[1.4 billion pollution contributors: automobile, have been purged from planet Earth. Do not attempt to assemble additional automobiles unless they are retrofitted into non-carbon emitting devices.]
[Good news, human! Due to the elimination of the pollution contributor: automobile, your ranking has increased.]
[103,893,880 humans have been eliminated—]
[Recalculating…]
[232,497,385 humans—]
[Recalculating…]
[397,302,003 humans—]
[Recalculating…]
[497,626,694 humans have been eliminated.]
[Current rank: 5,904,819,241 out of 7,516,405,638.]
[You are in the bottom 22nd percentile.]
[Advance and grow.]
The glowing text was back. And if that thing were real…and it was looking more and more likely based on the exploding truck, it had just blown up all the cars in the world.
It was luck alone that saved his life. If the damn broom handle hadn’t caused him problems, if he’d been one second earlier, his remains would be part of the flaming inferno that—
What!?
The flames collapsed onto themselves as if a giant vacuum cleaner had sucked out all the air, taking the smoke and fumes with it. Charred remains of the frame were all that were left, but it reminded Logan of something that had been abandoned long ago, not something that had literally been on fire a second ago.
Holy hell.
It was official.
He was in a science fiction movie.
If that glowing text was telling the truth, it had just eliminated over a billion cars, and some of those cars had people inside of them. Almost half a billion people! People like him, driving to the hospital, moms driving their kids to school, workers commuting.
It was early afternoon in the Okanagan, so at least they’d avoided rush hour, but what about the other side of the country, the other side of the world? He did some mental math. It was rush hour on the East Coast.
All those poor people.
He took in a jagged breath, the sharp stab of pain in his foot forgotten as he stood up and searched for his phone. At least he hadn’t thrown it in the bag with everything else. It was in his back pocket, but the screen was fucked. It had a huge crack running down one corner, but it still worked. His sister was at work, she had to be. The kids were at school. There was no reason for her to be driving at this time of the day unless…
A sinking feeling made his stomach drop.
Unless she’d received his text message and was on her way towards him.
“Please work,” he muttered as he tried calling her, yet again.
And just like the other times, the call didn’t produce a dial tone. It was as if he was in a cell dead zone.
Okay, okay. So he had no truck, no working phone. If he believed the glowing text, he wasn’t the only one without a car, so that meant no ambulance. He couldn’t do anything about his sister and dwelling on her status was causing his heart to race, so put a pin on that. Right now, he needed to save himself, so he’d be in the position to help his family.
Logan grabbed the broom handle and leaned on it while wiping blood away from his forehead with the back of his hand. He might have a concussion on top of the missing toe. One stumbling step was all he could handle before he lurched, his head on fire.
He’d take a break. Just a little one. Then he’d get back to saving himself.
As he leaned his forehead against the staircase railing and closed his eyes, something nagged at him. Beyond the impossibilities of the day, he’d never figured out how he’d been able to see as if he’d had instant laser eye surgery, or how it was possible to have glowing text messages implanted into his eyes. Everything else that had occurred—the snake, the exploding truck—had been external. Logan didn’t like mysteries, and this one was a whopper.
He blinked.
Come to think of it, the glowing text was back. Or, rather, it had never left.
It glowed out of the corner of his eye, like a bit of persistent lint that wouldn’t wipe off the lens of your glasses. Even trying this felt ridiculous—he’d officially drunk the Kool-Aid—but he did it anyway.
Logan concentrated on the blinking light and tried to zoom onto it mentally, like expanding a touch screen with his fingers.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Just like that, the text enlarged.
Name: Logan Hart [Hidden Name: Idiot]
Rank: 5,904,819,241 out of 7,516,405,638
Level: 1
Class: None
Grade: F0
Species: Human
Skills:
* Deepwater Idiot Lv.1
* Idiot’s Paradox Lv.1
Titles: Eager Beaver
Intelligence: 6
Constitution: 5
Strength: 5
Agility: 5
Dexterity: 5
Endurance: 5
Perception: 5
Wisdom: 4
Luck: 10
Free Attribute Points: 10
KarmaCoins: 0
He wasn’t just in a science fiction movie; he’d officially left the mothership.
It was undeniable that someone… some entity had managed to hack his brain and insert messages that were linked to a database. It was monitoring him—how else had it known when he’d killed the snake, or when the car had blown up? A satellite? New spy technology? Maybe they’d chosen Canada as their test subjects. After all, Logan loved his country, but it wasn’t known for its military might. But why had they given him a juvenile character sheet, something that resembled the video games his nieces played?
By concentrating, he could mentally ‘swipe’ the text, minimizing it to glowing text out of the corner of his eye. Logan mentally expanded it, and it popped up again.
First of all, the name on these statistics was beyond insulting. He could admit that he was an idiot about some things—the cabin came to mind—but there was no reason to rub it in. Whoever had caused this or was monitoring him was an asshole.
He glanced up at the sky. “You’re an asshole!” he shouted.
No response.
He tried to mentally hover over the [Hidden Name: Idiot]. Could he delete it?
No luck.
Logan had no idea what a Level, Class, or Grade meant, although he vaguely recalled seeing a message about ‘leveling up’ when he was underwater, and that would make sense, if he was now level 1. The skills were just as confusing, and when he focused—shit!
It had expanded.
[Deepwater Idiot: This uncommon skill is granted to users who fall headfirst into water deeper than 10 meters while mortally injured. It grants the ability to breathe underwater. Duration of the skill advances per level.]
[Idiot’s Paradox: This uncommon skill is granted to users who are relentless in inflicting agony on themselves. It produces a 1% pain reduction per level.]
If this were real, he’d managed to swim out of the lake only by the [Deepwater Idiot] skill. The Okanagan Lake was a fjord lake, with steep drops only meters away from the dock. If he hadn’t received that skill, he may have drowned.
Logan concentrated and managed to minimize the skill definitions. The rest of these statistics were confusing; was this mysterious spy hacking system attempting to rank his physical and mental capabilities in a numerical format? How the hell would it know how intelligent he was, or how strong? And to that end, were the ranks from one to ten?
And why would it give him a [Hidden Name: Idiot] label and yet rank his intelligence as one of his highest? It was just insult on top of insult.
[Free Attribute Points: 10]
What the hell was that?
There was a nagging suspicion in the back of his mind. Unlike the insulting [Idiot] title, he could focus on the attribute points and… move them?
Holy shit, it was letting him add points to each of his mental and physical stats!
The possibility of what that meant blew him away. If he added points to strength, would it make him stronger? Like bypassing the gym and losing weight with a magic diet pill? It couldn’t be possible. As far as Logan knew, he lived in reality, not virtual reality.
But if there was a chance that moving these points would help him, he didn’t need strength right now. He needed not to die. If his wound kept seeping blood through the makeshift bandage, his continued survival was in serious jeopardy.
With a feeling of unreality, he willed his constitution points up. They kept increasing, one by one, like pressing the plus sign on a keyboard.
[Constitution: 6]
[Constitution: +]
[Constitution: 15]
Finally, he ran out of free attribute points and yet… nothing happened. He felt the same numbness and wooziness from before.
What a rip off.
[…Would you like to confirm your allocation changes?]
What.
[Would you like to confirm your allocation changes?]
Logan looked around with wary eyes. On either side of him were the same pine trees, the same dirt road. The sun was bright in the sky and even after shading his eyes with his hand, he couldn’t see any planes or surveillance drones.
“Hello?” he questioned.
[…]
[Would you like to confirm your allocation changes?]
This time the text was underlined, as if whomever sending the messages was annoyed.
“Yes?”
[Confirmed. In the future, a review of your settings mainframe would be appreciated, Idiot.]
He didn’t have a chance to even be annoyed before a rush of energy surged through his body. Logan may as well have been connected to an IV line that funneled all the vitamins in the world. Gasping with his mouth wide open, he closed his eyes, relishing in feeling good for the first time since this started.
And although he was covered in dirt and dried blood, when he probed at the wound on his head, it wasn’t painful to the touch anymore, and the scratches from the shrapnel from the exploding car were healed over as if they’d had weeks to heal, not seconds. And his toe, his toe wasn’t agony anymore. There was still something wrong—that feeling of being off was there—but the numbness and the sharp jagged pain was gone.
Logan sat down on the ground and unwrapped his bandage with tentative hands, slowly at first, and then faster when he couldn’t see any additional blood.
It took him a few seconds to understand what he was looking at, but despite his secret hopes, his toe was still gone. Instead of a gory wound, the end of his missing digit had healed significantly, and the beginnings of what he thought was new skin was inching closer to the scabbed end.
It was tender—shit, was it tender!—but it shouldn’t be possible. For the first time, he had concrete evidence that the text hovering over his eyes had real world consequences. And the consequences, despite being unbelievable, may let him survive.
Logan mentally expanded his stats again.
Name: Logan Hart [Hidden Name: Idiot]
Rank: 5,866,278,052 out of 7,477,888,636
Level: 1
Class: None
Grade: F0
Species: Human
Skills:
* Deepwater Idiot Lv.1
* Idiot’s Paradox Lv.1
Titles: Eager Beaver
Intelligence: 6
Constitution: 15
Strength: 5
Agility: 5
Dexterity: 5
Endurance: 5
Perception: 5
Wisdom: 4
Luck: 10
Free Attribute Points: 0
KarmaCoin: 0
With a mental swipe, he minimized the stats and searched for anything that looked like a settings mainframe or a manual. But he didn’t have to search. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, further glowing text populated.
[Entering the Settings Mainframe.]