AS BULGAKOV ALLEGEDLY wrote, “Fear your wishes, for they have a habit of coming true.” I’d add that when they do come true, it’s in a twisted way that you could never have fathomed out.

Like anyone with average looks, I’d always wanted to appear a little cuter than I actually was. Nature and my parents hadn’t done an excellent job fulfilling their duties. Unlike my gorgeous sisters, I didn’t have wild success with the opposite sex. You might call me average: narrow chin, long, straight nose, sharp cheekbones. A typical Hollywood-style villain nerd.

But the guy looking out at me from the mirror actually was quite cute. The jaw was more prominent. Against the backdrop of the jaw, the sculpted cheekbones looked completely natural. The ears were small, unlike the radio detectors I’d grown used to. The eyebrows were blond — actually, silvery — and the skin and hair were noticeably lighter. The only thing that hadn’t changed was my brown eyes. That was the only way I knew that the reflection in the mirror was mine.

But there could be no mistake. The light-haired, sturdy guy in the mirror was me. I frowned, scratched my forehead, and adjusted my slightly wet hair. It looked like I was the one who needed first aid, not the stranger in the foundation pit. Calm, I had to stay calm.

I went back to the kitchen as if I’d been hit by a ten-ton truck. The water had begun to boil long ago, but instead of the rice I just threw in the sausages and opened a beer. What a business. No, not quite. What a business. And I couldn’t really tell anyone about what had happened. I’d be shipped off to the loony bin immediately. To be honest, at this point even I wasn’t completely sure that I hadn’t gone crazy.

What if the things that happened in all those fantasy books were coming true? Had the apocalypse come, were most people turning into zombies and just a few into Players?

I turned on my small kitchen TV and flipped through the channels. Vremya, Vesti, Novosti, Comedy Club,[3] a soccer match — nothing out of the ordinary.

I even looked out the window, just to be sure. Occasional passersby, wrapped in thin jackets that were still too light for winter (it was all the fault of the late cold spell) were bustling home. No one was chasing or devouring anyone. Maybe I’d been hurled into some sort of parallel universe?

I gave my apartment a check. No, it didn’t gel with my theory. The same crumbling Soviet-era furniture: the folding couch, Grandma’s old table with my laptop on it, the Czech wall unit[4] — the last vestiges of a country that no longer existed. The chipped wooden windows, the wallpaper that had been put up when my grandfather was still alive, the curtains... They obviously didn’t match the interior and who knows when they’d last been washed? Other than the computer and TVs — one in the tiny kitchen and the other in the bedroom-living room-only room — nothing had changed since my grandmother was around. I mean, I’m a self-confessed slob and my bachelor’s lifestyle does nothing to counter that.

I went back to the kitchen to mull things over, especially because I’d already finished the first bottle of beer and the sausages were cooked. I poured some mayonnaise and ketchup onto a plate and created an absentminded meal to the accompaniment of a sports commentator lamenting about how a soccer striker had missed an empty goal from 10 yards away.

My head was heavy. I couldn’t get myself to form even a few intelligent thoughts, all the more so because my body’s efforts were focused on digesting the food. In fact, the beer was acting like a sedative. My eyes were sticking together and my nose was trying to get acquainted with the table. Sleep. I needed some sleep. There must be a reason why people say you should sleep on it.

THE ALARM ON MY PHONE had been screaming for nearly a minute before I turned it off. I pattered to the bathroom in the darkness. The things you dream!

I turned on the light and nearly yelped. That sturdy blond guy was still there. He gazed out of the mirror looking a little frightened, but he obviously hadn’t gone anywhere.

So I guess it wasn’t a dream. I put toothpaste on my toothbrush, sat down on the edge of the tub and started to think about how I’d continue to live.

When I’d nearly finished brushing the right side, I froze in disbelief. How had I never noticed these progress bars before? They hovered in my line of vision in pairs, two on top and two on the bottom, scaring me in the way that I imagined a 16-year-old girl felt when taking a pregnancy test. The two on the top were sort of gold and green, while the ones on the bottom were red and blue.

OK, let’s think about this. It all had started yesterday when I’d punched that stranger. Someone in my head had called him a Player. As in, Ready Player One?

Maybe I’d somehow taken his place? In that case, everything would be simple. The red bar was health, the blue one was mana, the green one was vigor, but what about the gold one? Who the hell knew? The level of my sex appeal? Considering my new appearance, it was entirely plausible.

I finished brushing my teeth and climbed into the shower. The water was barely warm; the water main in our district had probably burst again, but I was used to it. Ever since I was a kid, I’d never been afraid of the cold.

After I’d dried off, I got dressed and sat down in the kitchen to contemplate. By all accounts, I needed to go to the hospital. To have a brain scan or whatever. Maybe it would simply turn out that there was a tumor in my head, and that tumor was trying to put me at odds with reality. On the other hand, if I skipped work right now, Bones definitely wouldn’t be happy. My boss was thin and sinewy, and on top of that he was also grim — obviously you didn’t need to look far to think of a nickname for him.

I thought for a bit, then dialed his number.

“Hello,” said a disgruntled voice.

“Eh, sir-”

“Sergei, I don’t want to hear it. Fyodor and Alexei are kicking back again. No matter what’s happened, I’m not giving you the day off. The van of beer is coming today. And who’s gonna supply the stores?”

“But-”

“But what, do you have a fever? Did you break your arm? No? Then you have no excuse. Do you expect me to run around the warehouse myself?”

With that he hung up.

As the saying goes, it wasn’t in the cards. I guess I’d need to go out. The news that Fyodor and Alexei had gone on a bender was unwelcome, of course. Everyone would need to run around more. On the other hand, the work was such that it attracted a certain crowd. People with college degrees don’t typically become warehouse loaders. I mean, normal people.

In my case, it was a conscious choice. I’d spent five years getting an economics degree just to go and work with my hands. You should have seen my father’s face. In fact, that was the first and biggest reason I’d done it. They’d already bought me a military card[5] and got a cushy job lined up for me in a fancy company — the job which, according to them, had “a lot of potential”. And I just left and got myself a menial job with a bunch of like-minded losers. That was the second reason.

Of course, it was hard to brag to my friends that I had gotten a job as a loader all on my own without connections, but I really didn’t care. When you talk about a grown-up, independent life, the emphasis is on the word “independent.” Thirdly, it turned out that the job paid reasonably well for our rather large provincial city. I could afford to eat, drink, buy some clothing, and take my latest crush to the movies.

And to be honest, I didn’t have any particular friends. I had a couple of acquaintances from university I could meet once every couple of months to grab a beer and hear about their sexual conquests or failures or commiserate about their workloads. They tactfully avoided bringing up my work.

It’s clear that loader isn’t a career you dream about when you’re a kid. No one ever says, “If you do well in school, you’ll be stacking pallets of beer for a living.” I understood very well myself that with time I’d need to grow in some direction. But for the time being the question didn’t concern me much. What did concern me right now was the fact that I needed to run like hell to get to work on time.

I looked in the fridge. Other than yesterday’s sausages and a couple of eggs, it was blissfully empty. Although an omelet with a grade-B meat product isn’t bad in itself, you shouldn’t eat one every day. It had been drummed into me since childhood that breakfast was supposed to be balanced and contain the right amounts of protein, fat, and carbohydrates.

There was only one dish that fit these criteria, and it was sold close to my house. According to the clock on my wall, they’d already been open for a half hour. That meant that they’d had time to put out the meat and fry enough for a few portions.

In front of the door I felt as worried as Leonov[6] when he was about to step into outer space. The colored shapes before my eyes hadn’t disappeared, and my hands were shockingly pale. Apparently, I was supposed to get used to the changing reality and my new body. More precisely, I felt it like the old one, but my eyes didn’t lie. OK, I’d talk to Bones, anyway. Not for today maybe, but I’d ask for tomorrow off.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

The stairway was silent; even Lydia didn’t poke her head out at the sound of my slamming door. On the third floor my nose started to itch as usual from the smell of cat piss coming from the apartment that belonged to a self-sufficient and independent (read: lonely) woman of an indeterminate age. She hated people just as much as she loved cats.

As I skipped the rest of the way, the green bar trembled a little and began creeping downward. I pressed the button on the entry system next to the front door and dashed out into the fresh, frosty air.

“You understand what it’s about, my dear sir, don’t you? They’ve b... br... bred a feeling of inferiority in our people. They’ve drilled it into us that if we want to be great we need to hate someone. We need to have a common enemy that supposedly prevents us, the powerful and awesome, from getting on with our lives... Ah, Sergei, greetings and salutations,” Mr. Petrov waved to me.

I stopped for a moment and nodded. His friend — or to be more precise, his listener — was sitting next to him, struggling to stay awake. He had a neglected appearance: a battered sheepskin coat like they wore in the late 1970s, a drooping sweatsuit, and old shoes with scuffed and cracked leather toecaps.

The two were clearly conducting a sophisticated discussion and they’d already had quite a bit to drink. But there were two things that interested me.

First, what time did you have to wake up so you’d be so wasted by 10 a.m.? It’s true what they say: desire is the best motivation. But the second thing was the most curious.

There was a text box floating over the Professor’s head.

Alexander Petrov

Academic

???

Carpenter

???

This was amusing. It was just like in an advanced online game.

I looked at the man in the sheepskin coat.

???

???

Plumber

???

That was it. There was a little more information about the Professor. Maybe it was because I knew him and I was seeing the other man for the first time?

“Mr. Petrov, you never told me you used to be a carpenter,” I said.

“A carpenter!” he waved my remark aside. “My father, God rest his soul, now he was a cabinet maker from God. I’m just a tinkerer. I can only fix things or just potter about.”

I nodded, put my hood on, and skirted the building to go out to the street. The most dangerous thought of any madman crept into my head: what if I was normal? Meaning that maybe that guy from yesterday really gave me some sort of superpowers? Maybe it was even by chance, like bad diseases are typically transmitted? No, I wasn't going to start wearing my underpants on the outside. But what if I had also become some sort of Player, and I was now looking at the world through the concave mirror of convention?

The people who were hurrying to work only confirmed these wild ideas for me. They all had question marks floating above their heads. Some of them had only a few lines, while others had nearly ten or so. But they all had a line I could read: pastry chef, coin collector, leader, shoemaker, Tatar, teacher...

So this mysterious system was displaying not just professions, but also nationalities, certain personality traits, and hobbies.

With these thoughts I literally flew past the three buildings until the intersection where the bus stop was. The traffic was a little livelier here. But most important, that’s where Uncle Zaur made the most delicious shawarma[7]in his rather filthy-looking snack joint.

“Hello,” I said, nodding.

“Good morning,” the old shop owner returned my greeting.

A notification appeared over his head:

Zaur

Azerbaijani

Very funny. As if I didn’t know it. “One please, to go.”

“You should come in. I’ll give you some tea with it. You all eat on the go and then you have stomachache and blame it on my shawarma.”

Uncle Zaur muttered all of this as he spread sauce on the lavash bread, then began throwing hot meat on it with quick, agile movements. All I knew about the owner of this hole was that he’d come to Russia a long time ago, married a Russian woman and ran his own small but formidable business. He also had two guys working for him making shawarma and shish kebab, but Uncle Zaur himself was always close by. Sometimes he’d drink with the regulars or thoughtfully smoke a cigarette, arms crossed over his small belly.

“Here you go, no change,” I said, holding money out to him.

“Enjoy,” he said, handing over a bag with the shawarma.

I wolfed down the hot meat in the lavash before I even got to the bus stop, just in time to helplessly watch my departing bus. Now I’d have to wait another ten minutes or so. I stepped to the side, lit a cigarette and took a drag.

If you thought about it, things weren’t so bad — provided my head was in order. So if I were of no interest to shrinks, I needed to figure out how to take advantage of what had befallen me. As far as I could understand, the message said something about the Insight ability, the Light spell, and the Savior avatar. It wasn’t yet clear how to activate the latter two. As I understood it, Insight was passive and worked all the time.

The bus, which arrived before too long, thwarted all my plans to enslave the world. I had to get on. As I paid the driver, I noticed that in addition to the occasional question mark, a Speeder sign was burning bright above him. I immediately plopped down on a seat and grabbed hold of the handle in front of the standing spot.

I was really starting to like this new ability of mine because after three intersections, with a wild screech of the brake pads, the bus stopped after nearly crashing into some ancient dude driving a cheap sedan. All the passengers lurched forward. Except me. The Speeder tried two more times to hasten my meeting with God, but he didn’t succeed. When I got out by the building materials plant, I was a little shaken, but intact.

And there were advantages to the driver’s speed. I thought I’d be cutting it close, but I ended up arriving twenty minutes early. So I took my time crossing the street and beelined for our base.

It was made up of five identical warehouses on one side and an office that abutted them on the other. Nothing to write home about — just a small private business owned by a Russified German who rarely made an appearance, usually just when he had to pick up his earnings or give us a major dressing-down. Incidentally, when it came to dressing-downs, he could go toe to toe with Bones. As I’d already mentioned, the workers were a diverse bunch: former convicts, a few drunks down on their luck, a couple of migrants, and the occasional student. And me.

Over the course of the day, trucks came up to the guardrail, filled out requisitions, and then, under the alert supervision of the shipping agents and Bones himself, we loaded their vehicles with goods for small stores. At a different time, usually in the evening, vans with water and beer arrived.

Today, too, a van was scheduled to come. Nothing major, just about 20 tons, but, as I understood it, two of our regular crew had gone on a bender.

“What’s up?” Marat said, holding his hand out.

He’d already changed his clothes, laid a few pieces of cardboard on the guardrail in order not to freeze his rear end, and sat down on them. When he saw me, he smiled, flashing the two gold caps on his upper teeth, and extended his hand.

“Hi,” I answered him with interest, shaking his hand and examining his stats.

Marat Gubaydullin, age 32

???

Thief

???

Marat had been a young offender when he’d first gone to jail, and he’d left it long after he’d been transferred to the adult division. When he’d finally got out at the ripe age of 23, he got married and even had a little kid. But my secret assistant still designated him a Thief.

I doubted it was referring to Marat’s slippery past. He’d been in jail for robbery, not theft. That meant that he was stealing from the warehouse on the sly. Now I understood who Bones had in mind whenever he was swearing to bring everyone into the open.

“The van from Samara is coming today,” I said.

“Yes, I heard. I’m sure we’ll get a good drink out of it,” Marat nodded, flashing the gold-lined “Hollywood smile” that he’d gotten in the slammer.

I nodded. During any delivery there were enough faulty goods, or, more accurately (air quotes) “faulty goods”. Sometimes the drivers themselves left a couple of pallets at our mercy so they could finish the trip faster. On days like that the loaders went home tipsy and happy. Even Bones couldn’t do anything about that.

“Uncle Alexei and Fyodor are already drunk. They won’t be going out today.”

Marat cringed. “Shit.”

I understood him. We had no equipment. Our workload was measured utterly simply: in human — or if you approached the process with a sense of humor, donkey — power. Two extra pairs of hands unloading the van meant a lot to us — especially because, counting the two shirkers, there were only seven of us altogether.

“So we work overtime,” he immediately shared his unhealthy optimism. “A little extra cash won’t hurt.”

“Right. I’m going to get changed.”

As I left the closet, I ran into Bones. To me, despite the insulting nickname, our stock manager was the binding force here. He kept a firm hand on the loaders. If you took him away and put someone else in charge, it was unlikely that anyone here would actually work. You’d need to put together an entire staff again.

“Hi, Sergei,” Bones shook my hand like a genius diagnostician trying to determine how sick I was by looking at me. “How are you feeling?”

“My ears are sort of ringing,” I lied, scanning his face.

In addition to his full name, the Insight spat out new information: Model Maker. That was interesting. What kind of models did Bones make in his spare time?

“You’ll be sick tomorrow. But today, no way. By the way, the vehicle from store number 9 has arrived. Let’s go load it. There’s water, beer, energy drinks, and cookies. Marat, you hear?”

“Fifteen minutes until the shift starts,” my hardnosed coworker called out lazily.

“I’ll let you leave 15 minutes early.”

“Yeah, that’s if the van doesn’t show up when we’re closing,” Marat retorted, but moved from his spot.

It’s probably not worth bragging about, but I was very good at preparing shops’ orders. When I first started out, I looked like a complete misfit. But it’s like that in any field. You’d get the job, make people smile because you’re new, but then you gradually become an expert. In the beginning, I was constantly scurrying around and getting in the way, but now it was a real pleasure to look at me. I didn’t make a single extra movement.

“Carbonated water, six pallets, check,” Bones counted aloud. “Beer, glass, two, check. Beer, plastic, three crates.”

Marat and I danced around each other. He dove into the warehouse while I walked out with my load. Twenty bottles aren’t very heavy when they’re inserted with heavy cardboard and sealed thoroughly in new polyethylene.

Unfortunately, today we didn’t have such a luxury. All the beer was from an old delivery that had been sitting in the warehouse for a long time. The cardboard had fallen apart, and then a radiator had leaked and the packaging had gotten wet. As a result, I had to carefully hold the beer from the bottom. No matter how experienced I thought I was, better safe than sorry.

I wasn’t aware exactly at what point the case fell apart. Four bottles fell out through the hole in the bottom at the exact moment when my foot was already lifted onto the body of the truck.

I raised my head and saw Bones’ angry face. He opened his mouth and...

[ ∞ ]

Marat and I danced around each other. I couldn’t shake off the feeling of déjà vu. This had already happened, just now. I had exited the warehouse and the case of beer had fallen apart in my hands.

More precisely, I was now exiting the warehouse and...

By reflex I shifted the case in my hands, taking a better grip. The glass clinked mournfully.

“Be more careful, Sergei.”

“The case has no bottom, sir. We should tape it up.”

“Go ahead. Marat, one more case of glass bottles. Then we’ll move on to the cookies.”

Holding the tape, I crouched down, staring with acute fascination at the intact case of beer.

First of all, now I knew the purpose of that gold bar, which had now lost a third of its length. It was displaying the progress of that most important development branch.

And secondly, I now had the ability to rewind time.