Chapter 1: Truck-kun Sends His Regards

  The condom was in his left pocket.

  Andy Snodgrass knew this because he had checked four times since leaving his apartment, which was three times more than a normal person would check and exactly the right number of times for a twenty-four-year-old veterinary technician who had never, in his entire life, not once, not even a little bit, had sex. He had the condom. He had brushed his teeth twice. He had Googled “what to do the first time” and then closed the browser tab so fast his laptop nearly slid off his desk because the results were either terrifyingly clinical or terrifyingly acrobatic and neither felt applicable to a guy whose most intimate physical contact in the last calendar year had been a Labrador retriever licking the inside of his ear during a routine vaccination.

  The evening air was warm for late September, the kind of warmth that felt like the city was doing him a personal favor, and the sidewalk under his sneakers had that particular golden-hour glow that made even the dumpster behind the Thai restaurant look almost romantic. Almost. The dumpster still smelled like pad see ew left in the sun, which, to be fair, was basically what pad see ew was, but the light was doing its best and Andy appreciated the effort.

  Megan lived four blocks from his apartment. He had walked this route dozens of times over the three months they had been dating, a duration that felt simultaneously like no time at all and like an entire geological epoch, mostly because for the first two months he had been too nervous to do anything more than kiss her goodnight at her door like some kind of Regency-era suitor who happened to own a PlayStation and work at an animal hospital. Megan had been patient about it in the way that made him feel both grateful and deeply, cellularly embarrassed, the kind of patience that communicated “I like you enough to wait” but also “I am aware that most adults figure this out before their mid-twenties.”

  She had texted him forty minutes ago. Just two words and an emoji.

  Come over ??

  He had stared at that fire emoji for a solid ninety seconds, parsing it for ambiguity the way a medieval scholar might parse scripture, searching for alternate interpretations that didn’t involve what he was fairly certain it involved. Maybe she wanted to show him a candle she had bought. Maybe her apartment was literally on fire and she needed assistance. Maybe the fire emoji had a secondary colloquial meaning he wasn’t aware of because his cultural references were primarily drawn from video games and nature documentaries.

  Then she had sent a second text.

  Bring yourself. Just yourself. And maybe a toothbrush if you want to stay over.

  There it was. The “stay over.” The two most suggestive words in the English language, somehow more loaded than anything explicit, because “stay over” carried within it the implication of a morning after, of breakfast, of waking up next to someone, of the entire sprawling terrifying beautiful architecture of intimacy that Andy had built up in his imagination over twenty-four years of not experiencing it.

  So he had brushed his teeth (twice), checked his pocket (four times), and stepped out into the golden-hour warmth of a September evening that the universe had apparently designed specifically to serve as the backdrop for Andrew Snodgrass finally, at long last, in the year of our lord, losing his virginity.

  He was thinking about what to say when she opened the door.

  “Hey” felt too casual, like he was showing up to watch Netflix, which, to be fair, was what they usually did, but tonight was Different and the greeting should reflect the Differentness without being so different that it became weird. “Hello, I have arrived for the sex” was technically honest but would almost certainly result in the door closing in his face and possibly a restraining order. “Hi, you look beautiful” was good but only if she actually looked beautiful when she opened the door, and what if she was wearing sweatpants, and was he supposed to say she looked beautiful in sweatpants, and actually yes, she would look beautiful in sweatpants, Megan looked beautiful in everything, which was part of the problem because looking at Megan made his brain do a thing where all the words he knew rearranged themselves into nonsense and came out of his mouth in the wrong order.

  The crosswalk signal at Meridian and Tenth turned green. The little white pedestrian figure appeared, the universal symbol for “it is safe to cross this street,” a promise made by the city’s infrastructure to its citizens that for the next thirty seconds this particular rectangle of asphalt belonged to people with legs and not to several-ton vehicles traveling at speeds incompatible with human skeletal integrity.

  Andy stepped off the curb.

  He was thinking about Megan’s freckles. She had exactly eleven of them across the bridge of her nose (he had counted during a movie once when she fell asleep on his shoulder and he had been too afraid to move for two hours because her hair smelled like coconut and he didn’t want to disturb the coconut). Eleven freckles. He wondered if she had freckles elsewhere. He was about to find out. The thought made his stomach do a barrel roll that was equal parts excitement and the kind of terror usually reserved for skydivers and people who hear “we need to talk.”

  The truck came from the left.

  Later, in the vanishingly small window of time between the impact and whatever came after, Andy would note with the detached precision of a man whose brain was doing that slowed-down thing brains do during catastrophic events that the traffic signal had been green. His signal. The walk signal. The little white man. He had looked both ways, because Andrew Snodgrass was the kind of person who looked both ways even on one-way streets, because his mother had raised him to be careful and he had been careful, he had been so goddamn careful his entire life, careful with his grades and careful with his feelings and careful with women and careful at crosswalks, and the signal was green, it was his turn, he had done everything right.

  The truck ran the red.

  There was no dramatic slow-motion montage. No life flashing before his eyes. No profound final thought about the meaning of existence or the faces of loved ones or the beauty of a world he was about to leave. There was just the truck, which was large, and Andy, who was not, and a very brief sensation that he would later describe (to no one, because he was dead) as similar to being hit by a truck.

  The condom was still in his left pocket.

  Consciousness returned the way a bad internet connection restarts: not all at once, not smoothly, but in stuttering fragments that assembled themselves into something resembling awareness with all the grace of a toddler building with blocks. There was darkness first, then a sensation he couldn’t name because he didn’t seem to have the sensory equipment to name things, then a kind of pressure that wasn’t pressure, and then, with the fanfare of a system notification in a video game he had not agreed to play:

  [SYSTEM INITIALIZED]

  [WELCOME, NEW ORGANISM]

  [SPECIES: PROKARYOTIC CELL (UNSPECIALIZED)]

  [TIER: 1]

  The text hung in his awareness. Not in front of his eyes, because he didn’t have eyes. Not projected onto a screen, because there was no screen. The words simply existed in a space that felt like the inside of his own mind, if his mind had been reformatted, wiped clean, and reinstalled on hardware that was approximately ten trillion times less complex than the brain he’d had fifteen seconds ago. Or fifteen minutes ago. Or fifteen millennia ago. Time, like everything else, had become difficult to pin down.

  Andy tried to process what he was reading and discovered that processing, as a cognitive function, worked differently when the processor in question was a single cell floating in what appeared to be a body of water so vast relative to his current size that it might as well have been the Pacific Ocean, except warm, and teeming with chemical compounds that his new, extremely rudimentary sensory apparatus was identifying as “food, maybe” and “danger, probably” and very little else.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  [CURRENT ABILITIES:]

  [ABSORB NUTRIENTS] - Passively intake dissolved organic compounds from surrounding medium.

  [DIVIDE] - Reproduce via binary fission. Cooldown: Variable based on energy reserves.

  [EXIST] - You are alive. Congratulations.

  He stared at that last one. Stared was the wrong word. He perceived it. He perceived it with the full cognitive weight of a man who had, until very recently, possessed a prefrontal cortex and opposable thumbs and a Costco membership and a half-finished playthrough of Elden Ring and a condom in his left pocket and a girlfriend named Megan who was probably, right now, at this exact moment, wondering why he hadn’t knocked on her door.

  He went back and read the second one again. [DIVIDE]. Reproduce via binary fission. He could reproduce. Right now, if he wanted to. No dinner, no awkward conversation, no three months of Regency-era courtship and a fire emoji. Just… split. The universe had killed him on the way to lose his virginity and reincarnated him as an organism that could literally go fuck itself.

  Exist. That was his other headline ability. Existing. The System, whatever it was, had looked at the full spectrum of things a prokaryotic cell could do and decided that the most notable among them was the bare fact of being alive, which it had presented with the enthusiasm of a participation trophy.

  Congratulations. You exist.

  The grief arrived without warning, a sucker punch from the inside, and for a span of time that could have been seconds or hours (because, again, single-celled organisms do not have a robust sense of temporal continuity), Andy Snodgrass floated in warm water and mourned.

  He mourned Megan, who would text him again and then call him and then worry and then, eventually, find out. He mourned his mother, who called him every Sunday and would now call him every Sunday and get voicemail and he couldn’t think about that, he could not think about that, so he stopped. He mourned his cat, Gerald, who was an idiot and was probably sitting on the kitchen counter right now eating butter from the dish Andy always forgot to put away. He mourned the version of himself that had been walking down a golden-lit sidewalk with a condom in his pocket and a whole future unspooling in front of him, a version that had been so close to something and would now never know what that something felt like.

  He mourned, and the water was warm, and the System waited.

  Then, because Andy Snodgrass was also the kind of person who had beaten the Nameless King on his third try and refused to acknowledge that he had rage-quit twice before that, the grief did what grief does when it meets stubbornness: it receded. Not gone. Not forgotten. Just filed away in whatever passed for long-term memory in a prokaryotic cell, which, given the lack of a hippocampus, was honestly impressive.

  And in its place, something else.

  [ABSORB NUTRIENTS] the System repeated, as if it had noticed his attention drifting.

  He was floating in warm water surrounded by chemical compounds the System was labeling as food. He was a single cell. He had no mouth, no stomach, no digestive tract. But he had [ABSORB NUTRIENTS], which, according to the description, allowed him to passively intake dissolved organic compounds from the surrounding medium, and the surrounding medium was apparently full of dissolved organic compounds, and he was, now that the grief had taken its seat in the back row of his consciousness, hungry.

  Not hungry the way he used to get hungry, the kind of hunger that made him stand in front of his refrigerator at midnight eating shredded cheese directly from the bag while Gerald watched him with the quiet judgment of a cat who has seen his owner at his lowest. This was hunger at the cellular level, a pull that wasn’t a feeling so much as a fact, the same way gravity isn’t a feeling but you still fall.

  He reached toward the nearest concentration of organic compounds and, because he didn’t have hands or arms or anything resembling an appendage, “reaching” meant allowing the chemical gradient to draw the molecules through his membrane. Which it did. Automatically. The nutrients just… slid inside him. His whole body opened up and took it all in at once, every part of him enveloping them simultaneously in a way that was, if he was being honest, more intimate than anything he’d ever experienced as a human. His first time, and it was with a cloud of amino acids in a prehistoric pond. Figured.

  [NUTRIENTS ABSORBED: +3]

  [XP GAINED: +1]

  The notification hit his awareness with the clean, satisfying ping of a well-designed UI element, and Andy, who had spent approximately eleven thousand hours of his life playing video games across various platforms and genres, felt a sensation so familiar it was almost comforting.

  He had gained experience points. By eating.

  The gaming part of his brain, which was apparently the most resilient structure in his entire psychological makeup, more durable than dignity, more persistent than grief, more fundamental to his identity than his own name, sat up and paid attention.

  XP. There was XP. Where there was XP, there were levels. Where there were levels, there were stats. Where there were stats, there was optimization, and where there was optimization, there was the possibility, however faint, however ridiculous, however cosmically absurd given that he was currently a speck of biological matter floating in a primordial pond, of winning.

  [XP: 1/10]

  [NEXT MILESTONE: ABILITY SELECTION]

  He needed nine more XP to reach his first milestone. Each nutrient absorption gave him one XP, maybe more depending on the compound. There were nutrients all around him. The math was simple. The math was, in fact, the first simple thing that had happened to him since a truck had rearranged his existence at a crosswalk where the signal was green, the signal was green, he had done everything right.

  Andy absorbed another cluster of organic molecules. The chemical gradient parted around his membrane and delivered them inside him like room service, except the room was his entire body and the service was molecular diffusion and the tip was one experience point.

  [NUTRIENTS ABSORBED: +5]

  [XP GAINED: +1]

  [XP: 2/10]

  Then another.

  [XP: 3/10]

  Then another. And another. The rhythm of it was meditative, almost absurdly so for a speck of pond life, a simple loop of sense and act and gain that quieted the part of his brain still screaming about trucks and Megan and the fundamental unfairness of dying at twenty-four with a condom in your pocket. Absorb. Gain. Absorb. Gain. Faster now, getting into a groove, the molecules sliding in easier each time as he learned to relax his membrane and just let it happen. The numbers ticked upward with each cycle, and each tick carried that small, clean satisfaction of progress, the same dopamine hit he got from watching an experience bar fill in any game he’d ever played, except this time the game was his life and the experience bar was literal and the stakes were eat or dissolve in a prehistoric soup kitchen.

  [XP: 7/10]

  He was getting faster at it. Not because his abilities had changed, but because he was learning where the nutrient concentrations were densest, following the chemical gradients to the good stuff instead of passively waiting for it to drift by. This was, he realized with something between pride and existential horror, the prokaryotic equivalent of learning to farm efficiently in the opening area of an RPG. He was min-maxing his nutrient absorption. He was optimizing his single-celled eating strategy. He was the kind of person who couldn’t turn this part of his brain off even after dying and being reincarnated as pond scum, and he wasn’t sure if that was admirable or pathological, but the XP bar was filling either way and that was enough. Besides, this was the most action his body had ever seen, even if said body was now a microscopic blob. He was going to take what he could get.

  [XP: 9/10]

  One more.

  He found a cluster of amino acids dissolved in the water nearby, richer than anything he’d absorbed so far, practically a five-course meal by prokaryotic standards, and pulled them through his membrane with the careful efficiency of a man who has spent his entire life being careful about everything except, apparently, looking left at crosswalks where the signal was green.

  [XP: 10/10]

  [MILESTONE REACHED!]

  [ABILITY SELECTION AVAILABLE]

  [PLEASE CHOOSE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:]

  And there it was. The first choice. The first branch point. The first moment in this new, impossible, microscopically small life where the System looked at Andy Snodgrass, prokaryotic cell, formerly human, currently floating, and said: What do you want to become?

  But that was an ability selection, not a tier evolution, and the options wouldn’t appear until he focused on the notification, and he wanted to sit with this for a moment. Not because he was hesitant. Because he wanted to remember what it felt like, this particular feeling, the one that lived at the intersection of grief and stubbornness and the first faint glow of something that might, in the right light, be called hope.

  He was alive. He was a single cell in a warm pond in a world that had a System and XP and ability trees. He had died a virgin on the way to not be one, and he had woken up as an organism that reproduced by splitting in half, which was, technically, the ultimate form of screwing yourself. He had lost everything, and he had gained one experience point at a time until the System gave him a choice, and he was going to make that choice, and then the next one, and then the one after that, because that was what Andy Snodgrass did. He made careful, methodical, slightly obsessive choices until something worked out, and if the universe thought that killing him with a truck on the way to his girlfriend’s apartment was going to stop that, then the universe had fundamentally misunderstood who it was dealing with.

  The notification pulsed gently in his awareness, waiting.

  Andy focused on it.

  If there was a god, Andy thought, the bastard was laughing himself sick. Killed a virgin with a truck. Reincarnated him as a single-celled organism. Gave him the ability to reproduce all by himself. Punchline delivered, cosmic joke complete, everybody laugh.

  Except Andy wasn’t done yet. He hadn’t even gotten to the good parts.

  He was ready to give whoever was watching something to talk about.