I leaned back in my chair.
It was a clunky black office chair I’d bought from the British Heart Foundation charity shop on the high street for twelve quid four years ago. The cheap artificial leather was peeling off the arms, and one of the small plastic caster wheels on the base had a habit of sticking in the carpet.
The springs groaned under my weight. Creeeak.
Did Josh really think I was some kind of tactical genius?
Or was he just saying all that bollocks because he couldn’t stand seeing his big brother rotting away in a cold distribution warehouse pulling pallets for minimum wage?
I leaned back a bit further, staring up at the water-stained ceiling.
Creeeak.
The bitter truth was something I’d never admitted to Josh, or Mum, or Kayleigh. I’d never even said it out loud to myself in the dark.
I was never going to make it to the Premier League. I was never even going to make it to the Championship.
I had been a decent, reliable League One centre-back.
I read the game well, I was good in the air, and I kept my line disciplined.
But I was slow on the turn, my passing distribution was average, and I lacked that extra yard of explosive recovery speed that higher-level scouts looked for. In my final full season at Hallowfield, my agent had sent my video highlights to eleven different Championship clubs.
Eleven clubs. All eleven sent back the exact same response: No, thank you. Not for us.
By the time V’s first text message arrived on my phone that Friday night seven years ago, I already knew the hard reality. I had hit my ceiling at twenty-two years old. I was never going higher.
Taking the five grand for a corner hadn’t just been about the cash. It had given me a golden excuse for failing.
If I destroyed my own career on purpose, then nobody could ever say I failed because I wasn’t good enough.
I could pretend to myself and to the world that I was a tragic fallen talent who threw it all away for easy money, rather than a limited defender who reached his absolute limit in Tier 3.
I had taken the bribes because I was terrified of watching myself slowly slide down the football pyramid year after year, getting dropped, getting released, and ending up in non-league anyway.
I closed my eyes, the realization heavy and cold in my chest. I’d been hiding behind that scandal for seven bloody years.
I shifted my weight to reach for my can of lager on the coffee table.
Creeeak THUD.
The stuck caster wheel caught violently against a fraying thread in the carpet. The cheap plastic base snapped sideways, the chair tipped over backward, and my legs kicked up into the underside of the desk.
"Woah fucking hell!"
The desk jolted forward. My laptop slid off the smooth wood, airborne for a split second, before slamming straight into the sharp glass corner of the coffee table.
CRACK.
The open can of Stella Artois went over with it, sloshing half a pint of warm, stale lager directly across the laptop keyboard, my lap, and the carpet.
I hit the floor hard on my back, the broken chair wedged under my shoulders, the laptop upside down on my right thigh.
The computer screen flickered white once, made a sharp buzzing sound, and went completely black.
I lay there on the carpet for ten seconds, staring up at the ceiling, breath knocked right out of my lungs.
Up above, a tiny hairline crack ran across the plasterboard near the light fixture. The flat was dead silent, save for the hum of the fridge in the kitchen and the steady, rhythmic dripping of lager from the edge of the coffee table onto my jeans.
Tip... tip... tip...
"Brilliant," I rasped to the empty room. "Fucking brilliant, Matt."
I kicked the broken chair off me, sat up, and winced. The corner of the coffee table had gouged a bloody tear through my denim jeans right over my left knee. Blood was already soaking into the fabric.
I stood up, hoisted the laptop off the floor, and set it on the desk. Lager was dripping out of the USB ports. I grabbed the sleeve of my fleece pullover and aggressively wiped down the keyboard, but the damage was already done.
The keys were sticky, smelling like the floor of a pub on a Sunday morning.
I pressed and held the power button.
The internal fan kicked on with a terrifying, high-pitched mechanical scream EEEEEEEEEE like a drill biting into metal.
The green-and-white Touchline Manager loading banner flashed onto the screen for a fraction of a second, completely distorted by static lines. Then the screen froze, and a stark grey system window popped up right in the middle of the display.
CORE DATA CORRUPTION: PACKAGE REMOVED.
Underneath the header was a scrambled string of alphanumeric code, followed by a system timestamp reading tonight’s date and exact time. Below that was a single, bold line of text:
UNREGISTERED ENTITY: MERIDIAN
Before I could move the touchpad to click on anything, the grey box vanished, and the screen went blank.
"What the bloody hell is that?" I muttered.
I tapped the power button again. Nothing.
I plugged the charger cable into the side socket. The charging light didn’t even turn on. I pulled the battery casing out, blew into the connectors, slammed it back in, and held the power button down for thirty seconds straight.
Bonk.
A sharp system error beep sounded from the internal speakers, and then the fan died completely.
I grabbed my phone off the sofa, opened a web browser, and typed in the exact text from the screen: Touchline Manager error Meridian entity.
The search results loaded: No matches found.
"Come on, you piece of junk," I hissed, tapping the laptop frame. "Don’t do this to me. Not tonight."
Spilling beer on a motherboard killed hardware; I knew that much about electronics. It fried circuits and shorted keys. But a physical beer spill didn’t generate custom error codes referencing non-existent data packages and unregistered entities.
Upstairs, the bloke in flat 18 turned his bath taps on. The old copper pipes inside the party wall vibrated violently, knocking against the brickwork.
Dunk... dunk... dunk...
I slumped back against the desk, my wet knee throbbing, and stared at the dead black screen.
Then it hit me.
It started as a sudden, sharp pressure behind my temples like the feeling you get when you dive into freezing cold water too fast. A strange, humming vibration rippled down the back of my neck, right at the base of my skull.
My vision flickered.
For a terrifying fraction of a second, my eyes weren’t looking at my living room. I felt a sensation inside my own brain like a massive, automated database engine was rapidly scanning through my personal memories.
Files opening. Pages turning at blinding speed.
I saw the wet turf of Beck Road under the floodlights. I heard the roar of the home crowd in the 88th minute.
I saw the grainy face of V sitting in the passenger seat of my car outside Sal’s chippy. I saw the cold integrity officer pushing his glasses down his nose. I saw Kayleigh’s empty coat hook by the front door.
Flick, flick, flick, flick.
It was moving through seven years of my life in less than half a second, indexing every tactical decision, every match, every mistake, every player I’d ever faced or watched.
And then, as abruptly as it started, the pressure vanished.
I gasped, grabbing the edge of the desk, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
It was the exact same adrenaline spike I used to get in the narrow tunnel at Beck Road thirty seconds before kickoff when the opposition boots were clicking on the concrete, the smell of Wintergreen ointment was thick in the air, and the noise of the crowd was vibrating through the walls.
I hadn’t felt that rush in seven bloody years. Why was it hitting me now in my own living room over a ruined laptop?
My phone buzzed loudly on the arm of the sofa.
Bzzt... Bzzt...
I jumped, snatching it up. The screen lit up with Josh’s contact photo. I pressed answer and jammed the phone against my ear.
"What?" I said, my voice raspy and uneven.
"Alright, calm down, soft lad," Josh laughed over the speaker.
"I left my iPad on your sofa cushion. It’s got all my training notes for tomorrow morning on it, and the gaffer wants them emailed over before eight AM. I’m just pulling back into the close now."
"Josh, wait "
Click. He hung up.
Ten seconds later, the low, heavy rumble of his Range Rover’s engine vibrated through the front wall of the flat. Car doors slammed outside in the driveway. Footsteps crunched over the gravel path, and then the front door handle jiggled and swung open.
Josh walked straight into the hallway, tossing his car keys into the air and catching them.
"Told you I’d be two minutes," he said, stepping into the living room. "Where’s the tablet? Is it under the..."
Josh froze.
I froze too. But not because of what Josh was saying.
Floating directly in the air above my brother’s head, roughly two inches above his neatly styled hair, were two lines of glowing, razor-sharp white text. The typography was perfectly crisp, hovering in three-dimensional space as if projected by a laser:
Download Completed . . . Initiating Touchline Manager Simulator . . .
A sharp, distinct mechanical sound echoed inside my head right behind my left ear.
CLICK.
It sounded like a heavy iron toggle switch being thrown inside a steel junction box.
The white text dissolved into thin air. A microsecond later, a large, rectangular UI interface box expanded smoothly over Josh’s chest and head.
It had a thin, glowing emerald-green border, a dark semi-transparent background, and the exact sans-serif font I had spent seven years staring at on my computer screen.
Hovering over my brother a twenty-six-year-old Premier League international earning forty grand a week was a full, real-time tactical attribute profile:
NAME: JOSHUA KERSHAW
CLUB: EVERTON FC
POSITION: AM (C), CM (C)
CURRENT ABILITY: ★★★★☆ (158 / 200)
POTENTIAL ABILITY: ★★★★★ (174 / 200)
KEY ATTRIBUTES:• Vision: 168 • Passing: 162 • First Touch: 159 • Acceleration: 154 • Composure: 148
TACTICAL TRAITS:• Dictates Tempo • Tries Killer Balls Often • Comes Deep To Get Ball
CURRENT MORALE: EXCELLENT
PHYSICAL CONDITION: 94%
I stared at the floating green box. I looked at Josh’s face underneath it. He was looking right at me, completely oblivious to the glowing tactical dashboard hanging in the air between us.
"Matt?" Josh asked, brow furrowing as he looked at my wet jeans and my pale face. "What the hell are you staring at? You look like you’ve seen a ghost."
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.
The simulation hadn’t just corrupted my laptop. It had loaded into my head.