I wake up face-down on my own floor, cheek flat against the carpet, with no memory of ever lying down.
For a long moment I stay exactly where I am. Partly to check nothing hurts. Partly because as long as I don't move, I don't have to find out what happened to my flat, my face, or my manhood.
The facts come back in pieces. I was on the balcony. There was a light in the sky, and it got bigger, and then it hit me — actually hit me, in the face — and a voice said something about assimilation, and then nothing. That was it.
I sit up carefully. Arms, two. Legs, two. Face, sore, but attached. No burns, no blood, no crater in the lino. The balcony door is still open, the September morning coming straight through it, and my washing is still hanging out there, damp but unperturbed, as if nothing fell out of the sky beside it at all. The clock on the oven — visible from the floor, because the whole flat is visible from anywhere within it — reads 06:10 am.
"Burglar?" I say to the empty flat, and pick up a shoe, just in case.
No, there's nowhere for one to hide.
Carbon monoxide, then. Leaky boiler, headaches, hallucinations — that's a real thing, I've read the warnings on the meter cupboard. I sniff the air, which achieves nothing, and look at the boiler. The boiler can barely heat the flat and looks to be holding together okay, although barely. I find it hard to believe it's putting visions in my head at the very least.
Which leaves the thing I've been avoiding since my eyes opened. The star. The light. The voice.
"...Hello?"
— GOOD MORNING, HOST. ASSIMILATION: COMPLETE. —
I throw the shoe at nothing and fall over the coffee table.
The voice isn't a sound. That's what I can't get past, scrambling back up against the bed with my heart hammering. It doesn't come through my ears. It's just there, printed on the inside of my head, calm as a train announcement.
"What — WHAT — what are you?"
— THE KARDASHEV SYSTEM. STATUS FOLLOWS. —
And then a panel of soft light unfolds in the air in front of me. It doesn't shine onto anything. It simply hangs there.
╔═ KARDASHEV SYSTEM ══════════════════╗
HOST: Leon Xavier AGE: 21
MENTAL INT 12 MEM 11 FOC 10 INS 11
PHYSICAL STR 9 AGI 10 VIT 9 RFX 10 [LOCKED]
TECH POINTS (TP): 0
ACTIVE MISSIONS: 1
INTEGRATION: —
╚═════════════════════════════════════╝
I read it three times from the floor. Then — and I'm not proud of the order my brain does things in — I get smug.
"INT twelve. Twelve! Above average, that. Knew it. All those years of—"
Then I read the next row. STR 9. VIT 9.
"...Nine? Nine? I carry stock all day!"
— THE SYSTEM MEASURES. IT DOES NOT FLATTER. —
"And what does LOCKED mean?" I poke a finger at the physical row. The finger goes straight through, because the panel is made of some form of light.
— PHYSICAL ADVANCEMENT: VIA TECHNOLOGY ONLY. —
I don't know what that means either, and I don't get the chance to ask, because the panel slides aside for a second one — and the second one shuts me up completely.
╔═ CIVILISATION ══════════════════════╗
DESIGNATION: HUMANITY
KARDASHEV INDEX: 0.73
POPULATION: 7.95 BILLION
HOMEWORLD: EARTH (SOL III)
CONTROLLED PLANETS: 1
COLONIES: 0
╚═════════════════════════════════════╝
The flat goes very quiet.
I know that word. Kardashev. It's from a video essay I half-watched a couple of years ago, at two in the morning, as you do. It's a scale for measuring civilisations — not people, civilisations — by how much energy they command. Type One runs its whole planet. Type Two runs its star. Type Three runs a galaxy. And humanity, all eight billion of us, every power station and rocket and data centre we have ever built, scores nought-point-seven-three.
This thing isn't measuring me. It's measuring the species. And it has printed me and all of humanity on the same page, as if the species' score is somehow my business.
"Why are you showing me this?" I ask, slowly.
— BECAUSE IT IS YOURS TO RAISE, HOST. —
I sit down on the bed. It's that or fall down again, and I've already had enough contact with the coffee table for one night.
Right. If I've gone mad, I'd rather know before work. So I run tests. I film the panel via my phone: the video shows my kitchen, but no panel is visible. I stand at the bathroom mirror: the panel hangs beside my reflection, plain as day to me, but the mirror doesn't show it. I lean out of the window and shout a passer-by, whether they can see a big glowing rectangle. They say they can't.
For completeness, I knock on the wall of flat 511. "Dave. DAVE. Can you hear a voice?"
One bang on the wall. In this building's language, that means no, and also stop.
Last test. I walk away from it — into the bathroom, door shut. Still there. I get under the duvet like a child hiding from a maths test. Still there, glowing gently through the dark. It doesn't hang in the room. It hangs within me.
So, invisible to everyone else. Silent to everyone else. It goes where I go.
I sit on the edge of the bed with that for a while, and the feeling splits clean down the middle. Half of it is relief: if nobody can see it, nobody can take it away, and nobody is sectioning me before lunch. The other half takes longer to name, and when I finally name it, it's loneliness. Whatever this is, there is no one on Earth I can check it with. No forum thread titled "glowing rectangle in flat, is this normal?". No helpline. Just me, a voice with all the warmth of a parking sign, and a number that claims to weigh civilisations.
My stomach growls loudly, ruining the moment. The cupboard is empty — last night's ramen was the last of what I have that's substantial. Toast, then. Even chosen ones have toast.
"Right," I say, pacing the four steps my flat allows while the bread's down. "What do you want? Why me? Who sent you?"
Silence.
Fine. Different approach. If it won't answer questions, let's review the panel again, check every line thoroughly. I bring the status panel back up and go through it row by row — and that's when I properly see the line I skimmed past earlier, when the stats had all my attention.
ACTIVE MISSIONS: 1.
"Hang on. One? I never accepted a mission. I've been unconscious since nine o'clock last night. What did I agree to? Is there small print? There's always small print—"
— MISSION: FIRST INTEGRATION. INTEGRATE ONE AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGY. REWARD: 10 TP. —
"That's not an answer, that's a to-do list. What's TP? What does it buy?"
— TECH POINTS. THEY ALLOW YOU TO UNLOCK NEW HORIZONS. —
"...That's it? That's the whole explanation?"
— YES. —
And here's the strange part: that flat little non-answer settles me more than a sales pitch would have. A scam would be selling harder. A hallucination would flatter me — nine VIT, honestly. This thing talks like a manual translated from another language by someone who didn't care whether I enjoyed it.
Which means it might be exactly what it says it is.
I make tea because my hands need a job. While the kettle heats up, I try the questions again, gently this time, the way you'd approach a cat that's already had one swipe at you. Where are you from? Nothing. Are there others like you? Nothing. Is this a test? Nothing — though the nothing feels deliberate. I'm already learning to read its silences.
And somewhere between pouring the water and finding the milk, the panic quietly turns into something far more familiar: the feeling of a job that needs doing. Alright. Never mind what it is. What's the actual situation?
Because strip out the impossible part and look at what's left. Something is offering to pay me for learning. That's the deal on the table. Points — whatever they turn out to buy — in exchange for study. And studying in the margins of shifts, unpaid, alone, for a future that kept not turning up, is the exact thing I have done for four years. It's the one thing in my life nobody has ever paid me for. This morning, something knocked on the inside of my skull and offered me a wage for it.
Either I've lost my mind, or the mathematics of my whole life has changed overnight. I honestly don't know which at this point. But I know which one I want it to be.
Because the practical situation is this: I have a Saturday shift in under three hours. Rent is due on the first, same as it was yesterday. Whatever has moved into my head, the till at Barnes' Corner Market still needs somebody behind it, and that somebody still needs paying. Destiny can wait until after work, like everything else.
"I've got a shift," I tell the panel, pulling my uniform polo off the radiator. "Whatever you are — we're doing this around a nine-to-six schedule. Is that a problem?"
— NO, HOST. CIVILISATIONS ARE BUILT UPON RIGOUR, EFFORT AND... MONE-RESOURCES. —
I stop. Was that... encouragement? And looks like we see eye to eye on that last part, haha.
I finish the tea and eat the toast standing over the sink, then pull on the polo — warm from the radiator and still slightly damp, the way it always is — running the day through my head as I dress: shift till six, the brown-sauce man probably back for another round, and now, apparently, homework from beyond the stars. My life has grown a second job overnight, and the second job pays in a currency I can't spend or quite find the use of yet.
Shoes on, and at the door I stop, because there's one question that actually matters and I still haven't asked it.
"This mission. 'Integrate one available technology.' Integrate how? What does that even mean?"
The panel shifts. And across the room, on the shelf where they've stood gathering dust since graduation, my university textbooks light up — a soft gold line around every spine.
— BEGIN WHERE YOU STOPPED, HOST. —
Two hours from now, the shop door will welcome me behind the till, I don't have enough time now before I have to leave. I pocket my phone, look at the glowing spines of three years I'd written off, and feel something I haven't felt since my university days.
Eager to read.