THE ASCENSION SYSTEM

CHAPTER 2

The World Feels... Wrong

I wake up to a flickering sky.

The streetlights above me pulse in and out like a dying heartbeat, casting shifting shadows over the cracked pavement. A neon sign blinks too fast, its letters scrambling into nonsense before snapping back into place. A man in a brown coat walks past—then stops, stutters backward in a loop, and repeats the motion like a corrupted video file.

What the hell?

My breath catches. My limbs feel sluggish as I push myself up from the ground. I don’t remember collapsing. The last thing I recall is... pain. A sharp, electric kind of agony surged through my skull, leaving nothing but static in its wake. Now I’m here, with the world around me glitching like a broken simulation.

“Hey! Are you okay?”

I turn too fast, my balance shifting strangely as if gravity itself is recalibrating. A woman stands a few feet away, her expression uncertain. Her voice sounds off—like an echo arriving before the words do. Her eyes flicker for half a second, irises cycling through different colors before settling back to brown.

A shiver runs down my spine. I need to get a grip.

I press two fingers against my wrist, feeling for a pulse. Rapid. Too rapid. Adrenaline floods my veins. I scan my surroundings—cars parked at odd angles, the sky twisting as if the clouds don’t know which way to move. A digital billboard above a convenience store blares an ad for soda, but the actor’s face distorts mid-sentence, stretching into an unnatural grin before the screen freezes entirely.

This isn’t a hallucination. It’s real. And it’s wrong.

I reach up, expecting to rub my temple, but my fingers brush against something else. A thin, translucent interface hovers just beyond my line of sight, filled with unreadable code fragments. The moment I focus on them, they scatter like startled insects, reforming into new sequences. My chest tightens. This is—

A sharp noise behind me.

Instinct kicks in, and I spin around, heart hammering. A man stares at me from across the street. Tall. Too still. His suit is crisp, unnervingly pristine, his face blank like he hasn’t quite figured out how expressions work. Then, without warning, he moves—too fast, too smooth, closing the distance in the blink of an eye.

I stagger back. “No. Nope. Not dealing with that.”

He tilts his head, eyes unblinking. “You are awake too soon.”

His voice is layered—one deep, one high, slightly out of sync. The air around him distorts like heat waves rising off the asphalt.

“What?” My throat is dry. “Who the hell are you?”

His head tilts further, almost unnaturally. “You are experiencing instability. The system is still adapting.”

The words hit like a cold slap. System. Instability.

A realization slams into me like a freight train. This isn’t just some bizarre dream. It’s not a side effect of drugs or some elaborate prank. Something fundamental about reality itself is… broken.

The man takes another step, and the ground beneath him ripples like disturbed water. “You must return to—”

“Yeah, no thanks.”

I bolt.

My muscles react before my mind fully processes the decision. My feet pound against the pavement as I weave through the chaotic streets, dodging people frozen mid-step and cars that flicker between states of motion and stillness. A streetlamp overhead shatters in slow motion, fragments suspended in the air before reversing back into place as if rewinding time.

Behind me, the man doesn’t run. He doesn’t have to. Every time I glance back, he’s closer. No sound. No movement. Just there.

My lungs burn. Panic gnaws at my edges. I need to lose him.

A side alley.

I veer hard, nearly losing my balance as the ground beneath me shifts unpredictably. My legs feel unsteady like I’m fighting against an invisible current. The walls of the alley stretch for half a second, distorting before snapping back.

Then—

Pain.

Blinding. Searing. Like a thousand needles drilling into my skull. My vision fractures, and for a split second, I see something else—a vast, endless grid stretching into infinity, numbers, and symbols cascading in waterfalls of raw data. It’s not just the world that’s broken.

It’s me.

I collapse against the alley wall, gasping, my fingers clawing at my temples. The system interface flickers again, more stable this time. And suddenly, I understand what it is.

A menu.

Options shift, written in a language I shouldn’t recognize but do. Diagnostic reports scroll past, flashing red warnings. Corruption detected. System divergence at critical levels. Restore parameters?

No. No, no, no.

I don’t know what that means, but every instinct tells me it’s bad. A forced reset? A wipe?

A shadow falls over me. I don’t have time to react before an icy hand grips my shoulder.

The man is here. His face still empty, his fingers pressing down like steel cables. “You must comply.”

The interface flickers again—one option is highlighted, pulsing.

Override.

I don’t know what I’m doing, but I don’t hesitate. I will activate it.

The world implodes.

Light floods my vision, a tsunami of raw information rushing through my mind. The alley, the street, the city itself—all of it dissolves into cascading data streams, unraveling before my eyes. I feel myself falling, weightless, untethered from reality.

And then—

Nothing.

Darkness. Silence. A void stretching in all directions.

I should be terrified. I should be screaming. But instead, I feel something else.

Control.

I’m not just inside the system.

I am the system.

A voice—not my own—echoes through the void. “You weren’t supposed to wake up.”

I smirk, even as the abyss around me pulses, waiting to consume me whole.

“Yeah, well,” I say, cracking my knuckles. “Guess your system has a bug.”

And then I reach forward, ready to rewrite the rules.