I stood where I was, halfway between the door and the pavement. For a good five seconds my brain ran through the options:

  One, I’d finally gone mad.

  Two, EA had used the cash they could’ve spent on getting licensing of the bloody Brazilian national team on hacking my brain.

  Three, I’d accidentally inhaled one too many burnt sausages and was hallucinating like a lad in a Lidl bakery on a Friday night.

  Then more numbers appeared over the neighbor’s kid kicking a ball. Stamina 55. Aggression 92.

  What the actual, unholy donkey’s arse was happening? I didn’t know, but one thing I do know was that that kid really needed to work on his endurance and temper . . .

  It was like someone had turned the real world into the Football Management interface. Every person had floating numbers, attributes, stars. Even the bloody dog had ‘Determination: 99.’

  Callum frowned, taking a step closer. “Oi, what are you doing, just staring at the street like a muppet?”

  I just stepped aside so he could enter, and Callum eyed me while muttering something about me losing the plot. I didn’t hear him. My brain was already racing: if this was Football Management somehow manifested in real life, maybe I could access his attributes and cross-check them with the online database to see if the numbers matched.

  I stared at the [LOCKED] tag like it had just shagged my non-existent missus. Locked? This wasn’t even part of Football Management Sim. Okay, it was, but you were supposed to be able to see the core stat and roughly make out the rest through scouting. The game wasn’t mental enough to lock your player’s actual attributes behind a paywall.

  But the hideous font . . . That was FMSim’s font alright.

  I poked at the words with my finger. Then a new line appeared:

  Level 1? What was this? Some RPG crossover with real life? Bloody hell, they’d taken the Football Management part of Football Management Sim so far off the rails, it might as well have changed its name to The Sims.

  Then I noticed something that made me freeze again. My own name. Floating there, plain as day:

  And right below it:

  I tried to click on the option with my willpower, and to my surprise, it . . . worked. The box expanded like someone had yanked it from a filing cabinet and dumped it in front of me.

  Okay, so obviously, this thing wanted me to commit to consciously accept this digital nonsense in real life.

  “Jamie!”

  I looked up. Callum was halfway down the hall already, shoving a pair of muddy trainers into his gym bag. “You coming in or what? You’ve been stood out there like a scarecrow for five minutes.”

  “I—yeah. Just—” I gestured vaguely at the air. Which, in hindsight, probably didn’t help my case.

  He squinted at me, one brow arched. “Mate. You takin’ the blue tabs again?”

  “No?”

  “You look like you’re about to start negotiating with your doorknob.”

  He slung the bag over his shoulder, still giving me that weird look then went on, “Swear down, you’re gonna end up on one of them documentaries if you keep staring at nothing. This is why you should get outside and kick a ball with some lads. Shutting in after a 9-to-5 ain’t good for you.”

  I barely heard him. My brain was still locked on the screen floating in front of me.

  I let out a long breath. Callum was right. I hadn’t felt this off in a while. Sitting around moping didn’t help. Maybe . . . just maybe, a tryout wouldn’t hurt.

  “So . . . when’s Mitch free, then?” I asked.

  Callum gave me a long look up and down, then a small smile. “Hit him up yourself, yeah? First rule of coaching is you gotta talk.”

  I watched him go, still staring at the [Accept Quest?] box, hoping it’d make the move for me. After another minute of staring in the dark, I hit Accept.

  The bus ride down had been long, slow, and filled with more coughing than conversation. Hungerford wasn’t exactly close to anywhere that mattered. You knew you’d arrived when the road signs looked hand-painted and the petrol stations offered a full English for a fiver and a suspicious side of beans.

  I got off outside the ground, a proper brick-and-mortar affair that smelled like fried onions. I pushed the gate open, thirty minutes early, feeling smug for once. One side featured a covered seated stand transferred in from another club that looked way too new compared with the rest of the ground’s ageing bits. The standing terraces were mostly simple concrete steps, and the dugouts looked like they’d been repainted once, maybe twice, if you counted. At least the pitch seemed decent enough, in the sense that you could tell you’d slide in without taking a chunk out of your knee.

  Mitch wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  I spotted a bloke fiddling with cones near the far side of the pitch. He looked up, gave me a flat nod. “You here to trim weeds or . . .?” I wasn’t sure if that was a genuine question.

  “I’m here for, uh, Mitch Thompson?” Somehow, my simple statement sounded like a question.

  The bloke raised an eyebrow. “Thompson, yeah? You mean the youth coach?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re over at the 3G pitch, John O’Gaunt. Town Ground’s just for matches.”

  I squinted. “He didn’t tell me that.”

  “Not my fault,” the bloke said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “You’re early, mate. Consider yourself lucky you didn’t show up for a match instead.”

  I muttered under my breath, scowling at the empty stands. Thirty minutes early, and now I’d have to dash across town. Classic Mitch. To be fair, it had been seven years since I’d last seen him. Still, classic Mitch.

  The walk across town took longer than it should’ve, mostly because Hungerford had that special kind of layout where every road looked like it’d been planned by a drunk with a ruler. I cut past a chippy, a charity shop, and two pubs that somehow both claimed to be The Old Something, before spotting the glint of floodlights over the houses.

  The funny thing (yes, there were too many funny things) about English football is that even a Tier 7 team somehow has a youth setup. Doesn’t matter if they can barely afford bibs that aren’t fluorescent relics from 2009, there’ll still be a group of sixteen-year-olds running drills like they’re one good pass away from a Premier League contract.

  You’ve got to admire it, really. This country would build a training ground before it fixes a pothole. I’ve seen blokes with busted knees coaching U12s on pitches flatter than a pub carpet, swearing they’ve got ‘a lad with real potential.’ Even the neighbor’s dog probably plays Sunday League somewhere.

  As I cut through town, I kept catching myself glancing at people passing by, catching the numbers that were supposed to show up over their heads. No glowing bars of Stamina or bloody Aggression. Just boring people going about their days.

  For a second, I actually felt relieved, like whatever FMSim had implanted in my skull had finally uninstalled itself overnight. Maybe the servers had gone down. Or maybe that whole thing last night had been a bug, some mental pop-up ad in my subconscious. Or maybe I hadn’t paid my subscription fee to the FMSim chip implant company.

  Maybe I was fine. Or maybe I’d gone mad in a very subscription-based way.

  Then I realized how wrong I was. The moment I stepped foot into the 3G, the numbers appeared again.