The notification appeared exactly seventeen centimeters in front of Rynn Sabre's left eye.
He noticed the distance because he'd spent three years as an architectural draftsman before the company automated his position, and old habits didn't die just because the economy had. Precision was precision. Seventeen centimeters. Slightly below direct line of sight. Intrusive, but not aggressively so.
The text glowed a soft, pearlescent white against the grey morning light filtering through his apartment window.
[WISH UPON THE SYSTEM]
A once-in-eternity opportunity presents itself before you.
You may wish for anything.
Your wish will be granted.
You have 24 hours to decide.
Rynn blinked.
The panel blinked with him, remaining perfectly fixed in his vision even as his eyes moved. He turned his head toward the kitchenette. The panel followed. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, it was still there, waiting patiently against the inside of his eyelids.
"Huh," he said to the empty apartment.
His first thought was that the prolonged unemployment had finally cracked something fundamental in his brain. His second thought was that if he was going to hallucinate, he'd have chosen something more exciting than a text box. Maybe a tropical beach. Definitely not his fourth-floor walk-up with the peeling wallpaper and the radiator that clanked like a dying machine every time the temperature dropped below sixty.
The panel remained.
Rynn swung his legs out of bed, the springs complaining beneath him. He was twenty-six, average height, average build, with the kind of face people struggled to remember five minutes after meeting him. Brown hair, brown eyes, features just symmetrical enough to avoid comment. He'd always considered his forgettability an asset. It made observation easier when no one was observing you back.
He walked to the window. The street below was quiet for a Tuesday morning—too quiet. No cars. No pedestrians. No distant hum of the city waking up.
A woman stood frozen on the opposite sidewalk, one foot raised mid-step, her coffee cup suspended in the air beside her, a perfect brown arc of liquid hanging forever between cup and lips.
Rynn's breath caught.
He pressed his palm against the cold glass, leaning closer. The woman didn't move. Neither did the pigeon suspended mid-flight above her, wings spread, eyes half-closed in what should have been a moment of avian serenity.
"What the—"
[TIME REMAINING: 23 HOURS, 58 MINUTES, 12 SECONDS]
The panel updated, apparently satisfied he'd noticed the larger implications.
Rynn's mind, trained for precision and pattern recognition, began firing in directions his emotions hadn't yet caught up with. Frozen time. Global phenomenon—the woman on the street wasn't the only one, the silence confirmed that. A wish. Anything.
Anything.
The word echoed in his skull like a bell strike.
He stumbled back from the window, his bare feet cold against the linoleum. The apartment suddenly felt smaller than its already cramped four hundred square feet. He dropped onto the edge of his bed, elbows on knees, staring at the panel that refused to be ignored.
"Okay," he said aloud, because speaking helped him think. "Okay. Let's be logical about this."
Step one: Determine if this was real or a hallucination.
He reached toward the panel. His fingers passed through it, encountering no resistance, no change in temperature, nothing. But when he withdrew his hand, the panel remained, undisturbed. Not a projection, then. Not a physical object. Something else entirely.
Step two: Test the boundaries.
"Wish for a sandwich," he said.
Nothing happened.
The panel didn't change, didn't acknowledge his spoken words. He waited thirty seconds, then sixty. No sandwich materialized. His stomach growled, indifferent to the cosmic implications of the morning.
"Right," he muttered. "Twenty-four hours. Not instant. Or maybe it requires conscious intent. Or maybe—"
His phone buzzed.
The sound was so jarringly normal that he actually jumped. The device lay on his nightstand, screen lit with a text message from an unknown number. He grabbed it, grateful for any connection to the world he understood.
'Are you seeing this too?'
Unknown sender. No way to reply—the message had no return address, just words on a screen.
Rynn typed back anyway. 'Yes. Panel. Frozen people. What's happening?'
The response came immediately.
'Don't know. Everyone I've contacted says same thing. We have 24 hours to wish for anything. Anything at all.'
'Who are you?'
A pause. Then:
'Does it matter? We're all in the same boat. Choose carefully.'
The messages vanished. Not deleted—they simply ceased to exist, the conversation thread empty, as if it had never happened. Rynn checked his call log, his contacts, his browsing history. Everything was wiped clean except for a single notification:
[TIME REMAINING: 23 HOURS, 47 MINUTES, 03 SECONDS]
He sat in silence for a long moment, processing.
Not a hallucination, then. Not isolated. Global. Everyone on Earth, according to the stranger, had received the same panel, the same offer, the same twenty-four hours. Billions of people, each granted one wish. Anything.
The implications cascaded through his mind like falling dominoes.
Someone would wish for wealth. For power. For beauty. For revenge. Someone would wish for world peace, and someone else would wish for domination, and what happened when conflicting wishes collided? What happened when ten thousand people wished to be the strongest person on Earth?
What happened when someone wished for something truly dangerous?
Rynn stood, pacing the narrow length of his apartment. Three steps to the kitchenette. Turn. Three steps to the window. Turn. The motion helped him think.
He needed more information, but information wasn't available. He needed to understand the rules, but the rules hadn't been provided. He needed—
He stopped pacing.
He needed to decide what to wish for.
The panel waited, patient and eternal, seventeen centimeters from his eye.
Wealth. The obvious choice. Money solved most of his immediate problems—the eviction notice tucked into his drawer, the collection agency letters he'd stopped opening three months ago, the hollow ache in his stomach that had become familiar enough to ignore. With money, he could eat. Could sleep without calculating how many days until he couldn't afford the rent. Could maybe, for the first time in years, breathe.
But wealth was finite. Inflation could destroy it. Theft could remove it. And if everyone wished for wealth, what would that even mean? Would the economy simply collapse under the weight of infinite currency?
Power, then. Physical strength. Magical ability—the panel hadn't specified what was possible, but if it could freeze time and grant wishes, magic seemed a reasonable assumption. With power, he could protect himself. Could take what he needed. Could—
Could become exactly the kind of person he'd spent his life avoiding.
Rynn had seen power before. His father had been powerful—six feet four of muscle and rage, a man who expressed love through his fists and disappointment through his belt. Rynn had spent eighteen years learning that power, unchecked, turned people into monsters. He'd escaped at nineteen, changed his name, built a quiet life in a city where no one knew his history.
He would not become his father.
So not power. Not in the traditional sense.
The pacing resumed. Three steps. Turn. Three steps. The radiator clanked, startling him, and he realized time was moving again outside his window. The woman on the street completed her step, sipped her coffee, continued walking. The pigeon vanished toward the rooftops. Normalcy, briefly interrupted, reasserted itself.
But not really normal. Nothing would be normal again.
Rynn thought about the stranger's message. Choose carefully. Easy to say. Harder to do when the weight of existence pressed against every option.
He thought about his mother, gone ten years now, cancer taking her slowly while his father drank himself into deeper rage. She'd had one wish at the end: for Rynn to be safe. To be happy. To be something more than what he'd come from.
He thought about the world waking up to this impossible opportunity. About the chaos that would follow—literally, chaos, as billions of wishes collided and reshaped reality into something unrecognizable. About the strong taking from the weak, because that was what strong people did. About the need to survive in whatever new world emerged from the next twenty-three hours.
He thought about his father's fists. About being small and helpless and completely at someone else's mercy.
And suddenly, he knew.
Rynn stopped pacing. He faced the panel directly, meeting its pearlescent glow with eyes that had gone very, very still.
"I've spent my whole life being controlled," he said quietly. "By poverty. By fear. By circumstances I couldn't change. By people stronger than me who took whatever they wanted because I couldn't stop them."
The panel waited.
"I don't want wealth. It can be taken. I don't want power—not the kind that makes me like him. I don't want to be a king or a god or anything that needs to prove itself by dominating others."
He took a breath. Held it. Released.
"I want to never be controlled again. I want to be the one who decides what happens, not the one who just endures it. I want to look at any situation, any enemy, any force in the universe, and be able to say 'no' and have it mean something."
The panel's glow seemed to intensify, just slightly.
"There's only one thing that fits," Rynn said. "Only one thing that can't be predicted, can't be controlled, can't be opposed by any system or power or force."
He spoke his wish clearly, precisely, with the full weight of intent behind every word.
"I wish to manipulate Chaos."
For a single heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the panel shattered into a billion fragments of light, and the world screamed.
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