St. Mary's Church Parking Lot — July 2010
Asphalt. Hot asphalt against my cheek, gritty and baking under summer sun, and the taste of blood where I'd bitten my tongue.
My hands pushed me up before my brain caught up. Palms scraped raw. A car horn somewhere. The world was too bright, too loud, and shaped wrong — the light hit everything at angles I didn't recognize, and my arms were longer than they should have been.
Get up. Get up, get up, get up.
I was on my knees in a parking lot. Cars lined up in rows, most of them dark-colored, serious. A church rose behind them — white clapboard, pointed steeple, the kind of New England postcard building they put on calendars nobody buys. People in black walked toward the front doors in twos and threes.
My suit didn't fit. The jacket pulled across the shoulders and the pants broke wrong at the ankles, and none of this was mine. Not the suit, not the body wearing it, not the hands I was staring at — broader than mine, rougher, a callus on the right index finger where I'd never had one.
The last thing I remembered was the bus. The 11:47 crosstown, packed shoulder to shoulder, and the shriek of brakes locking, and the world tilting sideways, and then —
Nothing.
And then asphalt.
I stood up. My knees buckled once, held on the second try. A sedan was parked three feet away and I caught my reflection in the driver-side window. The face looking back wasn't mine. It was older — early thirties, angular jaw, dark hair cut shorter than I'd ever worn mine. Blue eyes where mine had been brown. I touched my cheek. The reflection touched its cheek.
Okay. Okay okay okay.
My hand went to my pocket on instinct and found a phone. Not my phone — wrong shape, wrong weight, a model I half-recognized from a decade I shouldn't be standing in. The other pocket held a folded piece of paper. I pulled it out with fingers that shook.
A funeral program. Cream-colored, embossed cross on the front.
Robert "Buzzer" Ferdinando — Celebration of Life.
The name landed like a brick to the chest. I knew that name. Not from my life — from a screen. From a movie I'd watched on a hungover Sunday and then again three years later because the sequel showed up in my recommendations and I had nothing better to do.
Coach Buzzer. The basketball coach who died and brought five childhood friends back together. The inciting event of a comedy I'd rated three stars and forgotten about.
I was standing in the parking lot of Coach Buzzer's funeral.
The phone buzzed in my hand. Not a call — something else. The screen lit up with an app I hadn't opened, an icon I'd never installed: a cartoon wrench wrapped in a braided friendship bracelet, spinning once before settling into a loading screen.
The loading bar filled. The interface bloomed open.
A dashboard. Clean, minimal, built like something between a fitness tracker and a repair manual. Six stat bars sat at the top, all zeroed out. TST. CIN. SRE. CTM. PIN. SSY. Below them, a single notification pulsed amber.
I tapped it.
[WELCOME, PATCHER.]
[This friend group's timeline contains 47 critical bugs.]
[You are the only qualified technician.]
[First diagnostic in progress...]
I stared at the screen. The screen stared back. The little wrench icon spun in the corner like it was waiting for me to catch up.
A system. An actual, literal system. On a phone. At a funeral. In a body that isn't mine.
I'd read enough web novels in my old life to know what this was. Transmigration. Soul displacement. Whatever term you wanted to use for dying in one world and waking up in another with a magical smartphone app and zero explanation. The premise of a hundred stories I'd scrolled through on lunch breaks, always thinking nobody would actually handle this well in real life.
The app functioned like a stripped-down RPG interface. Stats tracked six attributes — Temporal Stability, Causal Intuition, Social Resonance, Comedic Timing, Patch Integrity, System Sync — all starting at baseline numbers that meant nothing to me yet. A skill market sat grayed out, locked. A mission log showed empty. Resources: zero across the board. System Rank: F.
At the bottom, a line of text in smaller font:
[System Rank F: Bug Reporter. Functions available: Basic notifications, stat display, mission acceptance. Functions locked: Temporal deployment, skill market, embarrassment arsenal, timeline visualizer.]
Temporal deployment. That sounds like time travel with a customer service accent.
The app couldn't be screenshotted — I tried, and the screen went blank. Couldn't be closed — the X button just minimized it to a persistent notification bar. The wrench icon sat in the corner of every screen like a landlord who refused to leave.
Another notification. I tapped it.
[Host identity confirmed: HOLDEN LAWSON.]
[Designation: The Forgotten Sixth Friend.]
[Dossier loading...]
Holden Lawson. I rolled the name around in my mouth. Not my name — not the one I'd died with. But the phone was certain, and the suit had "H.L." stitched inside the jacket collar in thread so faded it was almost invisible.
The Forgotten Sixth Friend.
The dossier gave me nothing useful. Name, approximate age, no listed address, no emergency contacts, no employment history. Just a blank profile with a status line that read: [ERASED FROM ACTIVE TIMELINE. REASON: UNKNOWN.]
I folded the funeral program open again. The inside listed the order of service, a poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye, and the names of those "joining in remembrance." My eyes snagged on the list.
Lenny Feder. Eric Lamonsoff. Kurt McKenzie. Marcus Higgins. Rob Hilliard.
Five names. Five men I'd watched bumble through a lake house vacation and a last-day-of-school disaster. Five fictional characters who were, according to the parking lot full of actual cars and the actual sun burning the back of my actual neck, not fictional at all.
The church bells rang. A single, low tone that vibrated in my sternum.
People were filing in. The parking lot was emptying. An older woman in a black hat paused near the entrance and looked in my direction — not at me, through me, the way you look at someone who doesn't belong but isn't worth questioning.
I straightened the tie in the sedan's side mirror. My hands — Holden's hands — trembled against the knot. The tie was navy blue and slightly frayed at the bottom, and it took three attempts to get it centered. In the mirror, a stranger's face wore my expression: the tight-jawed, wide-eyed look of a man standing on the edge of something he can't see the bottom of.
First funeral in a world that isn't mine. For a man I never met who apparently coached five people I've only watched on a screen.
The phone buzzed one final time.
[DIAGNOSTIC STATUS: 1 critical bug detected in immediate range. Priority alert pending. Proceed to service for deployment briefing.]
I pocketed the phone. Crossed the parking lot. The church doors were propped open, and the smell hit me before the sound did — lilies and old wood and candle wax, the universal language of someone being missed.
I walked into a dead man's funeral as a living ghost, and five rows from the front, five men I'd only ever watched on a screen sat shoulder to shoulder in the front pew.
One of them was already checking his phone.
To supporting Me in Pateron .
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
👉 Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!