The rejection email had been sitting in Isaac's inbox for three days, and he still couldn't bring himself to delete it.
"After careful consideration, the committee has decided not to proceed with your doctoral dissertation proposal. We appreciate your interest in our program and wish you success in your future endeavors."
Eighteen months of research. Two years of late nights in the University of Lagos library. Four years of his life spent chasing something that died with the click of a send button.
Isaac stared at his laptop screen through the dim light filtering through his apartment's single window. The NEPA blackout had started six hours ago, and his phone was down to eight percent battery. The generator outside Mrs. Adebayo's shop coughed and wheezed like an old man dying, but it wasn't his generator. His neighbors could afford fuel. He couldn't.
The WhatsApp message from his mother still glowed on his phone's cracked screen: "Your cousin Emeka got into Harvard. For his PhD. We are so proud of the family's progress."
The unspoken weight of that message pressed down on his chest like a physical thing. What about you, Isaac? What do we tell people about you?
He closed the laptop with more force than necessary. The plastic creaked in protest.
Outside, Lagos hummed its eternal song; generator noise, car horns, the distant sound of someone's radio playing gospel music. Life continuing around him while he sat in this concrete box, twenty-six years old and going nowhere. The empty cans of Peak milk on his desk caught what little light came through the window. His last meal had been yesterday.
Maybe the day before. Time had started to blur.
Isaac reached for the laptop again, his hands moving without conscious thought. The startup screen flickered to life, draining more precious battery, but he didn't care anymore. Nothing seemed to matter much these days.
His Steam library opened automatically. Dozens of games he'd bought during better times, when his teaching assistant stipend still covered food and rent. Most of them unfinished, abandoned when the weight of his failing research became too much to carry alongside anything that resembled joy.
At the top of his library, Evo-Realm's icon pulsed with a soft blue light. The most popular MMO in the world, they said. Billions of players across every continent. The first game to feature true neural immersion, your real-world skills could bleed into the game, and vice versa. Some marketing gimmick called NeuralSync™ that probably didn't work anyway.
He'd bought it two months ago during a moment of weakness, thinking maybe he could lose himself in something vast enough to forget the shrinking walls of his actual life. But he'd never actually logged in. Creating a character felt too much like admitting defeat, like acknowledging that his real world wasn't worth inhabiting anymore.
Today, defeat felt like mercy.
The character creation screen bloomed across his laptop display, all soft edges and promising light. Isaac didn't read the lore descriptions or study the stat distributions. He just clicked through the options with mechanical precision. Human. Male. Average height. Dark skin. The face that looked back at him from the preview window could have been his brother, if he'd had a brother who smiled.
Name: Isaac. He couldn't even be bothered to invent someone else.
The class selection screen offered him fifteen different paths: Warrior, Mage, Rogue, Healer, all the usual suspects from a dozen other games. But at the bottom of the list, highlighted in faded gray text, sat something different.
Apprentice (Unique - Limited Availability)
No description. No stat preview. No indication of what an Apprentice actually did or became. It looked forgotten, like a placeholder the developers never got around to finishing.
Perfect.
Isaac clicked it without hesitation. The game paused for a moment, as if surprised by his choice. Then a dialog box appeared:
"The path of the Apprentice is untrodden and uncertain. There are no guides, no guarantees, no promises of power or glory. Do you accept the unknown?"
For the first time in days, Isaac felt something that might have been a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Unknown sounds about right," he whispered to his empty apartment.
He clicked Yes.
The world dissolved.
Isaac materialized in what looked like a dying village. The graphics were incredible, he could feel the heat radiating from the sun overhead, smell wood smoke and something else underneath it, something sour and wrong. Thatched roofs sagged under their own weight. Gardens lay fallow, choked with weeds.
In the distance, someone was screaming.
His character's body felt strange, both foreign and familiar. He looked down at his hands, callused, steady, real enough to convince his brain they belonged to him. A rough hemp tunic hung loose on his frame. No armor, no weapons, no glowing interface elements cluttering his vision. Just a small blue dot in the corner of his sight that pulsed gently, like a heartbeat.
The screaming stopped.
Isaac found his feet carrying him toward the sound without conscious decision. Maybe it was game programming, some invisible quest marker guiding him forward. Or maybe it was the part of him that still remembered caring about other people's pain, even when his own had grown too loud to ignore.
He rounded a corner between two collapsed houses and found her.
A woman lay in the mud, her leg bent at an angle that made his stomach clench. Blood pooled beneath her, dark against the packed earth. An older man knelt beside her, his hands pressed against a wound in her abdomen. His fingers came away red.
"Please," the old man said, looking up at Isaac with eyes that held too much knowledge, too much grief. "You have to help her. She's all I have left."
Isaac dropped to his knees beside them. Up close, the woman looked younger than he'd first thought, maybe twenty, maybe less. Her breathing came in short, pained gasps. When she opened her eyes and looked at him, they were brown and warm and completely, impossibly human.
"I don't know how," Isaac said, and his voice sounded strange in his own ears. Rougher than usual, affected by whatever vocal processing the game was doing. "I'm just… I'm nobody."
"You're here," the old man said simply. "That makes you somebody."
Isaac pressed his hands against the wound, feeling wet warmth seep between his fingers. In the real world, he'd faint at the sight of this much blood. Here, his body moved with steady purpose, as if it knew things his mind didn't.
The woman's eyes found his. She tried to say something, but only blood came out.
"It's okay," Isaac heard himself say. "You're going to be okay. I've got you."
It was a lie. He could feel her heartbeat growing weaker under his palms, could see the light in her eyes starting to dim. But he kept talking anyway, kept promising things he had no power to deliver, because sometimes lies were kinder than silence.
She died holding his gaze.
The old man's sob cut through Isaac like a physical blow. Around them, other villagers began to gather, men and women with dirt-stained clothes and faces carved by loss. They looked at the woman's still form, then at Isaac, then at each other with expressions that carried weight no NPC should possess.
"She was the last of the children," a woman said, her voice hollow. "Now there are none."
"The blight took the rest," added another. "This was just... the final mercy."
They spoke like real people. They grieved like real people. When the old man gathered the dead woman in his arms and carried her toward what looked like a common grave, the others followed with the slow, measured steps of a funeral procession Isaac had never scripted, never programmed, never expected.
One of them, a middle-aged man with calloused hands and kind eyes, stopped beside Isaac as he knelt in the mud.
"You tried, Apprentice," the man said softly. "That matters more than you know."
Isaac looked up sharply. "How did you…"
"We can see what you are, even if you can't yet." The man's smile was sad but genuine. "The young ones always start the same way. Thinking they're nobody. Thinking they don't matter."
"I don't understand."
"You will." The man extended a hand to help Isaac to his feet. "The path reveals itself to those who walk it. But first, you have to take the step."
Isaac accepted the help, rising on unsteady legs. His hands were still stained with the woman's blood, virtual blood that felt real enough to make him sick.
That's when he noticed the notification floating at the edge of his vision:
Reputation gained with [REDACTED]: +50
Reputation gained with [Protocol: Unwritten]: +100
New ability unlocked: [Minor Sorrow] - You understand the weight of loss
Protocol: Unwritten. He'd never seen that faction name in any of the wikis he'd browsed before buying the game. Hell, he'd never seen a reputation gain that didn't tell him which group he was dealing with.
"What's Protocol: Unwritten?" Isaac asked, but when he looked around, the villagers were gone. All of them, vanished as if they'd never existed. Only the blood in the mud remained, and even that was beginning to fade.
His laptop's battery warning chimed. Seven percent remaining.
Isaac stared at the empty village square, trying to process what he'd just experienced. The graphics, the emotional weight of the scene, the way the NPCs had spoken, none of it felt like any game he'd ever played. It felt like grief. Real, raw, human grief that somehow reached through the screen and grabbed him by the throat.
For the first time in months, Isaac felt something other than numbness.
It wasn't hope, exactly. But it wasn't despair either.
It was curiosity. And right now, in this moment, that felt like enough.
The blue dot in his peripheral vision pulsed once, gently, like a heartbeat returning to life.
Like a reminder that sometimes, mattering to someone, even someone who might not be real, was the first step back from the edge of disappearing entirely.
Isaac saved his progress and closed the laptop. Outside, the generator coughed once more and fell silent, leaving him in the growing darkness of another Lagos evening.
But for the first time in days, the darkness didn't feel quite so absolute.