Consciousness arrived like waking in freefall.

  Kazuki Reiji's eyes snapped open to a ceiling he recognized, which meant either he was home or his brain was running the simulation again. The acoustic panels were still water-stained from the leak three years ago—five years ago now, he corrected, though the correction felt like trying to catch a fish in his own skull. Everything went wrong. Time had moved wrong.

  He lay on his back, unmoving. The mattress beneath him was thin, synthetic, smelled of dust and the particular sweat of someone who'd slept in the same spot for months. His apartment. The one he'd rented on his support-class salary. The walls were the color of institutional beige, the kind of paint that didn't commit to existing.

  His hands lay at his sides. He looked at them.

  They were smaller than they should be.

  Vertigo crashed through him—not the room spinning, but the sensation of standing at the edge of a drop so vast his brain couldn't calculate the distance. He'd been dead. Not symbolically dead. Not "dead inside" dead. He'd been the kind of dead where your heart stops and doesn't restart, where your brain goes dark for real, where you spend five years in nothing at all.

  He curled his fingers. The joints moved. The skin was smooth, unlined, the hands of someone in their early twenties. His hands, from five years ago.

  The window showed dawn light, the color of weak tea. Outside, the city sprawled in its ordinary way. No dungeons. No status screens floating in the air. No system message burned at the edge of his vision, asking if he wanted to accept a skill upgrade. Just buildings and power lines and the sound of traffic starting its morning rhythm, indifferent to everything.

  Reiji pushed himself up on his elbows. The small movement made his chest ache in a way that felt like remembering. His body remembered dying, apparently. His body had a memory his mind was still trying to accept.

  The phone sat on the nightstand where it always sat. He reached for it with hands that felt like they belonged to someone else. The screen lit with a swipe. The date read 03/21/20XX.

  Three days.

  Three days before the System descended.

  He stayed there for an hour, maybe longer, watching the ceiling and not breathing very much. The fact of it was too large to hold all at once. He kept cycling back to the same loop: dead, now alive, three days, alone with this, dead again, and now alive. The logic wouldn't form. It kept slipping sideways.

  Eventually, the morning got too bright, and he had to move. His legs remembered how to walk. His body was a thing that still knew how to do basic operations. He dressed in the clothes he'd worn yesterday—or the yesterday from five years in the future, which was also yesterday for him, and his brain started sliding sideways again, so he stopped thinking about it.

  The apartment was small enough that moving through it took no time. A single room with a kitchen counter that had never been used for cooking. A bathroom with a shower he'd never filled with anything but cold water. A closet with the kind of clothes someone buys when they're not planning to care about the way they look. Everything was arranged to take up as little space as possible. Everything was arranged for invisibility.

  ---

  The convenience store three blocks away had the same cashier it always had. A woman in her sixties with a name tag that said "Yuki," though he'd never actually heard anyone call her that. She rang up his purchases with the kind of practiced efficiency that meant she'd done this ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more.

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  Reiji bought a newspaper because he needed something to hold, something concrete. The date on the front was correct. The headlines were correct. An economic slowdown in Southeast Asia. A political scandal that nobody would remember after the next seventy-two hours. A feel-good story about a dog that had learned to skateboard.

  "Anything else?" Yuki asked.

  "No," Reiji said. "That's everything."

  She didn't look at him while she bagged the paper. No reason to. He was background. He was the kind of customer who came in, purchased something, and left without being remembered. The kind of person who'd trained for five years to be exactly this useful to everyone around him—which meant useful, and invisible, and safe.

  The world outside the store was on Tuesday morning. The sky was a pale, indeterminate color. Birds made noise. A woman sat on a bench near the park entrance, scrolling through her phone with the kind of passive attention that meant she wasn't thinking about anything important. In three days, seventeen people would die in a park radius from the System tutorial. Reiji could see the exact locations if he closed his eyes—the fountain would become a spawn point, the pavilion would collapse under the weight of a small dungeon's gravity well, the playground equipment would stand unchanged, but the ground beneath it would buckle.

  The woman wouldn't be one of them. She'd be dead for other reasons. He didn't remember her name.

  Five years ago, he'd spent his afternoons doing this: walking through the city and cataloging survival statistics. Learning which places would matter. Which people would survive and which wouldn't. He'd been trying to game the system before it even arrived.

  Reiji walked home. The sun moved across the sky in ordinary ways.

  ---

  His apartment felt smaller when he came back inside. He sat on the edge of the bed and opened his phone and scrolled through his email looking for something that wasn't there. No messages from friends, because he didn't have friends in any way that counted. No family checking in, because his mother had died two years before the System arrived and his father had opted out of contact five years before that. No work emails, because his support-class salary came from gig economy jobs that didn't consider him a permanent employee.

  He tried to sleep. Sleep was a mistake. Sleep was where you went to become nothing. His eyes snapped open before he'd even closed them completely.

  He checked his phone again. Still 03/21/20XX.

  The future wasn't a loop. Time moved in one direction like it always had. If he could feel his heart beating, if his lungs could work, if his hands were small and his apartment was too clean and the world outside was exactly as he remembered, then the loop theory was wrong. He was alive. Actually alive. Not dreaming dead. Not simulating consciousness in some pocket dimension between one and nothing.

  This was real.

  Reiji lay on his back again, staring at the ceiling. He thought about Version 2.0. The phrase surfaced in his memory like something trying to breathe underwater. Version 2.0 was what the architects called the incoming system. Not "the System." Not "the Descent." Version 2.0, like it was a software patch. Like there had been a Version 1.0 and nobody had told anyone about it, and now they were coming back for the sequel, and he alone knew what was different.

  He'd died learning Version 1.0. He'd died supporting other people's builds because his class couldn't carry. He'd died invisible and useful and unremembered, the way support players usually died—last in, first out, the ones whose deaths nobody saw coming because they were always standing behind the real combat classes.

  Version 2.0 was going to be different. He remembered that much from the fragments that came at the end of the old timeline, from the whispers in the forums just before everyone stopped posting. Version 2.0 had been patched. Changed. Made incompatible with everything he'd learned.

  He had three days to figure out what that meant.

  Three days to decide if remembering was a gift or a death sentence he'd simply woken up inside of.

  Reiji stood up. His legs carried him to the window. Outside, the city kept moving. Cars. People. The ordinary countdown to a transformation nobody could see coming. The woman in the park was probably still scrolling through her phone, making decisions about a future that was about to become classified information.

  "Ten out of ten," he said to the empty room, testing the words. "Best resurrection I've ever had."

  The sound of his own voice was strange. Thin. Younger than he remembered. He listened to it disappear into the quiet and didn't follow it.

  His hands were smaller than they should be. He wasn't sure if that was real or just how his brain remembered them. Either way, it meant he'd forgotten how to be twenty-two.

  Reiji turned from the window. The phone was still sitting on the nightstand. He walked toward it, toward the information he didn't have yet, toward the three days that were already slipping away. Outside, the city made its preparations for something it didn't know was coming.

  He had a lot of work to do.