Knock, knock, knock…
The frantic banging on the door yanked Alex Thompson out of a dead sleep. He groaned, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and stumbled out of bed in his tiny studio apartment in a rough patch of Chicago's South Side. The digital clock on his cluttered nightstand flashed 7:32 AM—way too early for this crap.
Still groggy, Alex, who wasn't big on sleeping in anything but his boxers, snatched a faded Nirvana tee off the floor, tugged it on, and slid into some worn-out Nikes. He was halfway to the door when a voice straight out of a drill sergeant's nightmares roared from the other side, "Yo, Alex! You better have my rent today, or you're out on the street! You got the balls to crash here, but not to open the damn door?"
Oh, hell nah. Alex didn't need to hear more to know it was Mrs. Nowak, his loud-as-hell landlady who looked like she could arm-wrestle a bouncer and win. Her gravelly voice was like a jackhammer, and he could already picture her out there in her gaudy tracksuit, hands on hips, ready to tear him a new one.
He shook his head, trying to shake off the mental image. Not today, lady. He checked his phone—rent wasn't due for another week! But Mrs. Nowak had been riding his ass every other day, pounding on his door like she was starring in a Chicago PD episode. Worse, she had a creepy thing for him. Alex wasn't exactly a Hollywood heartthrob, but at 24, with his Ranger-sculpted frame and a jawline that could cut diamonds, he'd caught her staring a bit too long.
He still got chills thinking about that one time she came to "collect rent" and flashed a crooked, cigarette-stained grin. "Alex, kid," she'd said, her hand lingering on his arm, grazing his bicep like she was sizing up a steak. "Can't pay up? I'm sure we can… figure something out." That wink was straight out of a low-budget rom-com, and Alex had nearly bolted. He'd forced a grin, mumbling, "Nah, Mrs. Nowak, I'll have it by Friday, no cap," just to get her to bounce. Since then, she'd been relentless, like she was plotting to cast him in her own personal rom-com. Hard pass, fam.
Alex leaned against the door, listening as her heavy footsteps stomped off, probably back to her own unit upstairs. He let out a breath. Growing up in a tiny town outside Bozeman, Montana, he'd dealt with worse than pushy landladies. His grandpa, a grizzled Vietnam vet who'd seen some real shit, had raised him on tales of combat while teaching him to shoot a .22 rifle by age 8 and a Glock 19 by 12. "A man's gotta stand his ground," Grandpa would say, squinting down the range with that old-school swagger. Those lessons stuck, even after the old man passed a few years back. To honor him, Alex had enlisted in the Army at 17, straight outta high school, with Mom signing off. He'd gone hard, grinding through Basic at Fort Moore, Georgia, then Airborne School, and finally RASP to join the 75th Ranger Regiment. Four years of being a straight-up badass—leading squads, jumping out of planes, running ops in dusty corners of the Middle East—had made him a damn good soldier. Until a botched parachute jump in '22 jacked up his ACL. Medically discharged at 21, he'd come back to civilian life with a limp, a GI Bill, and a fire to prove himself.
Now, in 2025, at 24, he was hustling as a junior coder at a sketchy tech startup in Chicago's Loop. After rehabbing his knee (it only acted up on long runs now), he'd burned through a two-year computer science degree at Arizona State, thanks to the GI Bill. Coding was his new mission—Python and JavaScript replaced M4 carbines and night raids. But civilian life? It felt like a cage sometimes. The bills didn't help. His gig paid $62K a year—decent for a rookie dev—but Chicago rent was straight-up extortion at $2,000 a month for this closet of an apartment. Add in food, his Spotify for bumping Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, and the occasional wings with his college crew, and he was barely keeping his head above water. He'd been stacking cash, little by little, until last September when Mom hit him up. The family was buying a condo in Bozeman for him to settle into one day. They had $180K saved, but the down payment needed another $12K. Alex, the only kid, wired every dime he had—$10K plus some change—because family was family, and that condo was his future.
Then his luck went to hell. A week after sending the money, his first startup crashed—bankrupt, gone, poof. No severance, just a "peace out" email. He bounced back quick, landing a system maintenance gig at another company, only to find out it was a front for some shady-ass crypto scam. Feds raided the place, and Alex was out of a job again—no paycheck for six weeks of work. For the past half-month, he'd been hitting up every dev job in Chicago, but nothing stuck. His bank account? $800 and some pocket lint. Real baller shit, right?
He flopped onto his sagging couch—a Craigslist find that smelled like regret and cheap beer—and glared at the water-stained ceiling. "Yo, universe," he muttered, flipping off the sky, "you wanna fuck me over any harder?" Maybe it was the exhaustion or the stress, but he felt a spark of that old Montana grit, the kind that got him through Ranger training.
Then, ding—a sharp sound echoed in his head, like a text alert but… inside his brain. Before he could process it, a perky, almost too-hyped voice—like some Gen Z influencer—chimed in his skull: "Yo, congrats, my dude! You just unlocked the Baller Sign-in System! Check in daily, and you'll score straight-up epic rewards. Wanna sign in today?"
Alex froze, his hand still raised in a middle finger to the ceiling. What the hell? Was he tripping? Too many energy drinks? But the voice hit again, all bubbly and pushy: "Hey, host! You signing in or nah?"
He'd binged enough sci-fi on Netflix and scrolled enough Reddit to know what this sounded like. A system. Like those overpowered dudes in anime who get cheat codes to run the game of life. Hallucination or not, he wasn't about to sleep on this. Leaning back, he muttered, "Aight, sign me in."
Ding! "Sign-in successful! Congrats, host, you snagged the Newbie Starter Pack!"
Alex's heart did a backflip. This was either the dopest thing ever or he needed a shrink, ASAP. "What's in the starter pack?" he asked, half-expecting the room to stay silent.
The voice popped off again, "Yo, you don't gotta talk out loud, bro. Just think it, and I'm in. Wanna open that starter pack?"
Alex's mind was racing. A system? Called the Baller Sign-in System? This was some Iron Man-level tech. He thought hard: Open the damn pack.
A flash of light hit his eyes, and a glowing blue interface materialized in front of him, like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster. It hovered like a hologram, complete with his face in the corner—scar on his left eyebrow from a Ranger training fumble and all. Below his avatar was a grid, like a video game inventory. Smack in the center sat a shiny red gift box, pulsing like it was straight out of a Marvel flick.
Ding! The voice chimed again. "Congrats, host! You just scored a penthouse condo in the sickest building in Chicago—a fully decked-out, smart-home, top-floor duplex at One Chicago!"
Alex's jaw hit the floor. One Chicago? That was the bougie-ass high-rise downtown where tech moguls and wannabe rappers flexed their clout, with rooftop bars and views of Lake Michigan. A place like that cost millions—way out of his league. He blinked, expecting the hologram to vanish, but it didn't. This was real. Or at least, real enough to ride with.
He leaned forward, a smirk creeping up. "Aight, system," he thought, "let's see how baller this gets."
Chicago was a beast compared to the wide-open plains of Montana. Back home, Alex had grown up in a speck of a town where the biggest drama was a bar fight or a deer wandering into someone's yard. His grandpa's cabin was where he'd learned to shoot—everything from a .22 to an AR-15. Grandpa had been a hardass, all "lock it down" and "sight picture, trigger discipline," but he'd loved Alex like nobody else. When he passed, Alex vowed to make him proud, which led to the Rangers. Those years had forged him—taught him to stay icy under pressure, to plan three moves ahead. Now, coding was his new warzone, but the grind felt familiar.
The city's hustle was relentless—honking cabs, L trains rattling by, and winters that froze your soul. Alex missed Montana's big sky, but Chicago's tech scene was where the money was. He'd been grinding at his startup, debugging code while blasting Drake's latest album, dreaming of the day he'd stack enough cash to buy a decked-out F-150 or maybe even hit a Hollywood premiere. The dream was to go big—maybe fund a screenplay, walk a red carpet, live that A-lister life. For now, though, it was him, his laptop, and Mrs. Nowak's rent threats.
As he stared at the glowing system screen, Alex felt a rush. No more scraping by, no more dodging landladies. If this system was legit, he was about to go from zero to hero, Avengers-style.