Where should I begin

To be honest, I am not sure how to tell this story. If you don't know about the system, all this will sound crazy and make not much sense. If you do know about the system, you will either think me a traitor for talking about it, or an idiot for tempting fate by doing something I might get punished for. In any case, here we are and there are a few things I want to tell. There are certainly it some things I don't want to tell, but that will come out any way. I have no illusions that I might come out of this story as a hero, I am not a hero. Not even close. My best friend might be one in a way, but I digress. So, talking about my experiences is difficult and I might sound crazy in one way or another, no matter how it goes. So I think I'll just tell a story. The story of how I met the system.

You would think that I can remember the day I got the system like it was yesterday. The day that changed my life forever and all that. But it is all a bit of a blur. Frankly, it was a little... Underwhelming.

I was in my final year of highschool and supposed to think about my life and what to do with it. I would like to say that taking care of my family kept me from doing that. That would have been a good reason. My family was me, my sister and my father. My mother was not part of the picture. If I'm being honest, my father wasn't really there either, but enough for us to have a roof over our heads and food in the fridge. My sister was annoying, as little sisters tend to be, but family and I loved her for it, not that I would have ever used that word. No, it wasn't my family, that kept me from taking charge of my life, even if I count my best friend as family for this. If anything, he was what you would call a good influence. He was driven and had worked himself up from being the troubled child of the neighbourhood to being the one everyone compared you to to make you feel bad about yourself. A real protagonist type of guy. Why he was my best friend? I couldn't tell you. It must have been one of those "we've known each other since forever" kinds of deals. I always suspected him to have a system already. How else could I explain his success? It was something nobody is supposed to talk about, but everybody knows anyway. Like where in a school one can smoke without teachers finding out or how to watch those movies that one shouldn't even know existed, but that bring the heart-rate up so nicely. So, of course I couldn't straight up ask him about the system. If he had it, it would record the question and that could have consequences later. If he didn't have it, what was he supposed to say then? But it fit. He had this magical helper and was on the road to success. And I, well I was busy trying to finish highschool while learning as little as possible, seeing as much of the girls without being seen myself and finding ever more creative ways of spending time without getting anything in return. I was being especially busy doing a combination of all three with my binoculars on the roof of the supermarket across the street from our school gym, when the system hit me. Of course, I can't know for sure that this is exactly what I was doing, but since that is how I spent most of that summer, it is a safe bet. It might have started earlier, but there is this one situation, that I recall.

It started very subtle. There appeared some icons next to some stuff I browsed and considered buying while waiting for a class to begin in the empty gym. Apparently some things were "good" and others "bad", according to the icons. Then something similar happened with videos I watched, when shopping became boring. Since all I knew about the system was based on guesswork, I experimented a little. Ordering some "good" snacks and watching a few "good" videos had no immediate effect. Neither did the "bad" alternatives. There was also no pattern, no obvious categories of good or bad things. Just as girls started going into the gym, there was a text message, informing me, that I had the first steps completed, or something like that. Seeing as it wasn't important, I put the phone away to focus on the view. No matter how I later tried, I couldn't find that message again. That was the case with all system messages. Read or unread, they disappear in no time. It is kind of funny. In that moment I could not have cared less about the message and had only eyes for the girls. Now I can't even remember what it was that they trained, but would very much want to know what it said in that first message. It is not even, that I could look into the changing room, that came later.

In the following weeks I experimented some more with how the system would react. Some of it made sense. Healthy snacks were marked as green, cigarettes were marked red. Some marks were surprising. Like the sandwiches with thin meat stripes, that I recently got into, got a better mark than that fruit salad my sister loved so much. Some of it seemed really strange to me. In general I expected the system to dislike my usual pastimes, like watching girls in the gym (or wherever...) or watching the latest movies. But while most of the movie posters outside the cinema were neutral or red, some were even encouraged. Also some of the more exciting little films, that I could only watch online were somewhat accepted by my new internal compass. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that even the girls I was checking out were judged for me. That wasn't what I had expected. Wasn't this system supposed to make me a better person? Yet here I was, unable to make sense of its reactions and sometimes even unsure, if I just imagined it. If it sounds like this kind of thing should be obvious: well, it was very subtle. At that time I could only see the hints and notifications of the system on my phone and any attempt of recording it made the thing disappear. And as curious, as I was about some of the functions, it just isn't a good idea to walk around, pointing your phone at people and staring at your screen. People really don't like that. Trust me. Also, lining up the phone camera with binoculars is extremely difficult, so getting feedback on my favourite waste of time was also a challenge. That and the lack of any consequences let my interest soon fade. I almost even forgot about the system. Almost. And only until it started messing with me.