1 – Welcome, Earthling

Andy was too large for the little couch in his trailer. He realized that, for the dozenth time, as he woke on his stomach with one leg hanging off the side and a sharp kink in his neck. He stared at the dirty yellowish linoleum flooring, scattered with empty bottles of Mexican beer with smushed lime wedges inside them. “Why,” he croaked, wondering what demon had coaxed him into sleeping on the couch again and not in the slightly larger bed at the back of the trailer.

He managed to sit up and look blearily around the trailer, twisting his back to work out the kinks. A pizza box and two unopened bottles of beer were on the counter. Considering the sheen of sweat all over his body, there was no way the beers weren’t hot. Why was it so damn hot? Had his little AC unit failed again? Poor thing had been struggling to battle the Arizona June; he couldn’t blame it for giving up. Or could he? “Traitor,” he grunted, clambering to his feet and flicking on the circular, rotating fan.

He stumbled to the door and flung it open, hoping against reason that some morning coolness remained in the outside air. He was too late; the heat radiated off the gravel and concrete, and he groaned. Even though the desert sun was in full effect, the breeze coming in felt better than the stifling air in the trailer, so he left the door open as he rummaged through his mini fridge, pushing aside nearly-expired milk and condiments for the holy grail: a full, twenty-four ounce, strawberry-flavored “Brain Nuke” energy drink.

He sat on the stoop of his little trailer as he sipped it, watching the dust blow on his neighbors’ plots. Sheila was still home. He could see her silhouette through the thin curtains as she walked back and forth, probably chasing after one of her little dogs. “Bet she’s working the swing shift,” he grunted. She was a cashier at Ron’s Ranch Market, about five miles away, closer to the east-side suburbs of Tucson.

Andy dug his phone out of his pocket and tapped the screen until the clock appeared: 2:45. He had nothing to do, seeing as he’d just lost his job at the Desert Oasis Plant Nursery. “Or do I?” He saw a missed call and a bunch of message notifications. Hope sprang to life inside him. Maybe Louisa had changed her mind, and he wasn’t fired—

The brief optimism shattered before it really took root. The missed call and messages were all from his mother. He idly read through them and felt confident they could be summarized as, “Andy, what are you doing with your life? You’re twenty-three and still plenty young to go back to school. Come live with me, and let me take care of you.”

He sighed and leaned his sore head against the trailer door, amazed that the metal felt a little cool against his skin. “This sucks.” Idly, he looked at his hands—calloused and dark from the sun. Dirt stains were still evident under his nails. “Nice of Louisa to wait until I planted all six of those lime trees before she fired my ass.”

“I’m telling you, Larry!” a shrill voice screeched from off to the right. “If you don’t get your lazy ass up, I’m calling my brothers, and they’ll drag you to work!”

“Call ’em, Tina! I don’t give a shit!”

Andy chuckled, sipping his energy drink. It was nice of his neighbors to remind him that no matter how bad things looked, they could always be worse. Those two were at each other’s throats every day, morning and night. He stretched, enjoying the breeze, warm as it was, on his bare chest. “Ah, what am I worried about? I can do framing again. Made plenty last summer.”

He opened his messages and selected his mom’s contact, sending her a quick note: Love you, Mom. Don’t worry, I’m good. Call you later. He stood and stretched, pressing his hands into his lower back. He’d dug six big damn holes in hard-ass soil, and his muscles were telling him they remembered the activity vividly. Bill had been using the mini skid steer with the auger attachment, so Andy had to work with a shovel and a big metal bar to break up the clay and rocks.

It was hard work, but he liked a good, clean, back-breaking job where he could let his mind drift. He liked coming home dirty, exhausted, and not thinking about work again until he pulled his motorcycle onto the job the next day. It was pretty much the opposite of school; when he’d been working toward nursing school, he’d spent every damn waking minute thinking about papers and tests and—

***Welcome to the System, Earthling! If you’re receiving this message, it means that you’ve been deemed intelligent enough to have access to the System’s benefits. Significant changes are coming your way! Be prepared to receive more notifications like this in the near future!***

Andy dropped his Energy drink, and the pink, fizzy liquid gurgled out of the can over the concrete. He stared at the slightly three-dimensional yellow letters where they floated before his eyes. “What, the hell?” He turned his head left and right, wondering if the letters were stationary, but they moved with his field of view. He reached up to try to touch them, but as he swiped his fingers through them, they slid away, disappearing in his peripheral vision.

He jumped to his feet, blinking his eyes and looking around in a panic. Was he having a stroke? Was he cracking? Hadn’t his mom’s uncle had schizophrenia? He’d heard voices, right? People telling him—

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

His phone pinged, and he looked down to see a new message from his mother. He opened it: Andy! Did you see that message?

“Oh, holy shit,” he sighed, not sure if he should be relieved or worried that he wasn’t the only one.

“Yo, Andy!” Larry called from across the way. “Did you see that shit?”

Andy stepped toward him, crunching his energy drink can under his bare heel. “Yeah, man. Weird, shit!” While he spoke, he thumbed his mom a message: Yeah, and we aren’t the only ones. He looked up and yelled, “What do you think that was?”

Tina answered, stepping out of their trailer, enormous coffee mug in hand. “It’s the next-gen cellular crap they're working on! I’m telling you: we all have chips in our blood!”

Andy tried not to chuckle, but he smiled as he reached up to pull some of his shoulder-length hair out of his face. A faint breeze, surprisingly cool, was blowing through the trailer park. “Chips, huh?”

“Yeah, don’t listen to her, she’s crazy as fu—” Larry’s words were choked off as he gasped in pain; Tina had kicked him square in the shin.

Andy tamped his hands down in the air. “Okay, simmer down, you two. We don’t want the sheriff out here again, right? Anyway, I’ve seen some weird things, but floating words in front of my eyes are a new one. Right now, I’d believe just about anything, including, uh, chips in my blood.”

Tina nodded, stepping a little closer to the gravel-strewn gap between their trailer plots. “I’m telling you! I heard a whole podcast about it. I’ll send you the link, Andy.” Tina waved her phone, and Andy nodded, glad he wasn’t close enough to hear the words Larry was muttering under his breath.

“I’m gonna rustle up something for breakfast, er, lunch, I guess.” He walked back to his trailer and mournfully picked up his spilled energy drink. He’d just stepped inside the door when more of those weird, floating letters streamed across his vision:

***Attention! After an initial survey, it has been determined that 47.33% of all life on your planet harbors latent mutations that will be awakened as mana currents propagate the local ether. Mutations could be alarming and may result in extreme personality alterations. It is recommended that individuals seek shelter apart from one another until the mutations and their nature are made apparent. This process is already beginning and will be complete within hours.***

“Huh,” Andy muttered, turning his head this way and that, trying to see around the back of the message.

“Yo, Andy, did you—”

“I see it.” He waved over his shoulder at Larry, then stepped into his trailer and pulled the door shut. He moved over to the couch and sat down, still staring at the message.

“Mutations. Huh.” He wanted to say it was some kind of elaborate hoax, but who the hell could put messages into the air in front of a person’s eyes? Nobody, as far as he knew. “Aliens?” he asked the slowly rotating, buzzing fan. He opened his phone and went to his recent calls, touching his mom’s name.

The line beeped twice, and then she answered. “Andy, honey, what’s going on? I’m getting scared!”

“I don’t know, Mom. Are you alone?” She was his only living family, and she lived alone, so he hoped—

“I’m at Ruth’s. Her daughter’s coming over—”

“Mom, if this message is for real, you ought to go back to your condo.” Andy hated that she lived in Florida, but she had a lot of friends living there—folks she’d known since college—and she’d moved down there when Andy’s dad had passed away.

“Oh, honey, do you really think so? That message was so strange! Mutations? It’s like… The people here are going wild, Andy! And this storm out of nowhere! Ruth thinks I should stay here with her.”

“I don’t know, Mom. Like you said, this is some weird shit.”

“Andy!” She hated it when he cussed.

“Sorry, Mom. Just go home and lock your door until we—” The dropped call tone sounded, and Andy frowned, looking at his phone. He tried redialing several times, but the connection failed. She’d mentioned a storm, but everything was too damn weird. He started flicking through his socials, wondering if people were mentioning the weird messages, but that was all people were talking about, and nobody had any answers.

As he spent the next hour intermittently sending his mother texts that never got read and reading wild conspiracy theories, he began to wonder where the official news was. Why wasn’t the government broadcasting something? Shouldn’t his phone be beeping like an Amber Alert with a government message telling everyone to stay calm or shelter in place or whatever the typical line of BS usually was? He tossed his phone on the coffee table and lay back on the couch, rubbing his temples, wishing he hadn’t lost two-thirds of his energy drink.

He might have dozed off, but when a gust of wind rattled his trailer, he sat up, wide-eyed. He had a queasy feeling in his gut, like something was wrong. Something wasn’t right, and it wasn’t just those weird messages he’d seen. He stood up and looked out the window. Shouldn’t the school bus have dumped the kids off a while ago? Shouldn’t people be getting home from work? The trailer park looked like a ghost town.

He reached for his phone, tapped the screen, but nothing appeared. He thumbed the power button a couple of times, but then he smelled burning plastic, and the back of the phone got really hot. Reflexively, he dropped it on the linoleum floor between the trailer door and his little kitchenette.

He watched as the phone began to expand until a golf-ball-sized bubble in the plastic ruptured, and fire and smoke hissed out of the opening. “Holy shit!” Andy ran to his kitchen counter and grabbed some aluminum barbecue tongs. He picked up the flaming, smoking phone and threw it out the door. The smoke was caustic, and he stepped outside for clean air. That’s when he realized the sky had gone deep gray, and there was a definite pre-rain tang in the air—a storm was coming.

“Little early for a monsoon…” Distantly, weird, purple-hued lightning flickered and forked through the sky, and thunder rumbled through the air. He was so fixated on watching the dark wall of storm clouds rolling in that he almost didn’t notice shadows lurching around behind Larry and Tina’s window shades. It looked like they were fighting again, thrashing back and forth. Andy tuned out the rumble of the storm and the rush of the wind, focusing on their trailer, and he heard a shrill scream.

“Come on, guys, goddammit!” Andy slammed his door shut and gave his phone a heartbroken glance as he walked toward their trailer. “I do not need this bullshit today!” That was when the third message appeared in his vision:

***Attention! Mana currents are integrating with the local ether. Expect unusual weather and environmental effects. Congratulations, Earthlings! This is an essential step for System integration.***