Scott woke up mid-scream.
"NOOOO — what the —!"
He scrambled back before his eyes were fully open, heels hammering against hard floorboards, one elbow catching the wall and sending a jolt up his arm. He pressed his back flat against it and stayed there, chest heaving, eyes dragging across every corner of the room.
Nothing. Nobody.
Just the grey morning light bleeding through the gap in the curtain and the distant groan of a bus somewhere on the street below.
He sat on the floor and waited for his heart to settle. It took a while.
Then the full weight of last night landed on him all at once.
'I jumped,' he thought. 'I actually jumped off that bridge.'
He looked down at himself. Faded black tee. Jeans. His jacket folded neatly beside him like someone had taken it off and set it down with care. He ran his hands over the fabric. Dry. Clean. Not a mark on him.
He stared at his own hands.
He should be dead. At minimum he should be in a hospital bed with a social worker asking him questions in a gentle voice. Instead he was sitting on his own floor in clean clothes feeling, if he was being brutally honest with himself, absolutely fine.
Which was its own kind of insult.
"I can't even do that right," he muttered.
He said it quietly, the way you say something you have been trying not to think. He sat with it for a moment then dropped his head back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. Couldn't pay rent. Couldn't keep a friend. Couldn't die properly. A complete set.
'Truly impressive, Scott.'
Then something else registered.
He was in his apartment.
He looked around properly for the first time. His room. His walls. The water stain above the window he'd been meaning to report for eight months. He crawled to the door and pushed it open an inch. The heavy padlock was hanging from the latch, shackle clicked open like someone had used a key and left it that way. He pushed the door a little further. The orange eviction notice was still taped to the outside, still mocking him in the same aggressive neon.
'How did I get in here?'
No answer. He added it to the pile.
He reached into his jacket pocket out of habit.
His fingers closed around something solid.
He pulled it out.
His phone. Screen uncracked, battery at thirty one percent, notifications from yesterday sitting there unread like nothing had happened.
Scott stared at it sitting in his palm.
'This was not in my pocket last night,' he thought. 'I checked.'
He put it down on the floor in front of him and looked at it like it might explain itself.
It didn't.
He checked the time. 8:15 AM.
"Shit!"
He was on his feet before the thought finished. He threw water on his face, grabbed his bag, and was halfway down the stairs before he remembered Mrs. Gable. He stopped immediately, planted each foot with the careful silence of a man crossing ice, and held his breath all the way past her door.
He slipped out into the street.
---
The campus was buzzing. The weather was annoyingly perfect, blue skies and a light breeze that had no business being this pleasant. A group of girls walked past him toward the library, their waists moving with that slow, easy roll that made men forget what direction they were heading in.
Scott watched them go.
'Still alive,' he thought. 'Might as well look.'
He was squinting at his paper timetable when a shadow fell over him.
"Excuse me? Do you have a second for justice?"
Scott looked up.
The girl in front of him was wearing a tight white T-shirt that looked like it had been painted directly onto her skin. Across the chest, the words SAY NO TO SEXUAL HARASSMENT were stretched over two very impressive, seemingly weightless curves that were doing a significant amount of work this morning.
"I'm Catherine," she said, flashing a brilliant, professional smile. "Law department. We're organizing a protest and a series of interviews regarding campus safety."
Scott blinked. "Wow."
Catherine's smile widened. "I know, right? It's a huge issue."
'I wasn't saying wow to the issue,' Scott thought, watching the way the lettering shifted as she breathed. 'I was saying wow to the fact that shirt has not given up yet.'
"This is good," Scott said, pulling his attention back up to her face. "Really important stuff."
"Exactly. I'm actually doing private interviews to get the male perspective on why harassment is a systemic failure. Could I get your number? I'd love to schedule twenty minutes."
"Sure," Scott said. He rattled off his number on autopilot, watching her type it in.
"Great! I'll text you the time and —"
The wind stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. Catherine froze mid-sentence, a strand of hair stuck flat against her lip. Above the fountain, a bird hung in the air with its wings spread wide, suspended like something had pressed pause on the entire world.
Everyone on the quad was frozen. Mid-stride, mid-laugh, mid-conversation, all of it locked in place like a photograph somebody had forgotten to finish taking. A plastic cup that had been falling off a bench sat in the air three inches below where it started.
The silence was total. Not quiet. Silent.
Then the screen appeared.
Translucent blue, hovering at eye level directly in front of his face.
[ SYSTEM INITIALIZING... ]
[ CASHBACK SYSTEM ACTIVATED ]
[ HOST SELECTION: DENVER SCOTT ]
Scott read it twice. Then a third time.
'Cashback,' he thought. 'Like a rewards card.'
He looked around at the frozen world then back at the screen.
'Am I dead? Is this what dead looks like? A loyalty program?'
[ WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE? ]
[ YES / NO ]
Scott looked at YES. Then NO. Then at Catherine's frozen face.
"Yes," he said. "Out of pure curiosity. Yes."
[ QUEST INITIATED: THE BOLD MOVE ]
[ OBJECTIVE: COMPLIMENT MISS SANDRA AND GAIN HER UNDIVIDED ATTENTION. ]
Then his stomach dropped clean out of him.
The world didn't blur or spin. It dissolved. The quad, Catherine, the frozen bird, all of it peeled back like wet paper pulling away from a surface, and what replaced it was distance. Pure, impossible distance rendered suddenly visible. Every wall between him and the economics block ceased to register as solid. Concrete, brick, corridor, stairwell, four hundred meters of campus, none of it stopped his eyes. They traveled in a straight unbroken line through all of it until they landed on Miss Sandra's office.
She was in her chair. Leaning back, phone in hand, mid-scroll. Frozen like everything else. The desk lamp threw warm yellow across the left side of her face and the top two buttons of her blouse were undone and even from this distance Scott could make out the individual lashes on her left eye.
He turned his head slightly, testing it. The fountain. The library. A woman at a third floor window with a coffee cup halfway to her mouth. All of it visible, the entire campus laid out like someone had removed every wall and left only the people standing in the spaces where walls used to be.
'That building is at least four hundred meters from here,' Scott thought, neck prickling. 'And I can see the pen on that woman's desk.'
He looked back at Sandra.
'What the hell is this thing?'
[ TARGET LOCATED ]
[ REWARD: $2,000 CREDIT & ACCESS TO "COIN TOSS" ]
Scott's jaw dropped.
'Two thousand dollars,' he thought. 'For complimenting Sandra.'
He did the math without deciding to. Rent cleared. Food for two months. Mrs. Gable off his back with enough left over to breathe.
Snap.
The walls came back. The wind came back. The bird above the fountain completed its wingbeat and sailed off. Catherine finished her sentence exactly where she'd left it: "— and place. See you then, Denver!" She waved and walked away, her hips doing that dangerous, unhurried swing.
Scott stood completely still.
"I jumped off a bridge last night," he said quietly, to nobody. "Woke up dry. Found my phone in a pocket I already checked. And now a system is offering me two thousand dollars to talk to my economics lecturer."
He picked up his bag.
"Fine," he said. "Fine."
---
The economics lecture hall had the dead energy of a room full of people who had somewhere better to be. Scott took his usual seat in the third row and waited.
Then the door opened.
Miss Sandra walked in and the room shifted in that involuntary way it always did when she entered. She was wearing a charcoal grey corporate dress with a white shirt underneath, the top two buttons left open. As she crossed to the podium her chest moved with a soft, heavy momentum that pulled every eye in the room. The trousers she wore sat close enough to her body that each stride sent her hips through a slow, deliberate arc that the back rows tracked without blinking.
Scott watched her set her notes down.
'Two thousand dollars,' he reminded himself.
"Today," Sandra began, her voice smooth and unhurried, "we discuss incentive structures. Why do people do what they do? Is it moral, or is it purely for the reward?"
She moved with an easy confidence, leaning across the desk to pick up a marker. "If I offer you a hundred dollars to jump off a bridge, you say no. If I offer you a million, you start looking for a parachute. The value dictates the risk."
Scott kept his face completely neutral and looked at his desk.
"Can anyone give me a real world example of a skewed incentive?"
The room went quiet.
Scott looked at the blue screen hovering faintly at the edge of his vision. Two thousand dollars. He thought about last night. The bridge. The water. Waking up on his floor this morning frustrated that he was still breathing.
'What exactly do I have to lose,' he thought. 'Seriously. What.'
He raised his hand.
The room noticed immediately. The collective attention shifted toward him the way it does when something unexpected happens in a quiet place. Sandra's eyebrows climbed before she could stop them.
"Mr. Scott." A pause that had genuine surprise in it. "The floor is yours."
Scott stood. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else but his voice came out steady. "An insurance firm that pays doctors for the number of tests they run rather than the health of the patient. The incentive isn't to heal. It's to bill. A correct system built on a corrupt motive."
The silence that followed was the kind that meant something.
Sandra tilted her head slowly. Her gaze sat on him longer than it needed to, recalibrating. "Precise. Correct. And surprisingly cynical." Another pause. "Well done, Mr. Scott."
He didn't sit down.
"One more thing, Miss Sandra."
The room went very still. The kind of still that happens when everyone senses something is about to occur that nobody will be able to pretend they didn't witness.
Sandra's expression didn't change but something behind her eyes sharpened. "Yes?"
Scott looked at her directly. Not at the desk. Not at the wall behind her. At her face. "You look incredibly beautiful today. That dress fits your shape perfectly. I think everyone in this room has been fighting a losing battle trying to focus on incentives when the main distraction is standing at the front of it."
The whole room held its breath. Nobody moved. Nobody whispered. Just sixty people sitting very still with the collective expression of an audience that had not expected the show to go in this direction and was not sure yet how to feel about it.
Sandra did not move.
The pink that crept up her neck was slow and involuntary and she clearly knew it was happening and could do absolutely nothing about it. It reached her cheeks and stayed there. She adjusted her glasses. Looked down at her notes for exactly one second, which was one second longer than Miss Sandra ever needed to look at her notes. When she looked back up she had pulled herself together but it had taken visible effort and the whole room had watched her do it.
She gave a single composed nod.
"Thank you, Mr. Scott." Her voice was steady. Almost. "Flattery will not earn you an A." A beat. "But I appreciate the honesty. Sit down."
"You're welcome," Scott said, and sat.
He stared straight ahead at the board and thought about how twelve hours ago he was standing on a bridge ready to be done with everything, and now he was sitting in a lecture hall having just told his economics professor she was beautiful in front of sixty people because a floating blue screen promised him two thousand dollars.
'I genuinely cannot tell,' he thought, 'if this is the worst my life has ever been or the best.'
---
The class ended twenty minutes later. Scott was packing his bag when he felt it. Not heard it. Felt it, somewhere behind his eyes, soft and clean like a key turning in a lock.
[ QUEST COMPLETE ]
[ $2,000.00 CREDITED TO ACCOUNT: XXX-XXX-552 ]
The number sat in his mind glowing a steady gold, as clear and readable as if it were printed on the inside of his skull. He didn't need his phone to see it. He just knew it was there, the way you know your own name.
He looked up.
Sandra was watching him from the podium. Her expression was composed and she hadn't looked at anyone else while he was packing.
"Mr. Scott," she said. "A word. My office. Now."
Scott looked at the gold number still glowing quietly behind his eyes.
He picked up his bag and smiled.
"I'm on my way, Miss Sandra."