Chapter 1 : Wake-Up Call
The pointer clipped against the projector screen, and Albert's chest caved in.
Not metaphorically. Not the slow-build anxiety of a pitch going sideways. Actual physical cave-in — left side, radiating down the arm, up into the jaw, the kind of pain that doesn't leave room for other thoughts. The slide behind him said UNIFIED BRAND ARCHITECTURE in 36-point Helvetica. He'd been mid-sentence about Q3 projections. His boss, Carla, was still writing something in her notebook. The two junior guys from the West Coast account were on their phones under the table, thinking he couldn't see.
He dropped the pointer.
Carla looked up.
That was the last thing he was certain about. Her looking up, pen frozen mid-note, expression shifting from polite boredom to something else. After that: white. Then nothing. Then —
The ceiling of somewhere unfamiliar.
Off-white. A water stain shaped vaguely like Florida. The mattress under him had a spring that bit into the lower back. Albert lay completely still for four seconds, cataloguing: not his apartment, too small, the light was wrong, morning somewhere he'd never been, and he was wearing — he sat up — boxer shorts and a white undershirt that weren't his.
The room was roughly the size of a large closet. A card table served as a desk. A garment bag hung on the back of the door, unzipped, showing the corner of a navy blazer. On the card table: a wallet, a set of keys, a folded sheet of paper that turned out to be a subway map with a route highlighted in yellow marker, and a BlackBerry that was almost out of battery.
Albert stood.
The mirror above the card table showed a stranger.
Late twenties. Lean in a way that suggested budget more than intention. Dark circles under eyes that were a different shape than the ones he'd spent thirty-four years looking out of. He raised his right hand. The stranger raised his right hand. He tilted his head. The stranger tilted his head.
The wallet had thirty-eight dollars, a MetroCard, a New York Public Library card, and a laminated NBC employee ID with a photo of the stranger's face and the name ALBERT MYERS — PAGE PROGRAM.
He put the wallet down.
He picked it up again.
The name on the ID was his name. Which meant either this was very precisely targeted or this world had a sense of humor about identity continuity. He filed it under deal with later and opened the garment bag.
Navy blazer. Gray slacks. A white button-down shirt. And clipped to the collar of the blazer, glinting under the apartment's single overhead bulb: an NBC peacock pin, the colors slightly faded, the kind of thing that had been worn before and survived several dry-clean cycles.
He put the uniform on.
The HUD arrived in the bathroom.
He was brushing his teeth with a toothbrush that tasted faintly of mint and someone else's decisions when something flickered at the edge of his vision. He went still. The flicker resolved into a translucent panel, low-resolution, slightly grainy at the edges, positioned in his upper-right peripheral like a television someone had turned on in the next room. Text scrolled across it in plain white font:
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING][ACHIEVEMENT HUNTER: ACTIVE][STAGE 1 — HUD ONLINE]
Then:
[WELCOME TO THE GAME, MYERS.]
The text hung for three seconds and vanished. The panel minimized to a thin grey border at the edge of his vision, barely visible unless he focused on it. He focused on it. It expanded slightly, showing four faint icons — placeholder boxes, most of them greyed out, unreadable. One of them pulsed with a dull amber glow.
Albert spit toothpaste into the sink.
The system — whatever it was — didn't come with a manual. No tutorial, no pop-up window explaining the rules, no cheerful mascot to walk him through the interface. Just that amber icon pulsing like a low-battery warning on a device he hadn't asked to own. He blinked at it. The icon didn't elaborate.
Here's what he could piece together from thirty seconds of staring at grainy text: there was a system overlaid on reality, it was tracking something called achievements, and it was built into him now the same way his lungs were built into him. He couldn't turn it off. He couldn't turn it off, and it apparently wanted him to do things.
The achievement concept wasn't complicated. Think of it like a video game — the invisible kind that runs underneath the real world, tracking when players complete certain conditions. Survive something. Accomplish something. Be present when something specific happens. The system would notice. The system would reward. Stats would go up: Wit, Charm, Insight, Endurance, Creativity, Nerve — the usual building blocks of being a functional person, now quantified and upgradeable.
The part that concerned him was the other icon. The one that pulsed different from the rest. He couldn't read the label yet — Stage 1 HUD was too low-resolution for fine print — but something about it suggested output rather than input. Like a speaker instead of a microphone.
He combed the stranger's hair in the stranger's mirror and decided to move.
The subway map's yellow route ended at Rockefeller Center.
The moment he stepped onto 49th Street and looked up at the limestone face of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Albert's stomach did something complicated. He'd watched this building on his television for years — background to a hundred comedy scenes, exterior establishing shot before commercial breaks — and now the midtown wind was hitting his face and a tour group was arguing near the NBC Experience store entrance and a guy in a peacock pin identical to his was waving him toward the employee entrance like he was expected.
Because he was. Obviously. It was his first day.
He touched the peacock pin on his lapel. The metal was cold from the outside air, and the enamel colors were faded: red, orange, yellow, green, blue. NBC's logo, worn down to something almost homely.
He went inside.
The lobby of 30 Rock was already in motion. Security had a line. Staff moved through with the particular velocity of people who knew exactly where they needed to be. And coming toward him from the direction of the elevator bank, carrying a tray of coffees with the focused expression of someone who had been given a sacred duty and intended to honor it: Kenneth Parcell.
Albert's feet stopped working for roughly half a second.
Kenneth was wearing the exact uniform Albert was wearing. Same blazer, same slacks, same peacock pin. He was smiling the way a person smiles when they've been smiling since birth and haven't stopped. He passed within four feet of Albert without making eye contact, focused entirely on the coffees.
Forty feet away, near the security desk, a woman in glasses was gesturing at a guard with the controlled intensity of someone who had made this exact point before and would make it again if necessary. Dark hair, black-framed glasses, what appeared to be a cheese cracker in her other hand.
Liz Lemon was arguing about a delivery.
Albert stood in the lobby of 30 Rock on October 11th, 2006, and the ambient noise of television production filled his ears like a frequency he'd been tuned to before he understood what tuning meant.
The HUD pulsed once.
From somewhere above — up through the floors, through the walls, through whatever mechanism a building uses to carry sound when it wants to tell you something — Tracy Jordan laughed. It was unhinged and specific and exactly how Albert remembered it from hundreds of hours of television, but hearing it through plaster and ventilation duct instead of speakers was a completely different experience. It had weight. It had intent.
Tracy was in this building. Somewhere above him, working himself toward whatever the morning had in store, and Albert had approximately three hours before whatever that was came straight at him.
He straightened his blazer and walked toward page orientation.
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