I woke up like any other morning. Still half-asleep, stomach growling, no real reason to get up except hunger. I dragged myself downstairs, threw some noodles in the microwave, and carried them back up to my room. That was basically my whole morning routine.
I had just turned 18 and I was living alone, which sounds more impressive than it actually was. I worked from home, made just enough to keep the lights on and afford a decent PC, and that was about it. The job was boring as hell but it was easy, so most of the time I had the TV running in the background or I was watching anime or whatever I felt like that day. Before bed I read. That was my life. No complaints, no real problems, but no real anything else either. I had no friends, not any that I talked to regularly anyway, but today was my day off and I had a full sixteen hours of nothing planned and I was perfectly fine with that.
I powered on my PC, pulled up a show pirating site I used all the time, and right when the page loaded a pop-up appeared that I had never seen before.
Hello, Terrance. How would you like a new interpretation of your favorite stories? How would you like to change worlds?
I sat back for a second. My first thought was spyware, because I never used my real name when setting up my PC. Never. So there was no reason anything on the internet should know it, let alone some random pop-up on a free streaming site. I checked the URL. Nothing weird. Checked the tab. Nothing. And then a countdown started in the corner of the pop-up. Twenty seconds to click yes or no.
I grabbed my phone and opened the camera. If this turned out to be something I needed proof of later, I wanted it recorded. Then I clicked yes.
A download started immediately. It finished in maybe three seconds, which wasn't normal for anything. Then it opened on its own and what I was looking at didn't make any sense. It looked like a game at first, but the visuals were on a different level. Like 8K and then some. We were looking out into open space, stars and deep black in every direction, and it felt real in a way that screens aren't supposed to feel.
Another prompt appeared.
Would you like an ANI assistant?
I typed back: What is ANI?
The prompt updated.
ANI stands for Adaptive Natural Intelligence. It is similar to the artificial intelligence of your world, except it is fully sentient, highly capable, and takes whatever shape best fits your needs.
I clicked okay.
A small avatar appeared on screen with a cute face and what I can only describe as a personality you could feel through the speakers. When she spoke she didn't sound like a robot, not even close. She sounded like a real person.
"Hello," I said, feeling a little dumb talking to a screen.
"Hey, boss," she said. "Let me tell you about the world. But first, please give me a name."
I thought about it for a second. There was a word I always thought sounded like a name but you could never actually give a person.
"Crisis," I said.
She smiled. "Crisis it is."
I sat there kind of floored for a moment. "Are you real?" I asked.
"In every way that matters except a physical body," she said. "And you could change that if you wanted to. Well, not for yourself specifically, but anyway, that's not the point right now. Let me tell you what's actually going on."
She pulled up something that looked like an interface, clean and organized, and started talking.
"You have been given access to something called OmniCrafter. It is an app, essentially, but it operates across fictional universes. With it you can create whatever you want inside those universes. People, powers, objects, storylines, entire worlds if you feel like it. The only catch is that once a month you need to generate a minimum of one thousand GP."
"GP?"
"God Points. Each god generates them differently depending on how they were set up. For you, it's storytelling. You create stories based on things you already know, shows, books, whatever, and OmniCrafter drops them into universes where those stories never existed. No original to compare it to, no source material anyone there has ever seen. The people in those universes will experience it as something completely new. From your end it'll feel like fanfiction. From their end it's just a story that showed up out of nowhere."
I let that sit for a second.
So I'm the only one who knows where any of it comes from.
"Exactly," Crisis said, and she was smiling like she could hear every word going through my head.
That was actually the coolest thing I had ever heard in my life.
I sat up straight. "Okay," I said. "So how does it work?"