TUTORIAL TO BECOME A GREEN FLAG (BUGGED)

The smell hit him first. It wasn’t the sterile, ozone-heavy scent of the cryogenic facility in 2144, nor the metallic tang of his oxygen recycler. It was the smell of cheap floor wax, chalk dust, and the lingering, synthetic scent of strawberry body spray that haunted every high school hallway in the late 2020s.

Aris gasped, his lungs expanding with a sharp, burning intake of air. He bolted upright, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

"Whoa, easy there, Aris. You’re going to give yourself a concussion before the midterms even start."

The voice was annoying, familiar, and—by all accounts of physics—should have been buried under six feet of concrete in a collapsed sector of Neo-Tokyo. Aris squinted, his vision swimming. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered, buzzing with a nauseating hum.

Sitting on the desk in front of him, legs swinging idly, was Leo. Leo, who had died during the Resource Wars. Leo, who looked exactly seventeen, with that stupidly bright yellow hoodie and a smear of ink on his thumb.

Aris blinked, rubbing his temples. The movement felt sluggish. He looked down at his hands. They were smooth, unscarred by the plasma burns and jagged shrapnel of the future. He gripped the edge of his wooden desk. The texture was raw, real, and painfully solid.

"Aris? You okay, man? You look like you’ve seen a ghost," Leo chuckled, tossing a crumpled piece of paper toward him.

Aris didn't answer. He couldn't. His mind was a battlefield of fragmented memories—the crushing weight of adulthood, the failures of the Resistance, and the final, cold silence of his last breath. He pinched his arm, hard. The pain was sharp and immediate.

I’m back, he thought, his blood running cold. But how?

Before he could process the impossibility of his situation, a jagged, translucent blue window flickered into existence in the center of his vision. It didn't look like a standard holographic interface; it looked like a malfunctioning piece of software from a bargain-bin VR game.

[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION: 99%...]

[ERROR: COMPATIBILITY MODE DETECTED]

[SYSTEM IDENTIFIED: 'GREEN FLAG SYSTEM' - BETA v0.01]

[STATUS: HIGHLY UNSTABLE]

[CRITICAL WARNING: Failure to comply will result in system-wide ‘Reset’ (AKA: Permanent Neural Erasure).]

Aris froze, staring through the blue text at the back of the classroom. A system? Here? Now?

"System?" he whispered, his voice raspy.

"Yeah, the system," Leo said, misunderstanding him completely. "The school system is rigged, I know. But we have to pass History, or my dad’s going to ground me until I’m thirty. Are you listening?"

Aris ignored him, focusing his mind on the flickering interface. It jittered, static dancing around the edges of the box.

[WELCOME, HOST: ARIS VANCE]

[MISSION OBJECTIVE: Win her heart with a gentle gesture.]

[TARGET: ELARA VANCE (No relation)]

[REWARD: +5 Stability Points, +10 Merit Tokens.]

[FAILURE PENALTY: SYSTEM REBOOT (Painful execution of user consciousness)]

Aris felt a vein in his forehead throb. "Win her heart? Are you kidding me?"

"Who are you talking to?" Leo frowned, leaning closer. "And who is 'her'? You mean Elara? The girl who hasn't spoken a word to you since you spilled that science experiment on her shoes in freshman year?"

Aris looked across the room. There she was. Elara. She was sitting by the window, a lock of dark hair falling over a physics textbook. She looked exactly as she had twelve years ago—composed, brilliant, and completely untouchable. Back then, he had spent three years trying to catch her attention, only to fail in spectacular, humiliating ways.

He didn't want to go through that again. He didn't want to be seventeen. He didn't want to play a game designed by a glitchy piece of software that threatened to lobotomize him if he didn't secure a romantic interest.

[SYSTEM ALERT: MISSION TIMER INITIATED]

[TIME REMAINING: 05:00 MINUTES]

[CURRENT STABILITY: 12% - CRITICAL]

[WARNING: The user is currently suffering from ‘Social Regression Syndrome.’ A gentle gesture is required to stabilize the narrative.]

"Narrative?" Aris hissed under his breath. "This isn't a narrative. It's a nightmare."

He stood up, his chair scraping loudly against the floor. Every eye in the classroom turned toward him. He felt the phantom phantom weight of a rifle on his shoulder, his body instinctively shifting into a defensive stance. He looked like he was about to start a brawl, not ask a girl for a pencil.

"Aris, sit down," the teacher sighed, not even looking up from his stack of papers. "If you’re going to act out, do it in the hallway."

Aris ignored the teacher, his eyes locked on the quest timer counting down in his field of view.

4:12.

4:11.

If he didn't do something, this "System" was going to kill him. And if he did do something, he was going to be the laughingstock of the school. Both options felt equally fatal, but the threat of "Permanent Neural Erasure" was a powerful motivator. He remembered the feeling of dying—the cold, the darkness, the nothingness. He wasn't going back there.

He walked across the room, his gait stiff, his movements calculating. He moved like a soldier in enemy territory, which only made his approach to Elara’s desk seem infinitely more threatening.

As he approached, Elara looked up. Her eyes were sharp, intelligent, and unamused. "Can I help you, Aris?"

The System chirped—a sound like a dying bird.

[INCOMING SUGGESTION: Offer a gesture of genuine kindness. Avoid: awkward compliments, physical touch, or reciting poetry.]

Genuine kindness, he mocked internally. Right. How about I offer her a tactical briefing on the upcoming collapse of the global economy?

No, that wouldn't work. He looked at her desk. She was struggling with a complex set of calculus equations. He saw the way she was gnawing on her pen, her brows knitted in frustration.

Aris stopped, his shadow falling across her notebook. He didn't say a word. Instead, he pulled out his own chair—not hers, because that would be too bold—and sat down in the empty seat next to her. He reached out, his hand trembling slightly, and took her pen.

She blinked, surprised, but didn't pull away.

"The derivative," Aris said, his voice calmer than he felt. "You’re trying to solve for X by isolating the variable, but you need to derive the function first."

He didn't make a grand romantic gesture. He didn't offer a rose or a love letter. He simply turned her paper, picked up his own pencil, and mapped out the three steps of the equation, his handwriting sharp and precise—far more mature than it should have been for a high school senior. He handed the pen back to her and pushed the paper toward her.

"Try it now," he said.

Elara stared at the math, then at him. The confusion in her eyes shifted into a subtle, piqued interest. "How did you... you were failing this class last week."

"I had a lot of time to think," Aris replied, a hollow smile touching his lips.

[MISSION UPDATE: Objective Complete.]

[STABILITY: 20% (IMPROVED)]

[REWARD: +5 Stability Points, +10 Merit Tokens.]

[NEW FEATURE UNLOCKED: SHOP ACCESS]

A new window popped up, blocking out the rest of the classroom. It showed a list of strange items: Charisma Boost (Small), Flashback Trigger (10 Credits), Temporal Anchor (500 Credits).

"Aris," Elara whispered, the edge of her voice softening. "Thanks. That... that actually makes sense."

She looked at him then, really looked at him, and for a fleeting second, the wall between them didn't feel so high.

But Aris wasn't looking at her anymore. He was staring at the clock on the wall.

17:45.

He had survived the first day, the first mission, and the first glitch. But as he looked at the flickering, unstable blue text that now dictated his existence, he realized the terrifying truth. He was back in his seventeenth-year-old body, but the world was no longer his. He was a piece of software now, living in a simulation of a life he had already lived, trying to keep a broken system from deleting his soul.

He leaned back, his heart finally slowing down.

"Anytime," he murmured, his gaze shifting to the window.

Outside, the world was sunny, bright, and blissfully unaware of the wars to come. But Aris knew better. And as he watched the System’s blue light fade from his peripheral vision, he made a silent vow.

If this "Green Flag System" wanted him to play the hero, he would. But he would play by his own rules—and he would find out exactly who, or what, had turned his second chance at life into a death trap.

[SYSTEM NOTE: The 'Green Flag System' is pleased with your progress. Warning: New target incoming. Difficulty: High.]

Aris closed his eyes.

Failure is mandatory, he thought, but I don't intend to fail.