The smelly foot woman yelled at me for the fiftieth time as I attempted to pull my underwear out of the dryer. She hated dryer 73, and because I was using dryer 72 - her favorite - she was forced to use 73. It clicks, apparently.

I’ve never noticed it, but Smelly Foot Woman said dryer 73 clicks every time she uses it, and it gives her a headache.

Her voice gives me a headache. The stench of her crusty, unwashed toes gives everyone in Gretchen’s Wash-o-Sheen Laundromat a massive migraine.

You should see the flecks of food flying out of her mouth as she yells at you for making her wait to use dryer 72. I admit, I already knew this when I’d showed up at Gretchen’s that fateful morning. But, I’d just had a terrible shift driving the city bus overnight, and I guess I was spoiling for a good battle with the first lady of foot hygiene.

“You never give me the clicker,” Smelly Foot Woman said to me. “I don’t do the clicker.”

I didn’t know her name, and I didn’t want to know because it would personalize her too much. I think it was Emma or Emmy or something like that. It didn’t matter.

“We all have to share around here,” I said to her. I also noticed a few pairs of boxer-briefs were still a bit damp. “Looks like I need a few more minutes,” I said. “Almost done.” I tossed in a few more coins, and dryer 72 rumbled to life once more.

She smacked her lips together, and glared at me like a disapproving teacher. Or, maybe a surly prison guard would be a better metaphor. The laundromat in the middle of the city was a prison of sorts. Every sad sack in the place would give their first born to be any place else. None of us could afford washers and dryers in our own apartments, not that there’d be enough space for them anyway, even if we could.

“I’m gonna remember this,” Smelly Foot Woman said. She ‘ha-rumphed’ down on the bench beneath the community bulletin board, with her arms folded, and a scowl that could melt titanium.

She didn’t have to suffer long. None of the rest of us fellow prisoners did either. A crack of thunder rattled Gretchen’s Wash-o-Sheen’s big front window, and the city turned purple under a broken sky.

The System had arrived.

A high frequency ping pierced my brain. You know those times you walk into a place with a TV on, and you get that weird high pitch noise in the back of your head?

Yeah, multiply that by ten, and that’s what it was like. Smelly Foot Woman had her hands over her ears. The other people inside the laundromat ran around like the place was on fire, until it actually was on fire. Then the ground started to shake.

No… that doesn’t do it justice. The ground started rippling like we were in a wave pool. More like a tsunami pool. I’m talking 11 on the Richter Scale. The beige tiles on the floor broke apart. The doors on the washing machines, and dryers flipped open and closed over and over like a drum line. The city outside crumbled. The walls on all sides fractured like glass. I remember catching sight of Smelly Foot Woman’s bulging eyes when the bottom gave out. I mean, THE bottom, the floor, the ground, all of Earth… gone. We were falling. Everything was falling.

It’s your worst nightmare come true. Those ones where you’re tumbling, spinning downward off the edge of a cliff or off the highest bridge, or an office tower. Just endlessly falling. No control. Nothing to catch you. Full dizziness. Head down, feet dangling helplessly behind you. Terminal velocity.

At first I was falling amongst the ruins of the laundromat. Bits of drywall, and tiles, and good old dryer 72. Then there were hunks of concrete, and twisted knots of rebar. There were cars, and bikes, and ATMs. The whole freaking city fell out of itself into the biggest sinkhole ever conceived.

Only… it all disappeared the longer this went on. I kept falling into purple nothingness, unable to see the bottom of a black void, and eventually after several minutes of this, I was the only thing collapsing at breakneck speed. It was as if everything else disintegrated.

Yeah, you can bet I hollered. Screeched. Screamed. I did it until I was hoarse, and then I did it some more. But, a good eight minutes of that, and you’re still falling with seemingly no end in sight, and your heart’s still ticking, and your brain’s still managing to hang on to some coherent thought… the howling didn’t seem to serve a function anymore. I just fell, silently, resigned to my fate.

Wind burned my face. My hair, my clothes tousled the way any skydiver’s would in total free fall. Then the craziest thing happened. This pleasing vent of warm air rushed up to greet me, and my fall slowed to a near stop. I went from ‘splat on the ground’ speed, to ‘gently descending’ as if I were on an escalator at the mall.

Which is when the System spoke to me for the first time. Or I should say, it texted me. I don’t know how else to put this, but I could ‘see’ text in front of me, like a graphic overlay. Whatever direction I looked, surrounded by this purple haze, continuing this gentle fall, there were words in front of me as though part of my vision.

SYSTEM initializing…

These words stayed in front of me for about thirty seconds. I reached out toward them, trying to touch them, but I couldn’t. I would close my eyes, and the words would disappear, but upon opening them, there they’d be again.

Stolen novel; please report.

Then they were gone. A few seconds later, more text.

This System brought to you by, Such Burger, “Much Taste!”.

Followed by a crawl of really small text:

Such Burger Corporation, a subsidiary of Boop Beverage & Confectionery Limited, all rights reserved.

What the hell was this? Even dying in an alien apocalypse you have to deal with ads? Figures.

Have to admit though, a burger did sound pretty good in that moment. Sure, there was the abject terror of everything you’ve ever known collapsing in upon itself, but falling for a good fifteen minutes straight had a way of depleting you to the point where you’d worked up a pretty decent appetite. I’d never heard of Such Burger, but I imagined good things. A double cheeseburger with a shake or maybe a Coke slushy. Man, what I would’ve given. But, I was getting ahead of myself.

Concentrate, you idiot.

You’re still alive, and why? None of it made sense. Maybe you’re not alive, maybe this is how everything ends, with an infinite plunge, and dreams of a greasy burger joint. I supposed there were worse ways to go.

Then a new readout flashed in front of me.

Tools:

Hitting 20

Power 25

Fielding 25

Running 20

Throwing 20

Overall Future Potential (OFP) = 80

I had no clue what any of that meant.

Yes, the air all around me was still a pleasing purple fog. Yes, I was still gently falling, and no, I could not see anything beyond my feet beneath me. And, these figures in front of me were as confusing as everything else.

Hitting? Fielding? Throwing?

What is this, baseball or something?

“Greetings, Human.”

A pleasant voice spoke to me with such clarity, it was as if they were inside my head.

“Hello?” I responded. “Who is this?”

“You are Adam, of Earth,” said the voice. “You are speaking with the System.”

“How did you know my name?”

“In a moment, you will be on the ground,” the System said. “In a moment, your new existence will begin.”

So, I wasn’t dead. That was welcome news.

“New existence?”

“We found your probe,” the System said. “We received your signals. We have grown fond of your baseball, and your baseball statistics. You entertain us, Human.”

That explained the ‘Hitting’, ‘Fielding’ stuff.

“Soon you will be on the ground, Adam of Earth,” the System continued. “We have reconstituted your world for you, to the best of our ability using the best intelligence we’ve had available from all the signals you’ve sent. We want more of your baseball. You will give us more. We will be entertained by you.”

“I don’t play baseball,” I said.

It was true. I didn’t know much about the game, other than the few times I’d watched it on TV, say during the odd World Series or something. I’d been to a few ballgames with friends. I played Little League when I was a kid. But, a baseball aficionado, I was not. I had a good memory, so I probably retained enough information about the sport itself that I could regurgitate things, and make it sound halfway convincing that I knew what I was talking about. But, in reality, I didn’t.

“I don’t know a whole lot about it,” I said. “Baseball, I mean. Are you sure you’ve got the right guy?”

“Congratulations,” the System said. “You’ve been specially selected. Your scouting statistics have already been shown on screen.”

Then the same statistics showed up again. “Hitting 20”. Twenty out of what? A million? I couldn’t hit a baseball pitch if my life depended on it. Maybe if it was Slow Pitch, like those leagues old people played in, which were basically just excuses to cuss and drink beer.

“I’ve already told you,” I said. “I don’t play baseball.”

“Silence,” said the voice. “You will play. You will win. Or, you will die.”

The words stung me like a zap to the spine.

“You will be landing soon,” the System said. “You will build a baseball franchise in the new world, joined in progress, reconstituted to the best of our abilities in a way you would recognize, but with the baseball we love at its center. We have given you special abilities no one else will have. You will build your team. You will gain promotion to the league above. You must earn promotion to the Paradise League. You must avoid relegation at all costs, or face Jinsha.”

“Run a baseball franchise?”

“You will qualify for The Brackets in your first season,” the System said. “You will satisfy our gambling needs during games.”

My head hurt. Everything happened too fast. It hadn’t been an hour before where I’d been fumbling with my underpants in front of dryer 72. Now, I’m being graded on my potential as a baseball player, and told to run a team. Brackets? Gambling? And, Jinsha?

“Who’s Jinsha?”

“Good luck, Human,” the System said.

“Wait,” I shouted into the void. “Who is Jinsha?”

“Soon you will be in the new world. New Earth. You will be joining the place already hundreds of years in progress. Best wishes.”

“Wait,” I yelled. “System! I have more questions. System!”

The aliens hung up on me. Somewhere, out there in the ether, Smelly Foot Woman was laughing.

True to their word, the purple clouds dissipated with the sky overcast like a normal Earth day. The black nothingness vanished to reveal I was hovering only a few feet off the ground.

The ‘landing’ they talked about.

I stretched my legs, and the toes of my runners touched brown grass, cold and covered in frost. There I stood, on an open plain that resembled a short cut lawn with seemingly no end.

There were no trees, no structures. Just endless horizon. It was cold, and there was a bit of a breeze. The city was long gone. There were no people. It was just me, freezing in my pants and short sleeved shirt on a field with no end.

Blood rushed to my head for a minute. Disorientation from having fallen for so long. You stand on firm ground, and it takes your brain a couple of minutes to figure things out.

A minute after that, my clothes lit on fire. Well, that’s the best I can explain it. There wasn’t any heat, but they ‘sparked’. I batted at them with my hands thinking they’d been lit on fire, but then the sparks gave way to a new set of clothes. So crazy. My short sleeved shirt turned into a heavy fur cloak. You wanna talk about warm? My pants changed into some kind of wolf pelt thingy. My runners morphed into fur lined leather boots. Boiled leather gloves warmed my hands. I looked like something out of ‘Braveheart’, or a dude in a '70s metal band.

I could hear the frost crunch under my boot heels, and I was thankful for the furs in that biting wind. And… that’s when I heard the galloping.