Chapter 8 : Initialization
Griffin's Apartment, South Philadelphia — October, 2005
Something is wrong with the ceiling.
Griffin opens his eyes at 6:47 AM — the clock on the flip phone tells him this, glowing from the milk crate where it sits — and the water stain he's memorized over two months has a ghost. A faint, translucent overlay sits between his eyes and the plaster, like a screen he didn't turn on. Pale blue lines form a grid at the very edge of his peripheral vision. In the upper-right corner, text pulses in characters too small to read from this distance.
He blinks. Hard. Three times. The overlay stays.
He sits up. The room swims — four glasses of bad whiskey and five hours of sleep have left a headache behind his right eye that throbs in time with his pulse. But the headache is normal. The translucent grid hovering at the margins of his sight is not.
Griffin stands. Walks to the bathroom. Splashes water on his face. Looks in the mirror.
His reflection stares back — sandy hair, crooked nose, tired brown eyes — and superimposed over the top of the mirror in text only he can see:
[CATASTROPHE PREDICTION SYSTEM — INITIALIZED]
[PHASE 1: AWAKENING]
[PASSIVE MODE: ACTIVE]
[USER DESIGNATION: GRIFFIN FINCH]
[STATUS: HANGOVER. HYDRATE.]
He grips the sink. The porcelain is cold under his fingers. The text doesn't move, doesn't waver, doesn't care that he's staring at it with the expression of a man who has just been handed a receipt for something he doesn't remember buying.
"No."
The text remains.
"No. What— no."
[TUTORIAL TIP #1: THE CPS CANNOT BE DISMISSED, DISABLED, OR UNINSTALLED. PLEASE STOP TRYING.]
Griffin backs away from the mirror. The text follows, maintaining its position in his field of view like subtitles bolted to the inside of his skull. He waves his hand through the space where the letters float. His hand passes through nothing. The text is behind his eyes, not in front of them.
Twenty minutes. He spends twenty minutes in the bathroom cycling through every response available to a man confronting an impossible user interface at 6:47 in the morning with a hangover: denial (doesn't work), bargaining (the text is immune to negotiation), anger (punching the wall hurts his hand and achieves nothing), and finally a kind of stunned, sitting-on-the-toilet-lid acceptance that isn't acceptance so much as exhaustion of alternatives.
[TUTORIAL TIP #2: PASSIVE MODE DISPLAYS CRITICAL ALERTS ONLY. DISASTER RATING HALOS VISIBLE WHEN SCHEMES ARE DETECTED. COMPLICITY METER: ALWAYS ACTIVE.]
The bottom-left corner of his vision holds a small gauge he didn't notice until now. A thin bar, almost invisible unless he focuses on it, with a number beside it.
COMPLICITY: 0%
Zero percent. Because I'm alone in my bathroom and nobody's scheming within earshot.
He stands. Drinks water from the tap — three glasses, because the system told him to hydrate and he hates that it's right. Eats a granola bar from the box on the counter. Gets dressed. The overlay dims when he's not focusing on it, settling into the background of his perception like a watermark on paper — present, but only visible when you look for it.
Okay. Okay. I made a wish. In a bar. Drunk. And the universe— what? Heard me?
He grabs his keys. The metal is cold in his palm. The walk to Paddy's is seven minutes and every step of it is spent testing the boundaries of whatever has happened to his brain. The HUD — because that's what this is, he's played enough video games in his old life to recognize a heads-up display — stays with him. The grid lines are faint in daylight, almost invisible against the October sky. The text notifications have stopped, replaced by a quiet, watching readiness, like a program waiting for input.
The Catastrophe Prediction System. I wished to see the trainwreck coming, and somebody took it literally.
Paddy's front door. Lift, shove, turn. The smell hits and the HUD—
The HUD reacts.
The ambient notification in the corner flickers. A faint pulse runs through the grid, like the system is booting up from standby. Griffin steps inside and the bar materializes in his enhanced vision as both the bar he knows — sticky floor, dim lights, Charlie's cleaning supplies — and something overlaid with data points he can't quite read yet.
Charlie is on a stool. Cross-legged. Eating something from a can. Mac is behind the bar, which Mac isn't supposed to be, but Mac periodically decides he's a bartender when nobody's looking.
"Griffin. My man." Mac slides a glass across the bar that Griffin intercepts before it falls off the edge. "You look rough."
"Late night."
"Say no more. I've had some late nights. Training nights. Very intense."
Charlie doesn't look up from his can. "I've been thinking."
Here it comes.
"What if—" Charlie puts the can down. His eyes have the specific brightness of a man who's been alone with an idea long enough for the idea to go feral. "What if we could sell rat meat? Like, premium. To restaurants. Because there's rats everywhere, and I know where they live, and restaurants need meat, and—"
A letter appears above Charlie's head.
Griffin's breath catches. It's right there — floating two inches above Charlie Kelly's unwashed hair, glowing faintly in a yellowish-green, visible only to Griffin, rendered in the same translucent overlay as everything else the system has produced this morning.
E
And beneath it, in smaller text:
[Scheme Disaster Rating: E — Embarrassment. Minor public humiliation. Probability: 78%. Estimated damage: $40 property, 2 reputation points (Charlie). No criminal exposure.]
Griffin stares at the floating letter. Charlie continues talking about rat preparation — "you gotta boil 'em first, that's the key, boiling gets the weird stuff out" — and the letter bobs gently above his head, pulsing in rhythm with the scheme's development. When Charlie adds a detail about seasoning, the percentage ticks from 78 to 81.
"What do you think?" Charlie asks. "Griffin? You with me?"
"Uh-huh."
The gauge in the corner of his vision moves.
COMPLICITY: 8%
Eight percent. From saying "uh-huh" to a man who wants to sell rat meat.
"I think it could be huge," Charlie says. "Like, franchisable."
COMPLICITY: 9%
"I'm gonna—" Griffin gestures toward the back. "Stockroom. Inventory thing."
"Cool cool cool."
He walks to the stockroom. Closes the door. Sits on a case of Yuengling. The HUD is still there — dimmed in the windowless room, but present, always present, a layer of information between him and the world that he didn't ask for and can't remove.
You did ask for it. That's exactly what you asked for. You just didn't expect the universe to have customer service.
He closes his eyes. The HUD dims to almost nothing — a faint awareness at the edge of perception, like knowing there's a sound in the next room without being able to identify it. Not off. Never off. Just quieter.
Okay. So I have a system. A catastrophe prediction system. It rates schemes and tracks my involvement and apparently has tutorial tips with personality.
He opens his eyes. The HUD brightens.
[TUTORIAL TIP #4: THE GANG DOES NOT CARE WHAT YOU THINK. THIS IS NOT A BUG. IT IS A CORE FEATURE OF YOUR ENVIRONMENT.]
Helpful.
Griffin stands. Walks back out to the bar. Charlie is drawing a business plan on a napkin that looks like a map of a sewer with dollar signs. Mac is doing bicep curls with a bottle of vodka. The E above Charlie's head glows steadily.
He takes his place behind the bar. Picks up a glass. Starts polishing.
The Complicity Meter reads 9%. The Scheme Disaster Rating reads E. The world has a user interface and it's ugly and it's permanent and it's the closest thing to an answer he's had since waking up in this body.
You wished for this. Now learn how to read it.
Dennis walks in at noon. Hair styled. Collar popped. The practiced stride of a man who enters rooms the way other people enter stages.
"Gentlemen," Dennis announces. "I have a proposal."
A letter materializes above Dennis Reynolds' head. Griffin watches it form — not the pale yellow-green of Charlie's E. This one builds from orange, deepens, and settles.
C
[Scheme Disaster Rating: C — Calamity. Significant property damage, relationship destruction, possible arrest. Probability: 67%. Rating may increase with additional participants.]
The orange letter pulses above Dennis's perfect hair and Dennis doesn't know and will never know and Griffin stands behind the bar with a clean glass in his hand and a headache behind his eyes and a system that has just confirmed what he already suspected: Dennis Reynolds is always worse than Charlie Kelly by at least two tiers.
"What kind of proposal?" Mac asks, already leaning forward.
The C flickers. Ticks.
C+
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