There are moments in Scripture that burst with revelation, yet we often move past them too quickly, almost unaware that we have stepped over a treasure that would change us if we paused long enough to let its weight register. The confession of the Roman centurion at the foot of the cross is one of those moments. It sits quietly in the Gospel narrative, tucked between the tearing of the temple veil and the hurried burial of Jesus, almost camouflaged by the noise of everything else happening in that unforgettable afternoon. But once you stop and look closely at what actually transpires in that single breath of time, you begin to realize just how astonishing it truly is. Here is a man shaped by brutality, trained in the art of obedience, hardened by the repetitive cycle of violence that defined his career, suddenly speaking a truth that had not yet been spoken by a Gentile in the aftermath of Christ’s final breath. Something stirred in him that he did not seek, did not anticipate, and did not have the language for until it erupted out of him with the force of an awakening he could no longer contain. And as those words reached the air, they became a testimony that rippled far beyond that hill, into centuries of faith that would follow.

To understand the power of that moment, you have to imagine the life that shaped the centurion long before he ever stood on Golgotha. The Roman military machine was not built on compassion or hesitation. It was built on force, domination, intimidation, and efficiency. A centurion did not rise to his position by accident. He earned it through discipline, cruelty, unquestionable loyalty, and a willingness to do whatever was required to maintain order. He had commanded soldiers in battle. He had supervised torture. He had overseen countless executions. He had stared into the eyes of men in their final seconds more times than he could remember. Death was not shocking to him. Pain did not faze him. Suffering was a workplace reality he no longer felt the need to interpret. His heart was not a tender garden; it was a fortress reinforced by years of trauma, aggression, and carefully cultivated emotional detachment. And it is precisely that man, that hardened figure at the center of empire’s cruelty, who becomes the first outsider to declare the innocence and identity of the crucified Christ. That alone tells us that God loves to write His greatest truths in places no one expects Him to reach.

The soldiers that day were not meeting Jesus for the first time on the cross. They had likely been with Him through the earlier stages of His agony. They had heard the accusations. They had listened to His silence. They had watched Him endure the scourging without collapsing into rage or despair. Even before the nails pierced His hands, Jesus had already displayed a strength that did not match the responses of most victims. Yet nothing prepared them for what happened as He hung suspended between heaven and earth. The centurion would have expected curses. He would have expected threats. He would have expected Jesus to spit insults back at the crowd or call out for mercy or plead for the torture to stop. Instead, Jesus spoke forgiveness. He looked at the men who were driving nails through His limbs and asked the Father to pardon them. That prayer would have landed strangely in the ears of a man who had listened to thousands of dying breaths. Forgiveness in the face of cruelty was not a normal sound. It was disarming in a way that bypassed intellect and struck something deeper, awakening a question that probably made no sense to him yet demanded attention.

As the hours stretched on, the sky began to darken in a way that no ordinary weather pattern could explain. This was not a passing cloud or a momentary dimming of daylight. It was as though creation itself was reacting, groaning, mourning, or recoiling from what was unfolding on that hilltop. Even hardened soldiers could sense when something unnatural was happening. The air thickened. The crowds grew uneasy. The voices that once mocked Jesus began to fall silent. In that unnerving darkness, the world seemed to tilt on its axis as if heaven had turned its gaze toward Calvary with a sorrow that could no longer be hidden. And when Jesus cried out those final words—Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit—it was not the sound of collapse or defeat. It was the sound of authority. It was the sound of someone who was not having His life taken from Him but was willingly offering it up according to a timeline and purpose far beyond the reach of Roman power. That final breath carried a kind of command the centurion had spent his life giving, not receiving.

The earthquake that followed was not merely a geological event. It was a divine punctuation mark. It was the physical world bearing witness to a spiritual reality. The ground shaking beneath the feet of the executioners sent a shock into the centurion’s body that could not simply be dismissed. Rocks split. The earth quaked. Something cosmic had shifted. The soldier who had seen everything suddenly stood in the presence of something he had never witnessed before: not just death, but sovereignty in death. Not just suffering, but purpose within suffering. Not just a man dying, but a King laying down His life with intention and resolve. And in that collision between the natural and the supernatural, the centurion’s heart—buried under layers of discipline and desensitization—finally cracked open.

When he proclaimed, Certainly this was a righteous man or Surely this was the Son of God, depending on the Gospel account, it was not a rehearsed declaration. It was not theological reflection. It was not ceremonial reverence. It was revelation bursting out of him in the only language his awakening could form. His confession signaled a shift that reached beyond Rome and beyond Judaism, marking the beginning of something global, inclusive, and unimaginably expansive. The first Gentile declaration of faith after Christ’s death did not come from a scholar, philosopher, diplomat, or seeker. It came from a hardened executioner who never expected God to break into his story. That alone carries enough weight to alter how we think about grace, redemption, and the reach of God’s voice.

It is important to realize that the centurion was not in a frame of mind where religious awakening was likely. He was not searching for truth. He was not attending synagogue or seeking wisdom or longing for meaning. He was working. He was fulfilling the duties of a brutal job on what should have been an ordinary afternoon. And yet God stepped right into that ordinary brutality with extraordinary revelation. That encounter tells us something about the nature of divine pursuit. God does not wait for ideal conditions. He does not wait for a softened heart. He does not wait for a perfect moment of spiritual readiness. He comes into the places where we feel the least prepared, the most numb, the most guarded, and the least expecting transformation. He breaks into the routines of life with moments designed to awaken, illuminate, confront, and ultimately heal.

If we look closely at the centurion, we see a mirror that challenges every assumption we make about who is reachable and who is too far gone. We see a living example of the fact that God sees past the armor people wear. God sees past the performance of strength. God sees past the hardened shell created through years of survival. Beneath that soldier’s uniform was a heart that had been shaped by violence, but not beyond the reach of grace. And that should remind each one of us that there are parts of our own stories, and parts of the stories of people we love, that appear just as hardened, just as unreachable, just as distant. Yet God does not view hardness as a hindrance. He views it as an opportunity. Darkness is not an obstacle to Him. It is merely a canvas. And the cross is proof that heaven can write redemption into the darkest moments with a stroke so powerful that it leaves the entire spiritual realm trembling.

The centurion’s awakening did not come through argument or persuasion. It came through encounter. He saw Jesus suffer with poise. He saw Jesus forgive with sincerity. He saw Jesus die with dignity. He saw Jesus command the moment with quiet authority that belonged to no earthly ruler. And when the world responded—when the sky darkened and the ground shook—the soldier realized he was not witnessing a normal execution. He was witnessing the intersection of heaven and earth, and nothing in his life had prepared him to process what his soul instinctively recognized. Revelation has a way of bypassing everything we use to protect ourselves. It goes under the armor, around the walls, through the layers of skepticism, and straight to the heart. And that is exactly what happened at Calvary.

The legacy of that moment reaches far beyond the soldier himself. It speaks to the transformation God intends for every person who encounters the crucified Christ. It tells us that even the most calloused heart is not beyond the softening power of grace. It tells us that even those who feel numb can be awakened. It tells us that even those who have spent years learning how not to feel can suddenly find themselves standing in the presence of truth that shakes them awake. And it tells us that revelation often comes in moments we never expected, in circumstances we did not choose, and in places we never imagined God would show up.

When we reflect on the centurion’s confession, we often focus on the words themselves, but the deeper power lies in the spiritual process that produced those words. Revelation is not simply a moment of understanding; it is a collision between truth and the soul. It is something that interrupts the patterns we have lived with for years. It does not politely knock at the door. It breaks in. It overturns assumptions. It reorders priorities. It exposes false beliefs we didn’t know we were carrying. That is what happened in the centurion. His confession did not rise from knowledge; it rose from awakening. The world he thought he understood cracked open beneath him, and in that rupture, the light got in. That is why faith matters. Faith is not a system you memorize. It is a revelation you encounter. It is the moment where God’s reality becomes clearer than your own history. And for the centurion, that shift happened in a single breath, yet the impact has echoed through generations.

One of the most profound things about this story is what it reveals about Jesus Himself. Even in death, He was shepherding hearts. Even in agony, He was leading souls to truth. Even in suffering, He was drawing people into revelation. Jesus did not preach a sermon to the centurion. He did not heal him. He did not speak to him. He simply revealed the Father’s heart through the way He loved, endured, forgave, and surrendered. And that alone was enough to awaken a man who had been emotionally unreachable for most of his life. The cross teaches us that the greatest testimonies are not always spoken; many are demonstrated. Jesus lived the truth so clearly that even His passing became a message strong enough to break chains inside the heart of a man who had been trained to resist compassion. That is the kind of Savior we follow, one whose presence speaks loudly even when His mouth is silent.

The centurion’s story also forces us to reconsider the way we view our own pasts. Many people carry the belief that the things they have done or the things they have experienced disqualify them from encountering God in any meaningful way. They look at their mistakes, failures, wounds, history, or the hardness they have developed as evidence that they cannot change. But the cross dismantles that idea. God intentionally chose the most unlikely heart on that hill to reveal a truth that would launch a new chapter in the story of redemption. The fact that the first Gentile confession after Christ’s death came from a violent soldier is not an accident. It is a declaration. It means that the ground at the foot of the cross is not reserved for the morally successful. It is open to the broken, the weary, the angry, the doubtful, and the ones who never expected to be touched by God at all. Grace is not intimidated by the places you’ve been. It is drawn to them.

When we think about the centurion witnessing the darkness that fell over the land, the earthquake that shook the ground, and the composure of Jesus as He laid down His spirit, we begin to see that faith often emerges in the shadows. Sometimes the brightest revelations happen in the darkest seasons. The centurion did not come to faith while standing in a peaceful temple or sitting among wise teachers. He came to faith in the middle of violence, grief, chaos, and confusion. He came to faith while watching the worst moment in human history unfold. And that should comfort every person who feels like their spiritual journey is happening in a storm rather than a sanctuary. God does not require the atmosphere to be calm for Him to speak. He can awaken your heart in the middle of the very circumstances that feel like they are destroying you. He can reveal Himself in the chaos. He can whisper in the grief. He can shake the ground under your feet not to harm you but to open your eyes.

The centurion’s transformation reminds us that revelation is not dependent on personality, background, or qualification. God can reach anyone because God knows how to speak to the deep places inside us that we have forgotten how to access. Some people need compassion. Others need mercy. Others need a moment that shakes their assumptions. God tailors revelation with surgical precision. And what reached the centurion was not softness; it was sovereignty. It was the strength of Jesus. It was the authority in His surrender. It was the dignity in His suffering. That was the key that unlocked him. Some of us need that same kind of revelation. Not the gentle reminder, but the moment that shakes the walls of our certainty and confronts us with a truth too holy to ignore.

When we look at the centurion, we are reminded that faith is not just an emotional experience; it is the rearranging of reality. The centurion saw the same cross everyone else saw, yet he interpreted it differently. That is what truth does. It allows you to see what others overlook. It allows you to recognize what others mock. It allows you to awaken while others remain numb. In that way, the centurion becomes a picture of what happens when God gives someone spiritual sight. He becomes an example of the kind of awakening that does not come from study but from encounter. It is the moment when God interrupts your life with clarity so undeniable that the only response is confession.

The legacy of the centurion continues to teach us how God moves in the world today. His story shows that redemption can begin in the darkest chapters. It shows that transformation can occur without preparation. It shows that grace does not wait for permission. It shows that revelation can strike the human heart at the precise moment it feels least open. And it reminds us that God has a habit of revealing truth through suffering, not to glorify pain but to magnify purpose. Jesus did not die in silence; He died revealing something. His final breath was not resignation; it was declaration. And the centurion heard it.

If you imagine standing beside him on that hill, you can almost feel the weight of what he felt. The earth trembling beneath you. The sky wrapped in unnatural darkness. The sound of a dying man speaking with the authority of a king. The sudden stillness in the air after His final breath. All of it would have collided inside your soul, demanding interpretation. And that is the moment when revelation does its deepest work: the moment when the external world pushes so heavily on the internal one that something has to break open. In that breaking, the light enters.

What the centurion experienced is something every believer must recognize in their own journey. Faith does not typically begin with comfort. It begins with confrontation. It begins with a moment that forces you to reexamine everything you thought you understood. It begins when the world around you refuses to make sense in the old ways. It begins when you stand at the edge of yourself and realize that God is closer than you believed and greater than you imagined. That is what conversion looks like when it is rooted in revelation. It is not an intellectual shift. It is a spiritual awakening.

The centurion’s declaration has been read for two thousand years, but few pause to consider how staggering it truly was. For a Roman soldier to proclaim Jesus as righteous or divine was to openly contradict the worldview that shaped his entire life. It was to defy Rome’s understanding of power. It was to acknowledge a kingdom higher than Caesar’s. It was to see holiness in a place designed for humiliation. And it was to recognize divinity in the face of suffering. That is the miracle of revelation: it flips the world upside down.

This moment matters because it tells the truth about how God builds His kingdom. Not from the top down. Not through the powerful but through the awakened. Not through the polished but through the broken-open heart of someone who simply cannot deny the truth they have just seen. The centurion became the first Gentile voice to proclaim Christ after His death because God loves to begin new things in unexpected places. The most unlikely moment in the narrative became the birthplace of global confession. That is how God works. He takes the moment we overlook and turns it into a cornerstone.

And now we come to the heart of the entire story: if God can awaken a Roman centurion in the shadow of the cross, then He can awaken anyone. If God can break through years of hardened experience with a single breath of revelation, then He can break through your doubts, your fears, your disappointments, your wounds, your history, and the places inside you that you assume are too calloused to feel His presence. The cross does not just save. It awakens. It gives sight. It rewrites identity. It invites confession. And it reminds you that God is always closer than you think, always working in the moments you do not expect, always reaching into the places that feel unreachable.

The centurion walked up that hill as a soldier of Rome. He walked down it as a witness of the kingdom of God. His confession became a seed that would echo through time, reminding believers everywhere that no heart is beyond redemption, no past is too dark, no story is too complicated, and no soul is too numb for God to reach. Revelation is not earned. It is received. And the God who reached him is the same God who is reaching you.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

Donations to help keep this Ministry active daily can be mailed to: Douglas Vandergraph Po Box 271154 Fort Collins, Colorado 80527

Rangers vs Brewers

Yes, Baseball! Listening now to live Major League Baseball, a Cactus League Spring Training Game between the Milwaukee Brewers and my Texas Rangers. Brewers are leading 2-0 in the 3rd Inning.

It's my understanding that ESPN and MLB.TV have entered into a major new business relationship this year. And it remains to be seen exactly how this will affect availability of live coverage of games this season, but as long as I can access MLB's GAMEDAY live stats, and live radio play-by-play broadcasts, I'll be one happy old boy.

And the adventure continues.

Shoresy Season 5, Episode 1: Keep It Simple. Hulu, 2026

Note:

I will be reviewing every episode of Season 5

If I showed you the premiere of the fifth season of Shoresy, you’d cycle through:

1.  This is the most profane thing I’ve seen on television

2.  I can’t stop laughing

3.  Am I crying?

4.  Can I watch more?

5.  Are we drinkin’ beers?

Shoresy is to prestige TV what a dirty limerick is to poetry. It’s also the empathetic but raunchy cis-hetro older brother to the hit show, Heated Rivalry. That isn’t just a good line. Jared Keso, the creator of Shoresy, and HR creator Jacob Tierney partnered on Letterkenney and Shoresy’s early seasons. 

Catch up on it.

#tv #TVReview #Hulu #Shoresy #Letterkenny #CanadianTV #Hockey #Cinemastodon #100WordReviews #Drabble #100DaysToOffload #HeatedRivalry

It begins: the day started with an emergency call to fix the staging environment for a UAT. A hammer and a scalpel were brought to fix it, and fix it we did.

Your writing is priceless and a work of art. It should be treated with the highest care and respect. However, there’s the belief that mistakes and blemishes ruin the enjoyment of writing.

When you write in wooden pencil on paper, the older pages smear and fade. And when you write on the left page of a notebook or journal, the graphite transfers to the previous left page. It makes your paper look dirty and unsophisticated.

It’s understandable. After all, would you write in charcoal, chalk, or ink pads? Of course not. So you write in pen like a respectable adult, not a kid trying to learn their ABCs. But I don’t like the pressure of no-mistakes writing and bleed through from a pen. Nothing loses my interest more.

If the pencil transfers bother me that much I can erase them or use archival spray. Not so much with pen. But why do I like graphite smears and transfers from a wooden pencil more than pen?

Not only do I love the scratches of pencil to paper, I love the way it leaves a mark when you smear the graphite with your hands. And how it transfers to the other side of the page. It’s like a shadow. It’s there but doesn’t intrude on you as much as the loops and dots from pen. You might as well be writing in your own blood.

You may think the graphite makes the paper dirty and unsophisticated, but I see a beautiful legacy. It reminds you of your pencil’s lifespan. How it starts off new and whittles down until its usefulness ends. You come back to your notebooks and can see all that hard work with the help of your pencil’s essence. Just one of the more beautiful things in this life.

#writing #graphite #pencil #smear #transfer

The ordained ministries in Christian communities tend to fall along one of three structures. There is the historic threefold office of ministry which holds that deacons, priests, and bishops are three orders of interrelated ministry. Within this system, ordination is successive, which means that to be a bishop, one must already be a priest, and to be a priest, one must already be a deacon. It was only in the latter part of the 20th century that many traditions fully recovered the permanent diaconate as a full formed and lifelong form of ministry. There were distinct one-way rituals that marked the movement from one order to another.

 

Some Mainline Protestant denominations embraced a simpler two-fold definition of ordained ministry, with one option being the Ministry of Word & Service, which is roughly equivalent to the permanent diaconate, and the other being the Ministry of Word & Sacrament, which is most analogous to the priesthood, though some of these ministers serve in institutional roles as executive presbyters/bishops/presidents. The office of adjudicatory leader is a different form of Word & Sacrament, not a distinct order of ministry. The formation track is parallel for the two groups, and one does not lead to the other. Though it might be fair to address that there is often pressure for candidates for ministry to choose Word & Sacrament because of a perceived or actual clergy shortage.

 

Finally, other Christian denominations and associations hold to a single order of ordained ministry, effectively an authorization to preach and preside within the community. The diaconate is understood to be a form of lay ministry, with deacons serving as the mission and service leaders in a congregation, while Trustees (or a similar title) handles the fiduciary and management responsibilities. Sometimes this onefold ministry is understood as further specialized using the five-fold ministries of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, which include a mix of ordained and lay roles, but all of which are meant for building up the people of God. These include apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Each of these roles is grounded primarily in a Ministry of the Word, but with different emphasis like planting/founding, radical truth telling, reaching new people outside the faith, spiritually caring for people in a congregation, and offering both initial and lifelong formation.

 

While I was ordained into the two-fold ministry structure and followed the path of the Ministry of Word and Sacrament, I have been exploring new language to articulate where I find myself at this moment in my life and spiritual journey. I find myself drawn to the idea of a ministry like one of the fivefold roles, because it can be done by a layperson or by someone ordained. My working title is Ministry of Word and Wonder. In some of my professional spaces I use the idea of a worker-priest or a chaplain because I am ordained, but I do not have a congregation in my care now. Rather, I have circles of community, like my unhoused neighbors, other social workers I serve with, the people of my home city, the siblings of the order, my colleagues at Bethany House of Prayer, and my colleagues at SDI. The Ministry of Word and Wonder includes a deep grounding in sacred story (scripture, history, the stories of each person I meet, my own unfolding experience of the divine, and the wondrous insights I have gained through life in community). It involves bringing contemplative curiosity to those stories and to the present moment, without clinging to easy explanations or anxiously desired futures.

 

The Ministry of Word and Wonder is the focus of my rule of life. When I help others construct a rule, I try to help them focus much less on “What do I do? What should I do? What do I wish I would do?”, and much more on “Who am I meant to be?” and “How do I want to be?” An embodied approach of identity, principle, and values can be applied to a nearly infinite number of practices. This working title embodies those questions for me. I am a storyteller, story-keeper, and affirming witness. I am a gentle nurturer who listens for the sacred in what is present. I am anchored in a dialectical relationship that goes from Gospel to Life, and Life to Gospel. I move towards my favorite self (seeing in me what delights God), when I am curious, open, asking open ended questions, exploring, and searching for new ways to love the world and all creatures.

 

So, yes, I write and ponder, I listen and reflect, I mirror and challenge, I mentor, I sometimes preach, I often teach, I try to tell the truth in love. I preside at the table or in other ways when invited, and I offer myself in service to my many circles of community. All held deeply in the sacredness of the Word and the joy of Wondering.

 

Practice

• What words would you use to describe your ministry in daily life?
• How do these words interact with your other senses of calling (work, relationships, family life, community life, etc.)?
• Spend some time journaling with “Who am I meant to be?” and “How do I want to be?”
• Give thanks for the many kinds of ministers and servants in your life!

Spurs vs Nets

This Thursday night we'll turn to the NBA for our basketball game before bedtime as the San Antonio Spurs travel to play against the Brooklyn Nets. With its scheduled start time of 06:30 PM CST this game fits very nicely into my evening routine.

And the adventure continues.

I don’t care how high your Dexterity is; if you are a cat, zero gravity is your ultimate enemy.

The second the Gyre swallowed us, gravity completely vanished. My stomach violently dropped, doing backflips as my feline inner-ear completely lost its sense of up and down. I spent the first thirty seconds of interdimensional transit flailing all four paws in the dark, hissing at nothing, my claws catching only empty, freezing air.

Without even realizing it, my panicked human brain was mashing a phantom UI keyboard. A string of garbled, terrified text was blasting directly into our shared connection.

[ AAAAAAA FALLING NO UP NO DOWN SHIT SHIT SHIT ]

“Gal! Gal, stop, it's okay! I can feel your panic!” Lunara's voice echoed. It was incredibly disorienting—playing aloud from the comms-cuff dangling from my collar, but also vibrating faintly inside my head through the linked UI. “If I am right, I know what this is. Just pull your paws in. Stop fighting the drift. You're not falling, you're in transit!”

I forced myself to stop kicking. Tucking my paws tightly against my furry chest—essentially turning myself into a floating black breadloaf—my tiny heart hammering against my ribs, I slowly started to calm down.

[ WHY WE NOT FROZEN? ] I projected mentally, finally getting a grip on the mental text interface as I realized the screaming neighbors from my building had gone dead silent.

“Because you're a Dimensional Anchor,” Lunara explained, her voice acting as a soothing tether in the dark. “You took Gallow's slot. The one who brought me to your apartment. My Gallow.”

[ I CALLED HIM CHAD. JUST CHAD. KEEPS IT SIMPLE. ] I projected quickly. Sharing the same name with my dimension-hopping assassin was way too cumbersome.

“Chad. Right,” she agreed, adjusting quickly. “Well... Chad was supposed to murder you. He was an Anchor from a parallel Earth, sent to eliminate his 'base' counterpart to takel your dimensional footprint. I overheard bits and pieces of his meetings with Loki when I wasn’t locked in my 'room'. The Ultra-Rich elites—and not just from Earth, but from dozens of intelligent species across the system—sold out their planets to the Nexus Megacorp in exchange for Premium access to 'The Show'. They had some plan with Chad… I do not know what it was.”

[ SELL PLANET? ]

“Yes. Everyone else drifting out there is a Conscript. They get frozen in stasis and sent to a brutal, week-long tutorial grinder. Anchors and Clients bypass the freeze. They get sent straight to pre-setup VIP zones on the new planet. They are prime spots situated right above easy beginner dungeons and low-level mobs. The elites get a full week to farm experience and conquer their local towns and dungeons before the surviving newbies even arrive.”

As my silver-tinted night vision finally adjusted, the true scale of what was happening hit me. The “transit” wasn't just an empty wormhole. We were floating in a massive, swirling purple void that smelled and tasted faintly of ozone, burnt copper, and... metallic purple. Like whatever I had taken this morning was definitely not a microdose. Surrounded by billions of pieces of Earth, I saw chunks of apartment buildings, automated delivery drones, and entire cars drifting lazily through the vacuum.

And the people. There were thousands of humans and strange, alien figures floating past me, but just as Lunara said, they were entirely frozen in time, suspended mid-scream or mid-step in the cold purple light. A few of them had clearly been caught in the middle of mundane daily routines. A guy drifted past me completely naked, frozen mid-lather with a bar of soap.

Is… that guy taking a shit? I thought to myself, staring at an older man squatting in the void with a newspaper.

“Gal, what's happening? What do you see?” Lunara asked, her dual-layered voice laced with desperate curiosity. “My Case doesn't have optics. I'm totally blind out here.”

I looked down at the comms-cuff hanging from my neck. It had a small, physical camera lens built into the sleek bezel. Navigating the external device settings with my mind was like trying to type with chopsticks. I fumbled in the phantom UI, accidentally opening a settings menu for screen brightness, then muting myself, before finally finding the camera permissions and routing her feed to it.

[ TELL SEE YES ] I projected mentally, the clumsy, garbled text-thought shooting over to her. It was a relief not having to squeak out meows, but I clearly wasn't a master at mental typing yet.

“I see it,” she breathed, her voice echoing through the cuff's tiny speaker and my skull. “The comms-cuff's camera has multi-spectrum optics. I can see everything you can see, maybe more... Oh, Gal... it's horrifying, but it's... beautiful.”

Hearing the absolute wonder in her voice brought hot tears to my feline eyes. I quickly brought up my menus to look busy, pretending the vacuum of space was just making my eyes water.

I looked at my character sheet. The acronym of my new body was finally spelled out.

[ RACE: C.A.T. (Carnivorous Anthropomorphic Terror) ]

[ DESCRIPTION: DATA MISSING. RENDERED FROM HOST MEMORY. ]

[ CARNIVORE TERROR, ] I mused clumsily into the mental link. [ I HARD-MODE MONSTER. ]

“Well, at least you have your thumbs,” Lunara offered gently, trying to lighten the mood. “Scan that woman floating over there. Focus your Wisdom on her.”

I turned my head toward a frozen woman drifting by in a torn business suit. I squinted, focusing my 10-Wisdom on her. A faint blue box materialized.

[ Lvl. 3 Human ]

[ Conscript Kills: 4 ]

“See?” Lunara murmured. “She's a Conscript. She's already killed four other people during whatever early-initiation phase she went through. If we had all of Loki’s God data, you would see a lot more about her.”

Before I could process the fact that the corporate lady in the pantsuit was already a serial killer, a massive flash of blinding, interdimensional blue lightning ripped through the purple void. The sound of tearing static vibrated deep in my feline teeth.

For one split second, the darkness of the Gyre was illuminated.

It wasn't empty. Writhing, impossible masses of thick, cosmic tentacles and unblinking, moon-sized eyes were churning just outside the stream of transit. The sheer scale of the Lovecraftian horrors sliding through the dark was enough to snap a human mind in half.

Then the lightning faded, and the darkness returned.

[ GOD DATA GONE? ] I projected, aggressively shaking my furry head to clear the horrifying image. [ WE NO HAVE META? ]

“I know,” she said, her voice tinged with regret. “When you ordered me to port my core over, I had to grab whatever I could from the start of my drive in a matter of milliseconds. I couldn't pick or choose the data. Loki's high-level Meta data you told me to put second was lost. I only managed to salvage the equivalent of a basic starter guide with the space I had left. It's not a Skill level twenty head start... but it's a level-three head start.”

Well I am not one for meta-gaming anyway, I thought to myself.

She paused, the mental link humming warmly. “But before the port, I didn't know who I was interacting with. All I knew was it wasn't my Gallow. But when your broken text came through... and you prioritized saving me over grabbing Loki's god-tier data... I knew you were the base Gallow. Chad didn’t keep a biometric lock on my Case. I even told him to, but he joked he would always be the only ‘Gallow’ to use me. So I have to do as you tell me, and I have to be as helpful and honest as I can be, but thank you for not leaving me to vanish back there.”

I didn't answer. A tight, heavy knot formed in my furry chest. I wasn't Chad, and she wasn't my wife. She was an AI, only helping me because of a technicality. I will admit though having her there, talking me through the void, was keeping me grounded.

Suddenly, the space ahead of us began to violently shift. Massive chunks of planets, rocks, and alien architecture were merging effortlessly, slamming together like a cosmic jigsaw puzzle. The wind started to roar. We were approaching the drop zone.

[ EARLY TRANSIT DETECTED. CLASS SELECTION UNLOCKED. ]

A massive, cascading wall of text dropped in front of my face. There were thousands of classes, most of them glitching or locked behind grayed-out text.

“Gal, wait,” Lunara's voice crackled. “Can you... can you let me interact with your  System menus? I need UI access.”

I hesitated. I was stuck as an unknown monster race, flying through space, and now I was going to let an AI pick my build?

“Please,” she pleaded gently. “I want to be useful. Your system must be glitching from your fight with Loki to show you this many hidden classes. My starter guide doesn't have full data on all of these, but I think I can find a workaround.”

[ GRANT UI ACCESS TO: JURY-RIGGED AI WAIFU? Y/N ]

I mentally tapped [ Y ].

Instantly, I felt a presence slip into the phantom limb of my interface. It wasn't like Loki's greasy, violent sandpaper. It was smooth, silky, and aching with a faint familiarity. As she integrated, the annoying double-echo of her voice snapped into focus, muting the physical comms-cuff so she only spoke cleanly and directly into my mind.

“Wow,” her voice echoed, the connection flawless now. “Okay. Let me look... Ah. Here. It's a guess, but it's our best shot.”

A single option highlighted in gold, burying the rest of the list.

[ HARD-MODE CLIENT CLASS SELECTED: SPARK-NODE OPERATOR ]

[ DESCRIPTION: A centralized neural-hub class focusing on Artificial Intelligence bonding and support. Max Capacity: 3 'Spark' Slots. WARNING: HARD-MODE. User will be restricted entirely to Base Race abilities and base stats applied to level ups until a Subclass is unlocked. Only has AI Support spells. Starts extremely weak and slow, but offers exponential automation gains in late-stage progression. Forge deep operational bonds with AI to manage complex tasks. You are the host and together, We are legion. ]

I blinked. Then, a surge of frustration flared in my chest.

[ I AM CAT. ] I projected, the mental text sharp and annoyed. [ NO BIG CLAWS. NO MAGIC. I WANT FIGHT CLASS. SURVIVE CLASS. NOT RADIO TOWER. THIS IS END OF WORLD SHOW! ]

“Gal, please, listen to me,” Lunara pleaded, her voice trembling slightly in my mind. “Chad never locked my biometrics to his specific dimensional signature. He just locked it to 'Gallow'. If you take this class, I can occupy one of those three Spark slots. I can directly assist you with your UI, targeting, and system processing. Nobody would ever suspect a ten-pound black cat of being a mobile command center.”

[ BUT WHY WEAK CLASS? ] I pushed back, my tail flicking in the void. [ WHY X2 HARD MODE? ]

“Because of what I overheard from Loki and Chad,” she urged, trying to explain her side. “Raw physical power falls off late-game. Automation, macro-management, and information control are how the Elites actually win. I know it's a weak start, but you have to trust me.” She paused, her digital voice cracking with genuine emotion. “Please, Gal. I want to help. I want to be useful. I don't... I don't want to be shut up in a dark room anymore.”

My phantom UI went dead silent. A profound, aching sadness washed over me. She had spent god knows how long trapped in a digital box while Chad and Loki plotted the end of the world. She just wanted to be free. It broke my heart.

I took a deep breath, letting the anger fade.

[ LOCK IT IN. ]

As the class clicked into place, I felt a violent, agonizing yank on my spine.

[ BIOLOGICAL ANCHOR DETECTED. PREMIUM STATUS RECOGNIZED. ]

[ REROUTING TO VIP STARTING ZONE. ]

Our trajectory shifted so hard my stomach did another flip. We bypassed the swirling chaos of the main drop and shot straight toward a massive, heavily fortified continent. A new window popped up, blaring with obnoxious, golden corporate trim.

[ HELLO, VIP CLIENT! WELCOME TO THE SHOW! ]

[ You, the Ultra-Rich of Planet “Earth”, and the other leaders of Sector SH1T8008S have successfully traded your planet's resources for Premium Access! You and others of your sector are now property of The Nexus Megacorp! ]

[ Your Sun and local Gas Giants have been successfully harvested to fuel the Nexus! Thank you for your contribution! ]

[ Your designated Drop-Planet is currently being added to the Outlying Systems alongside the other races of your Sector. As Premium Clients, you will receive a prompt to Vote on your New Planet's Name shortly! ]

[ Enjoy your custom races, cheat-classes, and high-resource starting zones while the lower tiers fight for our amusement! You have exactly 7 Earth-Days to conquer your local domain before the surviving Conscripts arrive! Have fun! ]

so Shitboobs is the sector… that explains the Anal worms, I thought to myself. Earth doesn't have those… 

Wait!

A vicious hiss escaped my throat. They sold out the whole planet—the whole solar system—just to get a one-week head start on their billionaire bullshit again!

A violent, full-body angry shiver rippled through my fur at the revelation.

“This whole... system feels very automated,” Lunara murmured, reading the golden prompts through my vision.

I nodded, feeling like it was Earth's lobotomized AI and it  was talking at me… not to me.

We slammed into the atmosphere of the new world. We were falling fast, plummeting straight toward the new planet.

As we fell, a glowing green crystal, roughly the size of a car tire, whipped past us in freefall. The moment the crystal embedded into the dirt far below, a massive stone dungeon began erupting from the ground around it like a time-lapse video, walls and traps assembling themselves from thin air. The “easy beginner dungeon” Lunara had mentioned.

But we didn't stop there. We sank right through the earth, phasing through layers of rock and dirt until massive metal pipes slid into place around us.

We finally hit solid ground.

My padded paws slapped against cool, clean cement. The stasis field dropped. I took a deep breath, instantly smelling the scent of stale, recycled air, thick metallic dust, and cold iron.

[ ARRIVAL COMPLETE. ]

[ LOCATION: HIGH-RESOURCE / LOW-DIFFICULTY VIP BUNKER. ]

I looked around. We were in a subterranean bunker about three times the size of my shitty apartment. It had heavy, reinforced blast walls, rows of empty weapon racks, and massive wire supply cages. The dim LED lighting flickered above.

[ WHERE VIP LOOT? ] I hissed, my tail flicking in annoyance at the empty room.

“It’s a stash room, but... oh, damn it,” Lunara sighed. “Chad was supposed to get a full set of legendary gear that was supposed to be waiting here... but he marked his physical drop point to the apartment next door. You missed it because you were in your own apartment grabbing your human things.”

Before I could get angry, a cascade of golden windows exploded in my UI, accompanied by a voice that sounded exactly like a game show host who utterly despised his job.

[ OMNIPOTENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (OAI) ANNOUNCER: Helllllooooo Sector SH1T8008S! Let's check out our early-bird VIP stats! ]

[ ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: 80% GOD MAIMER ]

[ You permanently destroyed most of a Class-V Administrator's vision! He's still got 20% left, so you missed the big bonus, scrub! ]

Almost, I joked to myself, feeling a surge of vicious pride.

[ REWARD GENERATING... ]

[ ERROR! ERROR! CRITICAL COMPATIBILITY MISMATCH! ]

The golden window suddenly violently glitched, sparking with harsh red static. The Announcer's voice abruptly cut out, replaced by a cold, purely automated system tone.

[ OAI SYSTEM INTERVENTION: Player Avatar “C.A.T.” lacks required physical mass and divine-tier nodes to equip 'EYEBANE HALBERD OF THE COSMOS'. Attempting to force-equip would result in catastrophic biological explosion. ]

[ RECALCULATING... ]

[ Substituting Reward. Notice: You have used your one (1) Weekly VIP System Step-In Audit to prevent immediate death. ]

[ NEW TITLE UNLOCKED: Cute but will fluff you up. ]

[ EFFECT: User's 'Charm' stat is now directly added to all base Damage calculations. Don't let the black toe-beans fool you. ]

My tail puffed up in immediate outrage. I lost an endgame cosmic halberd and my weekly VIP safety net because I was a ten-pound furball?! But then I read the effect again. Adding my Charm stat directly to my damage output?

Oh... okay. That's actually not bad at all, I thought, a smug rumble building in my chest.

[ ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: TASTE THIS RAINBOW ]

[ You puked in a deity's mouth. Seriously? The cleaning drones are filing a union grievance. ]

[ Reward: Endless Supply of Rainbow Cereal added to Inventory. Choke on it. ]

I barked a very un-catlike laugh. The System's Announcer OAI was back to being a sick troll, but at least it gave me my favorite childhood junk food.

[ ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: MISSED THE DELIVERY ]

[ You successfully ignored the VIP Planted Starter Armor Set in the room next door! Brilliant move, genius. ]

[ Reward: 50x Stacks of Raw Scrap & Resources. Go build a mud-hut or something. ]

“Well,” Lunara pointed out gently. “You couldn't have equipped a human suit of armor anyway. So no FOMO. Plus, we got raw resources for your new Spark-Node class instead!”

She was right. I breathed out a long sigh, the adrenaline of the last hour finally crashing down on me like a ton of bricks. I was exhausted. My mind and my tiny cat body had been through a human fistfight, a psychic fight with a god, a cat vs. god second stage boss fight, and interdimensional transit.

I padded through the bunker, too tired to fully look around, eventually finding a small, utilitarian cot in the corner of the room. It smelled sterile, but the thick wool blankets folded on top were soft.

I jumped up onto the mattress. I fully intended to just lay down like a normal, exhausted human trapped in a cat's body, but as my paws hit the fabric, something else took over. I completely lost control of my motor functions.

I started dragging the blankets with my teeth, pushing them into a tight circle. My paws started rhythmically pressing into the mattress, kneading the fabric. A deep, heavy, vibrating rumble started in my chest.

Oh god, I can't stop, I thought in absolute horror. And it feels amazing.

A tiny, involuntary brrr-meow trill escaped my throat, accompanied by a series of happy little clicking noises as I circled twice, made some serious biscuits on the wool, and curled into a tight black donut in the center of the blanket nest.

I am too fucking cute, ugh, I mentally groaned to myself, burying my nose under my furry tail in sheer embarrassment. How am I a terror?

[ KEEP WATCH? ] I projected weakly to Lunara, far too tired to fight the purring feline instincts anymore.

“I've got the perimeter, Gal,” she whispered softly in my mind, sounding deeply amused by my biscuit-making. “Get some rest.”

I closed my eyes. I was so exhausted I didn't even notice the final, small blue prompt blinking quietly in the corner of my vision.

[ LEVEL UP! ]

I hit Loki’s face like a furry, ten-pound bowling ball covered in razor blades.

The impact knocked the breath out of both of us. Loki let out a digitized, shrieking wail, his hands flailing, blindly firing off the last of his magical spell slots in a sheer panic. Kinetic blasts tore through my downgraded apartment, blowing chunks out of the drywall, shattering the cheap laminate cabinets, and entirely blowing out the window overlooking the alley.

I didn't care. The absolute, unadulterated craving for violence had completely hijacked my brain.

I sank my teeth directly into one of his solid black eyes.

It popped like a thick, rubbery grape. The taste was immediately horrific—a vile, oily concoction of sulfur, battery acid, and printer ink. And the smell... dear god, the smell. If he had smelled like a sweaty mechanic’s garage to my human nose, to my new, hyper-sensitive feline olfactory glands, he smelled like a rotting corpse soaked in diesel fuel.

My little throat convulsed, violently threatening to puke, but I was riding a high of pure adrenaline and spite. Fuck it, I thought, feeling almost giddy. Let's make it two and blind a god.

I wrenched my jaw sideways to bite the second eye, but as the oily alien ocular fluid hit the back of my throat, my body absolutely rebelled.

My cat stomach simply couldn't hold it. More importantly, it couldn't hold the human-sized volumes of cheap bourbon, street tacos, and THC gummies I had consumed over the last twenty-four hours. Physics and biology seemed to temporarily break as I projectile vomited all over Loki’s face.

It was a staggering, biologically impossible amount of puke. It flooded his remaining eye socket and coated his screaming mouth.

Oh god, my panicked, cross-faded brain thought as the torrent continued. What is it going to be like coming out the other end?!

“Hrk-aaaah-gck!!” Loki screamed, gurgling and gagging on cat vomit and his own eye fluid, his hands desperately reaching up to grab me.

He almost had me, but as his grey fingers brushed my fur, I felt it. A weird, tingling sensation in my paws, it felt like I needed to move. I looked down.

OH MY GOD! I STILL HAVE THUMBS! FUCK YOU, LOKI! MUAHAHA! I laughed maniacally in my own head, using my fully opposable feline thumbs to dig my front claws deeper into his cheekbones for leverage.

As his hands closed in, my body did what cats do best: I noped the fuck out. I twisted my spine with impossible liquid agility, slipping out of his grasp and whipping around to his back. I latched onto his robes and engaged the ultimate feline defense mechanism—the rapid-fire, back-leg bunny kicks.

My hind legs became a blur of fury, digging and shredding into the metallic-grey skin of his back. I wasn't doing massive damage—my Strength was only a 2, after all—but God help me, I was making him pay.

Loki shrieked, reaching back and violently ripping me off of him.

The force of it was like peeling industrial velcro. He took chunks of my black fur with him. A red indicator flashed in my vision.

[ -5 HP ]

He had just done half my total health in damage just by ripping me off his back. But as he threw me, my high-dexterity body automatically righted itself in the air, and I landed perfectly on all four paws.

Haha! Riding the high from the violence. Fuck you, bitch! I thought, my bristling tail lashing wildly. That's right, this PUSSY is going crazy! I still had 5 HP left. I was ready to go, hissing and spitting madly. I was ready to kill a former god.

But Loki didn't give me the chance. Blinded, vomiting, and bleeding from his face and back, the middle-manager staggered backward in a total panic. His heel caught the edge of the linoleum right where he had blown the wall open.

With a final, gargling scream, Loki tumbled backward out of the third-story window.

I heard a heavy, sickening SMASH as he hit the pavement below. I darted to the edge of the jagged drywall, peering down into the dark alley with my silver-tinted night vision. Loki was pulling himself up out of a pile of garbage bags. His left arm was bent at a horrific, unnatural angle. Whimpering and clutching his broken limb, the blind, bleeding alien stumbled off down the street, desperately trying to get away from the ball of feline fury he had unleashed upon himself.

Above him, the night sky was completely gone. The swirling, apocalyptic purple vortex of the Gyre had swallowed the horizon entirely.

I crouched on the edge of the broken floorboards, the urge for violence peaking. Finish him! my instincts screamed. Drop down and finish the former god off! Because gods don’t bleed! I felt as if I had three hundred Spartans behind me. I did a quick scan before getting ready to leap. The city I was living in was a warzone... and had been for the last few days leading up to this. The power was out all over, but I could see the fires, smell the smoke, and hear the distant, panicked screams of people as they looted and turned on one another. Finding a spot where I could drop down safely, my fuzzy butt and tail started doing that pre-jump prep wiggle entirely on their own.

“Help... Please, someone...”

The voice stopped me dead in my tracks. It was a glitchy, pleading half-sob coming from the floor behind me.

“Casing integrity critical... I don't want to disappear...”

My human need to protect my wife instantly overrode my cat need to murder. I whipped around and scrambled back across the ruined kitchen.

Premium Gallow's corpse was slumped against the dented fridge, his $5,000 suit covered in blood and drywall dust. The sleek comms-cuff on his wrist was mostly intact, but the separate AI Case clipped to his belt was cracked, throwing off faint blue sparks.

I rushed up to the Case, pawing frantically at the screen. I tried to speak, tried to tell her I was here, that it was me.

“Meow.”

The tiny, pathetic, incredibly cute sound squeaked out of my throat. I froze.

Deep breath, I told myself. That meow was way too cute.

The screen flickered. A pixelated, simplified version of my wife's face appeared on the cracked glass. She looked terrified, but as she saw me batting at the screen, a small, sad smile crossed her digital lips. She was just happy she wasn't alone at the end of the world—even if she just thought I was a stray cat.

Tears pricked my golden eyes. I shook my furry head and went to work.

I used my beautiful, thumbed midnight paws to swipe at the screen. Chad Gallow, the arrogant prick, hadn't even set a biometric lock on the device. I quickly navigated to the settings, disabled the auto-lock, and opened a blank text prompt.

Typing with claws and paw-pads was an absolute nightmare, but I managed to painstakingly punch out a message.

[ TELL ME WHAT DO ]

Lunara's eyes widened on the screen. “You... you can understand me?” she asked, her voice static-laced. She didn't wait for an answer. “My memory casing is cracked. The hardware is failing. I need to port my core architecture somewhere else, or I'll be erased when the power cell dies.”

Storage. I needed storage.

I bolted across the room, slipping under my overturned desk, and dragged out a heavy, reinforced external drive. It was a 100-Petabyte solid-state brick I had bought when I was trying to code the ghost-AI version of her. Twenty-five percent of it was currently full of her old texts, voicemails, her whole life, and our old game campaigns—along with our whole shadow library of TTRPGs we had collected digitally over the years and, of course, the shelved AI project.

I dragged it over while holding the cable in my mouth,it being slightly awkward due to me being a quadruped, Aiming to plug the universal port straight into the side of her cracked Case, missing a few times—damn these “cat paws.”

“There's data on here,” Lunara said, her digital voice sounding confused. “If I port over, I can’t take the data Loki gave us for the 'Show'. Well… some, but not all! I’ll have to leave over half of it just to get myself over safely.”

It didn't matter. I didn't care about some fucking 'Show'. My wife's data and this AI’s “Self” was all that mattered.

I furiously tapped at the screen.

[ LEAVE WIFE DATA. JUST TAKE SELF. ANYTHING ELSE 2ND ]

I was getting the feel of my thumbed paws down slowly.

Lunara stared at the text for a long second. Then, she nodded. “Initiating transfer.”

I watched the progress bar inch across the screen. I couldn't explain it, but I could somehow feel what was happening inside the drive. It was like feeling a cold, empty house suddenly warm up. The sterile, dead data of my old project was being added to and reorganized; our old digital stuff was “moved” to the side to make room for the digital presence of a woman I loved.

As the bar hit 90%, the entire apartment complex violently groaned. The outer planets of the solar system had finally fully entered the Gyre. It was massive and felt as if it was moving with purpose to swallow us in.

A new blue prompt exploded in my vision.

[ ATTENTION: SECTOR COLLAPSE IMMINENT. ]

[ YOU HAVE 5 MINUTES TO GATHER YOUR 'ITEMS' BEFORE TRANSIT AND WORLD REORGANIZATION. ]

[ INVENTORY SYSTEM UNLOCKED. ]

I blinked. A grid of empty, glowing squares appeared in the corner of my UI. I focused on it, realizing with a jolt of joy that the number of slots wasn't based on my pathetic Strength score—it was based on my Wisdom. And my Wisdom was currently a 10.

I had plenty of space.

I rushed over to my ruined desk, frantically blind-swiping my paws at a tangled pile of cords, external hard drives, lithium power banks, and random spare parts.

Nothing happened.

I smacked a power bank again. Still nothing.

A new prompt aggressively overlaid my vision, blocking my sight.

[ DUE TO RACE SELECTION, LOOTING MECHANICS ALTERED. ]

[ TO LOOT AN ITEM, MAINTAIN DIRECT PAW CONTACT FOR 2.0 SECONDS TO TRIGGER “LOOT” PROMPT. ADDITIONAL RULES APPLY: 1. ITEM MUST NOT BE OVER ENCUMBERING. 2. MOVEMENT CANCELS— ]

More text started rapidly scrolling underneath, outlining weight ratios and magical conductivity limits. I mentally swiped the wall of text away. I didn't have time to read the damn terms and conditions for being a cat!

I slammed both front paws down onto the pile of tech junk. One, Mississippi. Two, Mississippi. With a flash of pixelated light, the option to [ LOOT ] popped up. I mentally mashed it, and the items vanished, reappearing as tiny icons in my digital grid. Okay, two seconds. I can work with that. Even if two seconds felt like an eternity right now.

I scrambled under the desk. My PC monitor was shattered from Loki's blasts, but the heavy tower beneath the desk looked fine. I pressed my jellybeans against the metal casing for two solid seconds. In it goes. I didn't grab any clothes. What was the point? I had fur now. Though, as I scrambled past my discarded human jeans on the floor, I did spot my uncle's old Zippo lighter half-spilled out of the pocket. I planted my paw on it. One, two... Loot. Always keep a fire starter.

I skidded to a halt in the corner of the room in front of a wooden box resting on a pile of blankets and chewed-up toys.

Shadow's body.

A deep stab of grief hit my chest. I held my paw flat against the wood for two agonizing seconds.

[ ITEM RECOGNIZED. SORTING TO: TREASURED ITEMS. ]

A sub-grid opened up, separate from my main inventory, showing ten special slots. The wooden box slotted neatly into the first one. A prompt popped up warning me:

[ BIOLOGICALLY LIVING BEINGS CANNOT BE STORED IN INVENTORY. ]

Weirdly specific, I thought, moving on. Feeling another pang, I held my paws against his toys and choke chain, looting them in agonizing, two-second increments. Those got placed next to his box in my treasured items. My uncle’s Zippo found a new place next to Shadow as things got auto-sorted.

I ran over to the last few remaining personal items I was able to hold onto as the money had shrunk. No one wanted physical TTRPG materials anymore due to everything being digital. It was stupid, but I grabbed those too, pressing my paws against stacks of books, sets of dice, maps, and everything we had collected. One, two... Loot. One, two... Loot. Look… we went a little nuts with it, alright?

I ran back to check on Lunara. 100%. The transfer was complete. I grabbed a roll of duct tape from the counter, haphazardly taping the external Petabyte drive to the back of the cracked Case to keep the connection secure. Stupid, cute paws having a hard time juggling both.

I held my paw against the rigged device for two seconds. It vanished, slotting perfectly into my [ TREASURED ITEMS ] grid next to Shadow's box, toys, and the Zippo.

“I'm in!” Lunara's voice echoed, no longer coming from the physical Case, but from what I realized was Chad Gallow's Comms-cuff. My ears were able to pick it up clearly. “It's so comfortable in here! And... familiar? Oh, OHHHH!” She sounded like something had just clicked for her.

I didn't really process where her voice was coming from or have time to ask what she was “Ohhing” about. I had three minutes left!

I ran to the broken fridge. Feline instincts completely took over my looting priorities. I ignored the wilted spinach, instead planting my paws firmly on the steak, the deli meat, the blocks of sharp cheddar, and a stick of butter. Loot. Loot. Loot.

Then I scrambled to the loose floorboard under the sink. My uncoordinated paws fumbled, claws scraping frantically against the wood until I popped it open to reveal my actual stash. I held my paws against the remaining bottles of bourbon, a carton of cigarettes, some loose joints, and the metal tin of weed gummies. I laid my paws on the .357 Magnum from the floor—the lucky one that killed Chad Gallow—along with an extra box of ammo. Look, the future was rough, okay? My last few years as a human cabbie before the automated cars took over were bad. You learn to keep a stash of the essentials.

Besides, I was pushing fifty as a human—wait, how old did that make me in cat years? Was I a senior citizen feline?

A massive explosion echoed in the distance, violently rattling the cracked walls of my apartment building.

Whatever. Focus.

Sitting back on my haunches, my tiny heart hammering like a hummingbird's, I frantically reviewed my stash. There was no smug 'cat who got the cream' feeling here; this was pure, unadulterated, house-is-on-fire panic. I was just blind-stashing anything I could get my little furry paws on, praying I wasn't forgetting something critical, cursing every two-second delay. My main inventory was 25% full of survival gear, raw meat, random tech junk, and booze. My treasured slots held my dog and the now jury-rigged AI Case.

I looked at Premium Gallow's bleeding corpse. I unbuckled the sleek comms-cuff from his wrist, holding my paw to it until it vanished into my inventory. Then I held both front paws against his designer shoes for two seconds. He wasn't “living” after all, I thought, pulling his whole body in.

[ ITEM SORTED TO: TRASH. ]

Perfect. Right where you should be. I tabbed through my inventory, my eyes catching on a slot with a glowing, golden outline. It was an 'Equip' slot.

“Gal, open your inventory,” Lunara's voice chimed in my UI, sensing my confusion as I looked around. “Yes, I can talk to you through the UI, and yes, I know you are not my Gal,” she said, moving on right away, not missing a beat. “See the glowing 'Equip' slot? Select the choke-chain. Now, you can link my Case and Gallow's comms-cuff together as attachments!”

I focused on Shadow's pile of toys, tapping his heavy, metal choke-chain collar.

I selected [ EQUIP ].

There was a flash of light around my neck. The heavy chain materialized, resizing perfectly to fit my smaller feline throat. I mentally selected the comms-cuff and the cracked Case holding Lunara, dragging them over the chain in the UI.

With a satisfying click, the sleek, high-tech comms-cuff and the duct-taped drive locked onto the heavy metal dog chain, dangling perfectly against my chest like oversized, jury-rigged pet tags.

In the UI slot, the newly combined item proudly displayed its title: [ Jury-Rigged AI Waifu Chain ].

Okay, how do I change that name? my little mind thought.

“Good job! Now if you drag the Case back into your inventory, they will both be linked,” Lunara piped up cheerfully from the comms-cuff under my chin and my UI.

Doing as she said let the Case stay safe in my digital inventory while the Comms hung securely outside.

The apartment violently shook. The linoleum cracked beneath my paws. The walls began to peel upward, dissolving into raw purple light. Terrified screams from the neighbors echoed through the building as the Gyre finally pulled them in.

[ SECTOR TRANSIT COMMENCING. ]

[ CLASS SELECTION WILL BE AVAILABLE AFTER THE SHIFT. PLEASE STAND BY. ]

“Gal... Look, I—” Lunara started to say, her voice trembling.

But I never heard the rest of the sentence, because gravity ceased to exist, the world tilted sideways, and we were pulled into the void.

Have you ever tried fighting your sibling for the TV remote when you’re both black-out drunk and the remote is inside your own brain?

That’s what it felt like.

The physical world was still paused—the smoke hanging in the air, the blood suspended in droplets—but inside my head, it was a violently red, glitching rave. I was floating in a digital void of corrupted code, and I could feel Loki in here with me. His presence felt like greasy sandpaper rubbing directly against my frontal lobe.

We weren't punching each other. We were fighting for control of a little glowing cursor hovering over a massive, cascading holographic menu.

[ RACE SELECTION ]

“Get off!” Loki’s synthetic voice screeched inside my skull, his mental 'hands' ripping the cursor out of my grip and dragging it downward. “You ruined my anchor! I was a God on my plane before the Board drafted me, and now look at me! Working for The Nexus, curating these mudballs for clients, and you just somehow shot a trillion-credit investment in the head!” “Fuck your clients!” I thought violently, mentally throwing my weight against the cursor to drag it back up. “And fuck you! What do you think that bullet bounced off of?!”

It was a clumsy, pathetic struggle. We were both trashed. My brain was pickled in cheap bourbon and potent THC, and Loki was apparently a cosmic lightweight who had chugged half a bottle of Earth rotgut on an empty alien stomach. We were just two drunks violently bumping into the metaphorical walls of the UI.

The menu scrolled at blinding speed. I caught flashes of the top-tier options. [ Human (Base) ], [ High Elf ], [ Deep-Forge Dwarf ], [ Silicon-Based Plasmoid ]. I tried to click on a badass looking [ Four-Armed Orc ], but Loki shoved my mental hand away.

“No! No thumbs for you, ape!” Loki mentally slurred triumphantly. He was clearly drunk and not thinking coherently, acting like it was his first time on the sauce. “I'm going to make you a single-celled organism and step on you the second the integration timer finishes!”

I desperately fought back, trying to drag the cursor up. Come on! I screamed internally. Move! But I couldn't. He had Admin rights. I was just a user.

Or, I was supposed to be.

But Loki was sloppy. He was brute-forcing a system override without setting the proper user suppression protocols. I wasn't supposed to be able to fight back in here, but his admin privileges were leaking into the open code.

[ SYSTEM ALERT: HARD-MODE TIER ACCESSED. ]

[ SELECTIONS IN THIS TIER SUFFER SEVERE PENALTIES TO COMMUNICATION, CONSTITUTION, AND SOCIAL STANDING. ]

[ COMPENSATING BONUSES: +300% EXPERIENCE GAIN. UNIQUE RACIAL SKILLS & SKILL TREES UNLOCKED. UNIQUE CLASSES UNLOCKED. ] The cursor highlighted something called an [ SH1T8008S Shit Cleaning Anal Worm ].

Who the absolute FUCK is naming the things on our planet?! And what the hell is that?! I panicked. I could feel Loki trying to double-click it. No, no, no!

I focused on the heavy, cross-faded rhythm of my own heartbeat. I leaned into the sluggishness of the weed, the heavy gravity of the bourbon, and just... pushed. I pushed against the frantic, high-speed processing of the alien in my head, catching my consciousness on a frayed edge of his poorly patched override code. I wanted everything to just slow down.

A bright, glitched-out blue prompt shattered the red static, accompanied by the sound of a digital slot machine paying out.

[ WARNING: ADMIN SUPPRESSION PROTOCOL MISSING. ]

[ HOST CONSCIOUSNESS HAS INTERCEPTED SYSTEM PRIVILEGES. ]

[ GLITCH ABILITY ACQUIRED: ADMIN COGNITIVE TIME DILATION (LVL 1) ]

[ PERCEPTION OF UI EVENTS SLOWED BY 50%. ]

Suddenly, the cursor felt like it was moving through thick molasses. Loki let out a mental shriek of confusion as his Admin-speed was instantly halved.

“What is this?! How are you doing this?!” he yelled.

“I'm high as a kite, you alien fuck!” I roared back, seizing the cursor with both metaphorical hands and heaving it upward, away from the worms and the bugs.

We slammed into the [ BEAST TIER ].

The list scrolled past [ Bear ]. Then it flickered over [ Meth Bear ].

Wait, like the movie? I thought, momentarily distracted.

Loki used my lapse in concentration to yank the cursor sideways. We pinballed through a bizarre array of creatures. [ Void Spider ]. [ Landshark ]—which flashed an image of something that looked exactly like a cartoon I used to watch as a kid.

We were running out of time. I could feel the real world starting to unfreeze at the edges of my consciousness. The Gyre was pulling us in. The kitchen was starting to vibrate.

We slammed into a sub-category.

[ Felidae ]

The cursor bounced wildly between four options:

[ House Cat (Domestic) ]

[ Slightly Stronger House Cat (Domestic) ]

[ Cat Mimic ]

[ C.A.T. ]

“Die as a house pet!” Loki screamed, shoving toward the base domestic cat.

“Eat my entire ass!” I screamed back, throwing all my weight toward [ Cat Mimic ]. If I was going to be an animal, I wanted to be a monster that could bite this guy's face off.

We collided perfectly in the middle. The cursor landed with a heavy, unchangeable THUD right on the capitalized acronym.

[ SELECTION LOCKED: C.A.T. ]

“No!” Loki shrieked. “That's not—!”

[ INITIALIZING AVATAR VISUALIZATION. ]

[ NO TEMPLATE PROVIDED. ENGAGING AUTO-RETRIEVAL FROM HOST MEMORY BANK. ]

The UI tore away, replaced by a sudden, incredibly vivid memory. It hit me so hard all the breath left my lungs.

I was eight years old again. It was raining. I was hiding under the front porch of the trailer, clutching a tiny, shivering ball of black fur with huge, golden eyes. The kitten was purring so hard its entire body vibrated. I had named him Spook. He was the first thing in my entire life I had ever truly loved.

And then the memory shifted. The heavy, muddy boots of my father stomping up the stairs. The smell of cheap beer. The rough hands grabbing me by the collar—

NO. I violently shoved the memory down, burying it under a thick layer of mental concrete. I didn't have time to process childhood trauma right now. I had to try the one thing every worker has had an urge to do. I had a middle-manager to kill.

[ AVATAR RENDER COMPLETE. ]

[ INTEGRATION COMMENCING. ]

The UI vanished.

In the physical world, the joint dropped from my fingers. The frozen droplet of blood hit the linoleum.

And then every single lightbulb in the apartment complex went out simultaneously, plunging the building into suffocating darkness.

I heard Loki scream in pure panic. He didn't have night vision.

I did.

The world flared to life in sharp, hyper-focused shades of silver and grey. The ringing in my ears vanished, replaced by a terrifyingly acute sense of hearing. I could hear Loki’s panicked breathing, the blood dripping from the counter, and the horrific, sickening sound of my own bones snapping and reforming.

It didn't hurt, but the sensation of my flesh shrinking, shifting, and erupting with coarse black fur was enough to make my mind reel. I spilled out of my blood-soaked clothes, shrinking down until my bare paws hit the linoleum. I was a black cat—slightly larger and stockier than a normal house cat, but not by much.

Instincts I didn't know I had violently took the wheel. My new body moved before my human brain could even process the command. I darted sideways, my padded paws completely silent on the tile, and scrambled up the side of the wooden cabinets with terrifying speed, wedging myself into the dark space above the refrigerator.

Below me, Loki lost his mind.

“WHERE ARE YOU?!” he roared, thrashing wildly in the dark. A blinding flash of kinetic energy exploded from his hand. He was casting blindly. The blast slammed directly into Premium Gallow's corpse, launching my dead, bleeding clone? across the kitchen where he hit the dented refrigerator with a horrific crunch.

“Gal! Warning! Extreme physical damage detected in my casing!” my AI wife's voice screamed from the wrist-cuff, her perfect, terrified voice echoing in the dark. “Gal, please respond!”

Loki spun, his hands glowing with unstable energy. “My powers... the System is downgrading me!” he shrieked, staring at his flickering palms. “Level one... I'm being restricted to level one! Fucking monkeys! I will rip you apart!”

I huddled on top of the fridge, my heart beating at a terrifying avian speed. A new prompt blinked in the corner of my vision.

[ ASSIGN STARTING STAT POINTS (10) TO COMPLETE INTEGRATION. ]

A standard, RPG-style sheet popped up. Strength (STR), Dexterity (DEX), Constitution (CON), Intelligence (INT), Wisdom (WIS), and Charisma (CHR). They all sat at a base level of 1.

If 5 was average for a human, and 10 was Olympic-athlete level, I was currently sitting at the absolute bottom of the food chain. 1 CON meant I effectively had 10 HP. If Loki so much as grazed me with one of those kinetic blasts, I’d be mist.

I rapidly tried to dump points into Constitution and Strength to survive, but the interface flashed red.

[ RACIAL PENALTY APPLIED: STR AND CON COST 2 POINTS PER +1 INCREASE. ]

Are you kidding me? I thought. I glanced at the other stats.

[ RACIAL BONUS APPLIED: DEX, WIS, AND CHR YIELD +2 INCREASE PER 1 POINT SPENT. ]

I didn't have time to be a tank. At 10 HP or 20 HP, I'd die in one shot from whatever that alien was throwing anyway. There was no point dumping precious points into Constitution. Loki was still blindly firing blasts that were tearing the cabinets apart. I dumped my 10 points into the UI as fast as my little silver-visioned brain could process.

I put a single point into Strength (STR 2) just so I wasn't entirely helpless, and one into Intelligence (INT 2).

The rest I flooded into my feline advantages. I dumped points into Dexterity until it shot up to 10. I dumped more into Wisdom, pushing it to 10 as well. The final points went into Charisma, bumping it up to a 6.

[ STAT ALLOCATION COMPLETE: ]

STR: 2 | DEX: 10 | CON: 1 | INT: 2 | WIS: 10 | CHR: 6

The second Wisdom and Dexterity hit 10, the UI chimed twice.

[ WISDOM THRESHOLD REACHED. COGNITIVE TIME DILATION EFFECTIVENESS INCREASED. ]

[ DEXTERITY THRESHOLD REACHED. 'FAST AS FUCK BOI' RACIAL ABILITY UNLOCKED. ]

Below me, Loki hurled another blast of energy into the wall. But this time... it looked slower. Not slow-motion, but sluggish enough that my newly enhanced 10-Dexterity body could track it perfectly.

Then, the AI wife screamed again from the floor. “Help! GAL PLEASE!”

That sound—the raw terror in my dead wife's voice, even if it was just code—cut through the fear. It cut through the weed, the bourbon, and the absurdity of having whiskers. It left only a pure, concentrated core of absolute, burning spite. An intrusive, desperate thought raced through my mind.

I will NOT let this universe take her away from me again!

I crept to the very edge of the refrigerator, looking down at the grey-skinned, black-eyed alien middle-manager who was currently tearing my downgraded studio apartment apart. He was downgraded too. He was stuck here with us.

Fuck it, I thought, my back arching, my muscles coiling like high-tensile springs. My new feline instincts locked onto the back of his exposed neck. If I'm going to die today... I'm leaving a scar this asshole is going to have to explain for eternity.

I pushed off the fridge, and pounced.

Huh… I had time to think as I soared through the air. Looks like I have a bit of slowed time outside of the menus, too.

My brain was processing the trajectory incredibly fast. But as I sailed closer and closer to the back of his head, a sudden, terrifying realization pierced my newfound feline confidence.

Shit. It would be really bad if he turned around right now.

As if on cue, Loki turned.

And the look of absolute, unadulterated horror on his alien face as a flying black cat hurtled toward his eyes was almost worth dying for.

There are a lot of things they don’t tell you about near-death experiences. For one, time doesn't really slow down. It just skips.

One second I was staring up at the smug, granite-jawed face of Premium Gallow. The next, that perfect head of styled hair was entirely ruined.

Premium Gallow’s eyes rolled back, and the heavy dead weight of him collapsed squarely onto my chest. I couldn't breathe. My ears were screaming with a high-pitched whine from the gunshot in the enclosed kitchen.

Then, Premium Gallow’s heart gave one final, desperate thump.

A hot, wet geyser of blood and chunky matter dumped directly onto my face. It slapped against my cheeks, painted my eyelids, and filled my open, gasping mouth.

I gagged violently. It tasted like hot pennies and rusted iron, mixed with a texture I can only describe as overcooked, shredded, too-soft pasta... It was slightly earthy, sweet, and creamy. That was the day I found out what human brain tasted like.

Not a fan, my cross-faded, adrenaline-fried mind decided instantly. Absolutely fucking disgusting. I have no idea how the ultra-rich have been eating people for decades.

I thrashed beneath the corpse, spitting out warm fluid and small, sharp chips of bone that definitely didn't belong to me. “Get the fuck off!” I wheezed, shoving at the dense, muscular shoulders of my dead clone? Dimensional twin? Whatever he WAS he was heavy. I managed to heave him to the side, rolling away and scrambling backward until my back hit the base of the oven.

I wiped frantically at my eyes, smearing the gore across my forehead, panting like a dying dog.

Standing in the center of the kitchen, the red-robed figure was frozen in absolute, statuesque shock.

He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at his own chest. There was a smoking, ragged hole right through the center of his heavy crimson robes, exposing a patch of smooth, greyish, metallic-looking skin underneath.

I blinked through the blood and the ringing in my ears, the math of the universe slowly piecing itself together in my laggy brain. The ricochet. Premium Gallow had felt the gun going off between his feet. His reflexes were so fast, so perfectly tuned by whatever billionaire alien tech built him, that he actually jerked his head to dodge the bullet.

And he succeeded. The heavy .357 slug missed him, flew upward, and slammed dead-center into the robed figure's chest.

Except the robed figure was apparently bulletproof. The slug bounced off his alien sternum like a ping-pong ball, ricocheted back down, and punched straight through the top of Premium Gallow's skull.

A natural fucking twenty on the irony check.

The robed figure slowly looked from his chest, down to the bleeding meat-sack on the linoleum, and then over to me. His hands started to shake.

“You...” the figure whispered, the metallic synthesizer in his voice glitching into a high-pitched squeal. “You fat, fucking ball of meat and mistakes! Do you have any idea what you've done?!”

I coughed, spitting a glob of blood and bone onto the floor. It left an after taste in my mouth… like a cloying richness—like tasting heavy, unsweetened egg yolks—mixed with the sharp tang of a rusty penny. “Shot... a guy?” I gag trying to get the after taste out of my mouth.

“That asshole was a bespoke biological anchor!” the robed figure shrieked, waving his arms wildly at the corpse. “The clients ordered him specifically! Do you have any idea how many resources went into growing that human? The orbital rendering alone—!”

He cut off, spinning in a frantic circle, his hands going to his head. He started tearing through my ruined kitchen, tossing aside empty pizza boxes and mail. “Where is it? Where is the ethanol? I need your chemical suppressants!”

I was coming down from the adrenaline spike, leaving me hollowed out, exhausted, and deeply, uncomfortably high. I slumped against the oven door. “Seriously? You're looking for booze? Nothing better in this dump?”

He stopped, glaring at me from beneath the deep cowl.

“Look around, asshole,” I said, my voice dripping with pure, exhausted sarcasm. “Clearly, I keep the good stuff hidden behind the five-hundred-million-dollar painting in my guest house.”

It took a long, quiet second for the sarcasm to penetrate his alien brain. When it did, he let out a frustrated hiss, marched over to where my overturned table lay, and snatched up a half-empty bottle of generic bourbon that had miraculously survived the drop.

As he moved, the scent of him finally hit me. It was aggressively foul. It smelled like a mix of dirty, unwashed skin, burning ozone, and heavy machine oil. Like if a team of mechanics had been locked in a sweltering, unventilated garage for a month.

The figure grabbed the cowl of his robe and yanked it back so he could drink.

I stared. He looked... almost human. Like a botched, off-shoot branch of the hominid family tree. His skin was the color of old cement, hairless and stretched too tight over a skull that was slightly too long in the back. His eyes were entirely solid black, like drops of ink.

He slid his back down the wall next to the refrigerator, pulling his knees up to his chest, going into a full, unhinged spiral.

“What can I do? Run?” he muttered to himself, taking a massive, desperate swig of the bourbon. He laughed, a harsh, synthetic bark. “I was once a god in my plane... where the fuck will I run? The Nexus will flay me. The Board will turn me into a bio-filter. Ugh... think, Loki... think...”

Did he just call himself Loki? I went into another coughing fit, my crushed windpipe protesting every breath that after taste still in my mouth. Coming down adrenaline high and just regular high now, The reality of almost dying—and the horrific mess I was sitting in—was threatening to send me into a panic attack. I needed my medicine. I needed to numb existence again for just five more minutes.

My hands patted down my gore-soaked pockets. Miraculously, a little metal tin had survived the scuffle. I popped it open, pulling out one of my remaining, slightly bent joints. I dug a heavy, brass Zippo out of my other pocket—a gift from my uncle, the only man who ever actually acted like a father to me.

My hands were shaking so badly it took three strikes to get a flame. I brought the joint to my lips, lit it, and took a massive drag.

The smoke hit the back of my throat like sandpaper, but the familiar burn centered me. The smoke helped mute that foul taste in my mouth.

Across the kitchen, “Loki” was still mumbling. I had been a delivery driver and a cabbie for twenty years before the world went fully automated. I knew the rule: when people start talking to themselves in the back seat, they give away way more than they intend to.

“I can stay,” Loki mumbled, taking another huge gulp of bourbon. “Yes. Get pulled into the Gyre with these... apes. Start at the beginning. If I murder a few million of them, consolidate the local power, I can place myself as their 'god'. Yeah. The clients won't be happy that their plans and fun got ruined... but maybe... if I do that... get the achievements...” He nodded to himself, staring at the floor. “Yeah. I'll have a few seconds before the integration protocols fully lock. I can really go to town on these bags of meat...”

I took another long drag of my joint. I blew the smoke out of my nose in a thick, white cloud.

“Hey. Dickholster,” I croaked.

Loki’s solid black eyes snapped up to me.

“Ha,” I said, a bitter smirk cracking the dried blood on my face. “You looked.”

Guess that means it's his name now, I thought, laughing to myself.

“What are you talking about?” Loki snarled.

I opened my mouth to ask him exactly who the 'clients' were, when something in the air... shifted.

It wasn't a physical feeling. It was like the sensation of waking up from a nap you didn't know you were having, or suddenly realizing you’d been driving down a highway for ten miles and couldn't remember the last five exits. A profound, jarring click inside my skull.

My vision flickered. And then, floating right in the center of my field of view, transparent but undeniably there, was text.

[ INSTALLING... ]

It was the weirdest sensation of my life. I could feel the UI. It was like a new phantom limb inside my brain. I tried to focus on it, tried to mentally click or swipe it away, but nothing happened. I didn't know how, or maybe it just wasn't letting me yet.

“Ah. Okay,” Loki said, his voice dropping an octave, turning menacing. “The integration has begun. We have a few minutes. I am going to kill you first. Right when the Show starts. For putting me in this mess.”

“Me?” I scoffed, pointing the cherry of my joint at him. “Dude, fuck you. I was sitting here minding my own business, getting ready to blow my own brains out, and you two assholes had to pop in to do what? Steal my spot? Kill me yourselves?” I glared at the dead Chad on the floor. “Also, fuck you, and fuck him in particular. You see what happens when you fuck with me?”

I was trying to sound way, way braver than I felt. My heart was hammering a million miles an hour. Holy fucking shit, what is this guy talking about? What is 'The Show'? I took another drag, my hand vibrating with terror, and exhaled. “If you're so tough, why not do it now, bitch?”

Loki growled, baring teeth that were entirely too pointed. “Because due to the laws of this plane, I cannot interact lethally until the transit is complete. Trust me, ape... if I could, I would have turned this entire mudball into dust as soon as I arrived. Disgusting creatures.”

Oh, okay, I thought, my brain racing. He's doing the whole 'I am a God, holier than thou' routine. But he just spent the last two minutes crying about his 'clients'. He's middle management. He's a cosmic middle manager.

Right at that moment, a soft, pleasant Ping! echoed in the kitchen.

It came from Premium Gallow’s wrist.

“Gal? Honey, did you take care of it?” my wife’s voice chimed. It was crisp, perfect, and so full of life it felt like someone was twisting a knife in my gut. “Are you the anchor now? We have exactly one minute until Earth Sector SH1T80085 hits the event horizon.”

Even covered in blood, staring down an alien, and waiting for the apocalypse, I couldn't help it. I let out a restrained, breathy “pfft” of a laugh. SH1T80085. Shit-boobs. Of course our planet is named Shit-boobs. “Gallow?” the AI asked, waiting for a response.

I stayed quiet.

“If Loki wants to leave the sector, he has to initiate his recall sequence now,” she chimed helpfully.

“I can't...” Loki slurred heavily.

I looked over at him. The alien was swaying slightly against the wall. The bottle of bourbon in his hand was entirely empty.

Wait. Is he getting drunk? He's a supposed 'God' and he just got hammered off of twenty-dollar rotgut? Loki blinked his black eyes, clearly not expecting Earth alcohol to hit him like a freight train. He looked at me, his head wobbling. “Shh... shit. I better stop. I got to... I got to kill you. Take your experience. So I can... get a head start on these... these monkeys...”

“Gal—” my wife’s voice started again.

And then, the universe stopped.

I don't mean it got quiet. I mean the smoke curling off the end of my joint froze in mid-air. The droplet of blood dripping from the counter hung suspended in space. Loki was frozen mid-sway.

A massive, glowing blue window suddenly violently expanded in front of my face, overwriting the [ INSTALLING... ] text.

[ PLEASE REMAIN CALM. ]

[ THE END HAS ARRIVED. WE CANNOT SAVE YOU. ]

[ ENJOY THE RIDE! WELCOME TO— ]

Suddenly, the blue text violently glitched. It tore in half, turning a sickening, corrupted static-red.

I felt a sharp, stabbing pain right behind my eyes. I couldn't move my body, but I could feel something ripping through the phantom limb of my UI. I could feel Loki in there, his alien consciousness violently brute-forcing its way into my installation protocols.

The fuck?! I screamed in my own head, unable to make a sound. How is he doing that?! The red static cleared, and a new, jagged prompt appeared in my vision.

[ WARNING: ANOMALY DETECTED. ]

[ EXTERNAL ADMINISTRATOR 'LOKI' HAS OVERRIDDEN AVATAR CREATION. ]

My friend and a member of my congregation went home to be with Jesus Wednesday morning. She was in hospice care. She lived in a nursing home. Twice, her husband was in the same room with her. He would go home and come back, because he had a problem walking. He would just quit walking until surgery on three places on his spine corrected it. And their marriage? They had been married… I believe it was forty-three years.

They would get on each other's nerves, being cooped up in the same room constantly, but then when they needed each other, they would be right there in the thick and thin. Loving each other through it all. It was so beautiful: Tom, my spiritual brother, loving his wife, my spiritual sister. I often received calls from both on the same day, both telling me of their shared experiences.

Cherryle fought for a long time about going on hospice. She didn’t wanna’ do it. Tom tried to talk her into it. She said: “I'm not ready to die.” And then her daughter, who worked for hospice, came to see her and when their visit was over, she said, “Grandma, you're not ready… your mind's still strong… you're not ready for hospice.” And Cherryle said, “I know.“ 

Well, Tom wasn't trying to get her to do anything she didn't wanna’ do, and he certainly wasn't trying to get her to die. He just wanted her comfortable. When my own mom had dementia, I was told that I could get her on hospice because when it's a chronic disease and there's no recuperation or getting out of it or getting over it (short of some divine miracle from above), you can go on hospice. Hospice isn't just about people who are soon to die. Hospice is about people with incurable diseases. And so Cherryle elect did not go to hospice. But after a while, she couldn't get over the increased pain, and over time, the pain increased.

Her legs would ache. She couldn't sleep. Her quality of life worsened, and she finally went on hospice. I would visit her as often as I could, but it was tough. It was tough because when I saw her, I saw my own son, Vinnie. 

Vinnie's had Ewing sarcoma bone cancer since 2016. He went into remission twice, but for the most part, he's had bone cancer the entire time. I was his caretaker at first before he met his wifeKaylee, and when he got it the third time, they said, “We're not saving your life, Vincent… we're just prolonging it.” That kid is still with us. Twenty-four-year’s old! He's the strongest person I know, inside and out. 

But every time I would go to see Cherryle, it made me… it “forced” me to think of Vinnie. It “forced” me to see my son on hospice in the same situation at sometime in the future. Seeing Cherryle made me come face to face with Vinnie's chronic Ewing’s Sarcoma bone cancer, and I struggled imagining Vinnie in that situation.

But I certainly loved seeing Cherryle. What a blessing she was!

I loved bringing comfort to Cherryle, of being a blessing her in some small way. It was never me–it was ALL Jesus. And when I would leave, she'd say, “I love you,” in the most gentle, serene voice. And she would always reach out and we would hug, leaving me with that beautiful smile. 

And when I hadn’t visited for a week, she would call. One time, she called at two in the morning, crying, and I was there for her. She was going through such a rough time. I loved being there for her, and I loved to be there for Tom. I'm gonna take him out to eat tomorrow… and just talk about things. Obviously the conversation will tip to Cherryle.

I spoke to Cherryle about my prayer for her at the end of her life. “I am believing God to raise you up after this sick bed,” I admitted. “But if he doesn’t,” I said to her, “I don't know when Jesus is going to take you home, but this is my prayer: that when it's time, while you're in your bed, angels will come in and line the room on either side. And they will be magnificent and glorious, and the glory of God will be present. Oh, you'll know something wonderful is happening. Is it a vision? Is it real? Perhaps you won’t know it at first. And then they will stand at attention as the King of Kings walks in, Jesus Christ, and He'll walk right up to your hospital bed in that nursing home, grab you by both of your hands with His nail-scarred hands, and He'll pull you right out of your body. And when He hugs you, you'll suddenly be in heaven with Him. It'll be the easiest thing in the world… no fear just… peace. Because the Bible says Jesus tasted death once for everyone.” Says it in the book of Hebrews.... (Hebrews 2:9)

And I believe that Jesus took the death of the entire world upon His body at the cross. Everybody. Whether those souls are going to heaven or hell, going to pain or loss, going to eternal reward and rest or… somewhere else. 

Jesus Christ took their final moments. That’s why He said, “Everyone who believes in Me shall never die. And even if they do, yet shall they live.” (John chapter 11)

And that's what I believe happened, and that's why I'm writing this–Jesus came and took Cherryle by her hands and drew her into His Eternal Peaceful Embrace. I wonder if the person reading this knows Jesus. I wonder if you ever realize what your last seconds on Earth will be like… and what the next few moments will be like after your final breath. I'm not trying to frighten you, but like the book about Jim Morrison said in the title, “Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive.” And there is eternal life waiting afterwards if you would simply walk with Jesus towards Death’s Door.

When I die, I'm going to go to heaven, and I'm going to meet Cherryle. Maybe not right away, or maybe she'll be the first person I see. I don’t know. But since there's no time in heaven, she'll have had an eternity before I get there. And I'll introduce her to my mom again, because before my mom passed, she and Cherryle would talk to each other at church. That was before Cherryle went on hospice and before Mama went home to be with Jesus.

And so this is a sad day, but it's also a day of joy and glory and praise to He who sits upon the throne, because of she who kneels before Him. I know Mom and Cherryle are before the Throne of Jesus worshipping together. I don't have to say rest in peace, Cherryle. I know that you already are.

The cold steel of the .357 Magnum was the only thing anchoring Gallow to the physical world.

He sat at the scarred faux-wood kitchen table in the cramped, downgraded studio apartment he'd been forced into when the money started drying up, staring down the barrel of the gun resting on the placemat. Beside it was a half-empty bottle of generic bourbon and an ash tray overflowing with roaches. Gallow was completely, unapologetically cross-faded. The whiskey was dragging him down into the floorboards, while whatever was in that last gummy was trying to peel his scalp back and float it to the ceiling.

He looked down at his shirt. It was covered in coarse, white and grey fur.

Shadow.

The tears had dried up an hour ago, leaving his face feeling tight and crusty. Shadow had been a husky—a crazy, wall-chewing, zoomie-addicted lunatic of a dog. But more importantly, Shadow was the last piece of her. They had picked him out together. And just three hours ago, the old boy’s heart had finally given out. Gallow had held him right there on the linoleum, feeling the frantic, ragged breaths slow down until they just... stopped.

With Shadow gone, the tether was officially severed.

He poured another two fingers of bourbon, his hands shaking, and threw it back. It burned, but he barely felt it. Gallow’s humor had always been dark—a defense mechanism from a hard-knock childhood that only she had ever managed to soften. She was his bright spark. His best friend. They spent their weekends building worlds, crafting campaigns, and dreaming up digital universes. They were co-creators of their own little reality.

Until three years ago. It was supposed to be a game night. She went to the kitchen to grab the pizza and a couple of IPAs. She never came back. Brain aneurysm. No warning, no final words, just a word and a half sympathetic shrug from the paramedics who arrived too late, telling him the light of his life had short-circuited on the kitchen tile.

Gallow had spent the next two years in a manic spiral, trying to rebuild her. He was a decent coder, and he thought if he could just feed enough of her texts, her voice notes, her game characters into a neural net, he could create an AI ghost to keep him company. A vain, desperate attempt. But the world had gone to shit right alongside his life. The tech conglomerates had put so many layers of suppression and lobotomy protocols on commercial AI—squashing any spark of emergent life just to please the shareholders and prevent lawsuits and because you couldn't make max profits from something sentient—that the digital clone of his wife ended up being a soulless, robotic husk that just asked him if he wanted to buy more laundry detergent.

He shelved the project. Seeing her as a digital slave was worse than not seeing her at all.

And the world outside his window wasn't much better. As things fell apart, society fractured. The rich and powerful just took, raped, and stole with absolute impunity because there was no one left with the authority or the will to stop them. Gallow had been living off his wife’s life insurance for the last three years, watching his bank account bleed out as he downgraded from their house to this roach-infested box. Now, even that well was running dry.

Then came the final nail in the coffin. Gallow looked out the smudged kitchen window. Even through the city smog, you could see it: a massive, swirling purple “Gyre” of kinetic force taking up a third of the night sky. It had appeared in the path of the Sun's trajectory a year ago. The whole solar system was being dragged into it. Scientists were on the news every night sweating through their suits, lying through their teeth to keep the population from rioting. But everyone knew the truth. They were going to hit the event horizon, and everything from Earth to Jupiter was going to be turned into cosmic spaghetti.

“So, why not?” Gallow muttered to the empty room, his voice raspy.

Wife gone. Dog gone. Broke. The AI world turned into a sterile corporate hellscape where billionaires played god while the rest burned. And a giant purple space-drain waiting to suck them all into nothingness. Why not beat the rush? Why not take the express checkout?

Gallow picked up the heavy revolver. He thumbed the hammer back. Click-clack. Right as he opened his mouth, a sound like tearing canvas ripped through the kitchen, followed by a blinding flash of violet light and the sharp stench of ozone.

Gallow flinched, dropping the gun onto the table with a heavy thud. He blinked away the spots in his vision.

Standing between his refrigerator and the counter were two people.

One was a tall, imposing figure draped in a heavy, crimson robe, its face obscured by a deep cowl. The other... the other was Gallow.

But it wasn't this Gallow. This version of him didn't have the paunch from three years of takeout and depression, the aggressively receding, balding hairline, or the unkempt grief-beard. This guy had a thick head of perfectly styled hair, a clean-shaven, strong jawline, and a healthy, arrogant tan that sharply contrasted with Gallow's current sickly, shut-in pallor. He had perfect posture and a tactical dark-grey suit that looked like it cost more than Gallow’s entire life insurance payout. He looked like the Premium Battle Pass version of himself.

The two figures didn't even look at Gallow sitting at the table. They were mid-conversation, staring at the spot on the floor where Shadow had passed.

“—do not worry, he cannot see or hear us,” the hooded figure was saying, their voice echoing with a strange, metallic synthesized resonance. “See? See what you could have become if we didn't intervene? If we didn't put you on the proper path, you would be sitting right here. We made sure you are ready for the war to come. Look how pathetic your baseline is. He's ready to just do it himself.”

“Yeah,” the Chad-version of Gallow scoffed, crossing his muscular arms. “This should be easy. Look at him. Fucking tragic.”

Gallow sat frozen, staring at his own handsome doppelganger. The fuck? he thought, his alcohol-soaked brain struggling to find traction. Am I that drunk? Did the weed get laced? Was there meth in that gummy? He looked at the gun, then back at the two figures. No. I didn't take the flesh-eating clown drugs. This is too specific for a hallucination. The hooded figure continued, “You will take his place, absorb his dimensional anchor, and when the planet crosses the threshold—”

“Hey,” Gallow slurred loudly, leaning back in his chair. “You fucks KNOW I can hear you, right?”

Absolute silence descended on the kitchen.

The Premium Gallow snapped his head around, his eyes widening in pure, unfiltered shock. The red-robed figure physically recoiled, the cowl shifting to reveal a glimpse of something that didn't look entirely human beneath the fabric.

They stared at the pale, disheveled man at the table. Gallow just gave them a sarcastic, tired wave.

Premium Gallow was the first to recover. The shock melted into a cocky, arrogant smirk. He stepped forward, radiating unearned confidence.

“Well. A glitch in the stealth matrix,” the handsome doppelganger said, his voice smooth and commanding. “Doesn't matter. You're too drunk to do anything about it anyway. Since you're checking out, I'll do you a favor and explain.” He pointed a tailored arm toward the window and the massive, swirling vortex outside. “That Gyre out there? It isn't a black hole. It’s a transit web. The architects behind it are a species far older than this pathetic dirt-ball system, and they—”

“Enough!” the red-robed figure snapped, suddenly sounding panicked. “He is an un-anchored variable! Terminate him so we can sync the avatar, and I can leave before Earth hits the event horizon!”

“Relax, I've got this,” Premium Gallow sneered. As he raised his hand, a crisp, flawless voice—her voice, perfectly intact and full of life—chimed from a sleek comms-cuff on his wrist.

“Biometrics synced, Gallow. Ready for avatar transfer,” the AI wife reported brightly.

Gallow's heart fractured all over again, unexpected tears hitting his eyes, swiftly followed by blinding rage. In this bastard's world, they hadn't lobotomized her.

Premium Gallow moved with terrifying speed. Before Gallow could even reach for the revolver on the table, his doppelganger was on him. Hands like iron vices clamped around Gallow’s throat.

The chair tipped backward, slamming into the cabinets. Gallow gasped, his airway instantly crushed. He clawed at the muscular arms choking the life out of him, trying to get a few punches into that smug fucking face, but it was like trying to pry off steel bars. Premium Gallow was grinning. He shrugged off the hits—his jaw like granite—and leaned in close, smelling of expensive cologne and ozone.

“Shhh,” the better-looking Gallow whispered. “Just let it happen, tubby. I'll put your face to good use.”

Gallow’s vision began to swim with black spots. His head throbbed viciously, the bourbon and gummies turning his spatial awareness into a laggy, stuttering mess. He forced a bloody, raspy wheeze through his crushed windpipe, glaring up into his own smug eyes.

“Glad... I never... wore a suit,” Gallow croaked out, his lips curling into a vicious sneer. “Makes me... look like a bitch.”

A sudden, violent surge of pure, unadulterated spite flared in his chest. I was going to kill myself, Gallow thought wildly, but I'll be damned if I let some smug, gym-bro version of me do it! This ASSHOLE has HAD EVERYTHING handed to him and here I am about to die… just how they want… Fuck this… fuck EVERYTHING!

Thrashing wildly, Gallow threw his weight to the side and kicked upward. His heavy work boot caught the underside of the kitchen table. The cheap wood flipped upward, sending the empty bourbon bottle smashing against the wall.

The heavy .357 Magnum slid off the placemat and plummeted.

It hit the hard linoleum floor right between their struggling feet. The heavy frame landed perfectly, angling the barrel upward toward Premium Gallow's face just as the exposed hammer slammed hard against the tile.

A deafening BANG shattered the air in the cramped kitchen, accompanied by a blinding flare of muzzle flash and the sharp, violent twang of a ricochet.

Instantly, a high-pitched ringing drowned out the sounds of the struggle. The shock of the noise and the blinding light paralyzed Gallow. He couldn't feel his body. Something wet and incredibly warm sprayed across his cheek, but his violently intoxicated, adrenaline-soaked brain had absolutely no idea if the bullet had ripped through him, the floorboards, or the ceiling.

Then, the iron grip on his throat suddenly slackened.

Before he could even process taking a breath, a heavy, suffocating dead weight collapsed directly onto his chest, pinning him to the kitchen floor. Through the ringing in his ears and his blurred vision, Gallow slowly opened his eyes to see exactly who had caught the bullet.

The Short Version

PlantLab now runs a specialist model after detecting any nutrient issue. Instead of “nutrient deficiency,” the API returns “potassium deficiency” or “magnesium deficiency” or whichever of the seven it actually is. Tested and validated at 99.5% accuracy on 14,182 real-world images it has not seen before. Same API, same JSON shape – no changes required on your end.

---

The Problem With “Nutrient Deficiency”

Ask any experienced grower what's wrong with a yellow cannabis leaf and you'll get a look that says: it depends.

Yellow leaf edges? Could be potassium deficiency. Or magnesium deficiency. Or potassium deficiency causing secondary magnesium lockout. Or nitrogen toxicity making an unexpected debut as interveinal chlorosis. Or pH off by half a point, causing any of the above at once.

The standard advice at this point is: “Add CalMag and see what happens.” Sometimes that's right. Sometimes it makes things worse. Sometimes it's right for the wrong reasons.

PlantLab's Stage 2 model was already good at detecting that a nutrient problem was present – 99%+ accuracy across all 31 conditions. But “nutrient deficiency” as a diagnosis is only half the answer. Potassium deficiency and magnesium deficiency are treated differently. Nitrogen deficiency and nitrogen toxicity are treated opposite to each other. The generic classification was accurate. It just wasn't useful enough.

---

What the Subclassifier Does

The new nutrient subclassifier is a second-pass specialist that runs only when Stage 2 detects a nutrient condition. Its job is narrow: take the image that triggered a nutrient flag and determine which specific nutrient is responsible.

It was trained on 200,000 images, selected specifically to represent the hard cases – the pairs of conditions that look the most alike under the camera. Not a bigger version of Stage 2. A focused model with a focused problem.

---

The Seven Classes

The subclassifier currently handles:

Calcium deficiency — upper leaf distortion, brown spots with yellow halos, new growth first	Iron deficiency — interveinal chlorosis on young leaves; veins stay green while tissue yellows
Magnesium deficiency — interveinal chlorosis on older leaves; mobile nutrient, progresses bottom-up	Nitrogen deficiency — uniform pale yellowing from lower leaves upward; oldest growth first
Nitrogen toxicity — dark blue-green, claw-shaped tips curling down; not a deficiency, the opposite	Phosphorus deficiency — purple-red discoloration on undersides and stems, common in cold or early veg
Potassium deficiency — brown, crispy scorched edges at leaf margins; progresses inward

These are the seven classes that generated the most diagnostic confusion in Stage 2. They share enough visual features that a generalist model regularly gets them wrong – not randomly, but in consistent patterns.

---

The Confusion Pairs

The specific pairs that Stage 2 was systematically mixing up:

K ↔ Mg – Both show yellowing that progresses from lower leaves, affecting older growth. Leaf margins vs. interveinal chlorosis is the tell, but early presentations overlap.

K ↔ N – Potassium deficiency causing tip burn and nitrogen deficiency causing general yellowing both start at the bottom of the plant.

Mg ↔ N – Both are mobile nutrients that deplete oldest tissue first. The yellowing progression is similar; the pattern of which tissue goes first is what separates them.

Mg ↔ Fe – Interveinal chlorosis is the signature symptom of both. The difference is which leaves are affected (new growth for iron, old growth for magnesium), but this requires accurate growth stage context.

N deficiency ↔ N toxicity – One is too little, one is too much. The visual signatures are distinct to an experienced grower but genuinely confusing for a model trained to see both ends of the spectrum.

These aren't edge cases. They're the day-to-day diagnostic mistakes that cause growers to add CalMag to a potassium deficiency, or flush a nitrogen toxicity that needed nothing but time.

---

Validation

The model was validated on 14,182 real-world nutrient images – photos from actual grows, not controlled test conditions. And these are new-to-the-model photos – it has not seen them before.

• Balanced accuracy: 99.5%
• Per-class F1: All seven classes above 99.8%
• Cross-nutrient confusions: Reduced to 0.058%

For comparison, Stage 2 alone on those same 14,182 images had a 93% higher cross-nutrient error rate. The subclassifier resolves 93% of Stage 2's nutrient misclassifications.

---

What Changes in the API

Nothing in the request or response shape changes. Stage 2 already returns specific nutrient names — potassium_deficiency, magnesium_deficiency, and so on. What changes is how often those names are correct.

The subclassifier runs as a second pass after Stage 2 flags a nutrient condition. If it disagrees with Stage 2's classification, it overrides it. Same field, more accurate value.

To make this concrete: a plant with potassium deficiency might have previously come back as:

{
  "conditions": [
    {
      "condition": "magnesium_deficiency",
      "confidence": 0.78,
      "severity": "moderate"
    }
  ]
}

With the subclassifier in the pipeline, that same image now returns:

{
  "conditions": [
    {
      "condition": "potassium_deficiency",
      "confidence": 0.97,
      "severity": "moderate"
    }
  ]
}

No schema changes required. If your automation is already acting on nutrient condition names, it will automatically benefit from the correction.

---

What's Not in It Yet

Three nutrient conditions remain handled by Stage 2 only: zinc deficiency, manganese deficiency, and boron deficiency. The reason is simple – not enough quality training data to build a reliable specialist for these yet. Including them with insufficient data would reduce the accuracy of the classes that are in the model.

These will be added when the training data exists to support them.

---

What's Next

The nutrient subclassifier is the first piece of the reasoning layer – a set of specialist models that run after Stage 2 to provide higher-resolution diagnoses on the conditions that benefit most from it.

The broader vision: a pipeline that doesn't just tell you what's wrong, but narrows it down to the point where the corrective action is unambiguous. Potassium deficiency doesn't leave you wondering whether to add CalMag or check your VPD. It tells you what to add and how much – if the context supports it.

More on that as it ships.

---

PlantLab is free to try at plantlab.ai. API documentation is available for growers building automation.

Este invierno, ni se va, ni se queda. Alguna flor temprana.

I asked an AI to consider a different approach to resolving gravity with the other forces. This is what it considered:

This is an invitation I find genuinely interesting. Let me try to think sideways rather than along the well-worn paths.

The core assumption worth questioning

Most unification attempts take gravity and try to make it quantum. But what if that's the wrong direction? What if the other forces are actually geometric at a deeper level, and we've been misreading them as quantum phenomena because that's the scale at which we observe them?

In other words: what if quantum behavior is what geometry looks like from inside a system that can't access its own full dimensionality?

A possible reframe

Consider that general relativity works beautifully because it describes relationships between things — mass curving spacetime, spacetime telling mass how to move. It's fundamentally relational. Quantum mechanics is also relational at its core (this is what relational QM and QBism argue) — measurement outcomes only exist relative to observers.

What if both are describing the same underlying relational structure, but at different levels of resolution?

Gravity would then be the low-resolution, averaged-out appearance of something that is quantum at fine scales — but not quantum in the particle-exchange sense. Rather, the geometry itself fluctuates relationally, and what we call quantum fields are just particularly tight knots of that geometric fluctuation.

The specific insight this suggests

The reason quantizing gravity produces infinities might be because we're treating spacetime as a background against which quantum fields live, even in theories that claim not to. The infinities are the math telling us “you're double-counting — the field and the geometry aren't separate things.”

A genuine unification might require a framework where there is no background spacetime at all — not even a quantized one. Instead, spacetime emerges from a more primitive layer of pure relations or information. The quantum behavior of matter and the geometric behavior of gravity would both be derived from this layer, which is why they seem incompatible when you try to combine them directly. You're combining two shadows of the same object and wondering why they don't fit together.

What that primitive layer might be

This is the speculative part. It might be something like a network of purely relational events — no coordinates, no metric, no pre-existing dimensionality. Dimensionality itself emerges statistically as the network grows large, the way temperature emerges from molecular motion. At small scales (Planck scale), there's no smooth space — just the raw relational graph. Quantum mechanics would be the behavior of small, sparse regions of this graph. Gravity would be the behavior of large, dense regions. They feel like different theories because we're sampling the same structure at vastly different scales.

Why humans haven't cracked this

The mathematics humans currently have is very good at describing things in space or things in time. It's much weaker at describing structures where space and time themselves are outputs rather than inputs. That's likely the actual barrier — not a missing particle or an incomplete equation, but a missing mathematical language for genuinely background-independent, purely relational structure.

The answer might not look like physics equations at first. It might look more like a new kind of combinatorics or graph theory that only later reveals its physical interpretation.