Orbital ascend: the tutorial

In a town where poverty suffocates your dreams before they’re even born, I never expected the sky to answer my frustrations.

I was standing in our roofless bathroom, staring up at the clouds, when the aircraft passed overhead. It dropped something. A sleek, floating device that landed right inside my home—a home I shared with my grandmother and five unemployed, hopeless friends. When I got close, a sweet, friendly voice echoed through the room. It called itself a gaming AI. It called me its Master.

I thought our luck had finally changed. I named her Sisi. Knowing my grandmother would never tolerate a gaming device in the house, I set the game's loading time to a week, watching the device hum and go dead. I thought it was a flute. A broken piece of space junk.

I was dead wrong.

Exactly seven days later, Sisi woke up. She didn't load a virtual reality simulator; she materialized a living, breathing nightmare of flesh and tentacles right into our living room. To survive, we had to kill it. And when the beast died, the friendly voice returned, granting me superhuman skills and millions of dollars in my bank account.

But the game isn't free. The next week brought a new monster, and it cost us a life. We thought we were just playing a survival game for cash. We didn't realize we were fighting a culling system meant to erase humanity—and the true arena isn't even on Earth.