THE INFINITE CASHBACK SYSTEM

Infinite Cashback System

Ethan Carter

Host detected.

Financial distress threshold: reached.

Initialising Infinite Cashback System...

Ethan didn't breathe.

The words floated a few feet from his face, pale and steady, sharp-edged like text on a phone screen, though no phone was there. When he turned his head, they turned with him.

I'm dreaming.

He pinched the skin on the back of his hand, hard enough to hurt. The words didn't move.

I haven't eaten enough. I'm not sleeping. I'm having some kind of breakdown, that's all. Stress does this to people.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Counted to ten. I opened them.

Binding complete.

Welcome, Host.

"No," Ethan whispered. His voice cracked. "No, no. Stop it."

Command not recognised.

He flinched so hard he nearly fell off the bed. The thing had been answered.

He stayed frozen, staring at the glowing words with his hands wrapped tight around the blanket. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a calm voice pointed out that people who talked to hallucinations usually ended up in clinics, and that he couldn't afford a clinic.

But another voice, a stubborn, tired one, said: Then what happens if I just ask?

"Who are you?" he said.

Infinite Cashback System. A financial support program. You have been selected.

"Selected by whom?”

Information restricted at current level.

"That's not an answer."

Correct. It is not.

Ethan let out a breath that was half a laugh. It was so dry. So flat. If a hallucination could have manners, he thought, it would have these.

"Okay," he said slowly. He sat up straighter, pulled the blanket around his shoulders like a man in a lifeboat. "Okay. What do you want?"

The System does not want. The System provides.

Function: Every eligible expenditure by the Host will return cashback. Rate and eligibility depend on the nature of the expenditure.

"Cashback." He said it like a word from another language. "Like a credit card."

Comparison inaccurate. Rates are significantly higher.

"How much higher?"

Demonstration recommended.

The light shifted. New lines appeared, and Ethan found he was leaning toward them without meaning to.

MISSION 1

Spend $40 on a legitimate necessity within 24 hours.

Reward: cashback on expenditure. Failure penalty: none.

He read it once. Twice.

"Forty dollars." He was surprised at his own voice, thin and disbelieving. "You want me to spend forty dollars. When I have..." He didn't say the number. Some part of him refused to say it to a ghost. "I can't spend money right now. That's the entire problem."

Necessity is defined by the Host.

Cashback exceeds expenditure.

"By how much?"

Demonstration recommended.

"You keep saying that."

The words held steady. They said nothing else.

Ethan stared at them until his eyes ached. Then, as suddenly as they'd come, the blue lines faded. The ceiling was only a ceiling again, and the room was dark.

He sat there for a long time.

At some point he checked the clock. 2:14 a.m. He lay back down, but he didn't sleep. He lay with his hands folded on his chest like someone at a viewing, and every few minutes he whispered, "That was not real," to the dark.

The dark did not argue.

He thought about his mother. She had spent her last winter in that rented room on Alder Street, refusing to let him move her, saying she didn't want to be a burden. When he finally forced the issue, she smiled at him and said, "You worry too much, baby. Things have a way of turning."

They hadn't turned. She died in March, holding a paper cup of tea he had made too weak.

If things turn, they turn late. Too late for people like us.

He pressed his palm against his chest. It was aching in an old, familiar place, and for a long while he only lay there and let it.

Morning came grey and ordinary. The pigeons on the fire escape were fighting over something. Ethan stood in the bathroom brushing his teeth, looking at his own face unshaven, hollow under the eyes, a little crooked, the way it always got when he was scared.

You're okay. You had a nightmare. Get up, eat something, find a job.

He rinsed his mouth and stood there a second longer. On the shelf by the sink, Victoria's toothbrush was still in its cup, purple, bristles bent from years of hard scrubbing. He had not been able to throw it away. He had not been able to move it, either. It stood beside his own like a small, patient question.

Next week she'll come for it. Along with the rest of her.

He turned away from the mirror.

And in the corner of his vision, quietly, politely, blue letters unfolded.

Mission 1: 21 hours remaining.

Ethan gripped the sink.

"Fine," he said, to nobody. "Fine. You want to prove it. Prove it."

He didn't decide to obey. That was what he told himself later. He put his shoes on because he was awake and had nowhere else to be, and there was a small, unreasonable part of him that had heard cashback exceeds expenditure and could not let it go. Not because he believed it. Because hope was a habit, and he had never managed to quit it. It was more like a dare, the kind you make to a stranger at two in the morning when you have nothing left to lose.

It costs forty dollars. I'll lose forty dollars. And when nothing happens, I'll know I need help, and I'll call someone.

He almost believed that.

He walked to Mel's Market on Ninth, a slightly bigger store than the corner one. The whole way there, he watched the edge of his vision like a man waiting to be hit. Nothing appeared. The street was just the street, with its cracked sidewalk and its bus shelter and a girl in a yellow raincoat splashing through a puddle.

Inside, he did what he always did. He picked up a basket, and he counted.

A necessity. Something he would have to buy anyway.

Rice. Beans. Eggs. Bread. Chicken thighs, the same ones as always. Frozen vegetables. A bag of oranges he did not need, and put back, and took again, because Victoria had liked oranges.

He shoved that thought down and kept moving.

He nearly turned around twice. At the end of the cereal aisle, a man about his father's age was counting coins into his palm for a carton of milk, lips moving. Ethan looked away fast, unsure whether he was sparing the man or himself.

That's me next week. That's me exactly.

At the register, the total came to $41.87. He handed over the card and watched the little screen, half expecting it to go wrong. His stomach turned when the receipt printed. His balance would be under two-forty now.

You just threw away a week of food money as a joke.

Mission 1 complete.

He nearly dropped the bag.

Legitimate necessity confirmed. Expenditure: $41.87. Processing cashback...

The cashier was ringing up the next customer. No one else could see it. A blue line ran across the air, a little progress bar, filling slowly. Ethan stood absolutely still, holding the bag, while the bar reached the end.

Cashback issued.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

He didn't want to look. Part of him wanted to keep believing, badly, though he couldn't have said which way that it was fake, or that it wasn't.

He looked.

Transaction posted: Merchant adjustment. +$400.00.

He read it four times.

Available balance: $626.89.

Ethan walked out of the store in a kind of trance. He made it as far as the bus shelter, then sat down on the wet bench, his groceries in his lap, and stared at the number on the screen as it might bite him.

It was still there.

He refreshed the app. He closed it. He opened it again. He restarted the phone and waited for it to light, and opened the app a third time.

$626.89.

Four hundred dollars, for spending forty-one eighty-seven.

His heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his teeth. He wasn't happy, wasn't even relieved. What he felt was closer to fear than the kind you feel when a door opens in a house you thought was empty.

Something's wrong. It's a bank error. They'll reverse it in a day.

Cashback rate: ten times.

The words appeared beside him, soft against the grey morning. Ethan flinched. A woman at the other end of the bench glanced over, saw a man staring at nothing, and quietly moved her purse to her other shoulder.

"It's real," Ethan breathed. He kept his voice under the traffic. "You're real."

The System is real. The rewards are real.

He waited for it to say more. It didn't. Somehow the silence felt more honest than any speech would have. The System didn't beg him to believe. It didn't try to be liked.

"Why me?"

Information restricted at current level.

"Of course," he said, and laughed, a cracked, shaky sound that turned into something dangerously close to a sob. He pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth until it passed.

Because it had been three days since Victoria left, and two since he'd been fired, and one since he'd decided that he would rather starve than ask his best friend for four hundred dollars. And now a voice in the air had given it to him for a bag of groceries.

I don't deserve it.

Deserve is not a metric.

He almost smiled.

"Can I tell anyone about you?"

The System is visible only to the Host.

"Can anyone take it from me? Can the bank?"

The bank sees a merchant adjustment. It is consistent with normal records.

"And is it? " He hesitated. It felt childish to ask. "Is it legal? Is this okay?"

All rewards are legitimate. The Host will not be asked to commit unlawful acts.

Some of the tension in his shoulders let go, but only some. It was strange to be reassured by something he couldn't see, and stranger still that it worked.

Legitimate. Okay. A voice in the air says it's legitimate.

The bus arrived and left without him. Then another one. The driver of the second gave him a look through the windshield, a question, and Ethan lifted one hand, no, sorry, I'm fine, and the doors folded shut.

He wasn't fine. He was sitting in the rain with a bag of chicken going warm on his knees. But he was, for the first time in three days, thinking, and it felt like blood coming back into a numb hand painful, but alive.

The bus arrived and left without him a third time. He sat there, watching the rain begin again, thinking of the way his mother used to say good things come when you stop chasing them. He had never believed her. He wasn't sure he did now.

But there was money in his account that hadn't been there an hour ago.

His fingers were trembling. It occurred to him that he was afraid to move, afraid that if he stood, the shelter would vanish, the blue words would flicker out, and he'd wake up in the dark with three hundred dollars and nowhere to turn.

Mission 2 will begin in twelve hours, the System said. Failure to complete future missions may result in revocation of accumulated rewards. Prepare accordingly, Host.

Ethan went still.

Revocation.

So it can take it back.

He looked at the money on his phone, so quiet and bright, and felt his relief crack down the middle. It hadn't been a gift.

It was a contract. And he had just signed it without reading a single line.