Chapter 1: INITIALIZATION
The first breath burned.
Wrong lungs. Wrong throat. Wrong everything.
I jackknifed upward, hands clawing at sheets that shouldn't exist, and slammed my palm against a nightstand. Pain shot through my wrist. Real. Solid. Not a dream.
The room spun. Water-stained ceiling. Cheap blinds leaking gray morning light. A radiator clicking in the corner. None of this was mine. None of this was right.
My hands—
I held them up. Trembling. Different scars. The calluses were wrong. The shape of my fingers, the way the veins crossed my knuckles. These weren't my hands.
Okay. Okay. Heart attack. Stroke. Something happened. I'm in the hospital and this is a hallucination from the drugs.
But this wasn't a hospital. This was a studio apartment that smelled like old coffee and loneliness. A laptop glowed on a desk by the window. Clothes hung over a chair. Someone lived here.
Someone who wasn't me.
I swung my legs over the bed and my feet hit cold floor. The jolt traveled up unfamiliar muscles. Too tall. My center of gravity was off by inches. When I stood, the room tilted, and I grabbed the bedframe to keep from falling.
The bathroom. Mirror. I needed—
Three steps and my knee buckled. I caught myself on the doorframe, gasping. The body didn't respond like mine. The neural pathways were mapped differently. Even walking required concentration.
Breathe. Just breathe.
I made it to the bathroom. Flipped the light. Looked up.
A stranger stared back.
Thirties. Dark brown hair cropped short. Gray-green eyes that looked as terrified as I felt. Lean face, strong jaw, small scar cutting through the left eyebrow. Stubble darkening his cheeks.
Not me. Not anyone I'd ever seen before.
This isn't possible.
I touched my face—his face—and watched the reflection copy the movement. The skin was warm. The stubble scratched my fingertips. The man in the mirror opened his mouth when I opened mine.
"What the fuck."
His voice. Deeper than mine. Different resonance.
Pain lanced through my skull. Sharp. Sudden. Like someone had driven a spike behind my right eye. I doubled over, grabbing the sink, and something flickered at the edge of my vision.
Text. Glowing text, faint and translucent, scrolling across my peripheral vision.
[MACHINE ASSET SYSTEM — INITIALIZING]
The pain intensified. My vision went white. I collapsed against the bathroom wall, hands pressed to my temples, and distantly I heard myself screaming. The text kept scrolling, burning itself into my consciousness.
[HOST INTEGRATION: 47%... 63%... 81%...]
Make it stop. Make it stop.
[NEURAL CALIBRATION IN PROGRESS]
Every nerve ending was on fire. I could feel the foreign body's entire nervous system lighting up like a switchboard, connections being tested and mapped. Muscles twitched. Fingers spasmed. My vision strobed between clarity and static.
[HOST INTEGRATION: 94%... 98%... COMPLETE]
The pain receded. Not gone—a dull ache behind my eyes remained—but manageable. I lay on the bathroom floor, staring at the water-stained ceiling, breathing hard.
The text was still there. Hovering at the corner of my vision like a notification badge from hell.
[MACHINE ASSET SYSTEM v3.7.1 — ONLINE]
[DESIGNATION: INITIATE]
[SYSTEM LEVEL: 3]
I closed my eyes. Opened them. The text remained.
What the fuck is happening to me?
[INITIALIZING PRIMARY ATTRIBUTES...]
A cascade of data bloomed across my vision. Numbers. Categories. Like a character sheet from the games I used to play in another life.
[COGNITIVE PROCESSING (CP): 28]
[OPERATIONAL AWARENESS (OA): 15]
[PHYSICAL CONDITIONING (PC): 18]
[SOCIAL ENGINEERING (SE): 24]
[TECHNICAL PROFICIENCY (TP): 32]
[MACHINE SYNCHRONIZATION (MS): 8]
[SYSTEM ENERGY (SYE): 50/50]
Numbers. A system. And I was lying on a stranger's bathroom floor in a body that wasn't mine.
I pushed myself to sitting. The headache pulsed with every heartbeat. Twenty minutes—according to my internal clock, though I didn't trust anything about this body—and I was still breathing. Still here. Whatever "here" meant.
Think. Process. What do you know?
I knew I'd died. That much was clear now. The memory was fragmentary—lights, impact, the world spinning—but the ending was certain. Car accident. Black ice. The steering wheel coming toward my face.
I'd died. And now I was... somewhere else. Someone else.
Transmigration.
The word surfaced from somewhere deep in my memory. Stories I'd read. Anime I'd watched in college. The idea of a soul being transferred to another body, another world.
Except those were fiction. This is—
Another spike of pain. The system interface flickered.
[MACHINE ASSET SYSTEM — PRIMARY DIRECTIVE]
[SAVE THE NUMBERS]
I dragged myself to my feet. The sink was cool under my palms. The stranger in the mirror looked exactly as wrecked as I felt.
Numbers. What numbers?
But I already knew. The pieces were clicking together with a certainty that made my stomach churn.
The Machine. The one that watched everything. The AI built after 9/11 to prevent terrorist attacks. Irrelevant numbers—people about to be involved in violent crimes, either as victims or perpetrators.
I knew that story. I'd watched all five seasons of it, back when I was alive. Back when I was myself.
Person of Interest.
The realization hit like a physical blow. I gripped the sink harder, knuckles white.
I was in the world of Person of Interest. Three months—I checked the newspaper date I'd glimpsed on the kitchen counter—before the show's pilot. Before Harold Finch recruited John Reese. Before any of the main story began.
And I had a system. A system connected to the Machine itself.
[TUTORIAL MODE: DISABLED]
[PRIMARY DIRECTIVE ACTIVE]
[FIRST NUMBER ASSIGNMENT IN: 6 HOURS]
Six hours.
I walked out of the bathroom on unsteady legs. The apartment was small—kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom all sharing one cramped space—but it was lived in. Personal. Someone's home.
The laptop on the desk was open to an email client. I sat down, wincing as unfamiliar muscles protested, and started reading.
Marcus Webb. IT security consultant. Thirty-two years old. Parents deceased. No siblings. No spouse. Few friends. The kind of man who could disappear and no one would notice for weeks.
Convenient.
The thought was dark, and I pushed it away. Whoever Marcus Webb had been before I arrived, he deserved better than being treated as a vehicle.
His wallet was on the nightstand. Driver's license, credit cards, two hundred in cash. His face—my face now—stared up from the laminated photo.
I spent the next hour learning what I could. Webb worked from home, taking contract jobs for various companies. His apartment was in Queens, rent controlled, affordable. His medical records showed no significant conditions. His browser history revealed a fondness for sci-fi novels and true crime podcasts.
The TV in the corner played news when I turned it on. Surveillance debates. The Patriot Act. A senator arguing about government overreach. June 2011, and the world was still reeling from the implications of mass data collection.
They have no idea what's coming.
Samaritan. The ISA. Control. Decima Technologies. The war between two artificial gods that would reshape the world.
And somewhere out there, Harold Finch was watching irrelevant numbers die because he couldn't act alone.
Not yet.
[COUNTDOWN: 4 HOURS, 23 MINUTES]
I made coffee. Webb apparently took it black—the cupboard had nothing but cheap grounds and sugar—but my old preferences kept surfacing. I added cream from the fridge, took a sip, and winced.
Wrong. Everything's wrong.
But I drank it anyway. The warmth helped settle my nerves.
Okay. Think strategically. What are your assets?
A body that didn't feel like mine. A system I didn't understand. Knowledge of a fictional world that was now horrifyingly real.
And liabilities?
Everything else.
I opened the system interface with a thought—the action felt instinctive, like flexing a muscle I'd never had before—and studied my stats more carefully.
Technical Proficiency was my highest. That tracked with Webb's background in IT. Cognitive Processing and Social Engineering were decent. Everything else was baseline or worse.
Machine Synchronization at 8. Static, fragmented communications. I could feel it now—a faint hum at the back of my consciousness, like a radio tuned between stations. The Machine was out there. Watching. And somehow, I was connected to it.
[FUNCTION AVAILABLE: NUMBER INVESTIGATION (BASIC)]
[FUNCTION LOCKED: THREAT/VICTIM DETERMINATION (REQ. LVL 5)]
[FUNCTION LOCKED: INTERVENTION PLANNING (REQ. LVL 8)]
So I could receive numbers. I could investigate. But determining if they were victim or perpetrator, planning actual interventions—that would take time. Experience. Levels.
Great. A tutorial character in a world where mistakes get people killed.
[COUNTDOWN: 3 HOURS, 51 MINUTES]
I took a shower. The hot water helped integrate the body's sensations—or maybe that was just wishful thinking. Afterward, I stood in front of the mirror again, forcing myself to study the face that was now mine.
Marcus Webb is dead. Whatever he was before, he's gone now. I'm what's left.
The guilt settled in my chest like a stone. But guilt wouldn't save anyone. Action would.
I got dressed. Webb's wardrobe was practical—jeans, button-downs, a leather jacket that had seen better days. I grabbed his phone (a flip phone, 2011 tech), his wallet, and his laptop bag.
[COUNTDOWN: 1 HOUR, 12 MINUTES]
The hours blurred together. I walked the neighborhood, testing the body's capabilities. Ate a street vendor hot dog because the smell made my borrowed stomach growl. Sat in a coffee shop and watched people pass by, practicing awareness.
Everyone looked different now. Not suspicious exactly, but present in a way they'd never been before. I noticed postures, gaits, the way people held their phones. The system fed me fragmentary data—threat assessments, behavioral patterns—nothing I could articulate clearly, but the knowledge was there, seeping in.
[NUMBER INCOMING]
The notification hit like a cold hand closing around my heart.
[SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER: 598-23-4891]
[LOCATION DATA: UPLOADING...]
[POTENTIAL VICTIM — HIGH PROBABILITY]
A face materialized in my vision. A woman. Hispanic, mid-thirties, tired eyes, kind smile. Fear beneath the surface.
[INTERVENTION WINDOW: 72 HOURS]
Seventy-two hours. Three days to figure out who she was, why she was in danger, and how to stop it.
I grabbed a pen from the coffee shop counter and wrote the number on my palm. Nine digits. One life.
My first number.
Time to find out if I can actually do this.
I paid for my coffee and walked out into the Queens afternoon. The city sprawled around me—massive, indifferent, dangerous. Somewhere in its depths, a woman was about to become a victim.
And I was the only one who knew.
The library was six blocks away. Public computers. No trail. I walked faster, mind already spinning through search strategies.
Linda Vasquez, the system whispered. A name to match the face. Nurse. Brooklyn Memorial. Married.
The pieces were assembling themselves. And behind them all, the Machine hummed its silent vigil.
Watching. Waiting.
Counting on me.
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