The alarm went off at 6:44 AM, and Mohamed killed it on the second ring, annoyed before he'd even opened his eyes, the low-grade annoyance of a man who's hated his own alarm clock for six years and never once replaced it out of pure stubbornness. He lay there a minute longer than he needed to, not tired exactly, just not ready to let the day start yet.
The ceiling had a water stain shaped like Ohio, and he was still a little bitter about it. The landlord had fixed the tub upstairs the same day it broke, two years back, then never once sent anyone about the ceiling, three calls answered with three versions of "I'll put in a work order," which he'd eventually understood meant no. He'd stopped seeing it most mornings. It still caught him sometimes, and the irritation came back fresh, like it had been waiting.
He got up, made coffee, caught the leak with a dish towel before it hit the counter the way he always did, and sat on his mother's old couch drinking it in the gray March light. Nine hundred and fifty a month on fifty-eight thousand a year, the same word he used for everything lately: survivable. Not bad, not good. His job, his car, the fourteen months since his last date. He checked his phone. A text from his mother, sent the night before: *call me when you get a chance, nothing wrong,* the same opener she'd used his whole adult life, and beneath the annoyance of another guilt-text he hadn't answered, something steadier, the plain fact that she'd still be checking on him at sixty the same way she had at six, and some mornings that was the only thing that actually felt solid.
At 6:58 AM, a faint blue light appeared at the edge of his vision, and his first reaction wasn't fear. It was irritation, the flash of a man interrupted mid-coffee by something he didn't ask for. He blinked hard, assumed eye strain, said "Oh, come on" to an empty apartment when it didn't go away.
Then it didn't go away, and the irritation gave way to something colder. He set the mug down too hard, coffee sloshing over the rim, and stood there a second with his heart actually going, a real, physical fear he hadn't felt in years, the kind that lives in the chest rather than the head. He walked to the kitchen on autopilot, the light holding its position exactly the way a notification icon holds its position no matter how you tilt the screen, and looked directly at it, and it sharpened into text.
**AELIR CULTIVATION SYSTEM**
**Designation: AC-7,771,442**
**Host: Mohamed Vance**
**Species: Humanity**
**Tier: 1**
**Status: ACTIVATED**
**Welcome, Host. The Aelir Cultivation System has selected you as the cultivation target for your species. The System will provide quests, technology, and resources to accelerate your development from Tier 1 to Tier 6. Your cooperation is voluntary. Your success is not guaranteed.**
Mohamed read it twice, and somewhere around the second pass the irritation finally cracked open into something considerably larger and less manageable. "What," he said, to the kitchen, and then, louder, angrier than he'd expected his own voice to come out, "What is this. What is this supposed to be." He reached out and swiped his hand through the words, hard, the way a person swats at a fly, and his hand passed straight through them. They didn't ripple. They didn't scatter. They simply weren't there in any way his hand could touch, which somehow made the anger worse instead of better, because at least a hallucination he could physically fight would have made more sense than one that simply declined to notice he'd tried.
He stood in his own kitchen breathing harder than the situation should have required, one hand still hanging in the air where it had passed through nothing, and felt, underneath the anger, something that scared him more than the words themselves did: some steady, careful part of him, the same part that caught Cincinnati's errors every quarter without being asked, had already started cataloging what he actually knew instead of panicking. His hand had gone through it, so it wasn't physically in the room. It moved when his eyes moved, so it lived somewhere behind his own eyes rather than out in front of them. The font was consistent. The spelling was correct. He hated, in that exact moment, how much comfort he was taking from his own ability to stay steady about something this insane, because it meant some part of him had already decided this was real, and he wasn't remotely ready to have decided that yet.
He put both hands flat on the counter, closed his eyes, breathed. He counted to five and opened them. The header was still there, patient, and something about it made him want to put his fist through the drywall, which alarmed him more than the header did, since he'd never once in thirty years punched anything harder than a couch cushion.
He didn't. He stood there instead, breathing, and thought, unexpectedly, that this was the kind of morning a person wanted his father for, wanted someone older who'd seen more of the world and might know, even wrongly, what to actually do with it. His father had died when he was young, and most mornings he didn't think about that fact at all, had learned a long time ago not to, but standing in his own kitchen with something that shouldn't exist hovering in the corner of his eye, he felt the absence of it plainly, an old, familiar shape of a missing person rather than a fresh grief, and let himself feel it for exactly as long as it took to pass.
He looked at the clock. 7:04. Twenty-six minutes before he had to leave for work, and some absurd corner of his brain was already tracking his commute while the rest of him tried to process a foreign intelligence rewriting his optic nerve. He moved his attention to the smaller text below the greeting, because at least that was something he could read.
**LEVEL: 1**
**TECH POINTS: 0**
**INVENTORY: Empty**
**QUEST: Build your first technological product**
**Objective: Purchase a blueprint and craft a working item.**
**Reward: 500 Tech Points**
**SHOP: TIER 1 CATALOG**
**Blueprint: CVD Chamber (Modified), 200 TP**
**Knowledge Pack: Materials Science (Basic), 250 TP**
**Blueprint: Water Filtration Unit (Basic), 300 TP**
**DAILY LOGIN: DAY 1**
**+10 Tech Points**
**Current Tech Points: 10**
He read it three times, and somewhere in there the anger actually loosened, just slightly, into something closer to wonder. A catalog. A real one, with real prices, sitting in the corner of his own kitchen like it had always belonged there. Ten points, and the cheapest thing was a chemical vapor deposition chamber he half-remembered from a lab elective he'd scraped a B-minus out of, priced at two hundred. He did the math anyway, because the math was the one thing he could reliably do: two hundred divided by ten was twenty, twenty days if the number held, if any of this was even real.
He sat with it a while, and let himself imagine, for the first time in years, what it might feel like to be someone. Not rich. Someone. A name a stranger might recognize. He'd wanted that once, as a kid, before the world talked him out of wanting anything that large, and somewhere between Meridian and a water-stained ceiling he'd traded the want for survivable and called it maturity.
He remembered, sitting there, a science fair in sixth grade, a baking-soda volcano everyone else built and a homemade water filter he'd rigged out of sand and charcoal and an old two-liter bottle, mostly because he'd read somewhere that half the world didn't have clean water and the thought had bothered him more than a sixth grader's thoughts usually bother him. He hadn't won. A kid with a papier-mâché solar system had won. But a teacher, Mrs. Alcott, had pulled him aside afterward and told him he had a real mind for this, that he should keep at it, and for about two years after that he'd told anyone who asked that he was going to invent something the whole world used someday. He didn't remember exactly when he'd stopped saying it out loud. He just knew that by the time he graduated, the sentence had quietly disappeared from his own vocabulary, the way a language disappears from a house nobody speaks it in anymore.
"Twenty days," he said out loud, and almost laughed at himself, the short, tired kind of laugh that comes when a thing is too absurd to stay angry at. He'd run longer projects than that for people who never once thanked him for it. He just hadn't expected to need the skill for something that showed up uninvited in his own kitchen and ruined a Tuesday.
He got dressed fast, laughed again at the sheer absurdity of badging into work like normal while a floating number counted up his Tech Points, and left for work with the glow still riding the edge of his vision, patient the whole way out the door.
---
The drive to Corporate Drive took nineteen minutes, and he didn't remember a single one of them, his hands on autopilot while the rest of him ran the same arithmetic over and over. He caught himself gripping the wheel too hard, twice, and made himself loosen it each time.
[Editor: There is a lot to work on man(╥﹏╥)]
He parked in the same row he always parked in, badged through the same door, and sat down at the same desk, one of forty arranged in a room the exact color of oatmeal, a color he'd hated on his first day four years ago and had simply stopped registering since, the way you stop registering most things you can't change. He opened the same dashboard he opened every morning, carrier variances, freight tonnage, a pivot table that hadn't changed shape in three years, and the numbers on the screen sat next to a floating ten in the corner of his eye that was, he already knew without checking, going to be twenty by the time he got home, and the two systems of numbers refused to occupy the same category of his attention no matter how hard he tried to force them into one.
Ray Dombrowski, from the next desk over, took one look at him and told him he looked like hell. Mohamed told him he hadn't slept well and left it there, sharper in his own tone than he meant to be, and felt a small flicker of guilt about it that he didn't bother acting on. He didn't have the patience today for Ray's usual prodding, and some part of him, sitting there with a floating ten in the corner of his eye, found the whole exchange almost funny, how small an entire conversation could feel on a morning like this one.
His supervisor stopped by later wanting the same quarterly confirmation he wanted every quarter, the same numbers, the same notes nobody actually read, and Mohamed gave him the same flat, correct answer he always gave, and felt, underneath it, a tiredness that had nothing to do with sleep. He sat there afterward, hands still on the keyboard, doing nothing, and let himself feel, for exactly one private minute, the full weight of how much he actually resented this job, not any one person in it, but the specific, grinding fact of spending four years of his one life color-correcting a pivot table nobody read for a company that had never once, in four years, made him feel like the work mattered, or like he mattered doing it. He'd told himself, more than once, that it was fine, that it paid the rent, that plenty of people hated their jobs and this was simply what being an adult apparently cost. Sitting there with an actual, literal system apparently expecting him to build something with his own two hands, he found the old excuse considerably harder to believe than it had been yesterday, and something underneath the tiredness, something he didn't examine too closely yet, wondered what it might actually feel like to be a person whose name meant something to people who'd never met him, instead of a man forty other desks in an oatmeal-colored room could replace within a week.
Ray leaned over around two, apropos of nothing, to tell him about his granddaughter's dance recital over the weekend, some elaborate disaster involving a costume malfunction and a tearful five-year-old, and Mohamed found himself laughing properly for the first time all day, a real laugh, nothing to do with the header or the arithmetic, just an old man delighted with his own grandkid's chaos. It was good, actually, letting something ordinary land for once instead of running everything through the same tight filter the morning had put him in.
He ate a ham sandwich from the vending machine at his desk around noon, a dollar seventy-five, exact change, the same sandwich he'd eaten at that desk more Tuesdays than he'd ever bothered to count, and did the arithmetic again anyway, because the arithmetic was the one part of the whole impossible morning that actually felt like it belonged to him. Twenty days for the chamber. Longer for anything that actually did something useful. He still didn't know precisely what the chamber was for, only that his body seemed to remember the phrase chemical vapor deposition from a lecture hall nine years back the way you remember a smell, present, entirely useless, waiting patiently for a reason to matter that had apparently, against every reasonable expectation, finally arrived.
He'd noticed it that morning and hadn't let himself sit with it, too busy being angry to feel anything else, but sitting there now with half a sandwich in his hand, he let himself actually look at it: a water filtration unit, three hundred points, gravity-fed, no power required. The exact thing, near enough, that a sixth grader had once rigged out of sand and an old two-liter bottle because the thought of people without clean water had bothered him more than it was supposed to at eleven years old. He didn't know what to do with the coincidence, if it even was one, whether the System had reached back into some old file of who he used to be or whether he was simply the kind of person who'd always end up circling back to the same handful of things that had mattered to him once. Either way, something in his chest did something it hadn't done in years, something close enough to hope that he almost didn't trust it.
He worked until five, doing the whole day properly, the notes nobody read included, mostly because the freight numbers were still going to be wrong on Thursday if he didn't fix them today regardless of whatever was happening in the corner of his vision, and some stubborn part of Mohamed Vance, the same part that had never once let a thing be someone else's problem just because a bigger thing had shown up, simply wasn't built to let the day go unfinished. It cost him something, though, staying that careful through eight straight hours while quietly unraveling underneath it, and by four o'clock he'd caught himself, twice, staring at the same three rows of a spreadsheet without processing a single number, his whole mind somewhere else entirely, running the same twenty-day math on a loop until the numbers stopped meaning anything at all.
At 5:04 he shut down his monitor and looked, one final time that day, at the small stack of numbers hovering where nobody else could see them.
**Current Tech Points: 10**
Ten. Twenty days to two hundred, if nothing changed, if the number held, if any of this was even real, and he found himself, driving out of the parking lot, genuinely uncertain which outcome he actually wanted more, for it to be real, or for it to simply evaporate by morning and let him go back to a life that had, whatever its faults, at least been a life he understood.
He drove home in the gray end of a Louisville March, past the Thorntons on Bardstown Road where a woman he hadn't met yet was, at that exact moment, three miles away, paying for a twenty-ounce coffee and a bag of gummy worms, and Mohamed, knowing none of that, knowing almost nothing yet except a number and a shape and a patience he was going to have to find somewhere inside himself, turned onto his own street, parked the Corolla in its usual spot, and sat there a moment with the engine ticking as it cooled, not quite ready to go inside and be alone with all of it yet.
He called his mother from the driveway instead, mostly because he suspected that if he waited until he was actually inside, surrounded by the apartment and the couch and the header still hanging patiently in his vision, he wasn't sure he'd manage it at all, and partly because the guilt of an unreturned text from the night before had built up exactly as far as it always did before it finally moved him to act.
She answered on the second ring, the way she always did, and asked why he hadn't called back last night. He told her it had been a busy day, which was true in a way she had no way of understanding, and sat with the engine off and the cold coming into the car, thinking, for the length of one full breath, about actually telling her. Not the header, not the words cultivation system, not any of the impossible specifics, just the plain fact that something had happened to him this morning that he genuinely could not explain.
She was laughing about something before he'd even said a word, some story about a customer who'd argued with her for ten minutes over a coupon that had expired in March, and he found himself laughing too, easily, the particular ease of a conversation that had never once needed effort between them, and for a second the whole impossible weight of the morning went quiet, crowded out by nothing more complicated than his mother's voice being genuinely delighted with her own day.
He did not say it. He gave her the ordinary version instead, the Cincinnati complaint, whether he'd eaten, the usual shape their calls always took, and let himself feel, underneath the small talk, the specific tiredness of a man who wanted to be telling someone the actual truth and didn't yet have the words for it. She asked, near the end, the way she sometimes did, whether he'd actually tell her if something was really wrong, and he told her he would, and meant it, and understood, sitting there, that this was maybe the single most reliable fact of his entire life: that whatever this eventually turned out to be, she would still be there for it. He asked her for some time. She gave it to him without a fight, told him to come by Sunday, and hung up first, the way she always did.
---
He didn't sleep for a long time, and he didn't try particularly hard to, either. He sat on the couch with the lights off, the way he had that morning, except now the small stubborn header hung in the dark exactly as bright as it had in daylight, entirely unbothered by the absence of a lamp, and something about that specific indifference set off one more small flare of the day's residual anger before he managed to let it go. He read the Shop catalog again, slower this time, the particular slowness of a man who'd decided, somewhere over the course of an exhausting day, that if this thing insisted on being real he was at least going to treat it with the same care he'd bring to any actual decision, the way he'd have read a supplier's spec sheet before committing real money to it.
**Blueprint: CVD Chamber (Modified), 200 TP**
**Description: A compact chemical vapor deposition system suitable for thin-film and nanostructure fabrication. Includes quartz reaction chamber, gas flow assembly, and thermal control schematic. Materials and physical assembly required.**
**Knowledge Pack: Materials Science (Basic), 250 TP**
**Description: Foundational understanding of crystallography, phase behavior, and failure analysis across metals, ceramics, and polymers.**
**Blueprint: Water Filtration Unit (Basic), 300 TP**
**Description: A gravity-fed multi-stage filtration system removing 99.9% of common bacterial and particulate contaminants. Suitable for household or small community deployment.**
He noticed, reading it with a clearer head than he'd had that morning, that none of it was framed as a gift. Every entry had a cost and a plain description, nothing resembling encouragement, no exclamation points, no congratulations, Host. It read like a catalog, remarkably like the parts ordering system at Meridian, which struck him as the least magical comparison available and probably the most accurate one. A tool, not a gift. Something that would let him build, if he did the thankless work of earning the right to.
He thought about the CVD chamber a long while, back to a lecture hall on Eastern Parkway nine years earlier, a unit on thin-film deposition he'd scraped a B-minus out of and never once thought about again. Now it was the cheapest object in a catalog that had appeared inside his own skull, and some part of him had already started planning where he'd have ventilation for a furnace, without his permission, before he even had the two hundred points to buy it.
*Twenty days,* he thought. *You don't even know what it's for yet.*
He kept planning anyway, in the dark, on his mother's old couch, the number in the corner of his eye unmoved since dinner, waiting for tomorrow to add the next ten the way it had promised it would. Whatever else this turned out to be, some part of him had already decided to try.
He got up eventually and stood at the window, looking out at the same parking lot he'd looked at for four years, and let himself sit with something he didn't usually let himself sit with. He wanted to matter. Not the vague, socially acceptable way people meant it when they said they wanted to make a difference, but specifically: a name a stranger might recognize, the weight of walking into a room and having it register. He'd wanted that once, as a kid, before the world talked him out of wanting anything that large, and he'd never said it out loud to anyone, not even his mother, because the want embarrassed him a little, next to everything he'd actually done with his life so far. He wanted, eventually, for people to know his name the way they knew names that mattered, and he was tired of pretending that wanting it made him smaller for wanting it.
He thought about calling his mother back, actually telling her, and decided against it, the same decision he'd made in the car, except this time it felt less like avoidance and more like patience.
He went to bed at 11:40, later than he meant to, and set his alarm for 6:44, same as always, an old habit he had no real reason to change yet even with everything else different now. He lay in the dark a long time before sleep actually took him, running the arithmetic one more time out of something that had stopped being anxiety and started, somewhere in the last hour, resembling an actual plan: two hundred divided by ten, twenty days, twenty mornings just like this one, coffee and the leaking dish towel and the drive to Corporate Drive, and found, to his own quiet surprise, that the number didn't frighten him anymore. It felt instead, lying there in the dark with a whole impossible day finally behind him, like the first honest deadline he'd been given in longer than he could actually remember. Something with an end date. Something he could, if he was patient and careful and didn't let the anger win too many more rounds like it had this morning, actually finish.
He thought, drifting, about the whole strange shape of the day, how it had started with him hating an alarm clock and ended with him lying in bed genuinely excited about a number, and how much distance actually sat between those two feelings even though only seventeen hours separated them. He'd been angry. He'd been scared, properly scared, the kind that lived in the chest. He'd laughed twice, real laughs, at Ray's granddaughter and at his own absurd Tuesday. He'd been quietly, unexpectedly moved by a coincidence involving sand and an old bottle and a woman named Mrs. Alcott he hadn't thought about in almost twenty years. He'd missed his father, briefly and plainly, standing in his own kitchen at seven in the morning, the way he still did sometimes without warning, years after he'd stopped expecting the feeling to visit at all. It struck him, right before sleep finally took him, that he couldn't remember the last time a single day had asked this much of him emotionally, and that he didn't actually mind it, not the way he'd have expected to. He'd spent a long time keeping his days small and manageable and mostly flat. Tonight had been none of those things, and some part of him, falling asleep, was almost grateful for that.
The glow stayed with him all the way into sleep, patient in the dark exactly the way it had been patient all day long, asking nothing further of him tonight, promising nothing beyond what it had already promised, simply there, the way a door left ajar is there whether or not, tomorrow, a person finally decides to walk through it. He didn't know yet how many more days like this one were actually coming, how many more mornings he'd wake up angry at an alarm clock he refused to replace only to end the day quietly redesigning his own kitchen around a machine he hadn't built yet. He knew only that tonight, for the first time in longer than he could honestly remember, he had fallen asleep with something in front of him besides simply another Wednesday, and that the difference, small as it still was, felt like something worth however many bad mornings it eventually cost him to keep.
---------
[Editor: My second day and I don't get a greeting? Where is the courtesy?]