Chapter 3: Chapter 3: User #123
The coffee table lay on its side where he had knocked it over, one leg pointing at the ceiling. Garcia did not pick it up. He stood in the middle of his parents’ living room with his chest heaving and his eyes locked on the thing that should not have been there.
The window hung in the air at eye level, about the size of a tablet screen, glowing with a pale light that threw no shadow on the carpet. The television kept playing behind it, the documentary narrator still talking about Jordan Rivers, but the sound had gone distant and thin.
Garcia raised his right hand and swiped through the window.
His fingers passed through nothing. There was no glass, no heat, no resistance, and the text did not even flicker. He stepped back until his shoulders hit the wall with a soft thump, then shut his eyes and counted to five, because he had read once that hallucinations fell apart when you stopped feeding them attention.
He opened his eyes. The window was still there.
"Okay," he said quietly.
He was breathing hard, but the panic was already draining out of him and something steadier was moving in to replace it. He had spent three months shouting at things he could not change, and it had gotten him nothing. So he stopped shouting and did the only useful thing left to him. He read.
Either I have lost my mind, or this is real, he thought. Both are problems. Only one of them is worth anything to me.
The words sat clean and white against the dark panel.
[CAREER SYSTEM ACTIVATED]
User #123 detected.
Please select a field.
Below the message, a column of options appeared one by one, each inside its own bordered box, until the full list hung in front of him.
[Available Fields]
[Business]
[Medicine]
[Law]
[Entertainment]
[Technology]
[Sports]
[Education]
Garcia read the list twice.
A field, he thought. It wants me to pick a field, like I am filling out a university application at thirty-two.
The system was treating his ruined life like a menu, and it was waiting for him to place an order. He worked through the options the way he worked through everything, by cutting away whatever did not fit. Business meant nothing without capital, and he had none. Medicine and Law both required years of study that he could not afford and did not want. Technology was a world he had never understood, and Education paid badly while leading nowhere he wanted to go. Entertainment was vague enough to mean almost anything, which made it useless to him.
That left one.
When he looked at Sports, something settled in his chest. It was not excitement, but recognition. Sports was the only industry he had ever worked in, the only place where his instincts were worth anything, and the only field where six years of his life had not been completely wasted.
"Sports," he said.
He reached out and pressed the box. This time his finger met a faint resistance, like the surface of water, and the box flashed once before the screen changed.
[Field Selected: Sports]
Please select sport.
[Available Sports]
[Football]
[Basketball]
[Tennis]
[Boxing]
[Formula Racing]
[Baseball]
[Athletics]
There was no real decision here, and Garcia did not pretend that there was. He had spent his entire working life inside football, so he knew its contracts and its clubs, its transfer windows and its agents, and the way money moved through all of it. The other six sports might as well have been written in a language he could not read.
He pressed Football before the last option had finished loading.
[Sport Selected: Football]
The panel held for a moment, then expanded outward, and a longer list assembled itself in the air.
[Football Career Paths]
[Footballer]
[Coach]
[Scout]
[Agent]
[Club Executive]
[Club Owner]
[Analyst]
This list took him longer, because for the first time the choice actually mattered.
He read each one and measured it against what he was and what he could still realistically become. Footballer was a joke, since he was thirty-two with no professional record, so that path closed before it had even opened. Coach belonged to a different world entirely, one built on the training ground rather than the negotiating table, and he had never wanted any part of it. Scout sat closer to his strengths, but a scout found talent and then handed it to somebody else, which meant a scout never controlled a career, and control was the entire point.
Club Executive meant working inside another company’s structure and answering to senior partners all over again, which was exactly the kind of arrangement that had just thrown him out onto the pavement. Club Owner was impossible without the sort of money he would never see in his life. Analyst meant sitting behind a screen and producing reports for other people to act on, and that was not enough for him.
Then there was Agent.
There was no flash of inspiration when he reached it and no quiet voice telling him this was his destiny. It was simply the only role on the list that matched what he already knew how to do. He had scouted players and negotiated their contracts, he had managed their careers and held their trust, and he had done all of it well enough that other people had decided it was worth taking from him.
"Agent," Garcia said.
He pressed the box.
[Career Path Selected: Football Agent] Confirm selection? Warning: Career path cannot be changed after confirmation. [Y / N]
He studied the warning for a moment.
Cannot be changed, he thought. Fine. There is nothing else on that list I would touch anyway.
He pressed Y.
The window went dark.
For half a second Garcia thought it had finally vanished, and part of him was almost disappointed by that. Then white light bled back across the panel, brighter than before, and fresh text assembled itself line by line as a low hum rose from the screen.
[Golden Agent System Activated]
[Host: Gabriel Garcia]
[Field: Sports]
[Sport: Football]
[Career Path: Football Agent]
[Agency Level: 0]
[Skill Points: 0]
The panel scrolled, and a second block dropped into place beneath the first.
[Agent Stats]
Scouting: D — 420 / 1500 SP
Negotiation: D- — 260 / 1000 SP
Contract Knowledge: D — 390 / 1500 SP
Client Management: C- — 610 / 2000 SP Network:
Damaged — 40 / 100
Reputation: Ruined — 0 / 100
Influence: 0
[Skills] None
Garcia read the numbers slowly, and his first reaction surprised him, because it was not despair.
The four skill stats were not bad at all. A D in Scouting and in Contract Knowledge meant competence, even if reduced, and the C- in Client Management showed he understood how to handle people. The system was telling him what he had always suspected but had never once seen laid out in front of him so plainly. He knew the fundamentals of the job. Six years had built something real inside him, and no termination letter had been able to delete it from his mind.
Then his eyes dropped to the bottom three lines, and the small satisfaction drained out of him.
Network: Damaged. Reputation: Ruined. Influence: 0.
There it is.
That was the true insult, and it cut deeper because it was accurate. The system was not exaggerating his situation to wound him. It had simply measured the truth and printed it out. His skills were intact, but everything that let an agent actually use those skills, the contacts and the trust and the weight his name carried, had been burned down to nothing.
He focused on the word Network, and the panel answered him at once.
[Network: Damaged]
Former contacts exist, but trust, access, and willingness to cooperate have been severely reduced.
He shifted his attention to Reputation, and the system responded again.
[Reputation: Ruined]
Industry perception is hostile. Reputation must be rebuilt through verified career achievements.
Garcia let out a slow breath through his nose.
Rebuilt through verified career achievements, he thought. So it cannot simply hand my reputation back. It is going to make me earn every inch of it.
For reasons he could not fully explain, that made him trust the thing a little more than he had a minute ago.
"What do you want from me?" he asked the window.
The text changed in response.
[System Rule]
Agent Stats improve through successful football-agent actions. System Points may unlock career support functions. The system cannot erase existing consequences.
He read it twice to be certain he had understood. The system was not a miracle, because it would not lift the blacklist or silence the phone calls spreading his name, and it would not put his stolen clients back in his column. Instead it improved the work by rewarding the work itself, and it handed him points that he could spend on tools whose nature it had not yet bothered to explain. That was the whole arrangement.
Garcia found that he preferred it that way. A system that promised him everything would have been a lie, and he had heard enough lies in the last three months to recognize one the moment it appeared.
The panel cleared, and a new box dropped into place with a sharp chime.
[Main Mission Generated]
Mission: Create a football agency..
Time Limit: 72 hours.
Reward:
— Skill Points +100
— Scouting SP +10
— Network SP +5
Failure Penalty: Main Mission chain delayed by 30 days.
Garcia did not celebrate, because he understood the shape of what he was looking at, and the shape was a modest one. The system was not crowning him a king. It was pointing at a single door and telling him to walk through it.
But the first reward line held his attention longer than the rest.
Skill Points +100.
He did not know what a skill point was yet or where he would spend it, but the system offered no explanation beyond the name. An agent who had access to tools that other agents did not have, the way Walter carried knowledge that let him see Jordan Rivers at sixteen, would not need a network or a reputation to begin with. He would only need to be right one time.
The window held the mission steady in front of him, cold and patient.
Seventy-two hours, he thought. Register as an independent agent. That is the entire task.
He had told Ramos that he could not start his own agency, because no club would deal with him and no parent would trust him, and all of that was still true. But registration was none of those things. Registration was a form, a fee, and a signature, and it was the one part of starting over that did not require a single person in the industry to take his call.
For the first time in three months, Garcia was looking at something other than the wreckage of his old life.
The documentary was still playing behind the window, the narrator’s voice low and even, and the overturned coffee table still lay at his feet. He had not moved to right it. He stood in the dim living room with the glow of the panel on his face, reading the mission a third time while he turned the practical pieces of it over in his mind.
Then he heard footsteps in the hallway, slow and familiar, coming from the direction of the kitchen.
The system window stayed exactly where it was, steady and bright, as though it did not care in the slightest that another person was in the house.
"Garcia?"
He froze.
