It was still night outside when Anya came to. The sounds of endless traffic and the only somewhat subdued bustle of the city filtered to her through the hole in her window, along with a constant gust of chilly January air. She was surrounded by tiny shards of glittering glass and the smell of scorched flannel. Glittering like the stars, Anya thought through a murky haze of semi-consciousness. No stars in the city. What was that orange thing?

Her head cleared as she winced and the pain brought her back to her senses. She sat up, careful to not cut herself on the surrounding glass. She sniffed at the air and looked around for whatever was burning, then winced with the movement.

Her chest was stiff and stung a bit in the center. She reached down and frowned when she felt a hole in the middle of her flannel pajama top. The hole was about the size of a quarter and singed black around the edges. Her chest beneath the hole looked undamaged, and she brushed her fingers against her skin there to see if it was tender.

There was a slight tingle when her fingers touched the spot just over her sternum, and then a beam of light shot out from her chest and flashed across her room.

Anya screamed and scrambled back on her hands and feet, heedless of the broken glass around her. She didn’t notice as the tiny shards bit into her palms and soles of her feet as she tried to escape the thing suddenly in front of her. She was too panicked to focus on it, startled out of her wits by the appearance of a glowing object that filled most of her vision. When she thumped her back against her bed she had no choice but to stop and stare up.

A large opaque gray rectangle floated in front of her, covered in glowing orange text. The text was unreadable, just a series of squiggles and lines and dots that might have been a language. The symbols changed as Anya stared at them, snapping into recognizable English letters. Anya tried to get her heart and breathing under control as she stared at the rectangle. She squinted at it as the last of the unknown letters transformed into English.

ANYA NOWICKI: LEVEL 24 HUMAN

Statistics

Awareness-6

Dexterity-4

Fortitude-7

Intelligence-4

Strength-3

Willpower-7

On the right side of the rectangle was another label that read “SKILLS” and another below that which read “CLASSES-NOT CURRENTLY AVAILABLE” and in the center at the very bottom was a flashing crimson circle with the label “HELP.” Below that, a smaller message with a star next to it said, “YOU HAVE UNSPENT POINTS TO ALLOCATE.”

Anya stayed on the floor and stared up at the floating rectangle before her. Though really, she had played enough Role-Playing Games to know what it was as soon as it had translated itself into English.

It was a character stat menu for a game.

And it was hers.

She reached out to touch it and her fingers passed through it as though it were a hologram. There was a slight tingling sensation as her fingers went through the floating menu, and again when she pulled her hand back. She tried to rest her fingers on it, and found that while it wasn’t solid, tiny halos of dull light appeared around her fingers when she made contact with the menu.

She looked down at the small hole in the center of her sweater and frowned. She touched her sternum, it tingled, then the menu disappeared. She touched her sternum again and the menu reappeared hovering before her. Whenever she turned, the menu turned with her, always centered in front of her. It phased through furniture, the walls, anything solid.

She made the menu disappear again, then looked down around her at the broken glass from the window, and a few splotches of blood from her cut hands and feet.

“Oh shit,” Anya whispered and winced as she limped to the bathroom on her cut feet and spent a few minutes taking the tiny pieces of glass out of her skin and putting bandages over the thankfully small cuts. She focused on just tidying up the mess in her room for the moment, and picked up every piece of glass and cleaned up the blood. It was a normal thing to do, which was a relief because her brain was starting to scream at her that something very much not-normal had happened.

But for the moment, Anya just busied herself with tidying up. When she had finished, she decided her bed was a bit too messy, and made that, then thought she might as well do some laundry, and then realized she was stalling and she’d have to face the glowing stat menu in her chest eventually and took a deep breath.

Maybe she had just had more to drink at the noraebang than she thought. Maybe she was hallucinating. That didn’t explain the window though. Something real had broken her window, and it had come from outside, or she wouldn’t have had to pick up glass off the floor. The hole in her pajamas was real too. She felt the burned, crisp edges of the toasted flannel with her fingers. That was definitely real.

“Okay. Just…okay,” Anya said to herself and touched her sternum.

The menu reappeared.

“Holy shit,” Anya breathed. “What the fuck is this?”

She walked to her bed, the menu floating ahead of her as she moved, and sat down on the mattress. She had a million questions as she stared at the menu, and thankfully, it had been kind enough to provide what she hoped would be an answer to them. Anya reached out and pressed the flashing orange “HELP” button. It blinked once and a bright flash of warm light blinded Anya as she cried out and put her hands up in front of her face.

She blinked and lowered her hands as her vision cleared, and saw something floating in the air between her and the menu. It was made of translucent orange light and was about the size and shape of a very chubby baby with an over-large head shaped like a rose just starting to come into bloom. Its arms and legs were stumpy, and she saw it didn’t really have fingers or toes, but hands like mittens and feet that ended in rounded points. Its face was simplistic and almost cartoonish, featuring a wide mouth and huge eyes. It smiled at her and waved.

Anya screamed and threw a pillow at the creature. The pillow passed right through it, and the menu behind it, and flopped harmlessly to the floor after bouncing off the wall.

“What the fuck!” Anya shouted.

“Hello!” the creature said in a sweet, childish voice. It didn’t seem bothered or even to notice that Anya had just tried to knock it out of the air. “I’m your personalized assistant! What can I help you with?”

“Get out of my apartment!” Anya shouted.

“Of course!” the creature said. It floated to the side and through her window, passing through the pane of broken glass like a ghost. It hovered in the air just outside and smiled in at her. “Now what?”

Anya kept as far away from her window as she could and eyed the floating creature outside. It didn’t seem dangerous, and it had technically done as she asked. At worst, the impish creature was too literal. Anya tapped her chest and the menu vanished, but the creature remained.

“I see you’ve dismissed your interface menu,” the creature said, its voice muffled by the pane of glass separating them. “Would you like me to return to standby?”

Anya regarded the creature while it continued to smile placidly at her. It didn’t appear threatening. Hell, it didn’t even look like it was tangible, floating through the window like that.

“Come back inside,” Anya said but kept away from the window as the creature followed instructions and floated back into her apartment. “What are you? What’s going on? What the hell is all this?”

“I’m your personalized assistant!” it replied. This time it even gave her an awkward salute with one of its stubby arms. “What’s going on is I’m introducing myself! All of this appears to be your apartment!”

Anya glared at the chipper response. It really was entirely literal. She took a deep breath and tried not to scream in frustration or panic or both.

“No, I mean, what are you like, your species?”

“Oh! I see. I’m an Artificial Intelligence designated to you, Anya Sabrina Nowicki, for your use in determining how you wish to specify the use of your points for your personal statistics and skills.”

“Okay. An AI, great,” Anya said and took another breath. Her brain was already reeling at the implications of that statement, but there were other things to ask first. Anya brought up the orange-and-gray tinted menu again by touching her sternum and it appeared at once.

“What the hell is this thing?” Anya asked and pointed at the menu.

“That is the visual user interface for the Accumulated Universal Knowledge Archive Project,” the AI said and floated beside the menu screen and waggled their weird little mitten hands at it.

“And what is that?” Anya asked.

“The Accumulated Universal Knowledge Archive Project is a system by which users may draw upon the collected knowledge and skill of surveyed worlds and transfer it to themselves instantaneously!”

Anya’s mind spun at the further implications. Was it saying what she thought it was saying?

“Give me an example,” she said and had to lean back into her bed. She was dizzy and nauseous, but she did not—no matter how much she wished—feel like she were dreaming. Anya had had twenty-four years of dreams and none of them had been like this. Whatever the hell was happening, it had the unmistakable and tangible weight of reality to it.

“Okay! What is a skill you would like to have, but do not currently possess?” the AI asked.

Anya thought for a moment, happy to focus on a simple question. There were a lot of things she always wanted to do, but never quite had the time, money, or patience to learn how.

“Kinda always wanted to learn how to play the guitar,” she said after a moment of thinking.

“Great!” the AI replied and then the menu flashed with hundreds, thousands of skills for a second before narrowing down to one that simply read “GUITAR.” That one word expanded into a branching tree that had options underneath such as Spanish guitar, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass guitar, and then into different genres of music. The menu grew to accommodate the growing list of skills.

“Whoa,” Anya said as her eyes widened.

“You would first need to select the primary ‘Guitar,’ skill, and then use a skill point to unlock that. Then you could select a specialization, or you could just focus improving the general guitar skill itself,” the AI said.

“And then I just… know how to play the guitar?”

“Well, with only a single skill point, your ability would be quite low. But around ten points, you would be very good, at a professional level of performance, based on what scans of this planet have acquired regarding this particular skill and projected point values.”

“God damn.”

“It’s really neat!”

“No shit.”

“That’s correct, there is no shit here,” the AI said and did a brief scan of the apartment.

“No, I mean… forget it,” Anya said. The list of questions in her head was growing, all of them piling on top of one another until her brain had become a hive of buzzing queries.

“How many skills are there?” she asked as she studied the sprawling tree of guitar sub-skills.

“5,27,359,009 skills and assorted sub-skills. Many are redundant or heavily related to each other, like what you see here,” the AI waved at the guitar skill tree.

“And if I just give you some basic criteria, you’ll find the skills for me?”

“Yup!”

“Okay. Show me some assorted physical skills.”

“You got it!” the AI nodded their head and an assortment of skills replaced the guitar tree.

Akido. Fidget Spinning. Archery. Weaving. Stunt Driving. Finger Guns. Acrobatics. Heavy Weapons. Sneaking. Cliff Diving. Shadow Puppetry. Disco. Dismemberment. Baseball. Fencing (swords). Fencing (construction). Marksmanship. Jump-Rope. Boxing. Skateboarding.

Anya was at a loss for words as she continued to scan the list. It looked like every single physical pursuit somebody could imagine, including several that were impossible, like dinosaur riding and Atlantean wrestling.

“Uh, wow. What about mental skills?” she asked. The AI nodded again and once more, a list of improbable variety appeared.

Physics. Japanese. Mahjong. Architecture. Polka Trivia. Naval Strategy. Dowsing. Business. Surgery. Wine. Astronomy. Pig Latin. Board Games. Persuasion. Saxophone. Painting. Robotics. Psychology. Deduction. Guerrilla Tactics. Rocketry. Daemonic Speech.

“How are these types of skills here? These aren’t real,” Anya said and pointed at “Daemonic Speech.”

“The Archive informs me they are, in fact, real,” the AI replied. “The Accumulated Universal Knowledge Archive Project has collected many skills which you may be unfamiliar with.”

“All right, I’ll bite. Show me a list of some of the weirder skills,” Anya said.

“Weird?” the AI asked.

“Like Dinosaur riding or Atlantean wrestling. Magic and science-fiction stuff, if it’s in here,” Anya said and gestured at the screen.

“Of course!” The AI nodded and presented Anya with a third list of skills, this one consisting entirely of things she either considered too fantastical to exist, or did not understand.

Flame Dominion. Flesh Shaping. Ectoplasmic Materialization. Prognostication. Elemental Summoning. Void Walking. Ki Mastery. Shapeshifting. Elemental Evocation. Pheromone Secretion. Necromancy. Psychokinesis. Pact-Making. Energy Manipulation (Kinetic). Density Control. Aether Manipulation.

“Holy shit, these are real? I can actually learn these? Just like a guitar?”

“Yup!”

Anya clutched the side of her head as she started to feel dizzy. This was insane.

“Why is this here? The Universal Knowledge thing?” Anya asked and gestured at the menu. “Why do I have it?”

“Oh! That’s because REDACTED,” the AI said, its chipper, cheery, childish voice switched to something cold and robotic at the last word. Anya flinched at the change, not only in the AI’s voice, but its appearance as well. Their face went from animated and smiling to flat and unreadable, their posture went stiff, and their slightly transparent orange body flickered with static for a moment.

Then the AI went back to normal and smiled again.

“Did that help?” they asked.

“What the hell was that?” Anya demanded.

“What was what?”

“That thing you did! Saying ‘Redacted,’ like that and going all weird.”

The AI cocked its rose-shaped head to the side for a moment and squinted as if in thought.

“Huh. There is a zero-point-eight second gap in my memory. That’s funny! Let me see if I can find an answer!”

The AI’s face vanished entirely, and their rose-head closed its petals up and in. Its arms stuck out to the side and its legs pointed straight down as it began to slowly rotate in mid-air while Anya stared at it.

“Are you T-posing?” Anya muttered, mostly to herself.

After a few seconds of this, the AI returned to normal and gave Anya a sheepish smile and bowed.

“Sorry, but it seems there are some pretty severe gaps in my memory. I do not have access to all of the information I should, and I’m not even sure what’s missing,” the AI said.

“So you won’t know you don’t know something until I ask you about it?” Anya asked.

“It seems so.”

“What if I ask you why parts of your memory are missing?”

“Then I could try to answer you.”

Anya rolled her eyes. Literal. Right.

“Why are parts of your memory missing?” she asked.

“It’s because REDACTED,” the AI said and went stiff and robotic again.

“Saw that one coming,” Anya sighed.

“Sorry again. However I’ve started to flag known missing areas of my memory if that’s of any help. Do you have any more questions?”

“Oh yeah. Where did you come from? Technology like this doesn’t exist on Earth,” Anya asked. The more she spoke to the little AI, the easier it seemed. Which was sort of surreal in itself, Anya supposed, but she didn’t feel like she was going insane (quite so much) anymore, which was a definite improvement.

“I came from REDACTED.”

“Great. Who made you?”

“I was made by REDACTED.”

“Fuck’s sake,” Anya said and squeezed the bridge of her nose.

“I really am sorry about this,” the AI said.

“It’s not your fault…I think,” Anya said and then pointed at the menu full of guitar skills. “Can you go back to the main menu screen? Where it showed all my stats and stuff?”

“Yes!” the AI chirped and the menu returned to the initial screen. Anya waved a hand at her personal statistics.

“What about these? Can I change these too?”

“Absolutely! You have statistic points to raise them, which will increase the upper limit of any associated skills.”

All of the information the AI had told her so far—as well as the intimidating amount of information it had implied—was beginning to overwhelm Anya. For now, asking questions was fine, but what was she going to do with all of this? She knew she wasn’t smart enough to figure it out (a fact which the menu’s reading of her statistics seemed to reflect), but that had given her an idea.

“So if I raise my intelligence stat, I’ll get smarter?” Anya asked.

“Sort of!” the AI replied. “The definition of intelligence can vary between cultures and species. What you on Earth may consider to be very smart, somebody on another planet may consider foolish, or basic, or vice-versa.”

Anya was tempted to ask about alien life on other planets, but suspected that would inevitably come up anyway. It seemed a safe bet that wherever the Accumulated Universal Knowledge Archive Project had come from, it probably wasn’t anywhere on this planet.

“Wait, if you’re not sure about a culture’s definition of intelligence, how come I got a four? How’d you, or this menu thing, get that?”

“Intelligence as the menu defines it as a general rule is a measure of brain efficiency and processing power, sort of like a computer.”

“So what happens if I raise the stat?”

“The connections in your brain will become more efficient at relaying information at higher speeds.”

“So I’ll be stupid, faster.”

“You got it!”

Anya scowled a little at the AI, who maintained their gentle, clueless smile.

“Is it going to mess me up at all? Make my brain grow bigger than my skull, or rewrite my personality, or erase my memories or anything else horrible?”

“No! It’s just going to improve what’s already there.”

Anya sighed. Being able to think about things more efficiently would be nice. And trying to sort through the salvo of information coming at her was making her feel like she was drowning. She was sorely tempted to try something both out of basic curiosity and a further need to confirm this was all actually happening.

One point.

As a test.

And hopefully one that would help her process everything better.

“How many stat points do I have?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Based on my age, got it. Is it possible to undo any changes I make and go back to how I am now if I don’t like something?”

“Yes!” the AI said.

Anya took a deep breath. “Okay. Put one point into my intelligence.”

Anya’s stat menu now read “Intelligence-4+1—Confirm?” and flashed a faint orange.

“Are you sure you’d like to allocate this point?” the AI asked.

“Do it,” Anya replied, and the “Confirm?” prompt flashed again then vanished. The number beside the Intelligence stat changed from “4+1” to “5.”

“That’s it?” Anya asked after a moment had passed. “I expected—”

That was when the inside of Anya’s skull began to burn and something sharp pierced her forehead. She gasped and arched her back from the pain, mouth agape in a silent scream as she prayed that if she were about to die, that it would only be over soon.