Jordan read the text message twice.
His dad did actually cut his allowance two days ago. Not as a punishment, but more like David McKnight had sat on the phone and made it known that he was not going to fund a lifestyle that was actively making his son smaller.
Jordan had been pissed. Who wouldn't be in that situation? Yeah, he spent his allowance on buying things for Eliza and on Calypso's OnlyFans and on Doordash but what young adult didnt? When he text his best friend Kyle to complain Kyle had responded with "bro I've been trying to tell you this for months now."
Jordan didn't respond back.
Looking at it objectively now, he was in the wrong.
His mom thought he was meant for greatness, his dad was just hard on him because pressure makes diamonds. These were two people who worked twelve hour days at convenience stores in Orange County to send their son to a school that cost more per semester then most people see in a year, and he had used that opportunity to spend forty-five hundred dollars on a girl who called him "some guy from math class."
And over three thousand dollars on an OnlyFans model who doesn't know his name.
And god knew how much he spent on games that he hadn't touched since October when he was busy spending money on someone else's girlfriend.
He sat there long enough for the room to go quiet. Then, the heat on his face cooled down and the race sputtered out.
He understood it now.
Cameron had laughed at him.
Eliza had called him nobody.
He could see it now, Cameron telling the story at some frat party and Eliza smiling and adding commentary when she heard it retold.
They would keep going about their lives and Jordan would be a footnote because he never mattered enough to take seriously.
Unless…
Unless he stopped being this pitiful version of himself that they could laugh at.
His mom did say he was meant for greatness.
Jordan looked around the room, at the Monster Energy graveyard on his floor, at the half empty pizza box, at the stack of mail left unopened, at the textbooks on his desk with their spines still unbroken because he hadn't opened those either.
"Okay," he said to the room. Out loud, to nobody. "Okay!"
He was going to make his mom proud.
And Cameron Mitchell was going to remember his name.
The phone screen lit up.
Jordan picked it up, expecting his mom had sent a follow-up, but the notification looked wrong. It wasn't from any app he recognized. The screen had gone a color that his cracked display had never managed before, a kind of soft gold-white, and text was appearing that he definitely hadn't typed.
HOST FOUND TRUE CALLING.
He blinked.
INITIALIZING SYSTEM...
"What."
SCANNING HOST PROFILE...
GOALS DETECTED:
Financial Independence
Self Improvement
Social Ascension
Romantic Progression
Revenge Arc (noted)
FINDING OPTIMAL SYSTEM FOR HOST GOALS...
The text paused. Jordan held the phone with both hands now, sitting up straight on his bed, the pizza box and the Red Bull cans completely forgotten because his phone was doing something that phones did not do.
SYSTEM FOUND.
CALIBRATING TO HOST...
A progress bar appeared. Clean white, filled with gold.
1%
Jordan stared.
4%
"This is a glitch," he said.
11%
"This is a really weird glitch."
19%
The number climbed. It moved fast through the twenties, slowed at thirty-three like it was loading something heavy, then jumped again. Jordan's thumb moved on instinct toward the home button and then he stopped himself because the screen wasn't responding to anything except the progress bar, which was now at forty-seven.
57%.
63%.
He thought about putting the phone down. He also thought about the fact that he was the same person who had spent Christmas standing in a hotel parking lot getting publicly humiliated, and maybe the universe owed him one weird thing.
74%.
81%.
88%.
94%.
The bar crawled through ninety-four and ninety-five and ninety-six like each percent was weight-bearing, like something was being built underneath the number that took actual effort to construct.
97%.
98%.
99%.
The screen went completely white for two seconds.
Then it came back.
The phone looked the same. The crack across the upper right corner was still there. The Red Bull stain on the case was still there. But the screen had an interface on it that looked nothing like any app he'd ever downloaded, a soft gradient with gold trim and a logo that resolved slowly into focus.
A heart. With an infinity symbol inside it.
And below that, text:
WELCOME, JORDAN MCKNIGHT.
INFINITE CASHBACK SYSTEM: ACTIVE.