The glow from the monitors slowly faded as I told Sunday to stand by, leaving the room in a comfortable semi-darkness. The reports were incredible, world-changing, but a strange sense of calm had settled over me. The frantic, desperate energy that had been thrumming inside me since I'd first opened my eyes in this new world—the pressure to survive, to fix things, to not end up in prison or bankrupt my family—had finally, blessedly, eased.
For the first time, I felt like I could actually breathe. I could just… be. Pushing myself up from the chair, I stretched my arms high over my head, feeling my spine pop and release a satisfying series of cracks. I ambled over to the window, my bare feet padding softly on the cool floorboards. The latch was stiff, as always, complaining with a metallic screech before giving way.
I shoved the window open.
The evening air of New San Antonio washed over me, and I inhaled deeply. It wasn't fresh, not by a long shot, It was a complex cocktail of city smells: the faint, ever-present tang of ozone and smog from the endless traffic ten stories below, the distant greasy aroma of street food vendors, the chemical lemon scent of industrial cleaning from a nearby tower, and the underlying, humid musk of twelve million people living on top of one another.
I rested my forearms on the warm concrete sill, leaning out into the twilight. The city sprawled before me in a breathtaking, terrifying panorama. A megapolis. A near-dystopian jungle of steel, glass, and neon that stretched to the hazy, polluted horizon. A thousand other apartment towers just like mine formed a jagged artificial canyon, every single window a lit square, a tiny snapshot of a different life. Sky-bridges crisscrossed between them, and the constant, muted roar of aero-vehicles and ground traffic was the city's eternal, rumbling heartbeat.
It was packed, overcrowded, and from a purely practical standpoint, probably a nightmare. But in this moment, with the warm wind on my face and the weight off my shoulders, it had its own strange charm. There was a calmness in the sheer scale of it, a sense of anonymity and possibility, The crime rate here was moderate, they said.
To be truly honest, it was mostly uneven on that part. Some districts were infested with it, violent and desperate, while others, like this one, were fairly calm, protected by the simple economics of slightly higher rent and better security. It was the way of city life, in this world and my last. You took the good with the bad, found your own pocket of peace, and kept your head down, that is just how it is.
My gaze drifted from the specific—a couple arguing on a sky-bridge, the flickering sign of a noodle shop—to the general, and my thoughts followed. This wasn't just New San Antonio. This was New USA, part of a global patchwork of nations that all bore familiar names but were fundamentally different. New Japan, New Mexico, New Canada. There were no superpowers here, no nation holding the whip hand over all the others. The wars had seen to that. Now, it was a matter of landmass and population, not military or ideological dominance. They competed in entertainment, in tech, in economics. A quieter, saner world in some ways, but with its own unique set of crippling problems.
The biggest of those problems was the one that had landed me in this mess to begin with. The population crisis. The radiation from the old wars had left a lasting scar on human fertility. It was a universal constant, a shared global burden that made every nation, regardless of its name, grapple with the same desperate measures—like the GMRD mandates that had driven the original Sael to suicide.
My eyes scanned the countless windows, the infinite lights, each one a person. And that got me thinking about the people themselves. This world had racism, sure, in the way that ignorance and tribalism probably always exist in some form. But it wasn't the highlighted, virulent, systemic cancer it had been in my old world. How could it be?
Pervasive, grinding poverty was the great equalizer. When 90% of the population is just trying to survive the week, to pay the oxygen tax and the water bill and keep a roof that isn't condemned over their heads, you don't have the luxury of hating your neighbor because of their skin tone or ancestry. You're too busy hoping they'll help you pay the rent on your cramped, multi-family apartment that everyone all share out of necessity. Cramped living conditions forced integration, forced cooperation, forced a kind of grudging tolerance.
And on top of that, generations of global upheaval and migration had done its work. Almost everyone had a mix of something in them. Pure ethnic lineages were a rare curiosity, not a standard. Trying to be racist in a world where the person you want to hate probably shares at least one of your own ethnic markers was… pointless. It was a logistical nightmare of bigotry. It was, as I concluded with a soft snort, utterly fucking useless. The struggle wasn't man against man; it was everyone against the slow, entropy of a broken world. It was a terrible reason for tolerance, but it was an effective one.
********************
'Alright that is enough melancholy for the day…'.
My mind had wandered through geopolitics and social theory. It was time to come back to me. I pushed away from the window, leaving it open to let the city's breath continue to fill the room.
"Sunday, bring up my personal stat screen…. The one with the point allocation.".
A new, minimalist display hologrammed into existence before me. Four simple, clean bars with associated numbers: Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Endurance. They were all sitting at a baseline of 25, the points I'd purchased before when I got the first bankroll from Silent Hill. I felt good at 25. Better than good actually, but with the money from Silent Hill literally pouring in by the second, it was time to invest in myself, since I can afford to splurge now.
"Alright," I muttered to myself, cracking my knuckles.
"Let's round things out. No sense being a glass cannon or a smart weakling." With a series of mental commands, I purchased points, watching the numbers tick upwards.
26, 27, 28… I brought each stat up in tandem, feeling a slight, warm tingling sensation spread through my limbs and into my mind with each increment. It wasn't a jarring change, but a settling one, like my body was being fine-tuned, its potential fully unlocked. At 30, I stopped. The tingling faded, leaving me feeling… complete. Balanced. Sharper, stronger, more resilient, and more alert all at once. It was a perfect equilibrium.
The interface glowed enticingly. I had more money than I could possibly spend. Why stop at 30? Why not 35? 40? What would it feel like to have the strength of ten men? The mind of a supercomputer?
"Sunday," I asked, my voice full of temptation. "What's the hard cap? What happens if I push these stats higher? Say, to 35?"
Sunday's response was immediate and carried a tone of absolute, clinical warning. ["That is not advised, Sir. The physiological and neurological modifications are profound... Your body and brain are still undergoing significant developmental processes inherent to your biological age of seventeen, the current maximum of 30 points per statistic represents the identified safe threshold for stable, non-detrimental enhancement.]"
The word "detrimental" caught me off guard.
"What do you mean, detrimental? Like, I'd get a headache? Pull a muscle?"
"[The consequences would be significantly more severe,]" she elaborated, her tone leaving no room for argument. "[Pushing beyond the safe threshold risks severe systemic failure. Unregulated cellular growth, neural synaptic overload, catastrophic hormonal imbalance. In simpler terms: you risk uncontrolled mutation and permanent physical deformation. The process would not be reversible.]"
A cold chill that had nothing to do with the evening air went down my spine. I looked at my hands, imagining them twisting into gnarled claws. My face warping. My mind fracturing. This wasn't a game with cheat codes, this was real. And in the real world, there were rules and consequences.
"Right…. Okay. Message received," I said, my voice a little tighter now. I quickly closed the stat menu, the temptation vanishing, replaced by a healthy dose of fear and respect.
"Thirty is the limit. No arguments here… almost messed up there, thanks Sunday,".