Friday morning dawned with the frantic, digital shrieking of a town slowly coming unglued. The backward cat phenomenon of the previous day had been the opening act, the weird appetizer before a main course of pure, unadulterated strangeness.
Chris, filled with a sick, churning sense of dread, had tried to lay low. He stayed in his room, a self-imposed exile, desperately hoping that the glitches would somehow resolve themselves, that the corrupted data he had unleashed would just dissipate like a sulfur fart. But the universe, it turned out, did not have a self-cleaning cycle.
The Upshur County Community Forum, once his instrument of mischief, was now a frantic log of his own sins. It was a real-time feed of the reality he had broken.
"Has anyone else's garden hose turned into what I can only describe as a perfectly cooked noodle? It's just lying there in the grass. I'm afraid to touch it. I really need to stop using those Chinese shopping apps."
"Okay, this is getting weird. All the squirrels in my yard are hopping on one leg. All of them. In unison. What does it mean?"
"My GPS keeps trying to send me to the center of Kansas. Is this a satellite thing?"
Chris scrolled through the posts, each one another turn of the screw in his gut. He was the source of it all. The noodle-hoses, the one-legged squirrels, the GPS units suddenly possessed by the spirit of Dorothy Gale. It was all him.
The problem became terrifyingly personal at breakfast. Pete burst through the back door, his face a mask of thunderous disbelief. He stomped into the kitchen, slamming his keys down on the counter.
"That's it," he fumed. "That truck is officially possessed."
Misty looked up from her coffee. "What's wrong, dear?"
"What's wrong?" Pete threw his hands up in exasperation. "I'll tell you what's wrong. The truck won't start. Just makes a weird clicking sound. And the radio... the radio is broken in a way I don't think is physically possible."
Chris, who had been trying to appear as small and unremarkable as possible, felt his stomach clench. "What's it doing?" he asked, his voice a faint squeak.
Pete turned to him, his eyes wide with frustration. "It's stuck on one 'station.' But it's not music or static. It's a man's voice, a real flat, boring voice, just repeating one word, over and over again, every time I try to start the truck."
"What word?" Misty asked.
"'Tuesday,'" Pete declared, his voice rising. "Just... 'Tuesday. Tuesday. Tuesday.' How can a radio even do that? It's not a recording! I can change the input to the CD player, and it still just says 'Tuesday'! I'm telling you, it's possessed. And you know what the worst part is?" He pointed an accusatory finger at the calendar on the wall. "It's not even Tuesday!"
Chris stared down at his cereal, unable to meet anyone's gaze. He had done this. He had broken his step-father's truck with a conceptual word-based curse.
Just then, his phone, sitting on the table, buzzed with a notification from the community forum. His thumb, acting on a morbid, compulsive instinct, unlocked the screen. The head librarian, a prim and proper woman named Mrs. Kaspersen who was famous for her strict enforcement of the "no talking" rule, had just posted a frantic warning.
"URGENT NOTICE: The Upshur County Public Library is closed until further notice due to unpredictable atmospheric conditions."
Unpredictable atmospheric conditions? What did that even mean? A shaky cell phone video was attached to the post. Chris's finger, trembling slightly, pressed play.
The video showed the library's normally quiet, hallowed interior in a state of complete disarray. Books were scattered across the floor, their spines broken, their pages splayed open. And as the video played, more books just... fell. A thick history tome would suddenly leap off a high shelf and crash to the floor. A slim volume of poetry would slide silently from its place and flutter to the ground. There was no wind. There was no earthquake. The books were simply deciding they no longer wished to be on the shelves. A young librarian, trying to shelve a cart of returns, couldn't get down an aisle without stepping on a carpet of fallen literature. It looked like the aftermath of a poltergeist temper tantrum.
A new wave of social media posts erupted, a digital wildfire jumping from one platform to another. This time, the messages were centered on Buckhannon-Upshur High School. The proud, bronze Buccaneer mascot statue that stood on a pedestal in front of the school's main entrance had, for reasons no one could explain, started talking.
A crowd had already gathered. Dozens of students were broadcasting live on Instagram and TikTok. Chris pulled up one of the streams. The swashbuckling pirate statue, its bronze face frozen in a permanent, jaunty grin, was speaking in a gravelly, cliched pirate voice, offering unsolicited financial advice to the baffled onlookers. Its bronze head was still locked in place, but now its painted eyes seeming to follow students as they walked past.
"Yarrr, the secret to wealth be not in yer 401k!" the statue proclaimed, its voice a synthesized burble that sounded like a cheap Halloween decoration. "That be a fool's game! Invest all ye doubloons in turnip futures! The market be ripe for a bumper crop, mark me words!"
A group of teenagers laughed, holding their phones up to record the spectacle. The eye swiveled to them.
"And another thing!" it boomed. "The real treasure be NFTs of parrots! Digital birds for yer digital shoulder! It's the future of commerce on the high seas of the world wide web!"
Chris watched the livestream, a profound sense of helpless, nauseating dread washing over him. This had moved beyond funny glitches. This wasn't just backward cats and poetic welcome signs anymore. This was serious. A bronze statue had been given a soul, and that soul was a moronic pirate who thought turnip futures were a good investment.
As he watched the Buccaneer recommend "offshore accounts in the Tortugas, where the tax man can't find ye treasure," a small, private message window appeared in his vision. This one was plain, direct, and unadorned. It had a simple, serious header.
[PRIVATE MESSAGE from SYSTEM KERNEL]
Chris's breath caught in his throat. This wasn't the automated police. This was the main office.
[User "Christopher Day," your recent unauthorized actions have created 17 logic corruptions within the Buckhannon Reality Kernel. System integrity is now at 47%. A localized stability crash is possible. Unauthorized actions taken by System Stability Unit 734 are also noted.]
He read the message three times. 17 logic corruptions. System integrity at 47%. The System was telling him that he had broken reality, that the very fabric of his hometown was tearing apart at the seams. And then the last line... the ModBot was also at fault. The cosmic hall monitor had gone rogue. But that was cold comfort. The System was dying, and it was telling him that it was his fault.
Before he could even begin to process the implications of a direct message from the System Kernel, his entire world turned red.
His field of vision was consumed by a flashing, blood-red, full-screen alert. A loud, rhythmic klaxon alarm, a sound he had only ever heard in movies about nuclear submarines, blared in his mind, drowning out all other sound, drowning out his own thoughts. The text in the center of the screen was stark, white, and screamed with an unholy urgency.
[!!! CRITICAL STABILITY FAILURE IMMINENT !!!]
[AFFECTED SECTOR: 7G-EA.31415 (Buckhannon Reality Kernel)]
[URGENT MAIN QUEST ASSIGNED: DEBUG LOCAL REALITY KERNEL]
[FAILURE TO STABILIZE THE KERNEL WITHIN 24 HOURS WILL RESULT IN TOTAL, CASCADING REALITY COLLAPSE FOR THE DESIGNATED AREA.]
[Accept / Decline]
The word Decline was grayed out, flickering erratically as if it were a faulty fluorescent light. It was there, but it wasn't a real option.
Chris stared at the flashing red screen, his heart pounding against his ribs like a trapped bird. This was it. The ultimate consequence. There was no real choice. Declining meant doing nothing. It meant letting the town of Buckhannon, his home, his exasperated but loving family, every quirky and annoying person he had ever known, dissolve into a puddle of glitched, nonsensical reality. A world of backward cats, poetic signs, and turnip-based economies.
This wasn't about avoiding exposure anymore or getting in trouble; it was about saving everything. He couldn't ignore it. He was no chosen one. He was just a guy who had broken the world and was now being handed the toolbox to fix it.
Taking a deep, shaky breath that did nothing his nerves, he mentally focused on the brightly lit [Accept] button. He poured all of his will, all of his terror, all of his reluctant, newfound sense of responsibility into a single, mental command.
Accept.
The blaring red alert and the deafening klaxon vanished instantly. The sudden silence was as shocking as the noise had been. His vision returned to normal, the view of his messy bedroom snapping back into focus.
But now, there was a single, terrifyingly simple quest objective burned into his HUD, glowing with an urgent, ominous light.
[OBJECTIVE: Identify and physically access the Kernel's primary debugging interface.]