By noon the city had a name for it.
The System. Capitalized, singular, like there was only one — which there was, technically, just distributed across eight billion people with results that varied enormously. By noon there were already forums, already tier lists, already arguments about what Tier Four meant compared to Tier Three and whether the Healer subclass was better or worse than the Combat subclass at equivalent tiers. By noon the news was calling it the greatest event in human history, which seemed accurate. By noon approximately fourteen people I could see from my apartment window had demonstrated some variety of new ability, ranging from a woman whose houseplants had grown three feet overnight to a man on the corner who was levitating objects the size of cars and then setting them down carefully, like he was testing something.
My phone said: [ALTERNATIVE PROTOCOL: 7% COMPLETE]
I made eggs. I ate them standing at the counter. I watched the man levitate a compact hatchback four feet off the ground and then lower it back, and then walk away, and then come back, and then levitate it again. He did this eleven times while I was watching. I assumed he had a reason.
Mira called at noon and talked for forty minutes while I sat on my kitchen floor because the chairs were uncomfortable and the floor was not. She had, in the past twelve hours, healed a cut on her neighbor's arm that had been there for a week and closed completely in thirty seconds, removed a headache for the man who ran the convenience store on the corner, and confirmed that her abilities worked on animals when a street cat with a bad paw limped past and she put her hand near it and watched the paw straighten out.
"I keep thinking there's a catch," she said.
"There probably is," I said.
"Kai."
"There's always a catch."
"You're very calming."
"I know."
"What tier did your System give you?"
I looked at my phone. Seven percent. The blue box had not changed its fundamental message. It was still activating. It was still processing something it called the Alternative Protocol and had not explained.
"Still processing," I said.
A pause. Mira's pauses were specific — this one was the pause of someone choosing whether to push.
She chose not to. "Come over tonight? I made food."
"Yes," I said.
I hung up and sat on my kitchen floor for a while longer.
---
The first thing I understood about the new world, that first day, was that visibility had become survival.
Before, being unremarkable was neutral. It was just what I was — average height, average build, the kind of face that people described later as generic, someone who could stand in a crowd for an hour and leave no impression. I had never decided to be this way. It was just the shape of me.
After, unremarkable was a liability.
The System Authority — which had apparently existed in some preliminary form before yesterday, because organizations that comprehensive do not materialize in twenty-four hours — had set up registration stations in every major city. I walked past three of them on my way to the corner store. They were efficient, staffed by people who had the particular posture of people who knew what they were doing and had been told to project that certainty regardless of how they actually felt. At each station there was a line. At each line, the process appeared to be: approach, confirm System notification, receive registration tag.
I did not approach any of them.
I watched from across the street for a while. The people in the lines looked relieved, mostly. There is something very human about wanting official acknowledgment of a thing that has happened to you. Here is my ability. Here is my tier. Here is documentation that I am what I now am. The System Authority had understood this within twenty-four hours and deployed it, which told me something about them I was still categorizing.
A woman came out of the nearest station with a pale blue tag on her jacket that said TIER 2 — ASCENDANT and she looked down at it and her face did the thing faces do when something difficult has been made manageable.
I kept walking.
---
The second thing I understood, that first day, was that being unregistered was already becoming the wrong thing to be.
I heard it first in the corner store from the man at the counter, who had a Tier 1 tag and was telling a customer: "They said everyone needs to register by the end of the week. Safety thing. So they know where the abilities are." He shrugged. "Makes sense to me."
I heard it second on the screen in the corner of the store that was running news, a woman in a studio saying: "The System Authority has confirmed that registration is voluntary at this time, though officials strongly encourage—" and then I was past the screen and out the door with a bag of groceries.
Voluntary at this time.
I sat on a bench outside and ate an apple and thought about that phrase with the kind of attention it deserved.
My phone said: [ALTERNATIVE PROTOCOL: 9% COMPLETE]
A man walked past the bench and glanced at my jacket. At the absence of a tag on my jacket. His glance lasted a half-second, and his face did not do anything particularly readable, and he kept walking. But the glance had happened. I had seen it.
I finished the apple.
I had one week, apparently, before voluntary became something else.
---
Mira lived twelve blocks from me in an apartment that was warmer than mine, which she achieved through the specific method of owning several large plants and a good rug and caring about the space she occupied in ways I had never quite managed. I arrived at six with the groceries because she had said she made food but I knew from experience that Mira's definition of making food was ambitious and her relationship with following through on it was complicated.
She opened the door and the first thing she did was look at my jacket.
I watched her do it. The flicker across her face — something searching, something landing on the absence of a tag, something going still.
"Still processing," I said.
Her face shifted into something careful. "Right. Right, okay, come in."
She had, in fact, made food — pasta, well-executed, the kind of meal that meant she had been anxious and cooking was how she managed it. We ate at her kitchen table while she told me about her day and I listened and watched her hands, which moved more than usual when she talked, tracing shapes in the air. She was lit up in a specific way. New thing, new ability, the world rearranged around a capability she had not had yesterday. It was genuine and it was good to see.
I told her about the registration stations. I did not tell her about the glance from the man on the street.
"I'm going tomorrow," she said. "The registration. You should come."
"When mine finishes," I said.
She put her fork down. Picked it up again. "Kai. It's been eighteen hours."
"I know."
"Is that—is that normal? For it to take this long?"
I thought about the blue box on my phone. ERROR CODE 0x000. ORIGIN UNCLASSIFIED. ALTERNATIVE PROTOCOL ACTIVATING.
"I don't know," I said. "I've been trying to find information."
"And?"
"Nothing." Which was true. I had searched for the error code and found nothing. I had searched for alternative protocol and found nothing. I had searched for incompatible host and found three results, all of them from the first hours of the morning, all of them from people who had received the same message. All three threads had been deleted. "Maybe it's a processing delay."
Mira looked at me the way she looked at me when she was deciding whether to say the thing she was thinking.
She said the thing. "If your System doesn't activate—"
"It's activating," I said. "It's just slow."
"But if it doesn't—"
"Mira." I looked at her steadily. "Let's finish eating."
She was quiet for a moment. Her pasta was getting cold and she was not eating it.
"I just want you to be okay," she said.
The thing in my throat was not describable in any simple way. I looked at my plate.
"I know," I said.
---
I walked home at nine.
The city was different at night than it had been twenty-four hours ago. Not more dangerous, exactly — or not only that. More alive, in the way that things that have been given new variables are alive. There were lights on in apartments that were usually dark at this hour. There were people on stoops and in doorways, in pairs and clusters, talking with the specific energy of people processing something large. I saw three separate demonstrations of abilities on my twelve-block walk home: a man who made a small precise flame in his hand and then closed his hand around it and showed his friend the flame was gone, a woman whose shadow moved independently for a few steps and then resumed normal behavior, a child of maybe eight who made a sound and then covered her mouth and giggled while the sound kept going without her.
None of them had the wrong color of tag. None of them had no tag.
I let myself into my apartment.
I made tea I did not drink. I sat in the kitchen chair that was uncomfortable and thought about seventeen hours of ALTERNATIVE PROTOCOL ACTIVATING and about three deleted threads from people who had received the same message and about voluntary at this time and about a woman across the city reading a report with my name in it.
I did not know about that last thing yet. I was inferring it.
My phone screen lit up from the counter.
I looked at it from across the room for a moment before I picked it up.
[ALTERNATIVE PROTOCOL: 11% COMPLETE]
[ESTIMATED TIME REMAINING: UNKNOWN]
[NOTE: HOST PHYSICAL CHANGES INITIATED. THIS IS NORMAL.]
I read the last line three times.
Normal, it said.
I stood in my kitchen at nine-fifteen PM and I thought about what normal meant in a sentence that had started with INCOMPATIBLE HOST DETECTED, and I thought about the scar on my left palm, and I pressed my thumb against it the way I always did when I was in the middle of something I could not yet see the edges of.
The scar was warm.
It had never been warm before.