Chapter 1: Truck-kun Sends His Regards

Chapter 1: Truck-kun Sends His Regards

The condom was in his left pocket.

Andy Snodgrass knew this because he had checked four times since leaving his apartment, which was three times more than a normal person would check and exactly the right number of times for a twenty-four-year-old veterinary technician who had never, in his entire life, not once, not even a little bit, had sex. He had the condom. He had brushed his teeth twice. He had Googled “what to do the first time” and then closed the browser tab so fast his laptop nearly slid off his desk because the results were either terrifyingly clinical or terrifyingly acrobatic and neither felt applicable to a guy whose most intimate physical contact in the last calendar year had been a Labrador retriever licking the inside of his ear during a routine vaccination.

September air wrapped around him, warm enough that the city felt like it was doing him a personal favor, and the sidewalk under his sneakers had that specific golden-hour glow that made even the dumpster behind the Thai restaurant look almost romantic. Almost. It still smelled like pad see ew left in the sun, which, to be fair, was basically what pad see ew was, but the light was doing its best and Andy appreciated the effort.

Megan lived four blocks from his apartment. He had walked this route dozens of times over the three months they had been dating, a duration simultaneously like no time at all and like an entire geological epoch, mostly because for the first two months he had been too nervous to do anything more than kiss her goodnight at her door like some kind of Regency-era suitor who happened to own a PlayStation and work at an animal hospital. Megan had been patient about it in the way that left him both grateful and deeply, cellularly embarrassed, patience that communicated “I like you enough to wait” but also “I am aware that most adults figure this out before their mid-twenties.”

She had texted him forty minutes ago. Just two words and an emoji.

Come over 🔥

He had stared at that fire emoji for a solid ninety seconds, parsing it for ambiguity the way a medieval scholar might parse scripture, searching for alternate interpretations that didn’t involve what he was fairly certain it involved. Maybe she wanted to show him a candle she had bought. Maybe her apartment was literally on fire and she needed assistance. Maybe the fire emoji had a secondary colloquial meaning he wasn’t aware of because his cultural references were primarily drawn from video games and nature documentaries.

Then she had sent a second text.

Bring yourself. Just yourself. And maybe a toothbrush if you want to stay over.

There it was. The “stay over.” The two most suggestive words in the English language, somehow more loaded than anything explicit, because “stay over” carried within it the implication of a morning after, of breakfast, of waking up next to someone, of the entire sprawling terrifying beautiful architecture of intimacy that Andy had built up in his imagination over twenty-four years of not experiencing it.

So he had brushed his teeth (twice), checked his pocket (four times), and stepped out into the golden-hour warmth of a September evening that the universe had apparently designed specifically to serve as the backdrop for Andrew Snodgrass finally, at long last, in the year of our lord 2026, losing his virginity.

He was thinking about what to say when she opened the door.

“Hey” felt too casual, like he was showing up to watch Netflix, which, to be fair, was what they usually did, but tonight was Different and the greeting should reflect the Differentness without being so different that it became weird. “Hello, I have arrived for the sex” was technically honest but would almost certainly result in the door closing in his face and possibly a restraining order. “Hi, you look beautiful” was good but only if she actually looked beautiful when she opened the door, and what if she was wearing sweatpants, and was he supposed to say she looked beautiful in sweatpants, and actually yes, she would look beautiful in sweatpants, Megan looked beautiful in everything, which was part of the problem because looking at Megan made his brain do a thing where all the words he knew rearranged themselves into nonsense and came out of his mouth in the wrong order.

His signal at Main and Tenth turned green, that little white pedestrian figure popping up on cue, the universal symbol for “it is safe to cross this street,” a promise made by the city’s infrastructure to its citizens that for the next thirty seconds this one rectangle of asphalt belonged to people with legs and not to several-ton vehicles traveling at speeds incompatible with human skeletal integrity.

Andy stepped off the curb.

He was thinking about Megan’s freckles. She had exactly eleven of them across the bridge of her nose (he had counted during a movie once when she fell asleep on his shoulder and he had been too afraid to move for two hours because her hair smelled like coconut and he didn’t want to disturb the coconut). Eleven freckles. He wondered if she had freckles elsewhere. He was about to find out. The thought made his stomach do a barrel roll that was equal parts excitement and the terror usually reserved for skydivers and people who hear “we need to talk.”

The truck came from the left.

Later, in the vanishingly small window of time between the impact and whatever came after, Andy would note with the detached precision of a man whose brain was doing that slowed-down thing brains do during catastrophic events that the traffic signal had been green. His signal. The walk signal. The little white man. He had looked both ways, because Andrew Snodgrass looked both ways even on one-way streets, because his mother had raised him to be careful. He had been careful, he had been so goddamn careful his entire life, careful with his grades, careful with his feelings, careful with women, careful at crosswalks. And the signal was green. It was his turn. He had done everything right.

The truck ran the red.

No slow-motion montage, no life flashing before his eyes, no profound final thought about the meaning of existence or the faces of loved ones or the beauty of a world he was about to leave. There was just the truck, which was large, and Andy, who was not, and a very brief sensation that he would later describe (to no one, because he was dead) as similar to being hit by a truck.

The condom was still in his left pocket.

Consciousness returned the way a bad internet connection restarts: not all at once, not smoothly, but in stuttering fragments that assembled themselves into something resembling awareness with all the grace of a toddler building with blocks. There was darkness first, then a dull, formless pressure because he didn’t seem to have the sensory equipment to identify what was pressing, then a kind of pressure that wasn’t pressure, and then, with the fanfare of a system notification in a video game he had not agreed to play:

[SYSTEM INITIALIZED]

[WELCOME, NEW ORGANISM]

[SPECIES: PROKARYOTIC CELL (UNSPECIALIZED)]

[TIER: 1]

It all hung in his awareness. He didn’t have eyes to see it, didn’t have a screen to project it onto. Just words existing in a space that felt like the inside of his own mind, if his mind had been reformatted, wiped clean, and reinstalled on hardware that was roughly ten trillion times less complex than the brain he’d had fifteen seconds ago. Or fifteen minutes ago. Or fifteen millennia ago. Time, like everything else, had become difficult to pin down.

Andy tried to process what he was reading and discovered that processing, as a cognitive function, worked differently when the processor in question was a single cell floating in what appeared to be a body of water so vast relative to his current size that it might as well have been the Pacific Ocean, except warm, and teeming with chemical compounds that his new, extremely rudimentary sensory apparatus was identifying as “food, maybe” and “danger, probably” and very little else.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

[CURRENT ABILITIES:]

[ABSORB NUTRIENTS] – Passively intake dissolved organic compounds from surrounding medium.

[DIVIDE] – Reproduce via binary fission. Cooldown: Variable based on energy reserves.

[EXIST] – You are alive. Congratulations.

He stared at that last one. Stared was the wrong word. He perceived it. He perceived it with the full cognitive weight of a man who had, until very recently, possessed a prefrontal cortex, opposable thumbs, a Costco membership, a half-finished playthrough of Elden Ring, a condom in his left pocket, and a girlfriend named Megan who was probably, right now, at this exact moment, wondering why he hadn’t knocked on her door.

He went back and read the second one again. [DIVIDE]. Reproduce via binary fission. He could reproduce. Right now, if he wanted to. No dinner, no awkward conversation, no three months of Regency-era courtship and a fire emoji. Just… split. The universe had killed him on the way to lose his virginity and reincarnated him as an organism that could literally go fuck itself.

Exist. That was his other headline ability. Existing. The System, whatever it was, had looked at the full spectrum of things a prokaryotic cell could do and decided that the most notable among them was the bare fact of being alive, which it had presented with the enthusiasm of a participation trophy.

Congratulations. You exist.

Grief arrived without warning, a sucker punch from the inside, and for a span of time that could have been seconds or hours (because, again, single-celled organisms do not have a robust sense of temporal continuity), Andy Snodgrass floated in warm water and mourned.

He mourned Megan, who would text him again, then call, then worry, then eventually find out. He mourned his mother, who called him every Sunday and would now call him every Sunday to voicemail. He couldn’t think about that, he could not think about that, so he stopped. He mourned his cat, Gerald, who was an idiot and was probably sitting on the kitchen counter right now eating butter from the dish Andy always forgot to put away. He mourned the version of himself that had been walking down a golden-lit sidewalk with a condom in his pocket and a whole future unspooling in front of him, a version that had been so close to something and would now never know what that something felt like.