The green van trudged into a back lot at the edge of North Campus. Only a few cars were scattered across the expanse of asphalt, and Seth had no trouble finding a parking space. He opened the door and peered at the painted lines, which he'd missed by a mile. Whatever, he wasn't supposed to be parking here anyway. Not that the university could fine him for unauthorized parking. After all, the van wasn't his. Seth had jacked it from a gas station near the sheriff's office.

He shouldered his backpack and slammed the door shut. The whole drive back to the university, he’d been itching to check his laptop. Seth still didn’t know why the parasite needed it to use his abilities. The answer had to lie inside, but Seth had restrained himself, focusing on the drive.

Now that he’d arrived, the answers were at his fingertips. Even so, it was best to get back to his apartment first. Seth lived in an old building at the edge of campus. The apartments were designated as student housing, but Seth’s building was outdated and less popular than the others on campus. It was also cheaper, and right now, he was thankful for the seclusion.

Seth hurried down the sidewalk, his face hidden in the shadows of his hood. Streetlights dotted the path around North Campus, but they didn’t offer much visibility. Especially with the fog. Seth hurried past the few people he encountered, and luckily no one noticed his blood-coated skin or the shotgun hanging out the top of his backpack.

His apartment building was hidden behind a softball field, with a stand of pine trees to its rear. Seth stared up at the tower of brown bricks. An orange glow lit a few of the windows, interrupted by the occasional shadows of the inhabitants. Seth pulled out his wallet and pressed it against a scanner by the door. His student ID card acted as his key, and the scanner was powerful enough to pick it up through the folds of his wallet.

Seth entered the lobby, a small room with a tile floor and a couch shoved in the corner. The elevators were to the side, but Seth skipped past them and ducked into the stairwell instead. He jogged up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

A student was talking on her phone on the second floor, leaning against the railing. Seth flashed a smile as he passed her. “Don’t worry. It’s just makeup.”

The woman frowned but otherwise ignored him.

Seth continued to the third floor, entered the hall, and found his apartment without anyone else seeing him. Once inside, he collapsed on his couch and took a deep breath. That could have gone worse.

Still, he wasn’t in the clear yet. There was a good chance there was already a warrant out for his arrest. After all, the Sheriff had branded him the chief suspect for the “Shelby Massacre.” And though they had burned the building, Seth wasn’t confident information about his arrest hadn’t gotten out.

Which meant Seth couldn’t afford to dally.

He opened his bag and pulled out his laptop. The screen flickered to life as he opened the lid, and Seth squinted from the sudden light. His demo for the career fair was still open, a program designed to upscale low-quality radio imagery. During the trip, Seth had been waiting for the program to finish training its AI algorithm.

Not only had the program completed its training, but the demo was currently running.

Seth frowned, watching the demo’s progress bar as it crunched through data. The program was supposed to use imagery from a radio telescope as its input, but Seth hadn’t supplied it any. Not outside of the training set. So what was the program running on?

The file input was currently set to an IP address. A network location? That was odd. The demo was only supposed to work on local files. And not only that, but the program appeared to be chewing through a constant stream of data. The demo wasn't set up to handle such an input stream. The program was supposed to be a proof of concept, designed to work on static images only. Not a stream of real-time data.

What about the output? Seth navigated back to the demo's interface and looked for the output destination. It was another IP address, slightly different from the input. And again, the output appeared to be another stream of data. That made sense, Seth supposed. Read in a data stream from one network, write out the results to another.

To be honest, Seth wasn’t a programmer. He wasn’t even all that good with computers. He knew enough to cobble this demo together from other AI implementations he’d found online, but the program's strange behavior was beyond him.

However, Seth did have a multimedia player installed that could handle network streams. Perhaps he could pipe the output into that and see what the demo was doing. He didn’t expect it to work. The data probably wasn’t formatted correctly, and the media player probably wouldn't be able to read it. But it was worth a shot.

Seth opened the media player, entered the settings, and found the section for video streaming. With a bit of finagling, he managed to redirect the demo's output into the media player.

Static crackled across the screen. At first, it seemed like a failure. Of course, the media player couldn’t read the data, so it displayed as pure static. But when Seth unmuted the video, pure bliss filled his ears.

The Signal hit him as hard as a truck. It was the same sound he’d heard back at the barn before his parasite had evolved to the next stage. Only now it was stronger. Sharper. Higher resolution.

Is that what the demo was doing? It was taking this strange Signal and upscaling it? That didn’t make any sense. The demo was specifically trained on radio telescope imagery, not… whatever the Signal was.

What was going on? Seth found it hard to think with the Signal washing over him. He sank into the couch and cleared his mind. All that mattered was this feeling, the vibration in his bones, the hum in his ears, the energy that seemed to crackle through the air. The parasite drank in the Signal, preparing to evolve once more.

But as good as the Signal felt, Seth wanted more. Even with the upscaled resolution, he was nowhere near leveling up. It seemed that each stage required exponentially more energy. How could he speed that up?

Currently, the demo was running off his laptop’s shitty GPU. His desktop was far more powerful. If Seth moved the demo there, could it process the input stream faster? Increase the resolution further?

Seth needed to find out. He got up and moved the laptop over to his desk. A flash drive was plugged into his PC, and Seth yanked it out and stuck it in the laptop. From there, he navigated to the demo’s algorithm and copied it to the flash drive.

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It only took a few seconds, but Seth found himself tapping his leg, waiting for it to finish. That done, he moved the drive back to his desktop and transferred the program onto its SSD. Now that the demo was on his PC, Seth tried to open it.

A window popped up, saying the program had to recompile. A progress bar lined the bottom, with an estimated time of nine minutes.

Damn it!

As he waited, Seth leaned back in his chair and focused on the static. It already felt so good, he couldn't even imagine how much better it would be coming from his desktop. How else could he improve the Signal? Right now, it was streaming through his laptop's low-quality speakers. Some better headphones would help.

Seth scrambled through his desk drawer and pulled out a pair of wireless headphones. He slipped them over his ears and quickly paired them to the laptop's Bluetooth.

His muscles shivered at the Signal's touch. The static crackled through the headphones, and they drowned out everything else. It was like he was afloat in a sea of flashing lights. And the parasite squirmed in his chest, drinking in the flow of data.

It might take a while, but soon the parasite would evolve.

This time, Seth needed to have a plan. He'd wasted so many of his wishes already. But what did he want?

His stomach rumbled. He hadn't eaten anything since lunch. That could be a problem. If he evolved now, the parasite might waste a wish on trying to appease his hunger.

Seth couldn't have that. He got up and stumbled to his fridge. Lucky for him, his wireless headphones had a long range, and he could listen to the Signal as he searched for food. Inside the fridge, he found leftover pizza from three days earlier. Two slices with pepperoni, the cheese oily and congealed. Normally he'd heat them in the microwave, but there wasn't time for that.

Dinner secured, Seth took a bite as he headed back to his office chair.

A flash of movement flickered across his window. Seth jumped at the sight, and he yanked his headphones off.

False alarm. The movement was just a cat, an orange tabby sitting on the exterior windowsill. That was odd. Seth's apartment was on the third floor, and there wasn't an easy way to climb the building's exterior. Perhaps the cat belonged to one of the other students. Pets weren't allowed in the apartments, but people broke those rules all the time.

The cat tapped on the window, and it meowed at Seth.

However the cat had gotten up there, it looked like it wanted help. It would be dangerous to leave it outside. And even though Seth didn't want to deal with this shit right now, he wasn't a complete monster.

Cursing to himself, Seth hurried to the window, unlocked the latch, and hoisted it open. The cat hopped inside, and it rubbed against Seth's leg.

"You're welcome," Seth said. He left the window open, letting the fog drift inside. "I'm sure someone's looking for you, but I'll deal with that later."

Seth hurried back to his desk and took another bite of his pizza. With only a few minutes left for the demo to recompile, he sat back and finished eating his dinner. While he waited, he tried to think of a good idea for his next wish.

He was tempted to choose something combat-oriented. His other wishes had served him well in that regard, and there was a good chance this bloodshed wasn't over. However, Seth held back on that idea. This might be his last wish, and if it was, he didn't want to waste it.

If he could have anything he desired, truly anything, what would he wish for? What did he want more than anything?

He thought back to that dark closet, to the sounds of his parents arguing, to the stench of alcohol on his father's breath.

No, that was in the past. Seth wasn't a scared little boy anymore, and he'd never have to see his father again.

The progress bar neared the end, with only thirty seconds left. Seth leaned forward in his seat. It was so close. Only a few seconds more, and—

The monitor flickered off.

What? The computer had turned off. Seth pressed the desktop's power button. Nothing happened. It was like the electricity had been cut. Was the apartment's power out? No, the lights were still on. What the hell?

Seth leaned under his desk and followed the desktop's cord to the outlet. Halfway there, the cord had been severed, the plastic mangled by chew marks.

That goddamn cat. Did it chew through his power cord?

Seth looked around, but he didn't see the cat anywhere. God damn it. He'd saved that cat's life, and this was how it repaid him?

Well, that really sucked. The desktop might have made a huge difference to the Signal's strength, but now Seth would never know. He'd have to rely on the laptop, and though the Signal felt glorious streaming from his headphones, he could tell the parasite's evolution was still a far way off.

As he listened to the Signal, a strange feeling prickled over the back of his neck. It felt… like he was being watched. Seth turned around, back to the open window. Fog flowed through the opening and fell to the floor, like a translucent waterfall.

Perhaps that was what he'd felt on the back of his neck. Just the mist's cold touch as it condensed on his skin.

No, there was something more. Something felt wrong.

Seth took off his headphones and placed them around his neck. He couldn't explain it, but it felt like someone was there. In his apartment. Was it the cat?

"Hello?" Seth said.

No one answered, of course. It was probably nothing. After everything that had happened, it was normal to be a little on edge. In fact, Seth was surprised by how calm he'd been. So why did he feel so nervous all of a sudden?

Seth stood up and looked around. His gaze settled on the open kitchen. There. That was the source of the knot that twisted at his stomach. Someone was in there. Even though Seth could see clearly over the counter, and he saw nothing out of the ordinary, he knew. Someone was in there, Seth just couldn't see them.

He walked to the counter and peered over it. Still nothing, not even the cat. What was going on? Seth scanned the floor, which was made from cheap vinyl with a fake tile pattern. Normally the floor was perfectly smooth, but right in the kitchen's center was a slight depression.

Had that depression always been there? No, it couldn't have been. The dip in the floor was shaped like two feet pressed together, and there was an uncanny weight to the air. The feeling was subtle, but it sent alarm bells ringing through Seth's head.

Someone was standing there. Someone invisible.

Seth held his breath, and he tried to slow his throbbing heartbeat. This wasn't good. The invisible person wasn't moving. Perhaps Seth should pretend he hadn't noticed them. That would give him time to make a plan.

"I must be tired," Seth said, his voice full of fake confidence. "Maybe some coffee will help."

He ambled over to the coffee machine, careful not to walk into the invisible person. A cylindrical container of coffee grounds was tucked in the back of a cabinet. Seth grabbed it and peeled off the lid.

This was a stupid idea. He should have gone straight for the shotgun, but first, he needed to know that he wasn't going crazy. That there really was someone watching him.

Seth turned around and threw the coffee grounds in the air, emptying the entire bucket. A cloud of brown dust swirled through the kitchen, and Seth stumbled back, coughing. As the cloud began to disperse, Seth could make out a clear silhouette in the shape of a bulky man, exactly where Seth had thought he'd be.

Shit! Even expecting to see him, Seth nearly jumped out of his skin. He turned around and ran back to the couch. Back to his pack, and the shotgun within it. Seth fumbled for the shotgun, and he stood up, arms shaking.

The invisible man was gone. He must have wiped the coffee grounds off. Seth waved his shotgun from side to side, trying to listen for movement.

A flash of silver lit up in his peripheral vision. Seth swiveled toward it and froze at the sight of a floating kitchen knife. As soon as he'd seen it, the knife disappeared. Seth dug his finger into the trigger, ready to squeeze off a shot at a moment's notice.

Come on, where was he?

A line of pain flared across Seth's neck. Blood sprayed out and splashed against the floor. The kitchen knife clattered to the ground, blood staining its polished steel. Seth tried to raise his shotgun, but his vision turned black as the blood rushed from his head.

Did that bastard slit his throat? What the hell was going on?

Seth fell to his knees, his muscles going numb. Blood continued to drain down his chest in sheets, a waterfall that never seemed to end.

As he passed out, he could still hear the static crackling from the headphones around his neck. The feeling was glorious.