"Status," he said.
And it worked, which he noticed immediately, because two hours ago in that changing room he had said the same word five times in two languages at a panel that had sat there and ignored him.
So it answered when it felt like answering. He filed that away in his head, the way he filed everything. Whatever this thing was, it did not switch on for him. It switched on for itself.
It arrived with a ping.
[REECE ANGELL - AGE 22]
[Notts County FC - Title: Fallen Prospect]
[Position: AM (R), AM (C), M (R) - Foot: Left]
[Role: the one who arrives in the box a second late]
[TECHNICAL]
Crossing 9
Dribbling 10
Finishing 9
First Touch 11
Passing 11
Technique 12
Overall: There is a Bundesliga player in here somewhere under all that rust.
[MENTAL]
Anticipation 13
Composure 8
Concentration 9
Decisions 12
Determination 15
Off the Ball 13
Teamwork 11
Vision 12
Work Rate 16
Overall: He sees it before anybody and does nothing about it.
[PHYSICAL]
Acceleration 7
Agility 8
Balance 10
Jumping 6
Pace 8
Stamina 13
Strength 7
Natural Fitness 12
Overall: A body that used to be worth something.
[OTHER]
Appearance 11
Sex 7
Overall: 20 seconds.
[Current ability .... 58 / 200]
[Potential ability ..... 172 / 200]
[Bonus stat: 5]
[Items: Training Effect x3 (7 days)]
[Targets: 1. Ellie Prentice - Favourability 76]
Angell looked at the screen for a long time without saying anything at all.
He knew exactly what he was looking at.
Every footballer born after about 1990 had sat in a bedroom at the age of fifteen with a laptop and looked himself up in the game, and Reece Angell had been in it since he was sixteen.
He had looked himself up, and everybody had looked themselves up, and the lads used to send their own pages around the age group like report cards.
Twenty was the top of the scale, and nobody had twenty.
A fifteen or above was a man playing two divisions higher than this one.
A ten was the middle of this league. Anything under an eight meant you were a problem that somebody else was being paid to solve.
He went down the three columns properly, the way he would have read a scout report on a lad he was thinking about signing, and it took everything out of him in about forty seconds.
A nine for crossing. A nine for finishing. A nine for concentration and an eight for composure. A seven for acceleration, a seven for strength, and a six for jumping. He read all of it a second time in case he had got it wrong, and he had not got it wrong.
This was not a Bundesliga player's sheet. It was not even a good National League sheet. There were lads in that dressing room on three hundred and fifty quid a week who would have been twelves and thirteens across the middle of it.
He was twenty-two years old, and his best two numbers were Work Rate and Determination.
Sixteen and fifteen, sitting at the top of the page, the two numbers that won you nothing on their own, the two numbers that everybody's mate had.
That was what was left of him. That was what three years had done to him. He turned up, and he tried hard.
He sat on the end of his bed above a barber's on Sneinton Dale and understood that somebody had finally drawn an accurate picture of him, and that he wanted to put his fist straight through it.
And the worst one was not even a football number.
He made himself look at the bottom block, which had been sitting there the whole time, waiting for him.
The panel had given him a seven for sex, and underneath it, where the other categories had a sentence, this one just said: 20 seconds.
"Oh, you are joking," he said, out loud, in an empty flat above a barber's.
He put his face in his hands, and then he laughed until it hurt his ribs, because there was nothing else available to him. A seven.
The thing had graded him a seven and then written the reason underneath in case he felt like arguing about it.
And it was accurate, which was the worst part of it. It had been twenty seconds. He had counted them himself, and then he had apologised, and then he had apologised again.
Right. So it graded everything he did. It had watched all of that.
Then he took his hands down from his face and did the thing he should have done first, which was check what he had actually been paid.
He could still see the quest card when he shut his eyes. It had promised him three things, in a list, in that order, before he had done a single one of the two conditions.
A bonus stat of plus five, and there it was on the sheet.
A training effect multiplied by three for seven days, and there it was under Items. And a large favourability increase with Ellie, whatever that looked like in real life, and there it was at the bottom of the screen.
He put his finger on that last line, and it opened up under his finger like a drawer, with a blip.
[ELLIE PRENTICE]
[FAVOURABILITY 11 > 76]
[QUEST REWARD APPLIED: LARGE INCREASE]
Eleven. He had been sitting on eleven with a girl who had been coming in early since July just to watch him run.
He sat with that for a second, and then he went back to the top of the list and read down it again slowly, the way you checked a payslip when you were not sure they had paid you the bonus.
Three things had been promised, and three things had been paid. It had said exactly what it was going to give him, and then it had given him exactly that.
That was the first thing all night that had actually frightened him, and it took him a moment to work out why.
When he got there, the answer was very simple. Nothing in his life had done that since he was eighteen.
No club had done it, no agent had done it, and no manager standing in a corridor telling him to be patient had done it. Everybody promised a footballer things, all the time, and this thing had written its promises down and then paid them.
So it was not a hallucination, and it was not a tumour. It was a contract, and it was the only contract he had that anybody had ever honoured.
Prentice. He had not known that was her surname. He had known she was called Ellie because the panel had told him, but he had never known Prentice.
He said it out loud twice just to hear what it sounded like, and then he felt like an idiot, and then he thought about her going out of that door with her hair up and her bag over her shoulder, telling him that she would be looking on Monday, and he got up off the bed and walked to the window and back for no reason at all, the floorboards going creak, creak, in both directions.
He did not have her number.
He did not have her number; he did not know where she lived, he did not know what she did on a Sunday, and he could not exactly ring the club and ask them for it.
She had said she would be in at half twelve on Monday. So he would be there at eight like he always was, and he would make sure he was on that grass at half twelve like a lunatic, and that was the entire plan.
He was twenty-two years old, and he had spent the last six years being told that he had a good head on him.
Then he went back to the panel, because there were two lines on it that he had been walking around ever since it opened.
The first was near the top.
[Position: AM (R), AM (C), M (R) - Foot: Left]
[Role: the one who arrives in the box a second late]
In off the right, coming inside onto his left foot. That was what he had been, once.
Nobody had played him there in three years.
At Notts he had been a wide midfielder whenever he had been anything at all, which meant the sixty-one minutes he had been given were spent forty yards from goal, being told to get back and double up on their full-back.
At seventeen in Gelsenkirchen, he had been the boy who started wide on the right and finished in the six-yard box, and there had been a man in a puffa coat whose entire job was to scream at him to go, now, go.
He read the role line three times.
Arrives in the box a second late.
That was the most accurate sentence anybody had written about him since the operation, and a computer inside his own head had written it while he sat there in his coat.
Because it was not that he did not know where to be. His Anticipation was a thirteen and his Off the Ball was a thirteen, and those were the best two football numbers on the whole sheet.
They were ordinary numbers, and they were still the top of his column. He knew where the ball was going before anybody, and he set off before anybody, and he had spent two seasons arriving in exactly the right square metre of grass at exactly the moment the ball had already gone.
Every time it happened, it looked, from row H, like a lad who had not read the game.
The second line was at the bottom, and it was worse.
[Current ability .... 58 / 200]
[Potential ability ..... 172 / 200]