I swiped frantically at the infobox, suddenly unsure if it was just in my eyes, or if it was a physical thing. The woman shook her head as if she was dismissing an infobox of her own. I realised I didn’t know anything about the text that kept swirling over my eyes. All the questions I had pushed down during my fight with the chamelion suddenly rose to the front of my mind.

  “What the hell is going on?” I said.

  Before anyone could respond, the door behind the group of six opened.

  An alien walked through the door. My legs suddenly felt weak, and I had to swallow a little bit of vomit.

  Chaos broke out.

  The guy closest to the alien sprinted down the aisle, barrelling over roller chairs, until he tripped and landed square on his chin. The woman from the bonfire punched the alien straight in the face, then swore, holding her hand. A woman with bangs so sharp they’d cut through feta started to scream and didn’t stop. The person sitting closest to where I’d come in, the long-haired giant who had drawn a dick on my stomach at the party, jumped up from his chair and leaped towards the exit. The wall closed mid-jump and he crashed face-first into solid concrete.

  The alien didn’t react to any of this. It let Bonfire Girl punch it again without moving. It stood still, waited. I swear I heard it sigh. It sounded exactly like the sigh of a substitute teacher. It was resigned. It was the sigh of someone who didn’t get paid enough.

  Or maybe it did react. I had no frame of reference for this. That sigh could have been the alien’s version of a blood-curdling battle cry.

  It wore a tattered tan-coloured cloak that covered most of its body and had the hood up so its face was cast in shadow. I couldn’t make out eyes or mouths or any facial features at all. Instead, its head appeared to consist entirely of a mass of grey tentacles. Its arms were thin and ended in a sort of crab-like pincer, but with none of the sharpness. It walked upright and its arms stretched all the way from its shoulders to its feet. All in all, it had the appearance of a grim reaper with an octopus attached to its face.

  In one of its hands, it had a coffee mug with the words “It’s Monday, Tread Lightly” printed on the side.

  “I am a representative of the Reckol Corporation,” the alien said, when everyone finally quieted.

  The room erupted into yelling again. Not at the name of the corporation, I don’t think any of us recognized it. I think just the strangeness of the alien combined with its clear unaccented English had thrown everyone. It was the same voice from earlier that had announced the first fight. His voice was soft and gravelly with a southern accent, like he’d grown up in Texas.

  All the people here had been ripped from the world just like me. One moment, they’d been enjoying their last moments with friends, loved ones, strangers, and in the next they’d appeared here. I couldn’t blame them for panicking. If I wasn’t half-dead, burnt to shit, and hungover, I’d probably have had something to say as well. As it was, it took all my energy to stand up from the carpet and wobble over to a chair at the large glass table.

  I put my vuvuzela on the table and poured myself a glass of water. I drank it in one go and poured myself another. I didn’t know when I’d see water again. I didn’t know anything. Panicking wouldn’t help. It never did. I grabbed a few biscuits from the bowl in the centre of the table and put them in my pockets.

  I knew what I looked like to these people. I recognized a few of them from the party, and some clearly recognized me. A drunken jackass, a slobbering idiot covered in dicks. That wasn’t the real me.

  I looked at the alien again, willed up the infobox. Bonfire Girl was kicking him in the leg now, and he remained as still as ever, waiting for the chaos to subside.

  Universe. I thought back to when I’d first woken up. It had given me a comparative analysis of myself. One of the ratings was a universe baseline, but there had been other options as well. One had been a galactic average, but there had also been one for humans. I wondered if there was a way to stop the scan from showing me the universe scale. Reading all those zeros was giving me a headache.

  As if reading my thoughts, a new infobox appeared beneath the one for the alien.

  I focused on it and the world disappeared. My entire field of vision was interrupted by a screen of setting options. I scrolled down the list with my eyes, and kept going and going. I saw hundreds of different options, most of which didn’t make any sense to me. Absorbency, Smell Memory Associations, Circulation, Factory Reset, Itch Placement Algorithm, Pain Volume Mixer, Gunk, Gap Junction. Most of them were greyed out.

  Holy shit, I thought. Holy fucking shit.

  I found something called “Scale Display” and clicked on it.

  I mentally clicked ‘Homo sapiens’ and the X moved to that box. I closed the settings and looked at the alien. There was a tingling across the back of my neck, then the infobox reappeared.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  It was still my own voice reading out the words, but this time it had cast its voice deep, like it was doing an impression of a Neanderthal.

  I couldn’t help it. The absurdity of it. The unhinged nature of the voice in my head. It was clearly learning how to communicate with me, testing approaches. It had started nonsensically with its quest to kill, kill, kill. But even by the end of that fight the quest had morphed into the comparatively saner First Blood. And now this. It was throwing shit at the wall, seeing what stuck. It made me like it.

  It got me. The caveman voice. I started laughing.

  Everyone stopped shouting. The long-haired giant groaned once, holding his bleeding nose with one hand, but stopped when he realized he was the only one making noise. I felt everyone’s eyes on me.

  “Where does the voice in my head come from?” I said to the alien.

  “A great first question, Nathan.” The alien nodded his head in my direction, as if he were thanking me for helping move things along. He pulled out a chair and took a seat. “There are four basic types of grafts. Offensive, defensive, support, and cultivation. There are hundreds of sub-types within those, but that gives you a rough idea to start with.”

  “You’ve been given a support graft,” he continued, gesturing for the people still standing to sit. A few numbly took a seat, not taking their eyes from the alien. “There’s nobody within the open systems that doesn’t have this or something like it. It lets you absorb the life force from any creature you kill and then assign that life force to whichever skill or attribute you wish to. It comes with a few other benefits as well, but they won’t come into effect for some time.”

  Multiple people shouted out questions at the same time. The alien held out a hand, signalling them to stop. It was completely unrattled by us. Our anger, our panic. I remembered how it had reacted to being punched and kicked. We were like flies to it. No threat at all.

  “No, there’s no time. I can take three questions for now. If we have time after getting through consent, we’ll go through a basic orientation, but even that might have to be after the second round of tests. We’re on a schedule here.”

  A girl I hadn’t noticed until now raised her hand. She had a flesh-coloured eyepatch covering one eye, and seemed too thin. She looked about the same age as me, twenty-six, maybe older, but I could tell that she’d been sick for some time. And that ages a person. She could have been eighteen. She could have been younger. I could see it in her eyes, the lack of hope. It had gotten in deep.

  The alien nodded his head at her. “Samantha.”

  “You seem to know all our names already,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “My name is unpronounceable by your kind. You can call me Grxnalqtrx.”

  “I can’t say that,” the girl said. “No one can say that.”

  “Okay, call me Fred.”

  Samantha had a… growth on the back of her neck. Looking around the room, I realized everyone had the same thing. I touched my own neck. The skin there was rough, almost whorled, like a moss-covered ancient tree. I pulled my hand away like it had just touched fire.

  “Graft,” Bonfire Girl said.

  “Is that a question?” Fred put his bulbous hands up, pretending to be surrendering. He chuckled and his shoulders moved up and down. “I’m joking, Lily. Yes, graft. I’ll elaborate. The thing in your spine—well, in your entire body now that you’ve absorbed your first kill—is a biological entity from a deeper stratum. It’s akin to…” He took a sip from whatever was in his coffee mug, swished it around in a mouth I still couldn’t make out behind the tentacles. “Skin cells from a god. It encourages people like us to spread it, find hosts. When attached to a host organism—” He gestured around the table at the people. “—it offers them guidance in exchange for a share of the energy they absorb.”

  “Hosts?”

  “Gods?”

  “You put something in our fucking heads?”

  “Like a time share?” I said.

  “Exactly,” Fred said. “Or owning shares in a company. You kill something, you absorb its life force. The graft takes a percentage. Well, currently about eighty-three percent goes to various stakeholders. The source entity, the Reckol Corporation, your future contract owners, a little sprinkling to me. Some is lost to the aether during the absorption. You get the remainder. Two-ish percent. Put some points into your allegiance stat and it will increase the percentage you retain.”

  “That’s theft,” Lily said.

  “That’s capitalism, baby. You’re alive because of an extraction that cost more than your planet’s entire GDP. You work off the debt.”

  “Baby?”

  The long-haired giant slammed his hands onto the table. They left a blood smear on the glass.

  “What the fuck, guys?” he said. “What the fuck are we doing? Honestly. This is just. Like. Crazy. Come on. What do you want from us?” He banged the table again with both hands, but it sounded dull, forced. One of the glass bottles in the centre toppled, splashing water onto me and a few others. “You’re going to probe us? Is this mind games? A TV show? Where are the cameras, man?” His voice started to crack like he was on the verge of tears. “You fucking got me.”

  “Sebastian. Calm down,” Fred said. “No one in this room is going to hurt you. The bugs—we pulled you out in the nanosecond before an extinction event. You do remember that, don’t you? The gamma radiation blast. Certain death. Yada yada. You have to understand the amount of effort that went into making that happen. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare. So it’s not our intention to waste good product, after the lawyers went to all that effort. Some of you will remember the forms of consent presented to you as we picked you up. Some won’t. We have complied with sector laws in this regard, but you have all been flagged as having impaired faculties upon processing, so we have to re-do the consent again to make it official.”

  Sebastian finally sat down. He put his head in his hands and groaned.

  “Slaves, man. We’re fucking slaves.”

  “You are not slaves.” The alien’s tone changed for the first time. He sounded pissed off. His face tentacles went rigid and he leant forward over the table. “I got the same deal as you apes and I managed to work my way through it. And I didn’t even get the choice. You’re lucky you were in this sector. The Virus are peculiar about protocols. As long as you are on this ship and not under contract you still have a choice. Revoke your consent. We will send you back down to your planet and you can live the rest of your life there.”

  “That’s not going to happen, man,” Sebastian said. “It’s all, like, bombed out by now.”

  “Yes, true, but it is a choice.” Fred sighed, leant back again. “Look, I gave you three questions. We’re running short on time. I need your consent now that you have all…” He cleared his throat, or at least made a sound like clearing his throat. “Sobered up. We do that quickly and I can squeeze a bit of orientation in before sleep, then the duos gauntlet. We’ll pair you up randomly and throw you into one of the easiest dungeons on the ship. That’s going to be a doozy. Most of you already died in solo, and that’s by far the easiest.”

  I looked around the room again. There were ten of us, but the table was long, and there were enough chairs for about twenty more. A lot of empty chairs. I wondered if each of those were someone who had died battling the same monster as me. I met eyes with a few of the people. Most still looked panicked, but a few had smiles on their faces.

  I looked at Bonfire Girl—Lily—last. She hadn’t sat down, and was leaning over the table across from Fred. Her body was tense, gaze murderous. She looked like she was about to jump over the table and start pummelling the alien again. She looked me right in the eyes, like she’d been expecting my gaze, and smirked. The infobox came up again.