Ori does not sleep.
He tries. At eleven he closes the curtains and lies down with the lights off and his eyes shut, and the interface glows softly in the dark above him, visible through his eyelids in the way that a light source is visible even when you are not looking directly at it. Faint. Persistent. Entirely unbothered by his decision to ignore it.
He opens his eyes.
The interface is there, hovering at its usual height, the primary mission and the subquest and the FLARE information sitting in their clean and patient arrangement. It has not changed since he stopped interacting with it. It is simply on, the way a screen is on when nobody is using it but nobody has turned it off either.
He sits up.
"Close," he says.
Nothing happens.
"Exit," he says.
Nothing.
He tries: "Off. Stop. End. Cancel. Dismiss." He tries saying nothing and waiting. He tries lying back down and putting the pillow over his face, which addresses his own visibility but does nothing about the interface's. He tries standing up and moving to the other side of the room, where the interface follows him at a consistent distance, maintaining its position relative to his own the way a screen follows a user, which answers the question of whether it is projected onto a fixed point in space.
It is not projected onto a fixed point in space.
It is projected onto him.
He stands in the corner of his room at two in the morning with an interface he cannot close floating in front of him and considers his options, which are: continue trying to dismiss it, interact with it further, or accept its presence and attempt sleep anyway.
He goes back to bed.
He lies down. The interface hovers above him, visible and patient and producing just enough light to be a presence without being a disturbance. He looks at it for a while. Then he looks past it at the ceiling, at the water stain in the far corner, the country without a name.
"Why me," he says. Not aggressively. As a genuine question directed at something he is not sure can receive genuine questions.
The interface responds:
Eligibility criteria are not disclosed at this stage.
"That's not an answer."
It is the available answer.
Ori stares at this. The response arrived with the same tone as everything else the interface has produced: exact, minimal, neither warm nor cold. It is not a personality. It is a system responding to inputs with outputs. He understands this and finds it, perversely, slightly reassuring. A system with no agenda is preferable to a system with one he cannot see.
"I have nine thousand four hundred followers," he says, "because someone filmed me without my knowledge and posted it and I became a reference point in other people's conversations. I have no performance experience. No skills relevant to whatever FLARE is. No reason to believe I can gain six hundred followers in twenty-eight days through anything other than continued passive association with an incident I would prefer to forget."
The interface is quiet for a moment.
Then:
Current follower count: 9,412. Required: 10,000. Deficit: 588. The subquest does not require you to close the deficit through passive means. The subquest provides direction.
"Direction toward an audition show."
Correct.
"I don't audition for things."
That is consistent with your history. It is not a permanent condition.
Ori looks at this line for a long time.
It is not a permanent condition.
He does not know what to do with a floating interface telling him that his limitations are not permanent at two in the morning. He does not know what to do with any of this. But the line sits in him in a specific way, finding a particular place to land, because it is accurate in the way that simple accurate things are sometimes more useful than complex ones.
He has not done something before. That is all the history says.
"What is FLARE," he asks.
A new block of text appears below the existing lines:
FLARE: national talent competition program. Current season in pre-qualification stage. Open auditions select fifty contestants for broadcast rounds. Single-stage elimination format. Winner receives production deal. Next open audition: Vaelmund Grand Media Hall. Date: 28 days.
"Fifty contestants."
Correct.
"What happens if I fail."
The interface takes a moment longer than its previous responses before answering. Then:
Failure carries no irreversible consequence. You will have attempted something. That has independent value.
Ori reads this twice.
He thinks about the word irreversible, which the interface chose specifically. He thinks about things that are irreversible, which at this moment means one thing primarily: a room, a whiteboard, a voice that did not stay inside his head. That is irreversible. An audition he does not win is not irreversible. There is a meaningful gap between those two categories and the interface has located it accurately.
He lies back.
The interface glows above him.
He thinks about twenty-eight days. He thinks about Kael, who will need to be told about this. He thinks about telling Kael about this and Kael's face cycling through its predictable sequence of amusement and concern and acceptance. He almost smiles at the predictability of it.
He looks at the interface.
"Is there anything I need to do tonight," he asks.
No. First mission task will be available at dawn.
"Then I'm going to sleep."
Acknowledged.
"You're still going to be there when I wake up."
Yes.
"Alright," Ori says.
He closes his eyes. The interface glows through his eyelids in its faint and patient way. The city hums outside the window. The room is quiet in the way it has not been quiet in two and a half weeks, not the uncomfortable quiet of someone alone with something too large, but the quiet of a room in which something has arrived and been received and is now simply waiting for morning.
He sleeps.
When he opens his eyes at seven thirteen the interface is there, unchanged, a new line added below everything else in slightly brighter text:
Good morning. Your first task is ready.
Ori sits up.
He looks at it.
"Okay," he says.