Chương 1: Truck-kun Sends His Regards

The condom was in his left pocket. Andrew Snodgrass, a 24-year-old veterinary technician, was sure of this. He'd checked it no fewer than four times since leaving his apartment which was probably three times more than a normal person. However, Andy had a secret. He had never, in his entire life, not even once, been intimate. In fact, Andy had never even kissed anyone. And so, he had the condom. He had brushed his teeth twice.

He had Googled, "What to do the first time you have sex," and then closed his browser tab so fast that his laptop nearly slid off the desk. All of the results had been, terrifyingly acrobatic or terrifyingly clinical and neither felt applicable to a guy whose most intimate physical contact within the last calendar year had been a Labrador Retriever who had licked him inside of the ear during a routine vaccination.

September air wrapped around him and goosebumps ran up his arms causing the small hairs on the back of his neck to prickle. Earlier the city had been fairly warm, but now that the sun was setting the heat of the day was replaced with a chill that sat in Andy's stomach. Every squeak of his sneakers bumped his anxiety up one more degree and he tried to envision the beauty of the city as the sunset, the way he normally did. The orange glow twinkling off the McDonald's dumpster looked almost romantic.

That was until two pigeons started either fighting over a french fry or making more pigeons. From this distance, Andy couldn't be sure. And it had been awhile since Andy had brushed up on his pigeon lovemaking specifics. Megan lived four blocks from his duplex. He'd walked this route dozens of times over the last three months they had been dating, a duration that felt like both eons and maybe a week or so. The first two months Andy had been too nervous to even so much as hold Megan's hand.

He had simply taken her on dates, held the door, insisted on paying, and walked her back to her apartment where he had departed without so much as a goodnight kiss like some Regency-era suitor who just so happened to own a PS5 and work at a 24-hour Veterinary Hospital. She had been patient those first two months. Amusement twinkled in her eyes when she waited at the door leaning in 40, 50, 60% and Andy had nervously excused himself and thanked her for a wonderful evening.

And then she'd invited him over several times where he'd finally worked up the courage to clammily hold her hand. But forty minutes ago she'd sent a text. Just two words and an emoji.

"Come over. 🔥" He had stared at that fire emoji for a solid ninety seconds before he heard himself take a huge gulp of air. Oxygen cleared the black fog that had begun to fill the edges of his vision. He'd been trying to decode the message, searching for alternate interpretations that didn't involve what he was fairly certain it involved. Maybe, he reasoned, she had stepped on a thorn, and since he was used to such medical issues she'd asked him to come help.

Perhaps she'd been in a hurry and had sent a fire emoji rather than something less suggestive. Maybe she was just in the mood for dinner and a movie. But then she had sent the second text.

"You can stay over after, if you want." There it was.

"Stay over." The two most suggestive words in the English language, somehow more loaded than the aforementioned text because 'stay over' carried within it the implication of it being an evening enjoyable enough to invite waking up next to the person afterward. Seeing someone in their most un-put-together state and with morning breath and with– Andy was spiraling, so he took several calming breaths and then brushed his teeth, (twice. Including flossing and mouthwash), checked his pocket (at least four times), and stepped out into the golden sunset of the cool September evening. An evening that the universe had apparently, at long last, decided to serve as the backdrop for Andrew Snodgrass finally losing his virginity. He was thinking about what to say when she opened the door.

"Hey," felt too casual, like he was showing up to watch Netflix, which at this point was what they'd always done when he'd gone over to her place. Tonight though, was going to be different and the greeting should reflect the differentness without being so different that it became weird.

"Hello, I have arrived for the sex," was technically honest but would most certainly result in her closing the door in his face and the ordering of a Hitatchi online.

"Hi, you look beautiful," would work but only if she actually looked more beautiful than usual which might cause her to think that she didn't normally look beautiful–which she did. Even in sweatpants. Megan looked beautiful in everything, which was part of the problem because looking at Megan made his brain shut down, all of the words rearranged themselves and came out in the wrong order and made his hands cold and moist. The walk signal at Everhard and 10 St NE turned white.

The little pedestrian popping up without a care in the world. Welcoming Andy to cross the street. Hey man. It's safe. Come on over to this side of the road. Thanks for not Jaywalking. Andy stepped off of the curb. He was thinking of Megan's freckles. She had exactly eleven of them across the bridge of her nose. (He knew because he'd counted when she'd fallen asleep on his shoulder during a movie they'd watched last weekend and he'd been too afraid to move for two hours because her hair… it smelled like coconut.) Eleven freckles and coconut hair. He wondered if she had freckles elsewhere, and what she might smell of lower than the crown of her head. He was about to find out. The thought had his stomach immediately clenching again and the anxiety was so strong it took his breath away. The truck came from around the corner to the left.

Later, in the vanishingly small window of time between the impact and whatever came after, Andy would note with the detached almost scientific observation of a man whose brain was doing that slowed down thing in movies that the crossing sign had been illuminated. And even though it had been illuminated Andy had still looked both ways. He always looked both ways, even on one-way streets. He'd always been so careful in life.

Careful to get good grades, careful with his feelings, careful with love, careful at crosswalks. And the walk light had been on. It was his turn. He had the right of way. The truck had run the light. There was no slow motion montage, no life flashing before his eyes, no profound final thoughts about the meaning of existence or the faces of loved ones or the beauty of a world he was about to leave.

There was just the truck (which was large) and Andy (who was not) and a very brief sensation (that he would later describe to no one, because he was dead) of being hit by a truck. The condom was still in his pocket. Consciousness returned the way a bad internet connection comes back in a storm: not all at once, not smoothly, but in a stuttering fragmented way that eventually reassembled itself in a slow clunky way similar to a toddler playing with blocks.

At first, there was darkness, then a dull, formless pressure that didn't quite correlate to previous sensations that he couldn't quite be sure of. And then, with the fanfare of a system notification in a video game he had not agreed to the TOS of: [SYSTEM INITIALIZED] Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. [WELCOME, NEW ORGANISM] [SPECIES: PROKARYOTIC CELL (UNSPECIALIZED)] [TIER: 1] It all hung in his awareness.

He didn't have eyes to see it, didn't have a screen it was projected onto. It was just words he knew, existing in a space in his own mind, which if his knowledge of bacteria was correct, he shouldn't have. His thinking capacity seemed to him quite similar to how it had been fifteen seconds ago. Or fifteen minutes ago? Or fifteen millennia ago? Time, like sensation, seemed difficult to pin down. Andy tried to process what he was 'reading?' hearing?

And discovered that the cognitive functions worked very differently when the processor in question was a single cell floating in what appeared to be a body of water so vast that relative to his current size might as well have been infinite. It was warm. It was teeming with chemical compounds that his new, extremely rudimentary sensory equipment was identifying as 'food, maybe' and 'danger, probably' and honestly, very little else.

[CURRENT ABILITIES:] [ABSORB NUTRIENTS] - Passively intake dissolved organic compounds from surrounding medium. [DIVIDE] - Reproduce via binary fission. Cooldown: Variable based on energy reserves. [EXIST] - You are alive. Congratulations. He stared at the last one. No, stared was the wrong word.

He perceived it with the full cognitive weight of a man who had, until very recently, possessed a prefrontal cortex, opposable thumbs, a Sams Club membership, and a half finished playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 (a non-durge run, obviously), a condom in his pocket and a girlfriend named Megan with eleven freckles who, right now, at this exact moment (or fifteen millennia ago,) was wondering why he hadn't knocked on her door. He went back and read the second one again. [DIVIDE] Which was reproduce via binary fission.

He could reproduce. Right now, if he wanted to. No dinner, no awkward conversation, no sweaty palms, no three months of courting and two texts later. Just… do it. The universe had killed him on the way to losing his virginity and reincarnated him as an organism, that could quite literally, just exist and fuck itself. [EXIST]. That was his other headline ability. Existing.

The system, the universe, whatever it was had looked at the full spectrum of everything and decided that Andy should reincarnate as a prokaryotic cell, which most notably, could exist. Congratulations. You exist. Grief arrived without warning. A sucker punch from inside, and for the span of what could have been seconds, hours or years (because, again, single-celled organisms do not have a robust sense of temporal continuity), Andy Snodgrass mourned and existed.

He mourned Megan, who would text him, then call, then worry, since she'd been close enough to hear sirens. He mourned his mother, who called him every Sunday and that call on Sunday would go straight to voicemail. He couldn't think about that, so he stopped. He mourned his cat, Gerald, who was an idiot, and was probably eating butter from a dish that Andy always forgot to put away.

He mourned the version of himself with a condom in his pocket and the only worry in the world being, how do I put this on and then what do I do? He mourned, and the water was warm and the System waited. And then, because Andrew Snodgrass had also escaped the Mindflayer ship on his third try and refused to acknowledge that he'd rage-quit once, packed his feelings up and put them away. Still there, still remembered, just compartmentalized.

Compartmentalization and long-term memory were very both very impressive for a prokaryotic cell without a hippocampus, if he did say so himself. [ABSORB NUTRIENTS] the system repeated, as if it had noticed his attention drifting. What did you say Andy projected at the System. The system did not repeat itself. And that's how he found himself floating in warm water surrounded by chemical compounds that the System was labeling as food. He was a single cell. He had no mouth, he had no stomach, no digestive tract.

But he had [ABSORB NUTRIENTS], which according to the description, allowed him to passively intake dissolved organic compounds from the surrounding area, and the surrounding area was apparently chock full of dissolved organic compounds. Now that grief had taken a silent backseat in his mind, Andy had realized he was hungry.

Not hungry in the way he used to get hungry, the midnight hunger that made him stand in front of his refrigerator and eat shredded cheese straight from the bag while Gerald watched him with quiet judgement. This was hunger at a cellular level. A pull that wasn't a feeling so much as a fact, the same way that gravity isn't a feeling but you still fall.

He reached toward the nearest concentration of organic compounds and, because he didn't have hands or arms, "reaching" really meant slowly drifting toward and allowing the chemical gradient to draw molecules through his membrane. Which it did. Automatically, nutrients slid inside of him. His whole body opened up and took it in all at once. Every part of him simultaneously worked toward a common goal, which if he were being honest, was the most intimate feeling he'd ever experienced.

His first time, and it was with a cloud of amino acids in a pond. Go figure. [NUTRIENTS ABSORBED: +3] [XP GAINED: +1] The notification hit his awareness with a clean satisfying ping of a well-designed UI. Andy, who had spent an embarrassingly large amount of time playing video games across various platforms and genres recognized it instantly. It was familiar, and almost comforting. He had gained experience points–by eating.

His gamer-brain (which he was now referring to it as to keep himself amused), was somehow more persistent than grief, more fundamental to his identity than eagerness, or even anxiety, sat up and paid attention. XP! There was XP. And where there was XP there were levels. Even better where there were levels there was growth. Change. And there, was the possibility, however faint, however ridiculous, however cosmically absurd given that he was currently a microscopic bacteria floating in warm water, of winning.

[XP: 1/10] [NEXT MILESTONE: ABILITY SELECTION] He needed nine more XP to reach a milestone. That nutrient absorption had given him one XP. There were nutrients all around him. Assuming there were not diminishing returns, the math was simple. Andy absorbed another cluster of organic molecules. Chemical gradients once again parted around his membrane, delivered inside of himself like room service. [NUTRIENTS ABSORBED: +5] [XP GAINED: +1] [XP: 2/10] Then another. [XP: 3/10] Then another. And another.

The rhythm of it was meditative, ridiculously so for a speck of almost nothingness. It was a simple loop of sense and act and gain. It quieted the part of his brain that was still screaming about trucks running redlights, about Megan's eleven freckles and about the unfairness of asexual reproduction when you died a virgin. The numbers ticked upwards with each absorption, and that satisfaction of progress gave the dopamine hit that watching an experience bar in a video game fill up.

Except this time, the game was life, and the experience bar might actually take him to something that mattered. Something that might leave behind more than a cat, a mom and a girlfriend of three months. Around 5 XP it took two absorptions to gain an XP and then three. [XP: 9/10] One more. He found a cluster of amino acids dissolved in the water nearby, seemingly larger than anything he'd absorbed thus far. It was practically a five-course meal (by prokaryotic standards at least).

He carefully pulled them through his membrane imagining it was an apple, or apple pie. [XP: 10/10] [MILESTONE REACHED!] [ABILITY SELECTION AVAILABLE] [PLEASE CHOOSE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:] And there it was. The first choice. The first branch. The moment in this new, microscopic life where the System had allowed Andy to [Exist] and not much else, was now looking at Andy and saying, What would you like to become?

But this was just an ability selection, and the options wouldn't appear until he focused on the notification. First, he wanted to sit with this for a moment. He wanted to remember this exact moment. The swelling of happiness and pride overtaking the grief. The first faint glow of, something that in the right light, might be called hope. If there was a God or gods, Andy thought, those sick bastards were laughing themselves sick. Killed a virgin.

A (by his standards) good person who had just a little too much social anxiety to get out of his own way. Someone who spent more time being afraid than enjoying life. They put him in a pond without the ability to socialize and they gave them the ability to reproduce all by himself. Punchline delivered, cosmic joke complete, everyone laughed. Right? Right? Except Andy wasn't done yet. He hadn't gotten to the good parts and he was ready to give whoever was watching something worth talking about.