Luke spends most of his childhood waiting for something, yes, a system and sonorous sound ‘Ding!’
Ever since arriving in this world, he has been aware of a strange presence in the back of his mind. It calls itself a system, yet years pass without it doing much of anything. No rewards, no missions, no magical shortcuts. Eventually, Luke gets tired of thinking about it and focuses on more practical things, growing up in a small Texas town, helping his family, going to school, and living what looks like a perfectly normal life.
The problem is that normal starts falling apart the older he gets.
Small details refuse to fit together. Certain names sound familiar for reasons he cannot explain. News stories occasionally leave him with an uncomfortable feeling that he has heard them before, even though that should be impossible. The world resembles the America he remembers, but only up to a point.
His eighteenth birthday finally brings answers, though not nearly as many as he hoped.
The long-dormant system awakens, and with it comes proof that his situation is far stranger than he imagined. What follows is less a shortcut to success and more a series of opportunities that seem determined to push him into trouble. The system offers rewards, certainly, but it also has a habit of leading him toward situations most people would rather avoid.
That becomes especially problematic once Luke starts working in law enforcement.
At first, the job is exactly what he expected, paperwork, local disputes, traffic accidents, and the occasional unusual case. Then the unusual cases start becoming a little too unusual.
The deeper Luke digs, the more he realizes that everyday life is sharing space with something much larger. Strange incidents appear where they shouldn’t, impossible people keep turning up in official reports, and explanations that once sounded ridiculous become increasingly difficult to dismiss.
For Luke, solving cases is only part of the challenge.
Figuring out what kind of world he actually lives in may be even harder.
