The [WORLD QUEST: Civic Stabilization] log was still a nagging presence in Chris's HUD. He'd been so focused on his personal quests—the lawnmower, the job hunt, the delicate art of not saying something stupid to his new friends—that he had neglected the bigger picture. He reviewed the quest log, his eyes drawn to the still-depressingly-low red bar.
[Infrastructure Integrity: 45/100]
His pothole-fixing spree had helped, but it was a drop in the bucket. He felt a pang of failure, a stain on his otherwise impressive record as a newly-minted Reality Architect. He needed a bigger, more systemic solution. As he was contemplating the immense prospect of having to find and repair every crack in every road in the county, the System, as if reading his mind, generated a new quest.
[Quest: Siren's Song]
[Objective: The Buckhannon emergency alert siren network is outdated and unreliable, operating at a suboptimal level. This constitutes a critical failure in civic infrastructure. Optimize the system to 95% functionality or higher.]
[Reward: 300 XP, +25 Infrastructure Integrity]
Chris's eyes widened. A twenty-five-point boost to the stat. That was a massive reward. That was the kind of high-value, high-impact quest that could change things. This was his chance to make a real, meaningful difference. Okay, he thought, a new sense of purpose straightening his slouch. No more small-time stuff. It's time to tackle a real infrastructure project.
From his bedroom, he began his work. He executed a wide-area [Analyze Vector Data] and an [INSPECT] on the town's emergency alert system. A schematic of the town appeared in his vision, overlaid with the faint, glowing lines of the siren network. The System's diagnosis was immediate, and unsurprising. The problem was not the physical sirens scattered across the county; the problem was the weak, analog radio signal that was supposed to activate them, a signal that originated from a control box on the second floor of the fire department.
[Object: Emergency Transmitter – Main]
[Object ID: Emergency_Transmitter_Main_01]
[Manufacturer: RadioShack (Defunct)]
[Last Serviced: 1992]
[Status: Degraded (Signal Strength: 42%)]
RadioShack, Chris thought with a snort. Of course. The entire town's emergency preparedness is dependent on a piece of hardware from a store that doesn't exist anymore. That's just perfect. The problem was a fairly accurate encapsulation of his town: well-intentioned, but thirty years out of date.
This was a problem for a Reality Architect. Instead of a difficult, and likely illegal, physical repair, he could directly modify the properties of the faulty hardware from a distance. Using a combination of the town's online utility maps and his [INSPECT] ability, he pinpointed the exact object ID of the main transmitter. He then activated his [Modify Object Property (Minor)] ability.
The ability's simple interface appeared in his vision. He targeted the transmitter and inputted his desired changes.
[Target Object ID: Emergency_Transmitter_Main_01]
[Modify Property: "Signal Strength"]
[New Value: 100%]
He hit [EXECUTE].
His [EP] bar drained with an alarming speed, the blue line plummeting all the way down to 9% as the fundamental, physical properties of a piece of thirty-year-old hardware were forcibly rewritten. He felt a wave of mental exhaustion, a dull ache behind his eyes. Miles away, on the second floor of the fire department, the old transmitter's output was invisibly and instantaneously boosted to factory-new levels.
A ding sounded in his mind.
[Quest Completed! 300 XP Awarded!]
[+25 Infrastructure Integrity]
The [Infrastructure Integrity] stat on his [WORLD QUEST] log jumped from a dismal 45/100 to a satisfying 70/100. The red bar turned a beautiful solid green. He had completed a major objective of his World Quest. He felt a surge pride in his own competence. He was at least somewhat good at this. He was fixing the town at the very least.
Feeling accomplished after his successful infrastructure repair, he decided to relax and reward himself with a bit of light entertainment. He scrolled through the Upshur County Community Forum, eager to catch up on the local drama. The "Big Cheese Crisis" was a raging dumpster fire. Skip Jenkins, in a desperate attempt to salvage his campaign, had posted a rambling, awkward apology video that had only made him a bigger laughingstock. The forum now treated all three human candidates—the angry hypocrite Ralph Hardwick, the scowling Milla Slater, and the pizza-poisoned farmer Skip Jenkins—as complete and utter jokes.
A new poll from the Buckhannon Record Delta had just been posted, and it had immediately gone viral locally. The poll showed "Bucky Watcher" with a staggering 80% of the vote. The other three candidates were all polling in the single digits, well within the margin of error. The blurry deer picture was no longer just a protest vote; it was now the presumptive mayor-elect.
The comments were a descent into political absurdity.
[Gary L.]: "SEE? THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN. WE'RE SICK OF THESE PHONY POLITICIANS. BUCKY WATCHER IS THE ONLY ONE WHO HASN'T LIED TO US (MOSTLY BECAUSE HE HASN'T TALKED)."
[Brenda G.]: "I just think it's wonderful. A real grassroots movement. It's about time we had a candidate who was more interested in our Buckhannon'sproblems than in backroom deals."
The seed of doubt that had been planted in his mind after the bingo incident, the unsettling feeling of a little too much coincidence, began to sprout into a thorny vine. The pizza incident was weird. The timing was too perfect. His mind then flashed to the unflattering photo of Milla Slater, an image made possible only by the loud celebration of his mother's bingo win. Another wild, unbelievable coincidence. Then he remembered the story about Ralph Hardwick's disastrous, traffic-delayed press conference, a traffic jam that had happened just after his own step-father had rushed out of the house in a hurry. A hurry that had been made possible by his own Nudge.
The pattern was too perfect, too statistically clean to be simple chance.
He tried to dismiss the thought as paranoid narcissism. No. No way. That's insane. These are tiny, little nudges. They can't cause that much chaos. It's just a coincidence. A really, really, really weird coincidence. But the suspicion gnawed at him, a hard knot in the pit of his stomach. He needed to know for sure. He needed proof.
He pulled up the Record Delta article that summarized the spectacular collapse of all three campaigns, an article titled "A Race to the Bottom: Buckhannon's Mayoral Recall in Chaos." The article, which mentioned all three disastrous, campaign-ending events, was good starting point for a full, deep-level investigation.
With a deep sense of dread, a feeling like he was about to open a door he could never close again. He focused on the news article on his monitor and engaged [INSPECT (Tier 2)], specifically selecting the [Causal Analysis] module.
A complex, shimmering web of light, like a glowing flowchart from a cosmic conspiracy board, overlaid his vision. The System began to trace the cause-and-effect chains of the events in the article, its logic an undeniable scalpel.
He watched as the glowing lines on the causal map traced backward from each political disaster, connecting the dots.
A glowing, blue line connected the [Hardwick Gridlock] to a smaller, antecedent node: [Pete Woody's Timely Departure].
A blue second line connected the [Slater Photo-Op Debacle] to [Misty Woody's Bingo Win].
A third blue line connected [The Big Cheese Crisis] to [Christopher Day's Priority Pizza Order].
And then, all three of those causal chains, the threads that had so completely upended the entire political landscape of his town, converged on a single, brightly glowing node, a node that pulsed with the faint, blue light of his own actions.
[USER: Christopher Day]
The visual evidence was irrefutable, a schematic of his own accidental, invisible hand. He saw, with an absolute certainty, that his small, selfish, and well-intentioned uses of the [Nudge] had systematically, and with a surgical precision, destroyed every legitimate campaign in town. He had been the accidental, and horrifyingly effective, campaign manager for his own nightmare.
He stared at the causal web, his face pale, the color draining from it as the weight of his accidental electoral manipulation crashed down upon him. His only thought was a silent horrified scream.