Chapter 6: Greyed Out

The panel was still there when Caleb closed his eyes. It always was. It sat on the inside of his eyelids like the afterimage of a lamp, pale and patient, and the touch he had just given it still tingled in his fingertips like a static shock.

He opened his eyes, and the panel had changed. A thin line of light ran around its edge, and the blank glass inside had filled with rows of small tidy icons arranged in two columns, white on pale blue, each with a label beneath it in clean sans-serif letters. Most of them were grayed-out. They were not dim or faded. They were the flat dead gray of a button on a coffee machine that has run out of water.

That can't be all of it, he thought.

He lay on his back with one hand still hanging in the air and read the labels one at a time. STATUS, gray. ATTRIBUTES, gray. LEVEL, gray. MARKETPLACE, gray. MAP, gray. He tapped STATUS.

System message: Locked.

ATTRIBUTES. Locked. LEVEL. Locked. MARKETPLACE, a word that had been sitting in the back of his head since the first night like a promise, a shop where he could finally spend something on himself.

System message: Locked.

That one hurt the most. He had been planning it for a week without admitting it: sell a stone, buy something. A new refrigerator. A winter coat. A month of rent in advance, so that for once he could lie in bed and not do the arithmetic. He had been quietly furnishing a better life in his head out of a store that did not open.

He took his hand out of the air and stared at the ceiling. He had read the same story a hundred times. The man gets the system, the system opens, and a glowing window fills with numbers: strength, agility and luck, a bar that ticks upward whenever he does something right. A shop appears. A skill tree unfolds like a map of everything he could become. He had gotten a screen with three working buttons and a shopping mall that was closed for renovations.

They were in the bottom row, the only icons that were white instead of gray: SEARCH. WORLD LINK. ABILITIES.

Okay, he thought. Fine. Let's see what I've got. He noticed, with a distant kind of surprise, that he was nervous. It was a ridiculous thing to be nervous about. By his own clock, he had been shot at less than an hour ago. But this was a different fear. In the apocalypse, the fear had been simple and physical, the kind that lived in the legs. This was the old fear, the one he knew from job interviews and bank statements, the fear of opening a letter that might tell him what he was worth.

He started with ABILITIES, because it sounded like the most important and because he was a coward who wanted to be reminded of something good. A short list unrolled: Universal Awakening, Language Mastery, World Description, Dimensional Teleportation, and, last, PHYSIQUE ENHANCEMENT, Rank 1. That was all. Five entries, four from the system and one from a stone he had pulled out of a dead man's skull with a hatchet. Under each was a single plain sentence, the same sentences he had read on the first night. Under the last it said: Acquired. Source: awakening stone, low rank. There was no progress bar and no level, only a faint empty space at the bottom of the list where, he suspected, more would one day appear, the way a bookshelf in a new apartment has room for books you have not bought yet.

He swiped back and tried SEARCH. A small text field opened with a cursor blinking in it. He typed with imaginary thumbs, and the letters appeared as he thought them.

how to get rich

System message: No results. Query exceeds the scope of this index.

how to get stronger

System message: No results.

He hesitated. Then searched: Is Megan sorry

System message: Query is outside the scope of this index.

The shame had made him reckless, so he tried a few more. What are you? He got the same answer. Then tried one more search... awakening stone.

System message: Awakening stone. Crystallized fragment of the organism native to Apocalypse Earth. Properties vary. Identification of properties: locked.

garrett

System message: No results.

He thought about that one for a second. The system could tell him what a stone was, but it could not tell him who sold them. It knew things the way a library knew things, completely and without caring who was reading. His face went warm. It had been a stupid thing to type, and a stupid thing to have wanted an answer to, and he deleted the line one letter at a time, grateful in an absurd way that nobody could watch him do it.

The only button left was WORLD LINK. He tapped it.

The panel went dark for half a second and lit again. A map appeared, though not of any world. A single glowing point sat at the center of a black field, and a thin white thread ran from it to a second point, small and red, with a label beside it: Apocalypse Earth, Year 2048. Status: Unlocked. Below it, a second thread, much fainter, ran off the edge of the panel into the dark. At its end hung a small gray shape, round and closed, like a seed.

System message: NEXT WORLD: Locked. Estimated unlock: 11 months, 21 days.

Caleb read it three times, and then he sat up so fast his head swam. Eleven months? He had seen approximately one year flash by on the system window on the night he received the system, but and had not let himself think about what it meant. One world, and then a year's wait for the next. He thought of all the things he had imagined doing this week, the shop and the levels and the stats and the second world and the third. He had spent seven days buying boots, and the only door beyond the first one had a calendar attached to it.

System message: This is calculated on personal time. Personal time is the time you yourself live through. It is counted in hours lived, not in days, orbits, or years, because those differ from world to world and the hour does not. The remaining interval is approximately 8,500 hours of personal time. It does not shorten because you wait.

He read it slowly. Hours, he thought. It's counting in hours. Something about that snagged. He remembered the stairwell, and the math, and the line from the first trip, fifty-two hours there and a few minutes here. He worked it out the way he used to calculate tips. Eight thousand five hundred hours and something hours, divided by seven hundred and twenty. Half a day. Twelve hours.

His heart began to knock. I could do that tomorrow. I could go to the apocalypse for twelve hours and come back, and Earth would barely notice. I could unlock the next world in the time it takes to cook dinner. It was an insane thought and a beautiful one, and he sat on the edge of the bed with his pulse climbing, already planning the pack, the route, the water. He could feel a stupid, boyish grin on a face that had not made one in weeks.

System message: Correction. You have misread the interval.

The grin stayed where it was, like a coat left on a hook.

System message: Personal time is lived time. In any world, you live one hour per hour. Eight thousand five hundred hours is eight thousand five hundred hours to you, whether you spend them on Earth or in any world you can reach. The twelve hours you calculated is what an outside observer on Earth would record if you lived all of it elsewhere. You would not skip the interval. You would live every hour of it, and the world you left would simply wait. If you remain on Earth, it is eleven months for everyone on Earth including you, and would be 12 hours in the Apocalyptic World.

He read it twice, and then he laughed, one short breath through his nose, at nobody. He had built a small rocket out of arithmetic, and the system had taken it out of his hands as gently as a parent removing a lit match from a toddler. Twelve hours was what the outside would see. For him it was a full eleven months, every minute of it, stacked on top of whatever else he was already trying to survive. There was no shortcut. There had never been a shortcut, only a door with a calendar on it, and him, standing in front of it with a calculator. He lay back and let the grin finish fading on its own. Though he realised that the reason he'll age slowly is due to this ability as well. From an external observation, he ages normally; well, slower due to the stone, but would show almost no difference. Perhaps until he consumes more and gets stronger.

The deflation lasted about a minute. Then something else began to bother him, something that had been bothering him since he first saw the gray buttons.

It's holding the good stuff back.

The thought arrived in a smug little rush, and it felt wonderful, like the first sip of a cold drink. He had spent a week being told he was stupid and had been put on probation by a floating spreadsheet, and now, finally, here was a weakness, a crack in the examiner's armour. He folded his hands on his chest and tried to sound casual. You know, I've been wondering. You said I had to prove myself. You want me to get stronger, right? That's the whole deal. So why is everything that makes me stronger locked? Levels, stats, the shop, all gray. It almost looks like you don't want me to level up.

He waited, a little pleased with himself. The reply took a second.

System message: Leveling would do you little good. Your vessel is weak. The Level section unlocks in the next world. This does not mean you cannot advance. You are Level 0, and you may progress toward Level 1 now. You simply cannot see the progress. Raw strength, in the sense you mean, is the least efficient thing you could chase.

Caleb blinked. He had read enough novels to recognize an excuse. The system was the mysterious guide who withheld the cheat code and then lectured the hero about how real power comes from within, and he had never once believed that speech. He laughed, a short ugly laugh, the laugh of a man who has been handed a reason to stop being afraid, and he sat up and crossed his arms. Come on. You can't be serious. What's the point of a system, then? It sounds like an excuse. He was surprised to find that the thought did not feel as bold as it had a minute ago.

The panel did not move for a long time. When it did, the text was longer than anything it had ever written.

System message: You are underestimating what I am, and, as usual, behaving like a foolish human.

The scale I use was not invented for you. I'm not like those meager systems you see and read about. Take the universe you were born in and treat it as a single living being: every star, every law, every particle, one body. By my measure that being would stand in the high twenties. Level 999 is the range of the display. It is not a destination, and it is not a measure of what exists. You inferred it from the numbers shown, the way a child infers that the highest number on a ruler is the length of the world.

Most of the people you will meet who use a system never pass Level 20. The very strongest beings in my records are a small number of entities that create and destroy realities the way you blink, and they are still not at the edge of the scale.

You will not be one of them. You are Level 0. Your vessel tires after two days without sleep and could not survive an hour of what those beings call rest. The ideal of growth for you is not 999, and it is not 27. It is Level 1.

To be more accurate. The levels on this window are absolute levels, however, this explanation will be provided at depth after unlocking the second world.

Caleb sat very still. He had stopped breathing somewhere around the high twenties, and he noticed it only when his chest began to burn. He let the air out slowly. A whole universe, every star, was twenty-something. For a week he had thought of himself as a man holding a winning lottery ticket worth nine hundred and ninety-nine, and in one paragraph the number had been taken out of his hands and turned into a measuring stick for something so large that he could not make himself see it. And the ideal outcome for him, after everything, was one.

He felt something drain out of him from the top of his head down. It was not quite despair. It was quieter than that, the feeling of a man who has been told, kindly and accurately, that the mountain he planned to climb is very large, and that he has been issued a pair of sandals.

He grabbed his real phone off the nightstand, the one with the cracked corner and the dying battery, and typed level 27 universe into a search bar. The internet offered a video game wiki and a forum thread about a tabletop campaign. He typed level 100 being. Gaming wikis and manga about levelling and isekai appeared. He put the phone face-down on the blanket and felt faintly stupid, a man consulting a map of his own kitchen to find out whether the house was haunted. The only source that knew anything was in front of his face, and it was done talking.

So the cheat code, he thought, is that there's no cheat code. The panel did not answer. He lay back down slowly, as though the bed might break. Outside, a car passed, and its headlights crossed the ceiling and slid down the wall, over the crack and the Florida-shaped stain, and went out.

He realized, a little at a time, what he had been hoping for. He had been hoping to be someone. He did not mean powerful, or famous. He meant someone who could walk into a room and have it matter. He had spent six years as the person everyone could afford to disappoint, and for one week he had let himself imagine that this was the way out. It was a door. It just opened onto a very long hallway.

He thought about the eleven months. It should have been bearable. People lived through whole winters, whole jobs, whole marriages in less. But a smarter man would have seen the other half of it, which was that a man who did nothing with the time would arrive at the end as the same man, only older, with a new door and the same shaking hands. The smug warmth had gone out of him, and what remained was the plain practical coward he had always been. The apocalypse was a bad place, and every hour in it counted. He had barely survived two and a half days, and he had known then what he was walking into. Now he knew what the walk was for, and the knowledge made his legs heavy. Tomorrow, he told himself. Or the day after. He knew that voice. It was the one that had lived in his apartment for six years.

He looked at the gray buttons once more: STATUS, ATTRIBUTES, LEVEL, MARKETPLACE, MAP. Five locked doors in a row, each a small flat rectangle that did not care how he felt about it. He wondered how many of them he would ever see open.

Without wanting to, he thought of his father. His father had kept a ledger, a green cloth-bound book bought in bulk from an office supply store, one for every year. Every dollar in and every dollar out, in square careful capitals. As a kid, Caleb had thought it the most boring habit a person could have. Write it down, his father used to say when Caleb came to him with a worry too large to hold. If you can't write it down, you don't understand it yet. Caleb had inherited the ledgers along with the apartment's worth of boxes and had never opened one. He had bought his own notebook last spring without once connecting the two. He lay in the dark with a feeling like an old bruise pressed from the inside and could not tell whether it was grief or only tiredness. Possibly there was no difference.

Level one. He hated how reasonable it sounded.

He rolled onto his side and pulled the blanket over his shoulder. He did not close the panel. He could not have if he tried. It lay in the dark in front of him, soft and pale, patient as ever. He did not try to talk to it again that night, and it did not try to talk to him.

In fact, it did not speak to him again for twenty-one days.