Scott woke up screaming.
"NOOOO — what the —!"
He hit the floor hard, scrambling back on his hands and heels until the wall stopped him. He pressed against it, chest working overtime, eyes dragging across every corner of the room.
Nothing. Nobody.
He stayed there for a long moment, back flat against the wall, waiting. Nothing came. Just the grey morning light bleeding through the curtain gap and a bus groaning somewhere down the street like it had also had a rough night.
Then last night hit him all at once.
'I jumped,' he thought. 'I actually did it.'
He looked down at himself. His tee was sitting on him the same way it always did, loose at the collar, slightly faded across the chest. His jeans had that familiar crease at the knee from how he always sat. He pressed his palm flat against his thigh and the fabric was warm against his hand, completely dry, not a single sign that he had hit dark water from a bridge less than twelve hours ago.
He sat with that for a moment.
'How.'
He had hit that water. He remembered it clearly. The cold that drove every thought out of his skull the second he broke the surface, the dark closing over him like a decision that had already been made. There was no version of that night where he ended up back here breathing with his clothes sitting on him like he had just come back from a lecture.
'Did someone pull me out?'
Someone would have had to be in that water too, at that hour, which meant someone was either already in the river at midnight or jumped in after him, and neither of those made any sense.
He thought about the woman at the end of the bridge. The way she just stood there and watched him without moving a single muscle.
'It wasn't her,' he thought. 'She didn't even flinch.'
No answer came. He stopped waiting for one and looked around the room properly instead.
He was in his apartment.
His walls. His ceiling. The water stain above the window he had been meaning to report since October. He crawled to the door and pushed it open an inch. The padlock was hanging off the latch with the shackle clicked back like someone had used a key and not bothered to close it again. He pushed it a little further and the orange eviction notice was still on the outside of the door, same aggressive neon, same message, completely unbothered by everything that had happened since it was put there.
'How did I get in here.'
He reached into his jacket pocket out of habit and his fingers closed around something solid. He pulled it out and looked at it sitting in his palm.
His phone. Screen uncracked, battery at thirty one percent, yesterday's notifications sitting there like nothing had happened.
That phone was not in his pocket last night. He had checked every pocket on that bench twice and it was not there. He was certain of that the way you are certain of things that cost you something to find out.
He set it down on the floor in front of him and looked at it for a long moment.
"I can't even do that right," he muttered. "What the actual fuck."
He checked the time. 8:15 AM.
"Shit!"
He was moving before the thought finished. Water on his face, grabbed his bag, halfway down the stairs before he remembered Mrs. Gable. He stopped dead, placed each foot down carefully the rest of the way, held his breath all the way past her door, and slipped out into the street without a sound.
---
The campus was buzzing with the kind of energy that came with annoyingly perfect weather, blue skies and a light breeze that had no business being this pleasant after the night he had just survived. A group of girls crossed ahead of him toward the library, their waists doing that slow easy roll that made men forget what direction they were walking in.
Scott watched them go.
'Still here,' he thought. 'Unfortunately.'
He was squinting at his paper timetable when a shadow fell over him.
"Excuse me? Do you have a second for justice?"
He looked up.
The girl standing in front of him was wearing a white T-shirt that looked like it had been sprayed directly onto her skin. Across the chest, the words SAY NO TO SEXUAL HARASSMENT were stretched over two very impressive curves that were doing a significant amount of work this morning.
"I'm Catherine," she said, with a smile that had clearly been practiced many times. "Law department. We're organizing a protest and interviews on campus safety."
Scott blinked. "Wow."
Her smile widened. "I know, right? It's a huge issue."
'I wasn't saying wow to the issue,' Scott thought, watching the lettering shift as she breathed. 'I was saying wow to the structural integrity of that shirt.'
"Really important stuff," Scott said, pulling his attention back to her face.
"Exactly. I'm doing private interviews on the male perspective. Could I get your number? Twenty minutes of your time."
"Sure." He gave her his number on autopilot, watching her type it in with the focused efficiency of someone who had done this many times today.
"Great! I'll text you the time and —"
The wind stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. Catherine froze mid-sentence, a strand of hair plastered flat against her lip. The bird above the fountain hung in the air with its wings spread wide and going nowhere. Everyone on the quad locked in place at once, mid-stride, mid-laugh, mid-sentence, the whole world pressing pause on itself without asking anyone's permission. A plastic cup that had been falling off a bench sat suspended in the air three inches below where it had started.
The silence that followed was total. Not the quiet of an empty room but the silence of a world that had been switched off at the source.
A translucent blue screen materialized directly in front of his face.
[ SYSTEM INITIALIZING... ]
[ CUMBANK SYSTEM ACTIVATED ]
[ HOST SELECTION: SCOTT ]
Scott read it twice.
'Cumbank,' he thought. 'What the fuck kind of name is that.'
He looked around at the frozen world then back at the screen.
'Am I dead. Is this what being dead is. A system called Cumbank.'
[ WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE? ]
[ YES / NO ]
He looked at YES. Then NO. Then at Catherine's frozen face with the hair stuck against her lip.
He selected YES. He had jumped off a bridge last night and woken up dry and honestly nothing was going to rattle him today.
[ QUEST INITIATED ]
[ OBJECTIVE: FLIRT WITH A WOMAN AND SPEND $2,000 ON HER. ]
[ REWARD PENDING. ]
Then his phone buzzed in his pocket.
He pulled it out slowly. Banking notification. He opened it.
$2,000.00 deposited. Current balance: $2,000.00.
Scott stared at the screen for a long moment.
He looked at the quest. Then at the balance. Then at the quest again.
Two thousand dollars sitting in his account right now, money he had not touched, money that had not been there when he woke up this morning on his floor still frustrated that he was breathing. He had not eaten since a piece of bread on a park bench the night before. His stomach had been making its case since six in the morning and he had been ignoring it. He had an eviction notice on his door and a landlord who had run out of patience months ago, and this system, this thing that had decided to show up on the worst night of his life, wanted him to spend two thousand dollars on a woman.
And not just any woman apparently.
Then the next screen appeared.
[ CUMBANK SPENDING TIERS ]
[ SPEND ON A FLAT WOMAN: 2× RETURN ]
[ SPEND ON A THICK WOMAN: 4× RETURN ]
[ SPEND ON A BUSTY WOMAN WITH THE RIGHT CURVES: 10× CRITICAL HIT ]
Scott read the tiers slowly. Once. Then again.
Ten times two thousand was twenty thousand dollars.
He stood in the frozen world and looked at that number and tried to make it feel real. Twenty thousand dollars. From two thousand spent. On a woman. His whole body understood that this made no logical sense and his banking app was telling him the money was already there and those two facts were sitting in his head refusing to reconcile with each other.
'In what world,' he thought. 'In what economy does spending money on a woman make you richer. What generation cooked this up.'
But the money was there. He could see it. And twenty thousand was twenty thousand regardless of how insane the road to it looked.
Snap.
The walls came back. The wind came back. The bird above the fountain finished its wingbeat and sailed off toward the library roof. Catherine completed her sentence right where she had left it: "— and place. See you then, Scott!" She waved and walked away, hips doing that slow dangerous swing.
Scott stood on the quad and did not move.
Catherine stopped two steps away and turned back, something on his face catching her attention. "You okay? You went somewhere for a second."
"I'm good," Scott said, pulling a half smile from somewhere. "Just thinking."
She looked at him for a moment, not fully convinced, then nodded and walked off.
Scott watched her go then looked slowly around the quad. Students moving in every direction, talking, laughing, completely unaware that he was standing in the middle of all of it trying to figure out which woman he was supposed to spend two thousand dollars on without her calling security before he got a sentence out.
'Which one,' he thought.
He looked around the quad carefully. Then picked up his bag and headed to the lecture hall.
'I'll figure it out,' he told himself.
His stomach growled in response.
'After I figure out how to eat.'
---
The economics lecture hall carried that familiar dead weight energy of sixty people who had somewhere better to be. Scott dropped into his usual seat in the third row, put his bag down, and sat there turning the problem over in his head.
His stomach growled again, quieter this time, like it had accepted that nobody was listening.
He had been sitting there for ten minutes, running through every woman he could think of and ruling each one out for various reasons, when the door opened.
Miss Sandra walked in.
The room shifted the way it always did when she entered, that immediate collective stillness that nobody organized and nobody could stop. She was wearing a charcoal grey corporate dress with a white shirt underneath, top two buttons open. As she crossed to the podium her chest moved with a soft heavy momentum that pulled every eye in the room without a single person deciding to look. Her trousers sat close enough to her body that each stride sent her hips through a slow arc that the back rows tracked in complete silence.
Scott watched her settle at the podium and set her notes down.
He wasn't thinking about the quest yet. He was just watching her the way he always watched her, the way the whole room watched her, because she was Miss Sandra and that was simply what happened when she walked into a space.
"Today," Sandra began, her voice smooth and unhurried, "we discuss incentive structures. Why do people do what they do? Is it moral, or is it purely for the reward?"
She moved with easy confidence, leaning across the desk to pick up a marker. "If I offer you a hundred dollars to jump off a bridge, you say no. If I offer you a million, you start looking for a parachute. The value dictates the risk."
Scott looked at his desk.
Something about that landed differently than it should have.
He looked back up at her.
"The secret to any successful incentive," Sandra continued, moving to the board, "is that the reward must outweigh the perceived risk. People are not irrational. They calculate. Whether they know it or not, every decision a person makes is a transaction. You give something. You expect something back. The only variable is whether the return justifies the cost."
Scott sat very still.
The reward must outweigh the perceived risk.
Every decision is a transaction.
The return must justify the cost.
He looked at the system notification still sitting quietly at the edge of his vision. Then he looked at Miss Sandra at the front of the room, her back turned as she wrote something on the board, the dress doing what it always did when she moved.
Ten times return.
Twenty thousand dollars.
He looked at her properly for the first time since the system had activated and thought about the tiers and the two thousand sitting in his account and the fact that he had absolutely nothing to lose because he had literally jumped off a bridge last night and still ended up here the next morning with his clothes dry and his phone charged.
'Her,' he thought. Just that. Clean and simple. 'It has to be her.'
Scott looked at the faint blue glow sitting at the edge of his vision and thought about last night, waking up on his floor this morning angry that he was still breathing, his empty stomach that had been making its case since six AM.
'What do I have to lose,' he thought. 'Genuinely. What.'
He raised his hand.
The whole room went quiet in a different way. Scott never raised his hand. Not once this semester. Not in any class. The guy beside him actually turned to look at him like he had just done something physically impossible.
Sandra turned from the board. Her eyebrows went up before she caught them. She looked at him for a moment like she was confirming it was actually him.
"Mr. Scott." She said it slowly, like the name needed a second to make sense. "You're... raising your hand."
A few people laughed quietly.
"The floor is yours," she said, composing herself.
Scott stood. His legs felt like they were auditioning for a different body but his voice came out steady. "An insurance firm that pays doctors for the number of tests they run rather than the health of the patient. The incentive isn't to heal. It's to bill. A correct system built on a corrupt motive."
The silence that followed had weight to it.
Sandra tilted her head slowly. Her gaze sat on him a beat longer than it needed to, something behind her eyes shifting and recalibrating. "Precise. Correct. And surprisingly cynical." A pause. "Well done, Mr. Scott."
He didn't sit down.
"One more thing, Miss Sandra."
The room went very still, the kind of still that happens when everyone senses something is about to occur that nobody will be able to pretend they didn't witness.
Sandra's expression held but something behind her eyes sharpened. "Yes?"
Scott looked directly at her face. "I have a serious complaint."
Murmuring broke across the room immediately.
"Bro what is he doing —"
"Oh he's cooked, he's actually cooked —"
"Scott don't —"
Sandra raised one hand and the room dropped to silence. Her eyes stayed on Scott. "A complaint," she said.
"Yes." His voice stayed even. "Three weeks I have been sitting in this class trying to understand economic theory, and every single time you walk to that board it becomes genuinely impossible. The way that dress follows your shape when you move, Miss Sandra, that is not something a man just ignores and takes notes through." One second. "Respectfully, the university owes every person in this room a formal apology."
The room lost it completely.
"BRODDD —"
"He said it oh my God he actually said it —"
"She's going to bury him —"
"Nah he's done, pack his things someone —"
"Miss Sandra don't kill him please —"
Sandra raised both hands and it took a full five seconds for the room to find quiet again, which was four seconds longer than it had ever taken before.
She looked at Scott.
The pink that climbed her neck was slow and involuntary and she felt it the entire way up and could do absolutely nothing about it. It reached her cheeks and settled there with no intention of leaving quickly. She adjusted her glasses. Looked down at her notes for one full second, which was one second longer than Miss Sandra had ever needed her notes for anything. When she looked back up she had herself together again but sixty people had watched every moment of her getting there and the murmuring at the back had not fully died.
"I would say that was inappropriate, Mr. Scott, but —" Something crossed her face. She looked back at her notes. "Sit down."
The room caught it. Every single person in that room caught it. She hadn't finished that sentence and everyone knew exactly why.
Scott sat down slowly, a small smile at the corner of his mouth staying there without his permission.
The guy beside him leaned over immediately. "Bro. What the actual hell was that."
"Economics," Scott said, and stared at the board.
[ STEP 1 COMPLETE ]
The notification sat quietly at the edge of his vision with no fanfare and no reward. Just those three words sitting there clean and waiting.
'Step one,' Scott thought. 'So there's a step two.'
His stomach growled again and he ignored it the same way he had been ignoring it all morning.
He was still sitting there when Sandra's voice came across the room as everyone started packing up.
"Mr. Scott." Quiet. The kind of quiet that carried further than it should. "My office. Now."
Scott closed his eyes for exactly one second.
'I am in a genuinely deep mess,' he thought.
He picked up his bag.
"On my way, Miss Sandra."