Chapter 2

Bright, fluorescent lights blinded me. The blackness was banished, surrounded by white. Something hard gripped my face, shoving air into my mouth, my nose. I gagged, coming awake with a massive gasp followed by a violent series of coughs.

Bits of dull-blue dust exploded from the inhalation ports of the oxygen mask like a dragon’s exhale as I hacked, my lungs tight and dry.

Wait, oxygen mask? The disorientation twisted into full-blown panic. No. This couldn’t be happening. I looked down at myself, at my body. The IV, the monitor, the bed. The ambulance ride that must have brought me here. We didn’t have insurance, and doing some frantic math in my head I realized I was looking at from anywhere between $2,500 to $10,000 minimum.

Shit. Shit. I couldn’t afford it. We couldn’t afford it. Even the lowest number would wipe out my meagre profits from Nick’s tip sheet and the highest would put us on the street. There was… something that happened. My memory was fuzzy. A natural disaster? A meteor?

It slowly came back to me. That’s right. It had exploded before impact, showering the city and street with massive plumes of dust that reminded me of the immediate aftermath of the oil refinery in Beirut. And I’d been thrown from the resulting blast.

Experimentally, I leaned forward and winced, a sharp pain emitting from my chest beneath a thick bandage. Cracked rib. I had green-purple bruising all over my side and my shoulder throbbed from where I must have landed. I struggled to my feet and wheeled the IV stand towards the window.

I’d expected to see husks of collapsed buildings as far as the eye could see. But the Dallas skyline was intact. The Bank of America plaza building had collapsed, damaging some nearby structures but at least from this perspective, everything else looked mostly whole.

That was almost worse. The disaster had been a freak incident, unlike anything I’d ever heard of. There would be an inevitable compensation fund, but that would take time, and there had been clear examples in the past when it had taken an upward of a decade for lawmakers to establish anything remotely approaching a working solution.

Then, as if to punctuate my rising panic, the text box appeared.

<System Notification—>

I slapped the message away, retreated until my back slammed against a wall. Panic mingled with anxiety and I began to hyperventilate.

Head between my legs, I tried to come to grips with how bad the situation was. The only thing that could possibly make my current circumstances worse had happened: There was actually something wrong with me. Hallucinations. And not the fun, walls are slightly shifting and why did I leave the remote in the fridge kind. It was a hard delusion, tied to the dream I’d had the previous night. They’d want to keep me overnight for observation. It had to be a psychological issue, which would take time to diagnose and evaluate, and that was how ten thousand dollars turned into a hundred.

Hurriedly, I crawled to the foot of the bed and checked my chart. Below the listing of blood pressure and notes there was a bullet-point list detailing my condition: Severe smoke inhalation. Fractured rib. Dislocated shoulder. Exposure to an unknown substance. But I almost cried with relief when I found the field listed as M. Unidentified Adolescent. They didn’t have my name. That cinched it. I had to get out. Now.

It took a few painful moments for me to remove the IV. My head pounded under the intensity of the lights. My half-folded clothes and belongings were in a plastic bag placed haphazardly on a nearby seat. I got the feeling that whoever placed them there had been called away which was likely the reason my name and information hadn’t been lifted from my wallet.

The text box reappeared as I struggled back into my ruined clothes. I tried to push it away again but it shifted, moving out of my reach but remaining in my sight. I turned away from it, refusing to acknowledge the delusion when it moved to stay in my eye line. It scrolled slowly, as if it knew I couldn’t help but read it.

<System Message: CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE AWAKENED THE AQUARIUS CLUSTER.>

That stopped me flat, one-leg in to putting on my pants. For the first time I doubted what I was seeing was merely a product of a damaged mind. There were few things I took less stock in than astrology. Unless my subconscious was being ironic. Could a subconscious even be ironic?

<THIS IS NOT A HALLUCINATION.>

Apparently, the answer was yes. But Rene Magritte wanted his joke back.

<FOR YOUR REBELLION IN THE FACE OF IMMINENT DEMISE, YOU HAVE BEEN AWARDED THE TITLE: BORN NIHILIST.>

“Could have told you that,” I muttered. My pants were on. My shirt was ruined, but hopefully the hospital would be too busy for anyone to notice. In my haste, my eyes lingered on the underlined title and the text expanded.

<BORN NIHILIST: Augments the user’s existing proclivity to remain calm and rational, even in the worst of situations>

I tried not to think about the fact that I did feel strangely calm. I was panicking, yes, but it was strange that I wasn’t still hyperventilating on the floor, folding to the ever growing external pressure. I dealt with pressure well, until it grew so excessive and overwhelming that I broke down completely in a series of escalating panic attacks. Yet somehow, I was coping.

<YOU HAVE BEEN AWARDED THE TITLE: JADED EYE.>

I glanced at it and immediately regretted doing so after reading the first line.

<JADED EYE: A trite yet tragic event has twisted the user’s ability to see the world through a clear lens—>

“Fuck off!” I swiped at it, but it danced away and the text continued to scroll.

<—which is further augmented, making them adept at identifying traps and avoiding ambushes. However, the difficulty accepting good things at face value will also increase.>

“Accept my ass.”

<Confirmation: The title Jaded has replaced Nihilist as a primary title. The primary title can be rotated every six hours.>

Okay, no. Any doubts that this was a delusion suddenly faded as my mood further soured. No one was better at mocking me than I was. And this was feeling increasingly like a cruel joke. In fact, most of this wasn’t adding up. There was radar, satellites, thousands of telescopes pointed at any given section space at any given time. Something that big just slipped past everything?

There was no way. It wasn’t just the text box. This whole thing was the delusion. There had never been any meteor, any impact, any ambulance ride. This wasn’t happening. In all likelihood I was strapped to a gurney somewhere, drooling—

I stopped myself just shy of dissociating completely. If I went down that road there was no coming back. I needed to accept what was closest to reality, and reject the clearly fantastical elements. Namely, the text box that still danced in my vision.

<Congratulations: Between the confluence of your answers in the maw and your titles, you have unlocked an alternate class.>

Really, subconscious? The old protagonist unlocks OP class at the beginning of the story and steamrolls trope? You going to give me an evil eye and let me trade my soul to the devil for a demonic army next?

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

<Alternate classes can be powerful. Their strength is in their utility. But be wary, they are not as uncommon as you might think.>

That almost sounded like a direct response to my thoughts. Maybe, if I could learn to warp the hallucination I could minimize it, lessening the effect. At the very least ensuring I didn’t have half-assed RPG text popping up in front of my face at the worst possible time.

I focused my thoughts to a laser point, trying to direct them at the text box and sneered. So what is it? Necromancer? Blood-bender? Vampire? Death Mage? Dude-who-kills-everything-he-touches?

<System Notification: You have unlocked Ordinator as a primary class. Do you wish to proceed?>

I was about to spit an expletive laced negative, then bit it back. It took me a moment to realize why. My paranoia had wrapped back around on itself.

I’d been beating my head against the wall over the last year trying to cram in all necessary knowledge to be able to crush the MKAT, and some of that knowledge came back to me now. Every psychological disorder that I studied featuring hallucinations—schizophrenia, psychosis—had one thing in common. They always started small. Maybe you’d find the house wasn’t like you’d left it, or you’d hear inaudible voices. You started out wondering if the aliens were after you long before they actually arrived. None of that had happened to me.

So what had happened to my ramp up?

I reread the text again. This time, when I focused on the Ordinator class text there was no expanded information. The so-called system had given me all the information it was willing to. And unlike in my dream, there were two options.

<YES | NO>

I didn’t buy it. Any of it. But it was like Pascal’s Wager. In the most likely scenario that the system was a delusion, saying yes or no was a net zero. Maybe selecting yes in this case would be buying into the hallucination, giving it more power. But things were already this bad. Alternatively, if the decimal level possibility that this was real somehow happened to be the case, and I said no, I was actively fucking myself out of a clearly stated benefit.

All that assuming that in this wackass scenario, the system could actually be trusted.

Damn, my head hurt.

I gave it one more second, then made my choice. The response was immediate.

<Confirmation: User has accepted the contract.>

Wait, what contract? No one said anything about a contract. There wasn’t a damn EULA.