Spent

The world got Enhanced on a Tuesday. One cosmic software update, and now everyone has abilities — skill trees, stat menus, a golden interface floating at a polite reading distance. Drew got fix-it powers. The ten-year-old got streaks and routes. The seven-year-old found a button that makes joy come out. Celia had a microwave that wouldn't stop beeping and a boss who says yes to everything, so when the interface asked her to select your role, she swiped it away. Again, and again, and again. Until eventually, the system stopped taking no for an answer. Now she's a Candidate — conscripted into fixing "instabilities" the automated systems can't handle, dispatched on the commute, on her lunch break, in the middle of her kid's birthday. She never picked a role, which means she has no powers. It also means the part of the interface that's supposed to be locked isn't. She's a project manager. She knows what a raw spec looks like when the marketing copy peels off. Every fix works. Every fix costs her something she can't quite name. And she can't tell a soul.