Ray was doing what he did best: absolutely nothing.
The clock on the wall of the Green Meadows Residential Complex security post read 11:47 PM. Thirteen more minutes and his shift would be over, and then he could go back to his cramped rented room, collapse onto his lumpy mattress, and pretend that his life was going somewhere. The CCTV screens mounted above the desk showed the usual emptiness. Empty driveways bathed in the orange glow of streetlights. A flickering garden light near the fountain that nobody had bothered to fix for two years. And Mango, the stray orange cat that walked past the security post every single night at exactly eleven without ever once acknowledging Ray's existence.
Ray had named the cat Mango six months ago. The cat didn't care. The cat had never cared. But Ray kept naming things anyway because it gave him something to do during the long, empty hours when nothing happened and nobody needed him.
He leaned back in his chair, feet propped up on the desk, and flipped through channels on the old TV that had been in the security post since before he started working here. The remote was a worn out piece of plastic with faded numbers and a battery cover that had gone missing during his first month on the job. He had taped it shut with duct tape, and somehow it still worked.
A politician sweating under studio lights denied something that was obviously true. Click. A woman crying while holding a photograph of someone who had probably left her. Click. A dancing cockroach wearing sunglasses tried to sell him bug spray.
Ray snorted. "At least the cockroach is honest about what it is."
He stretched his arms above his head and felt his spine pop three times in quick succession. He was twenty three years old and his back already sounded like a box of gravel being shaken. Three years of sitting in this chair, watching the same empty driveways, waiting for something that never happened. His high school gym teacher had once told him that sitting was the new smoking. Ray had laughed at the time. He wasn't laughing anymore.
His elbow caught the remote and sent it clattering off the desk.
The worn out piece of plastic bounced once on the edge and disappeared into the darkness underneath. Ray stared at the empty space where it used to be, then at the CCTV screen where Mango was now sitting on the hood of a parked sedan and licking its paw, then back at the empty space.
"Of course."
He bent down and reached into the void beneath the desk. The space was a graveyard of forgotten things that had accumulated over three years of night shifts. Dust bunnies the size of his fist rolled away from his probing fingers. A single sock, gray and stiff with age, that Ray had never seen before and didn't want to think about. Cables tangled together like a nest of fabric snakes. An empty coffee mug he had been looking for six months ago.
His fingers found plastic. The familiar shape of the TV remote. But right next to it, cold and metallic, sat something else entirely.
He pulled both objects out.
The TV remote went back on the desk where it belonged. The other thing stayed in his hand, and Ray found himself staring at it with a growing sense of confusion. It was shaped like a remote, roughly the same size and proportions, but everything else about it was wrong. The body was made of tarnished silver metal, scratched and worn with age, covered in strange symbols that pulsed with a faint blue glow. They didn't look like any language Ray had ever seen. Not English. Not Spanish. Not even those decorative characters you saw on Chinese takeout menus.
At the bottom, etched into the metal, was a single word he could actually read.
NEXUS.
"Huh. Someone's old toy?"
He turned it over in his hands. The back was smooth, no battery compartment, no screws, no way to open it. Just more symbols that glowed with that same faint blue light. There was a small screen in the middle, like an old calculator display, currently blank and lifeless. And there was only one button on the entire device. Red. Big. Positioned exactly where his thumb naturally rested when he held it.
Ray glanced at the clock. Eleven fifty. Ten minutes left in his shift. He looked back at the strange remote and tried to remember if anyone had reported losing something like this. Nobody came to mind. The residents of Green Meadows were mostly older couples and young families who drove sensible sedans and complained about the HOA fees. They weren't the type to carry around mysterious glowing remotes covered in alien symbols.
Maybe it belonged to a previous security guard. The guy Ray had replaced, a middle aged man named Frank who had worked this post for fifteen years before retiring to Florida. Frank had left behind a lot of weird stuff. A collection of novelty bottle openers. A calendar from 2012. A handwritten note that just said "Tuesday" with no other context.
This remote could have been Frank's. It could have been sitting under that desk for years, waiting for someone to find it.
Ray's thumb hovered over the red button. What was the worst that could happen? It might beep. It might light up. Maybe it was one of those novelty gadgets that made funny sounds. Frank had liked those.
He pressed the button.
BZZZZT.
The world twisted inside out.
Ray's stomach dropped through the floor and kept going. His vision dissolved into a spinning tunnel of white and blue light, and he felt his body being pulled through something that was definitely not the security post. The chair vanished. The CCTV screens vanished. The desk, the clock, the coffee mug, all of it gone in an instant. Stars streamed past him. Actual stars, massive and burning and impossibly distant, hurtling by like he was falling through the universe itself.
He tried to scream but the sound died somewhere between his throat and his mouth. The roar of the tunnel swallowed everything. He couldn't tell which way was up or down. He couldn't feel his hands or his feet. There was only the light and the motion and the terrible sensation of being nowhere at all.
Then, just as suddenly as it started, everything stopped.
Ray hit the ground face first. In snow.
He lay there for a long moment, his brain struggling to process what had just happened. The security post. The remote. The button. The tunnel of light. And now snow, which was cold and wet and melting against his skin in ways that were becoming deeply unpleasant. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and immediately started shivering. Not the mild shiver of an air conditioned room. This was the violent, uncontrollable shaking of a body that was not designed to be in temperatures this low.
His security uniform, a light blue short sleeve shirt and thin black pants, was designed for mild evening breezes and indoor comfort. It was about as useful as a paper towel in a blizzard. The cold cut through the fabric like it wasn't even there and settled into his bones.
He looked up and forgot how to breathe.
The sky was wrong. It was deep purple, almost black at the edges, with massive ribbons of green and pink aurora swirling across it like paint dropped into water and stirred by an invisible hand. Two moons hung low on the horizon. One was pale blue and the other was rust red, and neither of them belonged to any sky Ray had ever seen. Miles and miles of ice stretched in every direction, broken only by jagged peaks that rose in the distance like frozen teeth.
This wasn't Earth.
And standing right in front of him, kneeling in the snow, was a ten foot tall creature covered in thick white fur.
Ray's breath caught in his throat. The creature was massive, built like a mountain wrapped in fur, with arms that hung past its knees and hands that could crush Ray's skull without effort. Its face was somewhere between a bear and a wolf, with intelligent blue eyes that studied him with an intensity that made his skin prickle in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
The creature knelt. One massive fist pressed into the snow while its head bowed in a gesture that could only be described as reverence.
"The prophesied one..." Its voice rumbled like distant thunder rolling across the frozen plain. "You have come at last."
Ray looked at the weird remote still clutched in his frozen fingers. Then at the giant furball kneeling before him. Then at the alien sky with its two impossible moons.
"I just wanted to change the channel."
The remote's screen flickered to life. Pale blue text appeared, one letter at a time, like someone was typing it from somewhere very far away.
[WELCOME, GALACTIC JANITOR LEVEL 1.]
[CURRENT MISSION: SAVE PLANET THUNDRA.]
[REWARD: LEVEL UP + UNIQUE ITEM.]
Ray read the message once. Then he read it again, hoping the words would rearrange themselves into something that made more sense. They didn't.
"Janitor?" His voice came out cracked and disbelieving. "I'm a security guard, damn it!"
The wind howled across the frozen wasteland. The creature remained kneeling, waiting. The remote's screen kept blinking patiently, as if it had all the time in the universe.
Ray looked around one more time. At the endless ice. At the purple sky. At the two moons. At the massive furry creature who apparently thought he was some kind of prophesied savior. He thought about his rented room and his lumpy mattress and his dead end job. He thought about how in thirteen minutes his shift would have ended and he would have gone home and nothing would have changed.
And somewhere deep in the part of his brain he usually ignored, a small voice whispered that maybe this was better than another night of nothing.