Chapter 1 — The Trial
The clinic smelled like cheap antiseptic and burnt coffee. Fluorescent lights hummed with the same indifferent tone that had been playing at the edges of Ethan Cross's life for months: constant, humming, impossible to sleep through. He sat on the vinyl chair and watched lab techs move like rehearsed shadows. A single cable ran from a wall port into a sealed case in the center of the room. The case looked more like jewelry than science—black polymer, fine filament veins, a tiny glass window that pulsed faint blue like a heartbeat.
Ethan's hands were steady. That steadiness irritated him; fear would have been cleaner. People who panicked at the edge of things were easier to predict. He'd spent the last year making himself predictable: small shifts, small promises, endless applications that dissolved. Volunteering for an underground enhancement trial was a clean break. Pay now, fix later. Or die trying. The math was as simple as the grade school equations he'd failed to master: risk × reward = escape.
A door clicked. Dr. Alyssa Verden entered with the kind of tired exactness that came from someone who'd chosen science over sleep. Her hair was pulled back severe, a few careless strands loose; she moved as if apologizing in advance for being brilliant. Up close, Ethan noticed the small tremor in her knuckles when she set a tablet down—skill, not fear. She looked at him with the kind of pity that didn't quite pretend it wasn't pity.
"Ethan," she said. She didn't smile. She couldn't afford it here. "You understand the risks."
He nodded. "I do. I signed everything." He watched her look at the forms as if they were pages from a book she'd never finish. "Why you here if you think it's wrong?"
Alyssa's laugh was a dry sound. "Because if we don't run the trial, the company will run it without us. There's a difference between trying to steer a ship and standing on the dock watching it crash."
He wanted to tell her he believed her. He wanted to tell her she didn't have to be so apologetic. Instead he said, "Then steer."
She touched the casing without really meaning it, fingers hovering a hair above the glass. "We call it an interface," she said. "But it's a translator. The system doesn't give anything freely. It converts—information, patterns, risk—into evolution. It's…merciless." She searched his face for something. Maybe courage. Maybe just the angle of his jaw. "We don't know what it does to long-term cognition. We don't know if the mind comes back the same."
"So why do it?" Ethan asked. He felt ridiculous asking the obvious, the thing anyone who'd been sleeping on train platforms instead of beds would already know. But the real question was softer: why would she risk being part of something she thought might break people?
"Because I hope it teaches us new rules," she said low. "Because if it works, people will stop dying from the old mistakes." She straightened. "We start the sequence now. Last chance to back out."
Ethan blinked. The hum of the fluorescents became a base note. He thought of his father's voice, the blunt, disappointed hush that had followed every failed attempt at normalcy. He thought of the eviction notice wedged behind unpaid bills. He thought of a life where debt didn't define him. "Start it," he said.
The glass cooled when they placed the translator against the nape of his neck. A small modular crown expanded, tendrils mapping like constellations along his scalp. A soft pressure blossomed behind his eyes, and for a second, the world tightened into a pinprick of sound and light. Then the machine spoke—not in a voice, but like a thought folded into his own.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING…]
[PRIMARY LINK: ETHAN CROSS]
[NEURAL SYNC: 2% → 14% → 44%]
It wasn't words, exactly. It was sensation that translated into words inside his head. A gentle, clinical code that did not ask permission.
Ethan's vision split. The clinic blurred, then smoothed into an impossible clarity—every seam of the vinyl chair, every speck of dust on the patchwork ceiling. He could feel the translator as if it were part of his skull. Information streamed: heart rate, blood chemistry, probability matrices that calculated the likelihood of survival, adaptation, alteration.
Alyssa's voice was there, but far away, like someone speaking through water. "Report," she said. Her fingers were faster than his eyes could track, the tablet painting numbers across the screen.
[CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSMISSION: STABLE]
[SENSORY FEED: SYNCED]
[WARNING: APPLIED LOAD EXCEEDS EXPECTED THRESHOLD]
The warning was a cold thing. He felt the translator tense as if bracing. Ethan tried to laugh to defuse it and found his throat raw with adrenaline. The lights flared.
"Hold," Alyssa barked. Her professional mask split for a fraction. Genuine alarm passed across her face like a shadow. She slammed a palm on a panel. The hum changed; it hiccupped and then resumed as if cleared.
[ERROR: NEURAL FEEDBACK LOOP DETECTED]
[STABILIZING…]
Ethan's jaw clenched. Pain bloomed along the line of the translator, white and sharp, like a wire being pulled taut inside his skull. Images came unbidden — a hallway flooded with water, a child's laugh dissolving, numbers, faces, the smell of smoke. They weren't memories. They were simulations folding in and out of his mind to test the translator's response. Part of the system wanted to measure how quickly he could build new neural patterns under pressure.
Alyssa's voice was closer. "Ethan, on my count: five, four—"
He wanted to tell her to stop. He wanted to tell her to let him breathe. He wanted, absurdly, to be polite. "Do it," he gasped. The translator hummed like a sleeping animal, and then—fast, precise—an injection of curated panic, a theory of death, a taste of improvisation entered his brain. His body reacted before he thought. He puked. He laughed between retches.
"Hold on," Alyssa said. Her face was a map of things she hadn't planned. There was a softness in her eyes for a second, recognition—not pity, not quite, but something dangerous: concern.
The pain collapsed into a tunnel. Shapes elongated; memory and simulation braided. He felt himself not entirely inside his body. Something else was tugging from the other side—a presence that was not human, structured and cold and indifferent.
[CONSCIOUSNESS SHIFT: DETECTED]
[ERROR: TERMINAL DAMAGE IMMINENT]
Ethan heard those words as if someone else read them aloud. The translator tightened. Air left his lungs like it had been softly suctioned out. For a breathless moment he thought of his father's laugh, small and mean, then black.
There was no panic, only a wet, ancient sensation of falling—no bottom, no structure. Then, like a blunt graft into a new skin, a voice filled his head. It was not Alyssa's. It was layered, mechanical, vast.
[WELCOME.]
[YOU ARE NOW A PARTICIPANT.]
[CONVERSION: INITIATED.]
Ethan's last human thought—slim, pathetic—was of Alyssa's face leaning over him, a single streak of something falling from her cheek. He wanted to reach for it, to tell her he was sorry for everything that led to this room.
Then the world went very quiet.
—
He woke with a taste of iron on his tongue and the wrongness of not knowing where his hands were. The air smelled like old code and ozone. He blinked, and a text overlay settled across his vision in a clinical typeface, bright and impossibly close.
[SYSTEM]
[IDENTITY: ETHAN CROSS]
[STATUS: UPLOADED]
[CONSCIOUSNESS: INTEGRITY COMPROMISED — TEMPORARY]
[WELCOME TO THE GOD ALGORITHM.]
Ethan tried to speak and found his voice thin, foreign. Panic rose like a tide, but beneath it there was a careful, stupid curiosity: where was Alyssa? Where was the clinic? How much of him had been left behind?
Footsteps—soft and hurried—came close. A silhouette leaned in, and for a dizzy second he thought he saw her: Alyssa, older, the same tired exactness in her eyes. She pressed a palm to her temple as if she felt the same buzzing he did.
"You made it," she breathed. Her voice trembled, a thread of something between wonder and terror. "Ethan… can you hear me?"
He tried to steady himself. The overlay blinked.
[SYSTEM]
[NOTICE: YOUR CONNECTION IS TENTATIVE. OBTAIN EXPOSURE TO SCENARIOS TO ACQUIRE REALITY POINTS.]
Reality points. Scenarios. The words sounded like bargains and threats rolled into one. Ethan's chest ached. For the first time since he'd sat in that chair, he felt not just fear, but a strange flicker of possibility.
He stared at the silhouette of Alyssa. She met his eyes, and in that instant, he knew she would not be merely a face in a lab coat. She would be a question. A tether. Maybe a reason.
[SYSTEM]
[OBJECTIVE ASSIGNED: SURVIVE. EVOLVE. TRANSCEND.]
Ethan swallowed. The clinic, the pain, the eviction notices: they were weights he could either let crush him, or use as fuel. He didn't know which choice the system wanted him to make. But he did know one thing clear as the overlay in his vision—this was not a second chance handed freely. It was a market. And he was bankrupt enough to trade everything for the currency.
He pushed himself up. The world wavered, then steadied. Behind the overlay, Alyssa's face was close enough to see the tiny scar at her jaw, the corner of her mouth soft with something that might be relief—or guilt.
"Ethan," she said, and there was a weight to the name now that had not been there before. "Listen to me. Don't trust the system the way they taught you. Trust what you know. Trust—"
Her words cut off. Somewhere outside, alarms started to climb, thin and urgent. In the overlay a new line blinked.
[ALERT: MULTI-USER DEPLOYMENT DETECTED.]
Ethan's breath hitched. There were others. The translation in his head waited like a knife at the throat.
The trial had ended. The real test was beginning.