The text changed again.
[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: CREATE GENUINE VALUE FOR ANOTHER PERSON.<<Preferably a lady>> ]
Garrett read it twice. Not because it was hard to understand. Because it wasn’t, and somehow that felt worse.
"Create value," he said. "So help someone?"
[HELP IS NOT AUTOMATICALLY VALUE.]
"Right. Of course it isn’t."
[VALUE IS MEASURED BY WHAT THE OTHER PERSON RECEIVES. NOT BY WHAT YOU DO.]
He stared at the words for a moment longer.
What did that actually mean?
He wasn’t sure.
The system had given him an answer without really answering anything, which seemed to be becoming a habit.
So, basically, he had to be useful to someone. Not perform usefulness. Actually be it.
Garrett considered that for a moment.
He wasn’t sure when being useful had become something he had to think about.
His eyes drifted back to the screen.
Maybe the important part wasn’t what he did.
Maybe it was what the other person actually got from it.
He set the phone down and decided not to think about it.
It rang almost immediately, like it had been listening.
His sister.
He looked at the screen for a second before answering. They didn’t call each other without a reason. They hadn’t in a while.
The system objective was still sitting in the back of his mind when he answered.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey." A short pause, the kind that meant she was working up to something. "Are you doing anything right now?"
"Not really."
"Can I get a few quid from ya? Just whatever you’ve got. I need to get somethings and Mum isn’t gonna give me money for that. She already told me."
Garrett glanced at the phone in his hand.
For half a second, the timing felt almost deliberate.
Then he dismissed the thought.
Coincidences happened.
He didn’t need a supernatural explanation for every phone call.
He didn’t need to check his banking app to know the number, but he glanced at it anyway. £61.12. Minus whatever the groceries he hadn’t bought yet were going to cost.
"I can’t," he said. "I got let go today. I’ve got nothing spare."
The silence that followed wasn’t the working-up-to-something kind. It was the other kind.
"You always say that."
"I don’t always say that."
"You do, though. There’s always a reason. It’s convenient."
"It’s not convenient. I just got fired this afternoon."
"Great timing," she said, and it wasn’t quite a joke, or it was, but not one either of them was going to laugh at.
"I’ll help when I can," he said.
"You always say that too."
She hung up before he could respond to that, which was probably for the best, because he didn’t have anything that wouldn’t have made it worse.
He sat there with the phone in his hand for a while. Not doing anything with it. Just holding it.
He was fourteen when she was eleven, and some kid at her school had said something about their dad not being around much. She’d come home and hadn’t said a word about it to anyone.
He’d only found out because he heard her crying through the wall that night. He remembered sitting outside her door for a long time trying to decide whether to knock, and then knocking anyway. She’d let him in.
Neither of them mentioned the kid. They watched something stupid on his laptop until she fell asleep against his shoulder, and he stayed like that longer than his arm wanted him to because he didn’t want to wake her up.
He couldn’t point to the exact moment that stopped being who they were to each other. There wasn’t one conversation, one fight, one thing he could blame it on. It had just gotten harder, over time, to be the person who knocked. Easier to be the person who didn’t.
Eventually that became the whole shape of it.
He still cared. That wasn’t a question, not for him. It simply didn’t look like anything anymore from where she was standing, and he understood, in a low, unhappy way, why that mattered more than the caring did.
His thought strayed to the system and its primary objective, which had enveloped the screen again.
Create genuine value for another person.
His sister had needed some money tonight, something specific, and he genuinely didn’t have it to give.
But that left him with a question he couldn’t quite shake.
If he couldn’t give someone what they asked for, did that mean he couldn’t create value for them at all?
He turned it over for a while, wondering whether there was some other kind of help that didn’t cost money, whether he even remembered what that used to look like.
He didn’t arrive anywhere useful.
He filed it, same as most things lately, under think about this later, and let it drop.
Knock.
Knock.
He sat up straight before he’d even registered why.
He wasn’t expecting anyone. Nobody came round anymore. That had been true long enough that the knock itself felt wrong before he’d worked out who it might be.
The third knock followed, firmer than the last two, like whoever it was already knew he was in and had no intention of leaving.
Garrett looked at the phone.
Then at the door.
The timing was strange.
Probably nothing.
He looked around the flat. The mugs on the counter. The trainer that had become part of the hallway. The state of himself, same clothes since that morning, no plan to change out of them until tomorrow forced the issue.
"Please don’t be someone I know," he thought, and got up anyway, because there wasn’t really a version of this where he didn’t.
He opened the door.
It was a lady from the third floor. He’d passed her in the stairwell a handful of times over however many months she’d lived there, exchanged maybe four words with her total, none of them memorable.
"Hi," she said. "Sorry. I know this is going to sound weird."
He didn’t say anything yet. He was still catching up.
"My power’s out. The whole flat. I’ve got a deadline tonight and about four percent battery left, and you’re the only person on this floor whose face I actually know." She pointed towards her door, as evidence she wasn’t lying.
"Any chance I could borrow an outlet for like an hour?"
Garrett looked at her.
Then briefly at the phone still in his hand.
Create genuine value for another person.
A woman he’d barely spoken to had just walked to his door because she needed something he could actually give her.
Maybe it was a coincidence.
Maybe it wasn’t.
He didn’t know.
"Now?" he said, glancing back into his flat.
"Yeah. If that’s okay."
He looked at the room.
Then back at her.
"Sure," he said. "Come in."
He stepped aside.
And for the first time since the system had appeared, Garrett had a very specific feeling that he might be standing in front of the answer to a question he hadn’t figured out how to ask yet.