The glow of the monitor illuminated Ethan’s desolate apartment. Rain hammered against the windowpanes, mimicking the relentless thrum of heartbreak in his chest. Victoria. Julian Thorne. The words felt like shards of glass lodged in his throat. He’d spent the last few hours alternating between guzzling lukewarm beer and furiously typing gibberish into his code editor, a futile attempt to drown out the reality of the afternoon’s eavesdropped betrayal.

He’d taken on a freelance gig a week ago, a relic of a system used by a small, now-defunct shipping company. They wanted him to poke around, find any vulnerabilities, maybe upgrade it if possible. The system was archaic, written in a language he hadn't touched since college, a digital fossil gathering dust on a forgotten server. Tonight, though, it was a welcome distraction.

He chain-smoked cheap cigarettes, the acrid smoke stinging his eyes as he scrolled through lines of spaghetti code. He’d been hired to find bugs, not solve his own crippling inadequacies. The irony was almost unbearable.

He was deep within a particularly gnarly subroutine, a jumbled mess of nested loops and cryptic comments, when he saw it. A file, tucked away in a hidden directory, with the ominous name "Genesis.sys." The file size was negligible, barely a kilobyte, but the creation date was significantly older than the rest of the system – older than the company itself, by a few decades.

Curiosity, a potent cocktail of boredom and self-destructive tendencies, overwhelmed him. He hadn't been asked to look at this file, probably shouldn't even be touching it. But the thought of delving into its secrets, uncovering a mystery in the midst of his personal chaos, was too tempting to resist.

He downloaded the file to his local machine, running a quick virus scan that came up clean. The file type was unrecognisable; his system couldn't identify its purpose. He opened it in a text editor, expecting to see garbled nonsense, but instead, he found a string of surprisingly well-structured, albeit alien, code. It resembled no programming language he had ever encountered. It was almost… organic.

Intrigued, he tried to compile it, feeding it to every compiler he could think of. Nothing. Each attempt resulted in a cascade of error messages, a digital rejection. He was about to give up, chalking it up to some bizarre proprietary format, when he had a thought. He remembered an old virtual machine he had set up for experimenting with esoteric languages, a digital sandbox filled with forgotten compilers and obscure interpreters.

He fired up the VM, copied the "Genesis.sys" file, and ran it through a long-shot compiler he had downloaded years ago, something called "Aether," a research project from MIT that claimed to be able to interpret "bio-digital code." He hadn’t touched it since, assuming it was just another academic pipe dream.

The Aether compiler whirred to life, its progress bar slowly creeping across the screen. Ethan watched, mesmerized, as lines of code flew by, transforming into something… else. The room grew colder, a strange hum emanating from his computer. He felt a tingling sensation in his fingertips, a faint pressure in his temples.

Suddenly, the progress bar shot to 100%. A single line of text appeared in the console: "System Initialization Complete."

Then, the world went black.

He awoke with a gasp, his head pounding. His apartment was silent, the rain having stopped. The only light came from the glow of his computer screen, which was now displaying a solid blue screen of death.

"Great," he groaned, rubbing his temples. "Just what I needed. Another system crash."

He reached for the power button, intending to reboot the machine, when he noticed something strange. Flickering in the corner of his vision, superimposed on the real world, were lines of text.

*Probability of successful coffee brewing: 87%*

*Probability of traffic delay on I-90: 62%*

*Probability of Victoria calling: 3%*

He blinked, rubbed his eyes, shook his head. The text remained, floating in the air like holographic subtitles. He reached out to touch them, his hand passing right through.

“What the hell?” he muttered, his voice hoarse. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. The text was still there, more lines appearing every second, a constant stream of probabilistic data.

*Probability of finding a matching sock: 91%*

*Probability of running out of milk: 54%*

*Probability of being fired from current freelance gig: 78%*

The last one made him sit up straighter. Fired? But he hadn’t even done anything yet. Besides break their ancient system, apparently.

He tried to focus, to make sense of what he was seeing. Was he hallucinating? Was it a side effect of sleep deprivation, cheap beer, and heartbreak? He pinched himself, hard. The pain was real.

He stood up, pacing the small apartment. Each step triggered a new wave of notifications.

*Probability of tripping over power cord: 23%*

*Probability of finding spare change under couch: 12%*

He carefully navigated around the power cord. He wasn’t sure what was happening, but he wasn’t about to test his luck.

He stumbled into the bathroom, splashing cold water on his face. As he looked in the mirror, he saw more text superimposed on his reflection.

*Probability of liking current hairstyle: 6%*

*Probability of successful job interview today: 42%*

*Probability of dying from caffeine overdose: 0.001%*

He stared at his reflection, his face pale and drawn. The notifications were relentless, a constant barrage of information, both mundane and alarming. It was like living inside a badly designed video game, with pop-up ads that couldn't be closed.

He had to figure out what was going on. He went back to his computer, carefully navigating around the downed machine. He tried to access the virtual machine, but it was completely unresponsive. The crash had been more severe than he initially thought.

He spent the next few hours frantically searching for answers. He Googled “seeing probabilities,” “holographic vision,” “strange code virus.” The results were a mix of conspiracy theories, science fiction articles, and medical websites describing rare neurological disorders. None of it made any sense.

The probabilities continued to flicker in his vision, a constant reminder of his new, bizarre reality. He tried to ignore them, to focus on the task at hand, but they were impossible to ignore. They were everywhere, predicting everything, from the mundane to the potentially life-altering.

As dawn broke, painting the Seattle sky in shades of grey and pink, Ethan felt a surge of exhaustion and a growing sense of dread. He had stumbled upon something extraordinary, something powerful, and something completely unexplainable. He had no idea what the “Genesis System” was, how it worked, or why it had chosen him.

All he knew was that his life had just taken a very strange, and potentially very dangerous, turn. And the incessant notifications popping up in his vision were a constant, infuriating reminder of that fact.

*Probability of having a good day: 0.000001%*

Ethan sighed. He had a feeling this was going to be a long day. He needed coffee. And maybe a therapist. And definitely a way to turn off these damn pop-ups. He just hoped he wasn't going completely insane. Because even if he was, the probability of him enjoying the experience was exceptionally low.