The System notification floated in Marcus's vision like a polite announcement of the apocalypse. [You have been Selected. Class assignment in 00:07:32.]
Around him, the subway car had gone quiet. Eight billion people were reading the same words in whatever language their nervous system had decided was home. The woman across from him — mid-forties, briefcase on her lap, the expression of someone who had been planning their Thursday very carefully — stared at the middle distance with her mouth slightly open. The teenager beside her had already started crying, though whether from fear or excitement Marcus couldn't tell.
He had seven minutes to figure out whether Selected was the good news or the bad news.
The timer ticked. Marcus watched it. He had spent twenty-three years building the particular habit of watching clocks instead of panicking, and it served him now: focus on the information, defer the feeling, act when action is possible.
[06:44 remaining.]
Around the world, and above it, and beneath it, in languages he would never speak and time zones he would never visit, seven billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine other people were having the same thought he was having.
What am I going to get?