She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even breathe for a second.

  Then the line crackled like she’d dropped the phone, picked it up again, and leaned in so close I could hear her chair squeak.

  “For real?” she repeated, slower this time. “Like . . . HUD? Floating boxes? Names, stats, the lot?”

  “Yeah,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I meant. “Started last night. Thought I’d lost it. Then it leveled me up. I’m Level 1 now, Stella.”

  Silence came again before a low whistle. “Christ on a bike. You’re not taking the piss.”

  “Wish I was.”

  “Right,” she said, and I could picture her already spinning her second monitor toward her, fingers flying before she’d even finished the word. “Describe the font. Exact hex code if you can see it. Is it anti-aliased? Any drop shadow? Does it flicker on motion blur?”

  “What? Hold on. Are you just gonna eat up what I said?”

  She snorted, a sharp, delighted bark. “Eat it up? Jamie, do you know how long I’ve dreamed of this day? I’ve got a folder on my desktop called ‘LitRPG_Wish_List’ with forty-three tabs open. You’ve read Dungeon Crawler Carl yet?”

  “No—”

  “You have to read Dungeon Crawler Carl, Jamie. It’s about a bloke who gets trapped in a game-show dungeon with his cat. The cat wears boots. Oh, and also the AI narrator is a sarcastic—”

  “Stell.”

  “—and there’s this bit where he weaponizes a—”

  “Stella.”

  She stopped. “Right. Sorry. Got carried away. This is just . . . mental,” she said, the giddy edge still there but reined in. “Tell me more. Walk me through it like I’m five.”

  I took a breath. “It’s . . . Football Management Sim. Exactly. Same font, same layout with floating player cards: name, age, position, best role with the little stars. I hit Level 1 tonight after coaching a youth session. The quest was ‘gain a management position.’ Done. Ding. Unlocked my own attributes: pace, tackling, positioning, heading. Numbers out of 200, just like the game. Everything else is still locked.”

  “Attributes gated behind levels,” she muttered, half to herself. “Classic progression loop. And the quest trigger?”

  “Accepted it mentally. Box popped up. Thought ‘yes’ and it registered.”

  “Intent-based input. No voice, no gesture. That’s . . . advanced.” A soft hmmm followed. “Any tooltip pop-ups? Hidden menus? Try thinking really hard about the word ‘options.’”

  I did. Nothing happened.

  “Negative,” I said.

  “Fair. Probably locked till Level 2 or a hidden achievement.” Keys clattered again. “Okay, stress test time. Tonight. I’m thirty minutes out. Grabbing my kit, jumping in the car. Prep the corpse laptop. I want to see if the corruption left a ghost process. And Jamie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Put the kettle on. And don’t accept another quest till I’m there with a hex editor and a packet sniffer. Could be a trap. Could be a backdoor. Could be both.”

  The line went dead.

  I stared at the phone, then at the ceiling where my own HUD still floated, calm and glowing.

  For the first time since the laptop died, I didn’t feel mad or confused.

  I felt recruited.

  Stella’s battered silver Clio fishtailed onto the estate, tyres chirping on the speed-bump she definitely didn’t slow for. The left headlight flickered (had been since 2022), and the boot was held shut with a bungee cord that rattled like a tambourine. As she killed the engine halfway onto the curb, the hazard lights hammered the street in violent amber flashes beneath the sodium glow. Showy.

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  She climbed out of the driver’s seat. Her hoodie was half-zipped over a faded NullRef raid shirt, her cargo joggers were stuffed with cables, and the neon-green lanyard read PAX East 2025 – QA Lead. A battered Pelican case clattered onto the pavement beside her, followed by a laptop bag that looked like it had survived three airport security bins and a toddler. Her hair (dyed electric violet at the tips) twisted into a knot held together by a biro she’d nicked from my flat in 2021 and never gave back. A stainless-steel water bottle (the one she’d started carrying after her GP said ‘cut the caffeine or cut the years’) rattled in the cupholder, full of flat sparkling water with a slice of lime floating like a sad boat.

  That was her alright.

  “Jesus, Stell,” I said, taking her in. “You don’t look a day worse than last time I saw you. Thought gamers aged like milk left on a radiator.”

  She snorted, yanking the biro from her hair and letting the violet-tipped knot tumble. “Quit gawping and move. I’ll bash your skull in with this Pelican case if you make me late for my own debug session.”

  After ten minutes of wrestling with my corpse laptop, she sat back, defeated. “Nothing. Not even a stray byte. Whatever handshake happened, it didn’t leave fingerprints on the drive.”

  She cracked open a stainless-steel water bottle from her bag and took a long pull. “Plan B. Live tests on you.”

  She produced a cheap webcam on a gorilla-pod, stuck it to the wall, and fired up a packet sniffer. “Stare at the lens. Think ‘status’.”

  I did. My HUD obligingly floated into view.

  “Capture’s clean,” she muttered. “No outbound packets. No Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no cellular. It’s all local to your skull.” She swapped the webcam for a phone camera in night-vision mode. “Blink twice.”

  I did. The HUD stayed rock-solid.

  “Native rendering,” she confirmed. “Not AR overlay nor retinal projection. It’s in you.”

  “Gotta give up on that,” I said, slumping back on the sofa. “Help me figure out how it works instead. Right now I can only pull up my own status. I don’t know how to trigger quests on purpose or access anything deeper. If this is FMSim proper, there’s supposed to be a full sidebar with squad screen, tactics, training, transfers, scouting, the lot. Right now, it feels like I’m stuck on the loading bay.”

  Stella capped her water bottle. “Alright, FM crash course, brain edition. Think like you’re at the main menu. No clicking, just will it: ‘Dashboard.’ ‘Home.’ ‘Club Overview.’ Something with a sidebar vibe.”

  “Negative.”

  She drummed her fingers on the coffee table. “This is tougher than I thought. Okay, FMSim 101: core tabs are Squad, Tactics, Training, Transfers. You’re ‘manager’ now, so try ‘My Squad.’ Or ‘Tactics Board.’ Hard focus, like you did with the quest.”

  My Squad.

  Nothing.

  Tactics.

  Zilch.

  “Piss off,” I muttered.

  “Patience, protagonist.” She grabbed a notepad from her bag and started scribbling. “Quests first, then. They’re the progression gate. The last one popped after you coached . . . is it a proximity trigger? Try staring at your HUD and thinking ‘Access Quests’ or ‘Next Objective.’ LitRPG 101: systems love nested menus.”

  “I already tried ‘Quest’,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Got nothing.”

  Stella tapped the pen against her teeth. “One-word triggers are sloppy design. Too easy to misfire. Try the full phrase: Available Quests. Systems love specificity. It stops you accidentally popping a quest every time you think ‘damn, I need a piss’ or ‘where’s my keys?’ I once worked on this mobile gacha where the menu was voice-activated and the trigger was just ‘shop’. Mate, every time someone said ‘shop’ in a call, boom, micro-transaction screen. Devs lost three grand in refunds because a streamer yelled ‘shop local’ during a charity bit. Took us two weeks to patch it to ‘open shop menu’. Lesson learned: specificity or bankruptcy.”

  “Stell,” I said, “your constant squeaky nonsense is gonna make me trigger a quest called ‘Stuff a Sock in Cousin’s Gob’.”

  She opened her mouth, closed it, then grinned. “Fair. Access Quests. Go.”

  I focused and emptied my head, then thought: Access Quests.

  The pane shimmered.

  “There!” I barked. “Got one. ‘Complete a training session.’”

  Stella punched the air. “Yes! Proximity or role-based. You’re ‘coaching’ now, so it’s feeding you FMSim basics. Accept it mentally, but slowly. Narrate what you see.”

  I did. The box ticked over.

  I told her what I saw.

  “Beautiful,” she breathed. “That’s your hook. Grind that, hit Level 2, and the sidebar unlocks. Squad view, tactics canvas, the works. You’ll be slinging . . . I dunno, counter-attack penalty shoot-outs in your sleep.”

  “You know that makes no fucking sense, right?”

  She laughed. “Oi, I’m a QA goblin, not a pundit. I just mashed the only football words I know. Sue me.”

  I stared at the glowing box, until it felt like the little 0/1 stared back at me.

  One session. Simple, then.