"You had one job!" his boss yelled, from across the room.

Indeed, it was true. Zab only had one job.

For most of the day, Zab Abibi sat at a desk before a set of monitors, watching data stream past. Things were always happening with The System. Zab was one of the millions of help desk employees (scattered across thousands of planets) who monitored The System backend streams and acted when something unusual happened.

Most of the time, the procedure was to file a ticket with the relevant department. Zab wasn't sure if those tickets ever got acted on, but that wasn't his job. His job was to file the tickets. Only when something truly extraordinary happened did he report directly to his boss. And he would have reported this event to his boss had he seen the message scrolling in the data stream.

Many things could happen with The System, but most did not need to be reported. Zab observed the message, did a cursory check of the other data that had happened before, and determined that no action needed to be taken. This was the most common case.

Oddly enough, there was a department interested in tracking new births, so Zab could observe when The System was installed onto a newborn baby shortly after their birth. That was quite common, and since the parents were both users of The System, they could be trusted to teach the baby how to activate and use it when they turned the right age. But he did file a ticket when that happened so that someone else could follow up with the parents in a few years to ensure everything went well.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Another occasional event was when a user tried to hack or break The System. Some clever beings attempted to circumvent a restriction or access features they did not qualify for. This needed to be reported to the appropriate department for punishment.

The third thing Zab was expected to do, although it happened only rarely, was report when new users were added to The System as adults. This was rare because all beings had The System given to them as children.

The only way an adult could be added to The System was when a new being entered the interstellar space controlled by the United System of Planets (USP) for the first time.

That rarely happened because space travel was highly controlled, and wars were fought in neutral space. New beings did not just cross into USP-controlled space for the first time. It just never happened.

Until, on the 201st day of the 683rd cycle of the 98th era, a single human from a planet called Earth crossed into USP territory without even knowing it.

Admittedly, Zab got distracted and wasn't looking at his screen for the briefest of moments. But at that moment, he missed the message about The System being installed on a new adult, in a new species the Universe had never seen before.

Meanwhile, millions of light years away, a small ship from Earth passed an invisible boundary in space. The lone occupant was startled by a message in his vision, like a popup window that would not go away.

"Standby for System installation... System installed... Booting up..."

"Welcome to The System. Please say 'Ready to Begin, Activate The System' to begin setup."

Max Martino was convinced that he had finally gone crazy, that all those years drifting aimlessly in space had finally broken his mind. What was blocking his view?