[Lattice Companion] Physical adaptation threshold reached. Baseline +1% (52%). Keep it up, Rook!
The notification came in at 6:24 on Monday morning, while Owen was lacing his shoes on the front step in the dark, and he read it twice and then put the phone away very carefully, the way you'd put away a lottery ticket.
Fifty-two. Without the drink. Without the warm-up. Just him, lying on a bed, being a slightly less broken eighteen-year-old than he'd been nine days ago.
"Are you smiling at your phone?" said Maddie, coming out behind him in her soccer hoodie. Dad was off the walk until Tuesday, by order of the ER nurse who lived in their house, so it was the two of them. "That's so weird. Who even texts at six?"
"Nobody. It's a health app."
"That's weirder."
They walked the route in the cold. The creek was loud under the footbridge from the weekend's rain. Maddie talked the whole way, about the clip, which had a million and a half views by then and which she had watched, she said, "maybe eleven times, not in a weird way," and about how the comments were arguing over whether Rook was a pod player or a Lattice employee or a bot.
"One guy said you're an AI," she said. "Like the game made you. As a mascot."
"I'm not an AI."
"That's what an AI would say." She kicked a pinecone. "Also, a girl in my class said your avatar is cute, and I had to leave the room."
School was worse.
School was a hallway full of people who had seen the clip, and the clip had his face in it. Not exactly. Rook was a little taller and his jaw was a little sharper and his hair did a thing in the wind that Owen's real hair would never do, but at the end of the clip, after the last hit, there was a shot of Rook sitting down on the grey stones in the dark with his elbows on his knees, and that was just Owen. That was exactly how Owen sat.
By second period, Jaden Price had made it everybody's lock screen.
"Mossbreaker," Jaden said, falling into the seat next to him in chemistry. "Bro. Mossbreaker. You know there's a guy on the forums doing a frame-by-frame of that last dodge? He's got arrows on it. He thinks you're exploiting a hitbox."
"It's a form."
"What form?"
"A bad one," said Owen, honestly.
At the front of the room, Mrs. Okonkwo let her beaded glasses chain swing once and looked at them over the top of her lenses.
"Mr. Callery," she said. "I understand from my nephew that you killed a tree."
The class went ohhhhh. Owen put his forehead on the desk.
"I'm told it was very impressive." She turned to the board. "Quiz on Thursday. Stoichiometry. Trees will not be accepted as an excuse."
He wrote it in the notebook: THU QUIZ. STOICH. Then, underneath, because his first-life self had gotten a D-minus in this class and his mother had written a clause about it: Actually study.
Theo: i picked my class
Theo: ELEMENTALIST
Theo: fire is life. fire is love. i am the guy who sets the moss on fire
Owen: you can't set the moss on fire
Theo: not with that attitude
Monday night, Owen did something he hadn't done once since launch day.
He didn't log in.
He did his chemistry. He did eleven pushups on the bedroom floor, finally, and eight reps on the garage bench, and he ate a dinner of chicken and rice and a lot of green beans, and he went to bed at 10:15, and he lay there in the dark and listened to the house, and his father's snoring came up through the floor, slow and even and very loud, like a man sawing a truck in half.
He fell asleep listening to it.
[Lattice Companion] Physical adaptation threshold reached. Baseline +1% (53%). Two in a row! Your body is responding fast, Rook.
Tuesday, 6:12 AM. He read that one in the back seat of his mother's car, in the dark, on the way to Dr. Mehta's office.
His father was in the front passenger seat, fasting, because the bloodwork needed it, and he'd made sure everybody knew how he felt about that. He hadn't had coffee. A man who had had coffee every morning since 1997 was sitting in a car without coffee at six in the morning and wanted the world to understand the sacrifice.
"I could have a little coffee," he said.
"No," said Owen's mother.
"Black. No sugar. Black coffee doesn't count."
"Black coffee counts, Rick."
"Who says?"
"Every lab in America."
Owen had texted the school office. His mother had signed a note. Owen had expected an argument about it, and there hadn't been one: his mother had just looked at him for a second over the kitchen counter on Sunday night and said, "Yeah. You should come."
The office was in a low brick building across the street from St. Joseph's, next to the cardiology practice where Aimee worked, with a parking lot full of puddles and a waiting room full of chairs that were all exactly a little too small. There was a TV in the corner, on mute, with captions. A woman in a cardigan was knitting under it. An old man was asleep. The TV was showing the local morning news, and at 7:58, while his father filled out a clipboard with a pen that kept dying, the screen cut to a graphic that said VR ZOMBIES? in red letters, over a stock photo of a teenager in a headset with his mouth open.
...after a seventeen-year-old in Ohio was found dehydrated and disoriented following a nineteen-hour session in the new game Vael Online. Lattice Neural Systems says its headsets include mandatory logouts and break reminders, and that the incident is under review. In a statement, Lattice CEO Adrian Vey said—
Then Adrian Vey's face, from some conference stage, with a microphone on his ear and a sweater that cost more than their couch.
"Vael is a world that moves with you. We designed it to reward balance. The best players we're seeing are the healthiest ones."
Owen stared at the screen.
He remembered this. Not this story; this kind of story. There'd be a hundred of them before the end of the year, and a pod death in 2027, and a law with a name, and Adrian Vey would say some version of that sentence in front of Congress in year six with his hand on a glass of water. The best players are the healthiest ones. Everybody would laugh at it, because by then the best players were all lying in forty-thousand-dollar pods with IV lines in their arms. And Lattice would keep saying it anyway, every year, like a man knocking on a door that nobody opens.
He's not wrong, thought Owen, who was sitting in a doctor's waiting room watching his baseline go up while his father filled out a form about chest pain. That's what's so weird. He's literally not wrong.
"Rick Callery?"
Dr. Mehta was a small, brisk woman in her late fifties with reading glasses pushed up into grey hair and the exact energy of Owen's mother on a night shift. She looked at Owen, and at his mother, and back at his father, and said, "You brought the whole family."
"They brought me," said his father.
"Good. Sit down."
Owen had expected to wait outside. He didn't. Nobody told him to leave, and he didn't offer, and so he sat on a plastic chair in the corner of a small white room and watched his father take off his shirt.
He'd seen his father without a shirt a thousand times. At the lake, in the garage on hot days, in the backyard with the hose. He'd never looked at it like this. The heaviness at the middle. The skin a little grey under the strip lights. A scar on his shoulder from a transmission that had slipped in 2011. The nurse stuck ten little sticky pads on him, chest and wrists and ankles, with wires coming off them in every direction like he'd been caught in a net.
"Breathe normally," she said. "Don't talk."
"Can I—"
"Don't talk, Rick," said Owen's mother.
The machine hummed. A long ribbon of paper slid out of it, with lines on it. Owen didn't know how to read those lines. In his first life, nobody had ever made one for his father. Not once. Not until the end, and at the end there hadn't been paper, just a monitor in a hospital room with a flat green line and a sound he still heard sometimes, at three in the morning, in 2040. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
NovelPhoenix carries the author's publication, yet this text was taken without permission. Reading the story there supports its writer.
Dr. Mehta read the ribbon with her glasses pulled down onto her nose. She took her time.
"Okay," she said. "It's not an emergency. I want to say that first, because I can see your faces. It's not an emergency."
His father let out a breath.
"But it's not a clean strip, either. There are some changes here." She tapped a part of the paper that looked to Owen exactly like every other part of the paper. "Nonspecific. That's the word I'm going to write. It means I can see something, and I can't tell from this what it is. Could be nothing. Could be your heart's been working harder than it wants to for a long time. With the chest pressure on exertion since Christmas, I'm not going to guess. I'm going to send you for a stress test."
"The treadmill one," said Owen's mother quietly.
"The treadmill one. Cardiology's across the street. They'll call you to schedule." She took her glasses off. "And blood pressure, Mr. Callery, is one fifty-two over ninety-six. Which is high. Which you knew."
"I didn't know."
"Did you ever check?"
His father thought about it. "No."
"Then you knew," said Dr. Mehta, not unkindly. "Okay. Here's what's going to happen until the stress test. You walk. Flat ground. Every day, if you can. You don't run, you don't lift anything at work you'd need a second guy for, and if you get that pressure again, you stop, and you sit down, and you call. Not tomorrow. That minute." She looked at Owen's mother. "I assume someone in this family will be enforcing that."
"There's a contract," said Owen.
Dr. Mehta looked at him for the first time like he was a person and not a chair.
"Clause six," said his father. "The kid wrote it."
"Then the kid should get a raise," said Dr. Mehta. "Bloodwork's next door. Results by Friday."
The bloodwork took eleven tubes.
That was what his father said, afterward, in the car. He said it to Owen's mother, and he said it to Owen, and that night at dinner he said it to Maddie, who had not asked.
"Eleven tubes, Mads. They took eleven tubes out of me. I'm a quart low."
"It was four," said their mother.
"It felt like eleven."
"It was four little tubes, Rick, and you looked away for all of them, and you asked the phlebotomist if she had a lollipop."
"She did have a lollipop."
"Because she keeps them for children."
But that was later. That morning, at home, his father ate his lollipop with enormous dignity and drank his first coffee of the day, black, at 10:40, standing at the counter, like a man coming in from the desert. He looked fine. He looked completely fine. That was the thing about it, Owen thought, standing there in his socks with his backpack, about to go to school late. That was always the thing. People looked fine.
"I can walk," his father said to him, out of nowhere. "Doc says. Flat ground." He pointed his coffee mug. "Six-thirty tomorrow. Don't you sleep in."
"I won't."
"You will. You're eighteen. I'll come up and get you."
"Dad." Owen looked at him. "I won't."
His father looked back at him for a second. Then he nodded, once, and drank his coffee.
Theo came over at 3:40, after school, with a bag of pretzels and the expression of a man who'd been promised answers and planned to collect them.
They sat in the garage because Owen's bedroom had become a place where his mother checked the thermostat. Theo sat on the weight bench. Owen sat on an upturned bucket. The garage smelled like cold concrete and engine degreaser and the faint ghost of a thousand of his father's coffees.
"Okay," said Theo. "Go."
Owen had thought about this all day. All weekend, actually, since the text. He'd thought about telling him everything. I died in a VR raid at thirty-two. I've played this game for fourteen years. In the first one you quit in a month, because I ditched you, and by the time I noticed, I didn't even have your number. He'd thought about telling him nothing. Neither of those was right. The first would sound insane, and the second would end the only friendship he'd ever really had twice.
"What if I said I know some stuff," Owen said. "About the game. Before it happens. Not everything. A lot of it's fuzzy. Some of it's wrong already, because things are different. But a lot of it."
Theo ate a pretzel. "Like the beta."
"Like the beta, but more."
"How much more?"
"Like." Owen looked at the concrete. "Like I've played it before. For a long time."
The garage was quiet. Somewhere in the house, his father's TV was going.
"Bro," said Theo slowly, "that's a time travel thing. You're doing a time travel thing."
"I'm not saying—"
"You're saying you know what happens. You knew about the moss. You knew it would be 8:09. You knew the tram." Theo pointed a pretzel at him. "There's only three explanations for that. One, you're a Lattice employee. Two, you hacked their servers. Three, the time thing."
"Four," said Owen. "I'm just really good at guessing."
"Nobody is that good at guessing. You guessed a minute."
Owen didn't say anything.
Theo looked at him for a long time. It was a strange look. Not suspicious. Owen had braced for suspicious, or for a joke, and what he got instead was the look Theo had given him in seventh grade when Owen told him his grandma had died, a sort of careful, sideways attention, like Theo was checking where it hurt.
"Okay," said Theo. "Here's the thing. I don't need to know how. Not today." He held up a finger. "But. One. When you can tell me, you tell me. Two. You don't use it on me. Like, you don't manage me. If you know something bad's coming for me, you just say it. Even if it's weird." He held up a third finger. "Three. Explain the tram."
Owen laughed. It came out a lot shakier than he meant it to.
"Clay doesn't slip," he said. "On iron. Normally. But the mudlings are clay, and when the rail's wet, the friction value on their feet goes to almost nothing, and when they're aggro'd onto you, they don't walk down the rail, they slide. Three times faster. It's a physics bug. In my—" He stopped. "In the version I know, they patched it in 1.3. Before that, people used it for everything. Pulls. Escapes. Murder."
"Murder," said Theo happily.
"Mercer found out about murder."
"Mercer found out about murder," Theo agreed, and lay down on the weight bench and laughed at the ceiling until he coughed. Then he said, still on his back, not looking at Owen: "Something bad's coming for me? In the version you know?"
Owen thought about a moving truck in the Bankses' driveway one morning in June, in the first life, that he hadn't gone outside to see. About a group chat that went quiet and never came back.
"Not soon," he said. "And it's not your fault. And I'm going to be there."
"Okay," said Theo. He didn't push. He just lay there with a pretzel on his chest. After a while he said, "Weirdest Tuesday of my life," and Owen said, "Mine too," which was true, and was the first completely true thing he'd ever said to Theo about it. Find the original chapter at novelping . com.
[Base 53% | Modifiers active: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3%, 3h 51m remaining | Primed +2%]
[SYNC: 58% (Clear)]
Tuesday, 7:52 PM. School night. Done by 9:30.
He'd planned the session down to the minute in the notebook on the bus, because there was only one thing he wanted to do tonight and it was on a timer: the wolf ridge, in the 8:14 night window, at fifty-eight. Two more points than he'd had at the shrine on Sunday. He wanted to know what two points felt like in Threefold Step.
He got to the ridge at 8:10 and found it empty. The world-first had pulled half the Riverlands into the Fenwild to stand on the Drowned Causeway and take screenshots. Nobody was hunting wolves. At 8:14 the sun went out like a breaker flipped off, and the marsh-lights came up along the Cairn Road, and the wolves came over the ridge, four of them, one Alpha.
[Night Wolf - Level 13] x3
[Night Wolf Alpha - Level 14]
He fought them clean.
That was the only word for it. Not perfectly, and not like a god, but clean, in a way he'd never once felt at this level in his first life. The Back Steps came out where he wanted them. Rising Cut landed on the third beat every time. He was Level 12 now, at fifty-eight, with a form tolerance of plus or minus sixty-two milliseconds, and sixty-two milliseconds turned out to be an enormous amount of room, a whole living room of room, compared to the closet he'd been working in a week ago.
[Flow: SYNC 59%]
[Flow: SYNC 60%]
At sixty, he went for it.
The Alpha came in low, and Owen stepped back on the exhale, and held, and turned, and lunged.
[Threefold Step - Imprecise (motion)]
[SYNC: 60% / 60% ✓ | Pivot: 71° / 90° ✗]
[Form completed outside tolerance. Effect: Imprecise.]
He stopped dead in the grass. The Alpha bit him in the thigh for twenty-two and he barely felt it.
Oh, he thought. Oh, you absolute bastard.
He'd known it. He'd written it in the notebook on Sunday in capital letters: HIPS ARE THE PROBLEM. But some stupid, hopeful part of him had thought that when he hit the number, the number would carry him. It didn't. The game had told him, in green and red, exactly what was wrong: he had the sync, and he didn't have the body. Seventy-one degrees. The form wanted ninety. And no amount of electrolytes in the world was going to turn his hips another nineteen degrees.
[Flow: SYNC 61%]
He killed the Alpha with a plain Rising Cut, a little angrily, and stood there breathing on the ridge at sixty-one, the highest he had ever been in either life, and didn't feel even slightly like celebrating.
Then he saw her.
She was sitting on a rock about forty yards up the ridge, at the edge of the light from the Cairn Road, with her legs crossed and her chin in her hand, eating an apple.
[Varga - Level 17]
Owen didn't move.
He knew that name better than he knew his own. He'd seen it at the top of every leaderboard for ten years. He'd watched her slide under the Maw's sweep in his last two minutes alive. In his first life, Varga came out of nowhere in May, in the Thornmarch, already famous, already in a pod, already the coldest player anybody had ever seen on a stream. She did not sit on rocks. She did not eat apples. She definitely did not come to the Riverlands in week two to look at a nobody on a wolf ridge.
Unless he's not a nobody anymore, thought Owen. Unless he's the rat guy. The moss guy. With a clip.
Her avatar was small, compact and wiry, with a long white-blonde braid and plain leather armor with nothing showy on it. She took another bite of the apple. She was watching him the way you'd watch a dog do a trick that you didn't think dogs could do.
He raised a hand. He didn't know why.
Varga looked at the hand. Then she looked at the dead Alpha at his feet. Then she stood up, dropped the apple core in the grass, and walked off the ridge into the dark without a word, and her nameplate faded out among the rocks.
[Flow: SYNC 60%]
Okay, Owen thought. That's new.
That's very, very new.
He went to Odran's hut at 9:05 because it was on the way to nowhere and because he couldn't help it.
The door with no bells. The garden. The candle in the window. He knocked, and the old man opened it, and looked at him the same way he always did: through the avatar, at the real body lying in the dark on a bed in a suburb outside Tacoma.
"Walker," said Ser Odran.
"Still early?"
"Hm." The old man studied him. The candle flickered. Owen braced for it. He'd heard it in two lives and a hundred times. "Your steps," said Ser Odran, "are not yet your own."
The same words. The same door, starting to close.
But the system said something else.
[Hidden quest detected: The Wayfarer's Road]
[Requirement: SYNC 65% at acceptance. Current: 58%.]
He stood very still on the doorstep, so as not to break anything.
It had never done that. Not once, in his first life, at forty-seven or forty-nine or fifty-three. It had always just said ??? and Requirement not met, and he'd spent years on forums arguing with strangers about what the requirement even was, before somebody finally datamined it. He'd thought the question marks were permanent. They weren't. They'd been waiting for him to get close enough to read them.
Seven points, he thought. It's telling me because I'm close.
The door closed. The candle stayed lit in the window.
[Session ended. Final SYNC: 58%.]
LATTICE COMPANION - Session SummaryDuration: 1h 33m
Baseline in: 58% | Peak: 61% | Baseline out: 58%
Hydration check-ins: 1 ✓ | Stand-up reminder: 1 ✓
Physical adaptation: logged
New personal best, Rook! Done for the night? Sleep is the best upgrade.
9:25. He took the headset off and lay there with the window open and the cold coming in.
Sixty-one. Seven points. Seventy-one degrees. A girl with an apple who wasn't supposed to exist yet.
He got out the notebook and wrote it all down, and at the bottom of the page, in capitals, because tomorrow at 6:30 his father was going to walk on flat ground and Owen was going to walk with him:
THE NUMBER ISN'T ENOUGH. FIX THE BODY.