Face-Slapping16 min read
I Woke Up Twice: The Spinner, the Space, and the Wedding That Saved Us
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I opened my eyes and it smelled like someone had left a window open in a bakery: warm, alive, ordinary. For a second I thought I had woken from a nightmare and was still trapped inside it.
"It's 7:57," I said to myself. "July 22, 2024."
My phone screamed the date at me in cold digits. My stomach gave a sharp, angry reminder that dreams feel like hunger sometimes. I swung my feet to the floor and ran to the window. The sky was a pure, unspoiled blue. The sun was generous and careless. There were two months left—two months until whatever I had already seen would happen again.
"Two months," I told the empty room. "Two months and then the world starts changing."
"Sis, are you okay?" Sergio called from the next room, voice muffled and sleepy. Sergio—my brother—knocked twice and stuck his head in the door. He always rubbed his eyes like he had been folding them wrong in his sleep.
"I'm fine," I said, and lied because the memory clawed at my ribs. I had woken before. I had died before. I had been stabbed during a robbery, and I had tasted metal and cold and then nothing. I had kept a system the whole time, a little spinner of prizes tied to kindness, and a space that saved what fit in it.
"You look scared," Sergio said, crossing the room and leaning on the doorframe. "You stayed up again?"
"I had the same dream." I let the words sit like hot tea between us. "But this time I woke up."
Sergio's face folded like paper. He moved in with sudden competence. "We should prepare."
He didn't know everything and neither did I. He didn't know the system spinner or the exact hours left or that the world would change three times in ways worse than most people could imagine. He only knew the look I had—one I had after nights of nightmares—and that was enough.
"Mom made breakfast," he said. "Eat."
I swallowed the warm soy milk in three gulps and tore into the tea egg like I hadn't eaten since a long time ago. The flavors were ordinary miracles. I let the food ground me. If I could remember the way hunger came in the last timeline, I could plan. If I could plan, maybe we'd live.
"I have two months," I told Sergio between bites. "Two months to stockpile, to save, to make the space real."
"You're getting dramatic," he grinned. "But okay. What do you need?"
"I need funds and attention," I said. "I need people to listen about a... an astronomy warning. I need to make points on the spinner. And I need you not to be a soft heart for every sob story."
Sergio's shoulders went stiff. "What?"
"You have to be practical. No giving away the stash. No letting anyone use the house as a free ATM."
He blinked. "I'm not that soft."
"Yes, you are. You will become softer if you spend all our savings on someone who gambled his life away." I was thinking about the man who took advantage of us in the last round. I had pictures in my head: his face, greedy and smooth. I wanted him out of the way this time before he could do what he had done before.
"Who?" Sergio asked.
"You'll see," I said, and let the spinner rest on the edge of my thought like a promise.
That morning the web still hummed with people half-asleep and half-ignorant. A national astronomy account had posted a dry, careful thread about a comet's odd trajectory. Two million followers and only a handful of comments. Nobody read the right things until I spent three figures promoting the post until the internet scratched.
"You're spending money?" Sergio asked when I told him.
"For a thousand points," I answered. "And because I like to annoy people who think the world is a sitcom."
"You bought a trend?" he laughed, but the laugh loosened into a more serious sound later. "Okay. Let's go to the market. We'll buy staples."
We went together. We bought rice and flour and oil and dried beans until our arms ached and the little rented truck creaked under the weight. I collected receipts like they were talismans. Each invoice was proof that we could plan.
"Anastasia," Sergio said in the truck, calling me by the name I used in the city the way a tailor uses a favorite thread. "If things get bad, we'll use the space. You said you wanted one."
"I did," I said. "And I will have it."
That day, in a grubby bathroom at a wholesale grain store, the spinner unfolded itself inside my head like a mechanical festival. Color ribbons burst and a translucent roulette shimmered above me.
"Congratulations," the system sang in a voice like coins. "You have earned sixteen thousand six hundred and twenty-three points."
My head buzzed. I had spent money to boost a post, and a pop star—one of the country's famous actors—had responded to my warning with a simple question mark. His fans flooded my thread, and that accidental flood turned into points.
"Would you like to wish?" the spinner asked, patient as a clock.
"I want a space," I said. "A storage space. Something to keep food alive, water clean."
The point orb took one of my points. It whistled, and I felt a small, milk-white light slide into my skull. Then I was inside a small warehouse: ten meters per side, square and clean. No spring bubbled in the middle, no tills of black earth. It was only storage, but it was ours.
"Level one: storage and preservation. Unlock level two—livestock and fertilizer—for one hundred thousand points," the system chimed.
I sighed. One hundred thousand. I set my jaw. I would get there. I ran my hand through the air like a sorcerer who could conjure money.
Back out in the sun, Sergio grinned and squeezed my shoulder. "So we have a mini-warehouse. Good. Now, what's the plan for the truck?"
"We hide it," I said. "We won't ship things to the house that would make it a beacon."
Sergio nodded. "Then we'll bring supplies ourselves. We don't advertise. We don't tell everyone."
We came home and began to empty boxes into the space with a speed that felt like a secret ritual. When the water drums arrived, I kept one in the back, fingers trembling as I watched the white light swallow them whole.
"How many points did you say?" he asked after we finished.
"Ten thousand and some change," I said. "I have enough to wish again. But I need a better wish. I want livestock."
"Livestock?" Sergio laughed. "You already hoard cans. Now you're going to be a farmer."
"Can you imagine eggs when the sun is gone?" I said. "I can. I plan for it."
"Alright, farmer Anastasia."
We kept buying—vegetables, seeds, spices, dried soup bases like treasure—and the system watched quietly. When we hit ten thousand points, the system offered me a wish. I made it: "I want a space that can hold animals."
The system swallowed another chunk of my points. I felt something deep and fierce in me respond to the offer of life that would continue to lay eggs when the world lost light.
That night, after dozens of purchases and a hundred tiny bargains, the industry of survival humored us. A seller at the market—Miguel Inoue, who raised cattle and always sold honestly—stood behind the counter, his hands like friendly tools. We bought sheep and calves. I watched them blink and chew.
"You're serious," Miguel said softly. He had been kind to me once before. "You want them now?"
"Yes," I said. "I want them safe."
Miguel nodded and helped load their crates into our yard. We placed two lambs and two calves inside the temporary shed. Then, one by one, I slid them into my space and closed the little door. The calves and the lambs disappeared like they were swallowed back into the promise of food.
"Careful with the lambs' water," Miguel warned. "Young animals die if we forget."
"I won't," I said.
We stacked crates and covered them like sacred boxes. We bought seeds and tools and endless rice, and the spinner filled with numbers like coins. The system showed me options: farms, greenhouses, simulated sunlight for extra points. I kept the strongest ones I could reach.
"Do you think the comet will hit?" Sergio asked at dusk, when the sky burned like an aquarium filled with flames.
"I know it might," I said. "And I know we can prepare. There will be an ocean surge, a blackout of sunlight. Plants will die fast if they don't have artificial light. People will panic. People panic badly."
Sergio's face hardened. "Then we will not be those people who panic."
"What about the others?" I asked. "What about the people who owe us?"
He was silent. There were debts in our town. There were stories of gamblers and loans and warm smiles that hid knives.
The name that lodged itself in my mouth like a sour seed was Ernesto Griffin.
"He took advantage of us last time," I said finally. "He lied. He begged. He... he killed me."
Sergio's jaw dropped. "Ernesto? He was there? That man?"
"He was there," I said. "He took the money we saved. He smiled. He moved like a shadow. This time he will not find our doors open."
Sergio reached for my hand.
"Promise me you won't act like yourself without me," he said.
"I promise," I lied again. I couldn't promise no violence—promises were a child's illusion—but I knew we could plan a better end than the one I remembered.
A week of feverish buying passed. Supplies clogged the house: sacks, cans, bottled water, fuel. We sold the family car to raise funds and bought small electric vehicles that were easier to hide. We installed crude filtration tanks and stacked sleeping bags and warm clothes for winters I hadn't yet lived through. The system's spinner nudged me with points each time a post or a retweet led someone to buy food; my small interventions had ripple effects. Each purchase, each prepped room, was an answer to a question I refused to let the world ask without an answer.
"Who's the naive idiot who thinks we can save everyone?" my father—Ramon—asked one night when we told him quietly what was happening.
"Whoever they are," I said. "They need to wake up."
Ramon had put our house up for sale and given us cash to work with. Norma—my mother—kept busy like a machine cooking and planning and pretending she wasn't afraid. My grandparents—Ernst and Georgia—listened like elders weigh every word with suspicious care.
"Get everything ready," Ramon said. "We will fix up the old house in the village. We will make it a bunker. We will plant. We'll be ready."
"Yes," I said. "We'll build a safe house. We'll lay plastic over the courtyard. We'll buy those air filters. We'll install a generator and a biogas system because electricity will be scarce."
Ramon nodded like a man who had been right about a hundred small things before. He had been a repairman in another life, and the new job fit him: he learned how to dig, to weld, and to think about holes.
Our plan moved like a slow, steady beast: buy, hide, install, protect. We bought seeds from a secret vendor and hid them in a wall. We built a greenhouse with pipe and plastic. We set heavy doors with reinforced steel. We set up the space for the animals, teaching ourselves how to artificially hatch eggs and how to feed goats.
"Do you think it will come?" Georgia whispered one night, rocking a weary, small movement of nostalgia.
"It will," I said. "But we will be ready."
And then the country watched a double-body of light burn like the inside of a bible.
"Did they say—did the scientists say we had a chance?" Norma asked, face raw.
"They are trying," I said. "They're trying. People always try."
We watched the world hold its breath on screens. Some nations launched missions to blow the comet apart. The live feed showed a capsule, silhouettes in suits, a small explosion against the black, and for a fleeting second the comet looked like a broken loaf. People cheered.
Then the live feed cut.
"Why did it cut?" my grandfather asked.
"It broke into two," I said. "Two halves heading our way."
We didn't have time to be naive anymore. The flood came like a rumor that turned into a shout. The ocean rose and tore through coasts. Evacuation sirens rolled like drums.
I went out and saved people. We took basins and pushed through the water with long poles and improvised rafts. I do not like to remember the smell of wet mud, of breath in mouths, of people's faces bright and terrified.
We rescued an old woman who had been clinging to a car roof. We pulled children out of cars and wrapped them in blankets. The system chimed and my points rose with every rescue. I understood then a cruel and helpful calculus: do good and the spinner rewarded me with gifts that meant survival. I no longer felt bad about being rewarded for holding on to life.
After the floods, the town began to change. The government announced strict rules: curfews, restrictions, rationing. Price caps followed. People turned into beggars and hoarders and whisperers of conspiracy. Some tried to convert the calamity into opportunity. That was when Ernesto showed up.
He came with a clean shirt and limp eyes and a smile that pretended to be wounded. He had borrowed money, eroded it, taken our cash by inviting us into a story about a sick mother and a hospital bed. He had begged until our pockets were empty and then called in favors that were owed to no one.
"You can't be serious," Sergio hissed the first time Ernesto strutted into the hospital corridor with a swagger that had learned to look like charm.
Ernesto was smooth in business; he had a way of bending a room. He walked into the emergency room like he owned the clock. He began to shout about being injured—claiming bruises and papers and a hospital note—and then produced a set of documents that smelled of lies.
"You're lying," I said when he tried to push his way forward. "You told him his mother had cancer. You lied."
"Who is she to tell me what to do!" he spat. "I borrow money. I return money when I can."
"You spent our money on gambling and debt," I said. "You lied to my brother. You lied about claiming help. You stole from our family."
"That's not true!" Ernesto cried, and his voice was already a business negotiation with morality. "That's not true. You have no proof."
"Then you can produce proof," I said. "You can show us where the money went."
He barked a laugh and shoved his shoulders out.
"Are you going to assault me for money?" he sneered. "You owe me an apology."
A few people had gathered around in the emergency room: watchful faces, the bored interest of those who had nothing better to do than watch family dramas. A handful of them were co-workers, and one by one they revealed things he could not have stopped back then.
"You spent it on gambling," a man from his office said, voice trembling. "I... I saw the account. There are bets. Lots of them."
There was an anger that swelled in the room like a tide. Phones came out. Cameras recorded. A nurse put a hand on her chest and filmed with slow, meditative intent.
"Stop it," Ernesto said, getting red in the face. He looked like a man who had been caught by a security camera while smiling at a bank vault. He tried to wave the accusations away.
"Answer for yourself," my brother Sergio said. He took a step forward, his face shut like a door. "Give back the money you stole from my family."
Ernesto tried to rub his temples and fake calm.
"I can pay back some, now," he said, pulling an envelope like a conjuror who only now realized he had been exposed. "I can—"
"No," I said, and I did not raise my voice. People in that corridor had started to gather like aimless birds. "You took money meant for my parents' retirement. You took money meant to secure a roof. You took our security and traded it on the casino lights."
He began to stammer. People started to film.
"Ridiculous," he said. "You can't—"
"Shut up!" a woman shouted from the back, voice thin and sharp. "You can't take their life and then call on charity when your own gambling eats you!"
The room watched. The hospital afternoon air felt thick and febrile. Someone uploaded an audio clip to a local group chat. It spread like spilled ink.
Ernesto's face shifted as the veneer cracked. First he was amused—the arrogant tilt of a man who thought he could buy his way out. Then the arrogance turned into calculation as he tried to find a legal escape. Then a tiny, bitter spike of fury.
"You have no proof!" he barked, clenching his jaw. "You can't prove anything. I'll sue you."
"Then sue," Sergio said coldly. "We've got the messages. We've got your transfers. Your accounts show you spent it on gambling. You lied about his mother. You told my brother that hope would buy poison."
Ernesto's hands reached for his phone. He dialed someone, a face called by hand. "Tell them I'm being harassed," he said into the phone. His voice broke. The crowd moved closer. Someone hissed.
"You want to play lawyer?" I asked. "We have witnesses. We have receipts. We have the videos."
The man's face, which had once looked like a comfortable mask, now crumpled. He began to speak faster, his sentences short like thrown stones.
"Please—please—" he begged, suddenly small. "I can fix it. I'll sell my car. I'll—I'll give you money back."
"Give it back," Sergio said. "Start with the eight thousand you borrowed. You will not touch this family again."
People in the corridor began to clap. The claps were sharp and clean, a public judgement held in palm. A nurse filmed his reaction. Someone else called the relatives of the people he had also cheated. They came in, one by one, a paper trail of patience and fury. The hospital staff had never seen a public shaming begin with such a soft spoken readiness.
Ernesto's face shifted through disgust and then open panic. "No—no—this can't be happening!" he cried, waving his hands. "I didn't steal— I'm sorry—"
"Look at you," a voice said from the doorway. It was Miguel, the cattle seller, who by chance had come to visit a neighbor. He stood like an honest tool. "You told my cousin his shop would be saved if he lent you money. You took it and then left them with the rent."
"Please," Ernesto whispered. "Please—"
The crowd booed. Phones recorded the precise moment his bravado evaporated into pleading. It sounded like a confession.
"Will you stop filming?" he said, voice thin, and then, a second later: "No, please, don't publish this."
"Too late," I said, and the world hummed like an old cassette tape that could not be rewound.
He got down on his knees right there in the hallway—an incongruity like a man putting his head under a faucet and expecting innocence. His knees hit the linoleum with a small, public thud. The hospital ceiling lights made a halo ring over his bald spot.
"Please," he begged. "Please! I'm begging you—"
At that moment it felt like the corridor itself leaned forward. The gossip, the cameras, the nurses, the patients—all of them reframed themselves as judges. People who had watched the news or read his excuses now saw him for what he was.
"Apologize to them," someone said.
He tried. "I am sorry," he said. The words were brittle. The people around him were not satisfied.
"Get up," my mother Norma said, stepping forward with the simple cruelty of a woman who had had enough. "Return the money. Or don't return it and I will tell everyone how you used our house as a piggy bank and then smiled at the coffin when we needed help."
Ernesto's eyes went black. He started to shout legal threats again—"defamation," "harassment"—whatever cudgel suited his panic. He was arrested in the court of public opinion faster than any badge could appear.
A dozen phones were pointed at him. A dozen people gave accounts. A clip was uploaded and, minutes later, a hundred thousand eyes watched a man on his knees in an emergency room, begging for mercy, while the people he had harmed looked on.
The arc of his face had changed: arrogance to confusion, to fear, to a raw plea. He crawled forward, cupped his hands, and tried to press them against the hands of the people he had wronged.
"Get up," I said quietly. "There is no redeeming yourself this way."
He cried. He begged. He promised to sell his car and to repay. But the cameras kept rolling. People in the corridor shouted details that made the story bleed. Video of his confession, his pleas, his promises, his city of lies—all streamed into the town's group chat. That night the clip trended and people called him names in the dark.
He lost the right to the small, private existence he had once had. The humiliation was public, precise, and slow. It was not a single blow but a full unspooling.
He left the hospital that day a different man. He walked hunched and small. People snapped photos of him in the market as he fled. When he tried to go into the small convenience stores, the shopkeeper pointed at the video on his phone and refused him entry. At the town meeting a week later, someone read a list of his misdeeds into the open record.
The punishment was public, and it did what humiliation does best: it rearranged his life.
After that day, the community watched him like a scab. People whispered and spat and filmed from a safe distance.
I did not rejoice in the pain. I had not taken a joy from watching him humiliate himself. But it was necessary that someone who had built a house of cards by stealing lives be unmasked before the storm came. He had killed someone before with greed. That was a debt beyond money. The punishment was to be seen, to be denied the anonymity he had used as a weapon.
The storm did not let us rest. With the comet's dust blackening the sky, we moved faster. I unlocked a new feature in the space: a livestock simulator. The system answered with a gentle chime and a burst of white light. The small globe of the space turned and generated a tidy, small farm where two lambs grew fat and two calves turned into stockable meat.
We buried jars and put up solar panels in the yard and installed a makeshift biogas digester. The town's leaders were busy deciding who would get shelters; we went about building ours.
"Will you stay on duty?" Sergio asked one evening as we finished bolting the outer gate.
"Yes," I said. "But I will also go out and help. The points help, remember."
"You're obsessed," he smiled.
"Am I?" I asked, and in the dark between the porch light and the stars that would soon be dustless I felt something like resolve. I had been given a second chance. I would not spend it holding someone else's hand while my family starved.
The day the sky stopped shining was not dramatic at first. It was like the lights in a house being shut down, one by one. A dull, thick dark sank like ash. The sun was a memory. Plants wilted within days. The world became a bone. People lost their tempers and their faces changed shape into something hungrier.
We sheltered. We fed the animals we could raise. We rationed. The spinner gave me seeds and the space kept them clean and dry. I realized then the strange power of points earned by help: the world had become a system and I had learned its language. I had learned to be useful because usefulness was a currency that translated into survival.
People came to the house, clutching hands, begging for shelter. We turned many away because we were a business of one thing now: survival. We had to conserve for ourselves and the elders. Some we helped—the ones who were truly in need and honest. The others we watched.
I thought about public justice often. When Ernesto's face had crumpled in that hospital corridor, the town decided its own punishments. The humiliation had been a public mirror and it dissuaded others. Maybe that is what justice looks like when the courts are busy with bigger things: a town that keeps its eyes open.
Months passed in that new time as we pivoted daily like sailors adjusting sails in a storm. We kept seeds alive under simulated light, we kept chickens in a house that did not need windows, and when food grew scarce among neighbors, we bartered and we sheltered. We guarded what we had because the first life taught me that generosity without boundaries becomes an invitation.
"Do you regret anything?" Sergio asked me one cold night when the generator hummed and the lambs chewed quietly in the adjacent room.
"I regret dying," I said. "I regret that it took death to change the way I treat life."
He put his hand on mine. "Then live," he said.
So I kept living. I kept doing the small relentless things that mean surviving: washing, cooking, mending, paying attention to data, listening to the system and to people. I coached my grandparents on how to use the masks and the simple radios. I taught my mother to save water more cleverly. I taught my father to read the clouds as a man reads a manual.
And when the town's leaders proclaimed curfews and ration lists and asked for volunteers to man shelters, I volunteered. I learned how small acts feed the world and how the world repays in ways that look like points and like people coming to save each other.
One evening, months after Ernesto's humiliation, I sat on the threshold of the little greenhouse. Two months had felt like an ocean and then like a single strip of land. I looked at the yellowed sky and at the small stubborn green shoots peeking like fingers through soil.
"I don't know what comes next," I said to the air, because sometimes you must speak to the dark.
"Whatever it is," Sergio said as he joined me, "we'll be ready."
He reached for my hand and I held it. I had been given back a life that had been bent and broken. I kept a spinner and a space. I had a plan and a family. I had a town that could punish a thief and a heart that could plan the smallest of gardens.
We would plant. We would protect. We would remember that the world was finite and people were not. At least, that was what I told myself, under a sky that had forgotten the sun but did not forget the small, stubborn things we keep alive.
The End
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