The gravel crunched under Arthur's boots with a definitive, rhythmic violence. To anyone else, it was just the sound of a middle-aged man walking toward his car, but to Arthur, it was an anthem. For almost three decades, his life had been a series of muffled impacts: the soft tap of a keyboard, the hiss of a sliding office door, the polite, suffocating silence of a man who worked late so his family could have a life he was too tired to join. He had been a "good man," which he now realized was a euphemism for a man who had stopped moving as he desired and followed the path given by others. It felt like he went nowhere.
He had come to the Oregon wilderness because he had lost something —what exactly he couldn't pinpoint. Other than the fact that his soul had become as grey as his cubicle walls. It was here, among the cedar and the sweat, that he'd rediscovered the word aggredere. The instructors hadn't taught him to be a bully; they had taught him that "aggression" meant to step forward. It was the essential masculine spark: the refusal to be part of the scenery. He'd spent countless years being the background; he intended to spend the rest of his lifetime being the protagonist.
"No more standing by," he whispered, his voice a raw rasp against the cooling mountain air. He felt heavy, not with fatigue, but with presence. He felt like a predator finally regaining its scent. He reached the edge of Highway 26, the asphalt shimmering like a dark mirror in the sunset. He looked at his hands—blistered, dirty, and trembling with a vitality he hadn't felt since his youth. He was ready to take action. He was ready to go home and finally create the life he had only ever dreamed of after a long day of working for the dreams of others.
He crossed the road to his car, standing proud, his mind projecting a future where he finally stood out from the masses.
He didn't see nor hear the truck until it was a wall of chrome and roaring diesel. In that final microsecond, there was no fear—only a towering, indignant fury. Not now, his soul screamed. I just learned how to move. The impact wasn't a sound. It was the sudden, absolute end of his ability to take another step.
Arthur expected darkness or perhaps the "White Light" everyone talked about. Instead, he found himself sitting in a high-backed leather armchair. It was plush, smelled faintly of expensive tobacco, and felt suspiciously like the one in his private study—except it was currently floating in a sea of iridescent, swirling fog.
"That was quite the impact," a voice said.
It was melodic and feminine, carrying a rhythmic cadence that suggested the speaker found everything—including his violent demise—faintly hilarious.
Arthur looked around. He didn't have a body, exactly; he was a cohesive "thought" suspended in the mist. Standing before him was a figure draped in shimmering silks that shifted colors like an oil slick on a puddle. She lacked a distinct face, but the way the light gathered around her head gave the unmistakable impression of a wide, mischievous grin.
"Am I dead?" Arthur asked. His voice didn't vibrate in a throat; it simply manifested in the space between them.
"Technically? You're a smear on the pavement," the entity replied, pacing with an airy, gravity-defying grace. "But for our purposes, let's call you a 'Candidate.' I am what your internet subcultures might call a R.O.B. A Random Omnipotent Being. Or a Ruthless Omnipotent Bastard. Dealer's choice."
Arthur tried to channel his retreat-honed stoicism, though it was hard to be stoic when you were a floating consciousness. "What happens now? Judgment? The Great Beyond?"
"Usually? You just dissolve back into the cosmic soup. It's efficient, but boring," she said, waving a hand to dismiss the afterlife. "But I like your flavor. You spent a week trying to 'reconnect with your male side' only to be flattened by a man-made machine. The irony is delicious. So, I have a proposal."
"A proposal?"
"Reincarnation. A new world, a new body, a new life. And to make it interesting, I'll grant you a boon. I've been peering into your memories... you were quite fond of that film with the little clear pills, weren't you?"
Arthur's mind—or the fragment of it remaining—raced. "Limitless? NZT-48?"
"Exactly," the R.O.B. chirped, clapping her hands with a sound like shattering glass. "A permanent, not just biological, integration of NZT-48 into your very essence. It will be etched into your soul, Arthur. Total recall, hyper-accelerated learning, sensory enhancement, and the ability to learn everthing. No side effects. No crash. No brain hemorrhages. Just pure, unadulterated genius. And this stays with you even through future reincarnations. You'll be the smartest person in any room, in any universe."
Arthur felt a surge of cold excitement, followed by the skepticism of a man who had spent so many years in corporate law. "There's a catch. There's always a catch."
"Sharp! That's the NZT potential peaking through already," she laughed. "Yes. To keep me entertained, I get to apply one permanent 'complication' to your new existence. You won't know what it is until you're breathing again. Nothing bad, absolutely not. I can guarantee that about half of the entire planet lives with similar problems. It just will make your life... cinematic."
She leaned in, and though she had no weight, Arthur felt a terrifying pressure. "So, Arthur. Option A: You walk into that white light over there and see if there's a heaven, or if you just turn into cosmic dust. Option B: You take the deal, and show me what a 'reclaimed man' does with the brain of a god."
Arthur looked at the light. It was peaceful, but it felt like a surrender. He thought about his unfinished "roar."
"I'll take the deal," Arthur said.
"Splendid," the R.O.B. whispered. "Try not to bore me."
The transition was not a fade-in. It was a physical assault.
The world exploded in a cacophony of agony. Arthur let out a pitiful moan—a sound far too high-pitched and melodic for his forty-year-old lungs. He was lying face down on a cold, unforgiving surface. His head throbbed with a rhythmic, wet heat that pulsed in time with his racing heart.
With unfocused eyes and trembling fingers, he clawed at the floor, trying to find an anchor. His hand found a massive, hot ridge on the side of his skull, and when he pulled back, his palm was slick with deep, oxygenated crimson.
He reached out blindly to steady himself, his hands brushing against scattered vellum sheets and then something long, tangled, and matted. He pulled at the tangle, only for a fresh spike of lightning to shoot through his scalp. It was hair. His hair. It was a thick, dark brown mane, heavy with clotting blood.
Then, the chaos stopped.
The NZT-48 integration didn't just "turn on"; it colonized his consciousness. In a microsecond, the pain was partitioned into a background file. His brain began processing tactile data with the cold efficiency of a forensic computer: the floor was polished limestone; the papers were hand-inked with mineral-based pigments; the "long hair" and – his hand shot to his face - the lack of a beard indicated a total physiological shift.
I am not Arthur.
Slowly, he sat up, keeping his eyes shut to avoid the vertigo. His new mind, operating at a trillion cycles per second, analyzed the cooling rate of the blood on his fingers and the drying patterns of the ink on the floor.
He opened his eyes. The world didn't just appear; it rendered in 8K resolution. He saw every grain in the oak bookshelves, every speck of dust caught in the light, even the dented bullet lying beside him.
Unconscious for an unknown time. Blood loss: negligible. Status: Non-lethal.
He was in the textile mill's library. The air was a cocktail of old parchment, Loom-oil, and the metallic tang of a massacre. He looked down at his hands—slender, pale, and incredibly steady. As he felt a strange, unfamiliar weight on his chest, the R.O.B.'s parting words echoed with a cruel clarity: "Half the planet lives with similar problems."
"Wow," she whispered. The voice was like silver bells, but the tone was the cold rasp of a lawyer. "I really did not expect this."
Fox. The name arrived with images of a her parents torture to death, the Fraternity, and the loom that wanted to prevent her from her fate. He saw the face of Sloan, the man who had turned a sacred duty into a murder-for-hire scheme. He saw Wesley—the boy with the panicked eyes and the untapped potential.
In the original timeline, Fox had chosen the "curving" bullet to end the cycle, taking her own life to uphold a code that had already been betrayed. But in this reality, the bullet lost just enough momentum before striking her. The "suicide" had become a "concussion."
The NZT processed her -uh- his feelings for Wesley—the protective instinct, the budding romantic tension. Arthur's forty-year-old male ego recoiled.
Reciprocated feelings. Target: Wesley Gibson. Status: Complication. Avoid at all costs.
The male soul inside Fox went into high alert. He—she—did not like that one bit. The "negative" was clear now: he was a tactical genius trapped in the body of a woman everyone thought was an assassin, burdened with the hormonal residue of a tragic romance.
There was no time for an identity crisis. The situation demanded action.
"Sloan and Wesley should either be leaving or already have left through the passages behind the loom. I will erase prove of my surviving and then vanish. The front should be soon be swarmed with police after all those explosions," she muttered, her eyes scanning the room.
She stood up, her balance perfect despite the new body and head wound. She moved through the library with the predatory grace of an apex killer. The others were dead—Sloan's empire was a graveyard of elite assassins. She moved from body to body, her hands moving with surgical precision.
She looted her former colleagues, taking high-denomination cash, encrypted burner phones, and a pair of customized Berettas. Every movement was optimized for speed and silence.
She knew the layout of the factory better than her own childhood home. She moved toward the chemical storage for the cloth dyes. If she was going to disappear, Fox had to stay dead. A fire in the textile mill wouldn't just destroy the evidence of her survival; it would cremate the Fraternity's secrets.
As she splashed accelerant across the loom room, her mind was already three days ahead.
I have a safe house in Hegewisch under the name 'Sarah Miller.' Emergency funds: $40,000. No cameras at the 4th Street ATM. Risk of detection: minimal.
She struck a match. The flame reflected in her wide, intelligent eyes—eyes that saw the world not as a place of fate or "The Loom," but as a chance at a second life. Something different. Something new.
As the factory began to roar with the fire she had created, she stepped out into the night air. This chapter was over. She wondered what in the eyes of an ROB would count as cinematic entertainment.