Rebirth12 min read
A Second Life, a System, and the Clock That Ticks
ButterPicks132 views
I watched my own body on the pavement as if it belonged to someone else.
It looked like a rag doll. My legs were folded into impossible angles, blood steaming in the hot sun. My long coat had been shredded into ribbons. People had already gathered, phones out. Someone swore and said a Bentley had stopped. The Bentley’s hood had little red splashes on it.
I should have shouted, "It wasn’t my fault." I should have told them it was an accident. I had so many half-written emails, so many unpaid bills, so many plans. I had a promotion waiting that required travel, but travel could wait. We had been together seven years. Ellis—Ellis Bradford—had been my boyfriend since college. We used to joke that we belonged to each other the way two old coats might belong in the same closet. I had expected to grow old with Ellis.
Instead, I hovered, a thin translucent version of myself, watching him crouch and press his shaking hands on my chest like a child. He shouted, "Help! Somebody call an ambulance!" He never looked at the Bentley. He never grabbed its owner by the collar. He just clutched me like a cushion.
He was not supposed to be the kind of man who left, but then he was never the kind of man who said the things love needs. He had been patient in a way that was quiet and small: he paid the bills he could, he made dinner sometimes, he laughed at my jokes. He did not tell me he was lonely. He did not tell me he had started answering someone else’s messages quickly in the middle of the night. He did not tell me he had let a stranger become his comfort.
I saw the woman’s high heels by my apartment entrance that day—Davina Bradley’s shoes. Her silk blouse was draped over my chaise lounge. My carefully chosen pillows had been pushed aside. I opened the door with my key because I thought, for once, "surprise." Instead I found Ellis and mouths and limbs and a stranger pulled like a moth into wrong heat. My chest tightened. I did not scream. I did not throw things. I said, "Good. You explain."
Ellis panicked. "Daphne—" he began. The woman laughed, breathless in the mess of covers. "Which of us do you prefer? Your girlfriend or me?"
Ellis had the answer that made him smaller than the life I'd known. "You, of course," he said without shame. "She’s always working."
I left. I walked out of my own house and into a street filled with the same stupid sunshine that remembers everything. I did not call my parents; I did not lock my phone. I crossed at a light I thought was green. I remember the Bend of Sound right before the world became hands of cold metal.
A moment later, I floated.
"Capture qualified soul... quality: above average..." a voice said. It sounded like it was coming from a machine in a science fiction movie.
"Who is there?" My voice sounded like a memory, too thin to be mine.
"System 7382. Soul capture success. Subject: Daphne Copeland. Bind? Reply in five seconds."
I could have said no. "No" would have been a line drawn in a different life. But I had a life. I had parents who never had much, and a brother who made bad choices and kept getting help from me. I had a lease. I had a job that I loved. I had too many reasons to keep living to let a countdown take me.
"Yes," I said.
The machine’s voice counted down as if it were an auctioneer. "Binding—five, four, three—binding successful."
Then the gray room around me opened like a curtain. I was in a metallic chamber the size of a small study. The only object was a large old clock hanging from the ceiling, its face blank but its hands thick as rope.
A transparent screen appeared in front of me. Cold letters marched across it.
"Welcome, System 7382," the voice intoned. "You are assigned the role: Terminator of External Probability Deviations."
I blinked. "What is that?"
"You will be sent into world nodes to resolve anomalies caused by external devices—'out-of-sequence life alterations' commonly called 're-births' or 'overlays.' You must terminate the overlay and restore true sequence."
"A...what?"
"Tasks will grant soul points and attributes. Failure will erase."
I read the small font that said my current stats.
ID: 7382
Name: Daphne Copeland
Age: 28
Title: Novice Termination Agent
Points: 0 (0/2000)
Soul Points: 10
Wisdom: 60
Stamina: 40
Strength: 10
Aptitude: 30
Charm: 25
Luck: 5
Spirit: 50
Skills: Basic Computation
"First mission: Campus Re-born. Transferring."
That one line shredded me the way the cold metal had. The next sensation was like being kneaded by a hand made of wind. I felt my soul compress, pulled into a channel that ground and stretched.
When I opened my eyes again, I was not in the gray room. I was seventeen again.
"Smack."
Someone hit me. Not a memory, an actual physical sting across my face in the dorm. Hair was yanked. My body moved weirdly—its muscles knew old aches.
"You're disgusting," a chorus of girls said. One face smiled like a shark. That must be Felicity Renard—tall, perfect, a remolded diva of a teenager who acted like an empire of one.
"Stop!" I croaked. My voice was someone else's. My thoughts were mine. "Let go."
They left, threats flung like spit. I crawled to the doorway. A girl—Bianca Howell—stood there with waters in her eyes.
She was the original occupant. "It’s okay," she said, and I understood in a way that scabbed a wound. The voice in my ear said, system voice: "Target: Felicity Renard. Objective: Remove overlay. Restore Bianca Howell’s path."
I bit the top of my thumb under the sink and looked in the mirror. The face was youth and bruise. My head swam with memories that were not mine. An identity had been stolen. A clean life was broken.
Bianca Howell had been promised a steady path—a good school, good parents, and a future built on promise. But Felicity Renard had returned to the high school stage with the cunning of someone born twice. She used inside knowledge like weapons: rumors she planted became facts; she twisted kindness into crimes; she let boys gutter into monsters. She had slowly strangled Bianca’s prospects into a noose.
The system explained in my head without gratitude: "Terminator: You must disrupt Renard’s path at weakest point. Recovered points will strengthen your core. Remember: evidence and public exposure are permissible. Nonlethal neutralization preferred."
I put on Bianca Howell’s sweater and went out into a world of acne patches and nervous boysmells. It was so loud with adolescent urgency. The school was a theater where everyone wore labels and the wrong label could become a life sentence.
"Why'd you bring the police?" someone asked when I walked into the center of the campus.
"Because people hurt me," I said plainly. "And I'm not silent anymore."
The first move was small: I called the police about the girls who had assaulted me. Then I called a reporter—Laura Newton—from a local paper whose eyes were hungry for a story. "There’s been campus bullying. I want to tell the truth," I said.
She came with a camera and a soft voice that hid a bigger hunger. "Tell me what happened," she said.
"I was attacked. They did it because of lies Felicity spread," I said, and I said the names.
The police took those girls in. They were terrified parents on the other side of the desk. The school did what schools often do: it tried to smooth the whole thing into the carpet. "Don’t make a fuss," the principal said, in a voice that smelled of paperwork and sweat. "We can handle it internally."
"Report it then," I said. "I want the record to show the truth."
The scuffle became a public act. The girls were brought to the office, and their parents were angry, embarrassed. The family men tried to intimidate me—"This is our child," one told me, "You ruined her future."
"She ruined mine first," I said, the words peeling off like paint. I insisted on legal repercussions.
The money negotiations started the way they always do. The school didn’t want scandal; the families didn’t want jail time. They offered cash. "Take it," they said. "It’s simpler. Drop the charges."
I laughed in their faces. They did not like being laughed at. "I don’t take their silence for sale," I said. "Either justice or publicity. Your choice."
They chose the money without thinking they'd make worse decisions because greed is slippery.
Weeks passed like a stack of exams. I studied. I caught up on the classes Bianca had left undone. My wisdom stat did not climb significantly: she had taken math and formulas earlier than I had. It was easier to learn some things than the ache inside.
I learned something else, too. This life of Bianca’s had traps I could use. Rumors that had started small could be redirected. A whispered accusation in the right ear could grow to a public humiliation. I tasted the power of truth and its sharp edges.
So I planned.
"Bianca," Laura said once over tea, "You’re making enemies. You’ll be alone."
"Good," I said. "I’ll be more focused."
I kept going to class and hacking at quizzes like a maniac. I made sure there were witnesses if anything happened. I kept using the police. I kept handing evidence to Laura. I learned to film without shaking, to speak without a tremor. People started to clear a path for me in the cafeteria. People watched before they crossed me.
Felicity Renard watched, too. She began to look old in her eyes. A predator sensing a trap quivered.
One night she invited me to a birthday dinner at a small restaurant off-campus. "It’s my birthday," she said by text. "Come. No trouble."
I came because I had reasons to go. The room was a velvet trap. There were old boys from outside school, men who smelled like leather and bad choices. I could have walked out. Instead, I sat and watched as men poured drinks. I pretended that I could not have known their intentions, but the system had given me small advantages: warnings, hints, a nudge to prepare.
At the table, when everyone drank together, I lifted a cup. "I don’t drink," I said.
"Don’t be a prude," someone said, and poured.
They were sloppy, but they were not stupid. They assumed the girl in the room was pliable. She would not be. I left the room and pretended to go to the bathroom. I lingered in the hall and listened.
"What if she runs?" one said.
"Don’t worry. We have fun planned," another answered.
I smelled the pattern then. Felicity liked to trap people with false kindness. Her circle had guys who would do anything when the lead sang them the right tune.
When I walked back in, the men already had buttons undone and eyes half-slitted. I moved between them with a camera hidden in my bag and recorded the room. I clicked photos. I clicked video. The glow of my phone felt as real as a sword.
Party photos went up that night to a private cloud. But I made them public. I wrote the story like a scalpel. I called Laura and said, "I have something you need to see."
She came. She wrote. She posted. I watched the explosion.
The world moved faster than high school gossip. Within hours the restaurant had anonymous comments, traffic, phone calls. Felicity’s name, once a golden glyph, became a stain. Her face went around town like a wanted poster. Her friends closed ranks and then fled.
That was the first public punishment. It started like ripples. It gathered speed. People shared. People judged. People came to look. For Felicity it was the first cut that opened and bled.
And then she made the terrible mistake of striking at me through other means: she worked the edges of cruelty and revenge in a way only a woman used to being the center of a room could. She used her father, who was more interested in profit than pride. She used the rumor mill to put my name back on the list of "available for sale."
When the photos went viral, the people who had watched her grow suddenly looked away. Men who once courted her called. Strangers texted offers. "You could work for us," one message read. "We pay." Her father found buyers in the dark.
Her life that had been built on cunning and violence began to unravel in public.
That unraveling—when people come to look at the fall of someone they once envied—is what I learned to make into justice. I saw mothers clutch their children's hands and point. I saw colleagues text each other with triumph. Fame swelled into shame.
"How could you—" Felicity said once in the hallway, face rigid with hate. "This is a lie."
"You built the shape of this yourself," I said. "You set every stone."
She did not answer. She went on making bad choices. One thing led to another, and soon the school, the town, and then social media were watching.
Public punishment is ugly. It is a wolfish thing to watch someone fall. I did not celebrate. I was not a monster. I wanted her gone, but my heart refused to be a stone. The system did not ask for blood; it asked for restoration.
But restoration can require a public reckoning.
The day of the public reckoning was cold. I sat in a hospital chapel while reporters whispered outside like birds. A crowd had gathered near the hospital entrance. The message had spread: "Felicity Renard taken in. Surgery underway." I watched from the inside and thought about precedent and justice.
They wheeled her in under blankets. She had always been brave in the way of the cruel: loud, animal, fearless when others were watching. Now, in the bright fluo of emergency lights, someone who had once stood at the center of school dances looked fragile as paper.
A reporter shouted questions. "Did you plan this, Miss Renard? What do you say to those you hurt?"
Her father pushed through the crowd, red-faced and thin-lipped. "Leave us alone!" he demanded. He was the kind of man who had used other people like tools and never seen their faces again.
The crowd was not kind. A teenager from class—someone who had been quiet in math—stepped forward with a phone and said, "Everyone has a right to be judged. You took that right from others."
I watched Felicity's expression as the crowd turned from curiosity to scorn. Her chest heaved. Her eyes were two small dark stones.
"How do you feel?" a woman asked, a volunteer from some watchful charity. The cameras rolled.
Felicity tried a sneer and it crumpled into a sob. "I—" she began. Her voice was raw. Then she had nothing. The hospital was like a theater of exposure. Her name was said and repeated. People who had once whispered her name in admiration now spat it.
The 500-word reckoning had to be larger than the few sentences a reporter would write. It needed texture: the hum of the hospital, the clamor of the phones, the faces of people who had suffered. So they poured forward like a slow wave. Mothers gripping their daughters’ hands. Former victims facing her without fear. Men who had been complicit now shrinking with shame.
"Look at me," Felicity said suddenly, voice breaking. "Look at me. I—"
The crowd closed in. Someone filmed her. Someone else shouted, "You deserve this." Another voice said, "She took so much."
Her father stood there and did what fathers do when fear eats them: he looked away and begged the press to leave. "She's my daughter," he said in a voice small and thin. "Please."
But people wanted to see. They wanted to be witnesses. The photographer's shutter clicked like a verdict. Felicity's pride, once inflated like a sail, flattened. She tried to shake free. A woman spit. "You have no shame," she said.
At a certain moment, the show turned darker. Felicity’s thirst for revenge had led her to trust the wrong people. Once the photos went out, men called and offered money and worse. The father, who had once been glamorous enough to shield her, found ways to monetize disgust. He sold her privacy in secret deals. The town looked on. The buyers came with commas in their bank accounts and no conscience.
I remember the publicist from a tabloid standing near me. "This," he said, "gets clicks. It kills reputations."
A child in the crowd asked her mother, "Why is she crying?"
"Because she was mean," the mother answered. "Now people see. Mean people pay."
Felicity’s voice grew thinner. "I'm sorry," she said, words that sounded like an echo. "Please—"
People filmed. People judged. Then men with hands that had done much worse than gossip moved close. It was grotesque. I had hoped the crowd would be enough. I had not wanted ugliness to turn to violence. But the world is messy and hungry.
She was taken into an examination room. A nurse said quietly, "We will treat injuries." Someone in the back whispered, "She should be judged in court, not the street."
But the court of public opinion had already pronounced.
The physical punishment followed in private ways that spoke of ruin: operations, legal consequences for some, social exile for many. Felicity’s father found himself stranded. The men who had preyed found their businesses criticized. The school lost its principal. The ripple effects moved like hungry fish.
In the public square—digital and street—people had watched the fall of a girl who had killed innocence slowly. They cheered then turned to silence. Some were merciless. Some were reflective. "That is what happens," someone muttered. "You hurt, you lose."
Felicity's face, once a currency, was now something people pointed at like a warning. I had not wished for all those things that happened next: the surgery, the unbearable bills, the way a father sold what family they still had left. But when the storm settled, when the system closed the case as "resolved," I sat with Bianca's body in a dorm bed and let the clock over my head tick.
The system rewarded me with points and a small measure of relief. I was stronger by five points of strength and two points of luck. The mission closed. I passed one mission, and the world kept turning.
"Next mission: Transferring... Historical node: The Rise of the Intruder in the Court." the voice said. "Preparing transfer."
I looked up at the silver clock in the tiny room. Its hands began to twitch, then to move, then to tick.
"Five, four, three—"
The world folded again.
I was never the same. I carried the memory of the pavement and the smell of Bentley oil, the taste of fear, and the echo of that voice counting me into service. I kept my oath to Bianca Howell. I kept my promise to the system. But what I had not counted on was how thin and fragile the line is between justice and cruelty, or how loudly a town can clap when it thinks it's right.
I learned to be careful. I learned that some roads lead to wreckage. I learned that public punishment can heal or destroy. I learned to watch.
And above my head, that clock—the one the system hung in the small aluminum room—kept ticking. It kept each mission measured, each life weighed. It kept its patient, indifferent "tick" like the last sober thing in a world that never stopped shouting.
"Start transfer," the system said. "Next world: Palace—Wang Empress overlay."
I braced. I had work to do. I tightened my grip on the future I had not expected and stepped forward when the clock struck its even tick.
The End
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