it the phrase, “This is still your life” was slowly typed out, letter by letter. Omar let out an uneasy groan. He found this slow typing effect to be somewhat disconcerting, and he feared that he might have to suffer through it for the entire tutorial. However, after the painfully slow typing ended, the voice in his head surprised him by saying things that weren't written in the message window.

“Even though your life is now a game, this is still your real and only life. You, and only you, are responsible for your own actions, and the consequences thereof. There are no guarantees expressed or implied, and no special status … ,” and so it went.

Omar smiled and nodded once to himself realizing that, as expected, everything worked itself out.

Unfortunately, Omar had just about reached the limit of his short attention span. Without intending to do so, Omar effortlessly ignored the voice in his head, even though it was technically impossible for him to not hear it. Perhaps, even more remarkably, he could tune out the voice while still thinking about it.

“I should give it a name,” he thought, referring to the thing he was ignoring, effortlessly, and without even realizing it. “I could call it ‘my interface’ or maybe ‘the interface’ or something like that. … But those aren't really names, right? In that case, how about I just name it ‘Interface’ with a capital ‘I’ … but then … no, … I don't know. That sounds kind of awkward. Plus, I'd have to mentally add a capital ‘I’ whenever I thought about the word, and that just seems like it'll be too much work.”

Omar waited a few moments for the problem to work itself out like the prior one did, but nothing happened.

“Whatever,” he thought dismissively, before getting up.

In not choosing a name, Omar inadvertently chose to, instead, give the voice a title. It was his “interface,” and because it was his “interface,” this meant that the naming problem had actually worked itself out, after all.

⁂

On his way to the kitchen he said, with a clap, “Now for the important question,” and then rubbed his hands together greedily. “Should I microwave the rice and toast the bread separately, or make the rice sandwich and then heat it in the toaster oven?”

For a moment, Omar gave the impression that this was truly a question for the ages of the sort that learned men and women spend their entire lives trying to understand.

This impression was absolutely mistaken.

In fact, rather than bothering to give his supposedly “important question” a moment's thought, Omar simply went ahead with gathering the necessary supplies as if he already had a plan.

He didn't.

After he had everything out before him on the kitchen countertop, Omar simply stood there staring hungrily at an assortment of condiments and other sandwich-making ingredients, almost as if he was waiting for the sandwich to make itself. Surprisingly enough, he wasn't actually expecting the sandwich to make itself; at least, not yet. Omar stood there, as he was, because he forgot that he was supposed to think about his terribly important question.

More than that, it was almost as if he was actively avoiding any thoughts pertaining to his super important question. This wasn't deliberate in any sense. It was just that Omar's mind was beginning to wander, and right now, it could only wander away from whatever was on his mind.

ADHD and similar attentional issues were often like that. Omar, with his pathologically short attention span, had ADHD amongst his diagnosed conditions from that first round of testing he had as a child. At the time, however, his doctor described it as being the “least of his worries” in his original report.

In the logic of Omar's mind, his attention ironically wandered back to that other thing he was ignoring, as it was the most obvious distraction available. He spoke out loud and said, “I wonder if I missed anything important in that lecture thing?” Even though it was technically impossible for him not to see the transparent window in his heads-up display, Omar somehow “briefly glances” at the message window.

Welcome!

An Introduction to Reality Break

1. Warnings and Disclaimers

• This is still your life

• Sole Liability

• No Guarantees

• No Special Status

• Dangers!

• Player versus Player Conflicts → Piss people off at your own risk

2. Wait. Did you say that time was two-dimensional?

“Nope,” he says confidently and out loud, but then corrects himself by adding, “or at any rate, there's nothing new there.” Then, as if to stress his conclusion, which is exactly what he was doing, Omar takes a moment to scoff derisively at the most recent topic. “Heh. As if there was anything they could tell me about how to piss people off.”

Omar viewed himself, perhaps rightly so, as being something of an expert when it came to pissing people off. “And yet, I'm always getting ‘helpful advice’ about it, as if I don't know any better—or was it, as if I should know better … but—no, because, I do know better!” And despite sounding hesitant and uncertain, his inane rambling actually ended in a somewhat decisive tone.

To Omar, this thought was perfectly clear and easy enough to understand.

However, in this he was mistaken.

Even within his own mind, this perfectly clear thought was about as transparent as the wet brick that was his attention span. Ultimately, what this really meant was that Omar treats unsolicited “advice” on this topic as being either a form of encouragement, or an invitation to piss someone off.

After subconsciously hearing his interface say something about PKers, Omar consciously connects his inane rambling with the thing he did not hear.

Incidentally, Omar was still just standing there, with a somewhat blank expression, staring at the food on his countertop.

The connection between the inane rambling of his recent thoughts and the warnings regarding PKers was the question he had asked Suman about the dangers of players killing other players. Although this had been a connection he made seamlessly in his mind, Omar dismisses its importance just the same because of how satisfied he he had been with Suman's answer. Or at least, that's what he now thinks.

His thoughts about this connection between pissing people off and PKers had been incomplete. There had actually been something else about that thought, something that was comparatively more important, but the rest of that connection failed to consciously click with Omar.

Instead, he suddenly slaps himself in the face. “Stop it Omar! Hurry up and decide!” he said loudly and admonishingly, before unironically adding in the same tone, “No more distractions! Why am I even being indecisive again?! This is dumb.”

Rather than risk delaying his lunch preparations yet again, Omar chooses to do both, and thus avoids the need to make any difficult decisions. “I'll microwave the rice and then toast the entire rice sandwich,” he said, while thinking much too highly of himself. “Plus, it's not like I was doing anything important today, so I might as well take the time to make a good rice sandwich.”

However, before he could actually begin making his sandwich, a loud voice addressed him directly, saying, “Omar! Your attention on this one topic is required.” It was a voice in his head, but it wasn't the voice of his interface.

Given how highly he thought about himself at the moment, the idea of hearing additional voices in his head did not concern Omar in the slightest. This new voice was male and sounded very authoritative, but these attributes only served to elevate Omar's lack of concern to almost transcendent heights. That the tone and demeanor of this “new voice” was practically the exact opposite of the friendly telephone operator voice of his normal interface, did not even register as uninteresting or unimportant.

Most new players found this new speaker to be somewhat intimidating because that is exactly how it was designed to sound. Omar on the other hand, looked at the list of topics in his HUD and saw that “Space Travel” had followed after the “Player versus Player Conflicts” topic. At this, he actually felt a tinge of regret for having missed such an interesting topic. “Whatever. I'll just figure that stuff out later,” he said, in reference to the complexities of space travel in the year 2016. He shrugged and got back to work.

⁂

Hearing is not the same as listening, and Omar was the walking embodiment of that principle. This wasn't something he thought about—at all—despite the many, many times he's heard variations of this phrase, over the course of his life, being lobbed at him as complaints and accusations. Of course, he hadn't been listening then either, and those rare occasions when he'd been accidentally attentive didn't count. Those incidents had been brief, and he'd typically forget about it just as quickly.

The ongoing lecture in his head had stopped, and without any other distractions, Omar's mind was well and truly empty. His interface was silently waiting for his acknowledgement because, back when the new voice asked for Omar's attention, it hadn't done so rhetorically.

The new voice yelled “OMAR!” loudly in his head, which startled Omar enough that he jumped and said, “What—what!? Who—what!” while looking around for the teacher, cop, or serial killer that had tried to frighten him.

For the record, it did frighten him, if only briefly, though he'd never admit this.

Normally, he'd react by doubling-down and channeling his momentary shock into irritation and anger, and then he would try to hide both his anger and fear from others, usually doing so very poorly. This time, however, he just felt sort of dumb and slightly embarrassed by the fact that a voice in his head had actually scared him. “Hah—hah. Very funny,” he said, as if it was a practical joke.

At the moment, other forces were at play here; namely his hunger, which had grown to the point that it was beginning to impact his mood and behavior. Ironically, instead of being angry and irritable when hungry, Omar was actually more focused and less prone to angry outbursts. However, that focus was, unsurprisingly, usually limited to finding or preparing food. This was a learned response he'd developed over the years because, occasionally, he would literally struggle to pay attention long enough to make a simple sandwich. But only occasionally. Also, in Omar's defense, his sandwich will be anything but simple.

Still, Omar was bound by the same physical needs that most life in this universe must bear. His evolutionary instinct to consume was only just starting to butt up against his dreadfully limited attention span, but soon something would have to give as hunger was not something that was so easily denied. As of yet, he hadn't reached that point, which was just as well, because now he had a new distraction to catch the attention of his wandering mind.

In his HUD, something was blinking. Blink … blink … blink, … it went, and Omar couldn't help but notice that it was the next topic on the list that was blinking, rather insistently in fact, “almost like,” he noted absently, “it was waiting for some sort of acknowledgement.” To the easily distracted man-child, the allure blinking lights was second only to his attraction to things that shined and sparkled.

It read, “Important! Chronoactivity Limits on Populations,” which surprised Omar because he did not recall hearing his interface say that—as if he hadn't ignored most of what it said thus far. Before he could ruminate on the failings of his new, super high-tech cybernetic interface, the unspoken phrase stopped blinking. “Really?” he said, with the last of his sarcasm, but his heart just wasn't in it. In all, this had been enough of an acknowledgment for his interface to continue, and so the new voice began speaking, albeit somewhat sternly.

“It is the general consensus of the largest coalition of known civilizations in this galaxy, that, as specified in the Martian Accords, no significantly large population of humans in the sol system will be allowed to become permanently chronoactive.”

“You will not be given our exact definition of ‘significantly large population,’ nor of any other related term. We know how much you humans like searching for loopholes in legal documents and treaties. The exact numbers are extremely context specific and detailed enough to cover a wide variety of scenarios that we don't want you to know about. However, at the counsel of the Gas Bags—and yes, that's an accurate translation—we will offer the following as a general rule: for a typical player with a typical number of known, passive family members and friends, that player could make all of those people permanently chronoactive, and each of them could do the same. This process cannot be repeated with that resultant generation.”

As the new voice spoke, it did so with neither humor nor vitriol, and yet it seemed as if it struggled just to tolerate the fact that humans even existed. However, it didn't sound like it hated humanity so much as it hated what humans could do, or have done. The effect was reminiscent of an adult talking down an unruly teenager that everybody else had given up on. Regardless of what else happens, there was no one left to care. In place of any comforting compassion or goodwill, there was now just a line that couldn't be crossed.

“In the event that your actions merely present a real threat of exceeding this limit, the timeline will be altered to specifically ensure that you never happen. Additionally, your descendants by blood or by contracted chronoactive status, and your ancestors for the last 10,000 years, will all also unhappen. In the event that this limit has actually been exceeded, your entire species will be reset, and every human that has ever lived since you first evolved, will unhappen. In place of those voided humans, a new set of humans will evolve instead.”

After a brief pause, the new voice seemed to collect itself before it said, with finality, “In the end, as a measure of last resort, your entire planet will be sterilized, repeatedly, so that life never emerges on Earth,” and then it said, “Your civilization will not become permanently chronoactive,” matter-of-factly, as if it just said the sky was blue.

“The Newbie Aegis. As a new player, you will be under the modest and non-guaranteed protection of the ‘Newbie Aegis’ for a limited time. Generally this will be until you reach a Total Effective Rank of C, or an equivalent amount of subjective time or experience. Before this protection expires, you are advised to … ” It took Omar a few moments to register that his normal interface, with its familiar female voice, had resumed its introductory lecture with the next topic.

He had listened to the entirety of what, he presumed, was some sort of edict from a higher authority in their galaxy-wide civilization. However, his attention wasn't so much a result of the intimidating mystery-voice, as it was a result of his own interests in “aliens and stuff.” With a token effort, Omar found something trivial to complain about by focusing on the phrase, “a typical player.” The phrase was practically offensive, though only mildly, as if it had been a poorly executed jab specifically meant to insult him. “Hah, they're dumb. People don't like me because that's the point!,” he said, jokingly. It was a pointlessly petty comment, even for him. Realizing this, he grunted “meh,” and then said, “but seriously, what the hell happened on Mars? Note to self: find out,” which is actually a very common response amongst new players. Another part of Omar, deep down, added this note to a growing list of things to do.

Meanwhile, Omar's hands had not been idle. He'd already begun moving with mechanical efficiency through the routine motions of sandwich making, and by this point his body moved more or less automatically on its own, and with barely any conscious effort on his part. It was an effect that normally allowed his mind to wander, as it so often does, while also ensuring that he continued to perform those menial tasks that simply had to be done. However, now that there was nothing else interesting to think about, Omar simply thought of nothing.

A familiar veil of apathy fell across Omar mind that served to shield him from the various burdens and obligations of everyday life.