Chapter 8: Twenty-Four Hours

The countdown sat in the upper corner of the panel in thin white digits, and it did not care that he was still wearing his boots.

System message: Time remaining: 23:58:41.

Caleb climbed out of the tub and stood dripping on the bathmat. His jeans, which he had apparently been wearing under the shorts for no reason he could remember, clung to his legs. He peeled off the boots one at a time and poured black water out of the left one into the sink. Okay , he thought. A plan. A solid plan for my life. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet with a towel over his shoulders. How hard can that be?

It took him eleven minutes to find out.

He started with a pen. He took the notebook out of the kitchen drawer, dragged a chair to the table, and wrote PLAN across the top of a fresh page in block capitals, underlining it twice. He looked at it. He wrote 1. He looked at that. Money , he wrote, and felt a little relief, because money was always a safe first line. How? Better job. Which job? Any job. He crossed it out. He wrote Get stronger , remembered that getting stronger in the sense he meant was apparently a waste of time, and crossed that out too. Revenge on Megan. He held the pen over the page for a long minute and then wrote underneath, in much smaller letters, (why?) , and found he could not cross it out.

By midnight the page was a graveyard. He had written and struck out become rich , be a main character , get respect , find a girlfriend , find a better girlfriend , make Megan sorry , buy a car , buy a house , and be happy . Every line had looked like a goal until he stared at it, and then it turned back into a complaint wearing a hat. He had actually written be happy . He put the pen down.

Hey , he thought. The panel did not answer. Can you give me a hint? Anything? I'm not asking for the answer. I'm only asking what you're looking for. Silence. He tried again, politely. Please. I know you're watching. I know this is a test. Just tell me what kind of plan counts. In the corner the digits slid by.

System message: Time remaining: 18:52:02.

Nothing else.

He did the only thing he knew how to do. He went looking for the answer in other people's stories. He lay on the floor and let every manga and manhwa and webcomic that had ever eaten his sleep scroll past his mind like trailers: the hero who got a system and became the strongest hunter in the world, the cultivator who swallowed a heaven-defying pill and beat the ten-thousand-year genius in one chapter, the reincarnated nobody who started with nothing and ended with a harem, an empire, and a throne. Revenge , he thought. They always start with revenge. Get strong, humiliate the people who laughed at you, roll credits. Or money, so rich that everyone bows. Or strength. Level 999. He caught himself. Level 999 was the length of a ruler, and the real answer for him was one.

He lay there a very long time with his arm over his eyes. None of them had to write a plan. They got a window and a monster and a power-up, and the plot did the rest. It occurred to him that this was exactly what he had been doing, all of it, for weeks. Waiting for the plot.

At two in the morning he packed. He did it badly and fast, the way a man packs when he is trying to outrun a thought: the machete, the hatchet, the folding knife, dry boots laced tight, the leftover lighters and water tablets, a can of beans, two protein bars, a flashlight. He did not take the notebook. He closed his eyes.

Take me to the apocalypse.

The first one went down in three strokes, and the second took two. He did not think. He had learned in a stairwell how to stop thinking, and he put the lesson to use. He went down a ruined street in the dark with the machete low and the smell wrapped around him like a coat, and every time something turned its head toward him, he swung. It was easier than it had been the first time. It was easier because the part of him that had refused to hit a person in a flannel shirt had gone very quiet, and he did not know where it had gone. A man in a bathrobe. A teenager in a hoodie. A woman with a long blue braids. Each took less than a minute, and each made a sound as they fell. He did not look at the faces and he did not pry out any stones. He kept moving, one dead thing after another, and with each one the sound in his own head grew louder, until it was a high steady drone, like a machine left running in an empty room.

I'm good at this , he thought, somewhere in the fourth hour. I'm actually good at this. It was the worst thing he had ever thought.

At some point the street ended, and he stood in the middle of a parking lot with five bodies at his feet and the sky going orange and red. His arms were shaking. He sat down on the curb, and the machete slipped out of his hand and clattered on the asphalt, and he put his face in his hands and began to sob. Then evolved into an outburst of tears. It was not the neat, clean crying of the first night. It was loud and ragged and ugly, big dry sobs that shook his chest, and he rocked back and forth on the curb and said to no one, "I don't know what I want. I don't know."

Nobody answered. There was nobody to.

He went home at dawn, though in the apartment it was still the small hours of Saturday, barely a minute after he had left, because six hours in a world that ran at full speed cost the world he came from about thirty seconds. His body did not care. It had been awake for thirty hours and hurt in every part. He stood in the kitchen with the machete in one hand and looked at the table, where a pair of gym socks lay, left there three days ago. He looked at them for a long moment, and the full dreary shape of the last three weeks rose up in his mind: the hours on the bed, the thread-voices, the half-finished jokes, the small shameful nightly arrangement of his life. You are twenty-eight years old , he thought, and you have a floating angel of the universe watching you, and you are using a sock.

He took the dry and croocked socks to the sink and lit one of the lighters. The smoke alarm went off in under fifteen seconds. He stood in the shriek of it with the fire licking at the faucet and his mouth open, and then he put it out with a cup of water, and the whole apartment smelled of burnt cotton and shame. He laughed until he had to hold on to the counter.

At eight, he called in sick. Dale picked up on the second ring. "Caleb."

"I'm sick," Caleb said. "I'm really sorry. I can't come in."

There was a pause long enough to hear the fryer. "You sound like it," Dale said finally.

"I'll make it up. I swear."

"Get some rest."

It was the first time in his life that a lie to his manager had been almost true. He lay down on the bed with the countdown glowing in the corner of his eye, 10:58:12 , and closed his eyes for five minutes. He opened them at noon. 06:58:50.

By four o'clock he had gone through every stage a man goes through when he is trying to talk to a god and the god will not talk back. He had begged: Please, just tell me what you want. I'll do it, anything. He had bargained: If you give me a hint, I'll never touch that stuff again, I'll go to the gym every day, I'll work twelve hours. At about five, he got angry.

"Fine!" he shouted to the empty apartment, to the pale light, to the cold white letters in the corner of his eye. "If I'm so useless, unbind me! Do whatever you want! I don't need you! I never asked for any of this!"

Silence. The refrigerator rattled. The shout seemed to hang in the air as something dropped from a great height. He stood there panting, and then something cold went down the back of his neck.

"Wait," he said, and his voice had gone small. "No. I didn't mean that. I'm sorry. Don't. Please don't."

He sat on the floor with his back against the bed. He knew it was undignified. He knew that a man who threatens a god and apologizes within ten seconds deserves whatever happens next. He remembered the examiner's voice from the seventh night, shortsighted, greedy, prideful, easily manipulated , and the line about the forum written by strangers. It's right , he thought. It's right about all of it. He put his head down on his knees.

He had turned the problem over for twenty hours and found no solution. He was not smart enough and not strong enough. He was twenty-eight and still nobody, and the one thing that could have changed that was about to close the door, and for no better reason than that he did not know what he wanted to be when he grew up. He sat there a long time in the dying light.

He did not notice the golden slant of the afternoon on the wall go orange, then rose, then purple. He did not notice the countdown in the corner of his eye turn from white to a pale, uneasy red.

System message: Time remaining: 00:04:31.

He was thinking. It was not the grand theatrical thinking of the manga, where suddenly the main character find an outrageous solution that somehow works. It was slow and small and tired, and it came in pieces. I just want to be okay. It was such a little thought that he almost let it go. I don't need to be rich. I don't need to be the strongest. I don't even know if I want to get married. I don't care if I date a lot of people or one or nobody. I just don't know what I want. He turned it over. I just don't want to waste a day. Not on things that don't help me. Not on scrolling. Not on hating someone who doesn't think about me. Not on waiting. I want to wake up and live well, and not hurt anybody to do it. I don't mean selfish. I just mean... He searched for it. ...healthy. Like a person who is actually alive.

He stopped. It was embarrassing, a small childlike thought, and his ears went hot even though nobody could hear it. He did not know it was an answer. He did not know anything by then. His body, which had been awake for over thirty-five hours, finally and completely ceased to cooperate, and he slid sideways against the bed, still turning the thought over, still trying to make it bigger. The last thing he heard was the refrigerator.

System message: Time remaining: 00:00:01.

Ding.

The system considered.

It had been considering for twenty-one days. It evaluated the subject: a male human, aged twenty-eight, weak by every metric, prone to escapism, prone to self-pity, prone to reflexive appeals to an authority he feared and did not understand. It reviewed the three weeks. It reviewed the run, the sedan, the park, the bathtub. It reviewed the final sentence, which had been written not in words but in the slow, tired architecture of a mind that had stopped performing. The sentence was not a plan. It was the first honest thing the subject had produced.

The system weighed options. Allocation of strength: rejected. The vessel could not bear it, and strength inflated what it did not improve. Allocation of resources: rejected. The subject had no discipline to manage them. Allocation of perception: this was the correct instrument. A weak vessel in a hostile world required advance information more than force. Perception reduced the number of occasions on which the subject would need to be saved. It rewarded no vanity.

The system selected perception. It then adjusted a second parameter. Subjects who were given no feedback tended to deteriorate, so the interface would be calibrated to provide a limited, gamified layer of information, enough to hold the subject's attention and not enough to flatter him.

The assessment concluded, and the result was recorded.

When Caleb woke, it was dark. He was lying on the floor with a crick in his neck and a taste in his mouth like old pennies. For one terrible second he remembered nothing, and then he remembered everything at once and sat up so fast that his vision went white at the edges. The mission. The countdown was gone. In its place, the panel hung in the dark, clear and steady.

System message: Mission Complete.

What? I didn't— I don't have a plan. I passed out. I didn't write anything—

System message: Result: Passed.

Reward: FIELD VISION (passive). Within a radius of 100 meters, in every direction, you will perceive all matter, motion, and structure. The volume is a sphere, not a circle. It extends 100 meters above you, 100 meters below you, through earth and stone, and 100 meters in every direction around you.

INTERFACE CALIBRATION: Analysis unlocked. Analysis displays the base attributes of a target, the description of an object, and the properties of an awakening stone.

He read it twice. Then, slowly, he looked up, and the apartment had gone transparent. It was not like glass. The walls were still there, and the ceiling, and the floor. But in the corners of his vision, faint and silver, he could see through them, the way you can see the grain of a table under a clear coat of varnish. He could see the neighbor's television glowing through the wall. He could see the water in the pipes running through the floor like thin blue veins. Two stories below him, a man was cooking something in a pan. On the roof of the building across the street, a cat was asleep in a box.

He put a hand over his mouth. "Holy..."

He looked at the little pebble of broken concrete he had carried back from the stairwell as a souvenir, and a line of white text appeared beside it.

System message: Concrete fragment. Low density. Fractured.

He looked at his own hand.

System message: Human. Male. Age: 28. Condition: Fatigued.

There was nothing else, no numbers and no bars, but it was enough that he almost cried.

System message: Assessment: Passed. Instruction: Write down what you thought in the final minutes. All of it.

He found the notebook and sat at the table in the glow of the panel with the pen in a hand that was not quite steady, and he wrote it out the way he had thought it, one line at a time. I want to be okay. I don't want to waste a day. I want to live well, and not hurt anybody to do it. It was three in the morning when he finished, and his handwriting got worse as he went. At one point he stopped and thought, this is stupid, who am I writing for? , and the word penalty rose in his mind like a cold bubble, and he picked up the pen again. He did not know what failing to obey would cost. He had a feeling he would rather not find out.

System message: Compliance: Observed. Assessment: Progress detected. Insufficient.

The objective is not that you carry out what the system instructs. The objective is that you live fully. Whether you will recognize this remains unresolved.

He read it and did not understand it. He understood the first line, that he had done what he was told, and that this was apparently less than what had been hoped. He did not know what it fully meant. He closed the notebook.

Outside, it had started to rain, very lightly, on the roof of the building across the street, where a small gray cat slept in a box and, for the first time in his life, Caleb Maddox could count every drop.

6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNQ4GIJQEFG

[author] [/author]

The field vision works like an x ray, but at this stage, it links to his field of vision, hence he won't be able so see inside a box if he's not looking at it. Admittedly, I may forget this feature, or it may change as the rules in this novel are fully decided. About the novel overall. The rough structure from beginning to end is complete, what's left is actually writting down vital parts to reduce plot holes.

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