Chapter 6: Viral
The video hit forty million views in eighteen hours.
Jake learned this not from the news or from social media or from the System’s app, which had been silent since the Rift closed. He learned it from his mother, who called him at 6:47 AM on Sunday — an hour that Misuk reserved for emergencies, recipe emergencies, and emergencies that were actually not emergencies but that she had classified as emergencies because the alternative was waiting until a reasonable hour and waiting was not a thing that Korean mothers did when they had information to deliver.
“Jake-ya. You’re on TV.”
“What?”
“Channel 7. Channel 4. CNN. That Korean channel, the one Soyeon watches. You’re on all of them. The video. From yesterday. The blue light.”
Jake was still in bed. The leaning chair had been replaced by the floor, which was less comfortable but more structurally sound. He reached for his phone. The screen was a wall of notifications — hundreds, maybe thousands, a cascade that had been building while he slept, each one a brick in a wall that was getting taller by the second.
He opened Twitter. His face was everywhere. Not his face exactly — the video was grainy, shot through glass from twenty feet away, and the blue light obscured his features — but the hoodie was identifiable, the Nikes were identifiable, and the H Mart in the background was identifiable, and Koreatown was small enough that a guy who regularly bought Shin Ramyun in bulk was not, ultimately, anonymous.
The hashtags were already established. #KoreatownHero. #BlueLightGuy. #InfiniteAwakened. The last one made his stomach drop, because it implied that someone — a commenter, a self-appointed analyst, an internet detective — had connected the video to the concept of Awakened abilities and was speculating about the nature and extent of his power.
He scrolled through the comments. The spectrum was predictable: reverence, terror, conspiracy theories, and the inevitable segment of the internet that argued about whether the video was CGI.
This is clearly fake. You can see the rendering artifacts at 0:14.
My brother was THERE. He saw it with his own eyes. This is real.
The government needs to contain this guy. What if he’s unstable?
He saved those people. He’s a hero.
He’s a weapon. There’s a difference.
Jake closed Twitter. Opened the System app. The white circle on the black background. It loaded slowly, as if considering, and displayed a single message:
PUBLIC EXPOSURE DETECTED.
RECOMMENDATION: ESTABLISH CONTACT WITH HUNTER ASSOCIATION (LA BRANCH).
LOCATION: 633 S. SPRING ST., LOS ANGELES, CA 90014
“Mom, I’ll call you back.”
“Jake-ya, don’t—”
He hung up. He would pay for hanging up on his mother later, in the currency of guilt and galbi-jjim and the specific, sustained disapproval that Korean mothers expressed not through words but through the angle of their eyebrows and the volume of their sighs. But right now, he needed to think.
Hunter Association.
The term had appeared in the news over the last three days. Governments worldwide were establishing organizations to manage the Awakened — registration systems, training programs, deployment protocols. In Korea, it was the Korea Hunter Association, a government body with emergency powers. In the US, it was being called the Hunter Association, a joint venture between FEMA, the Department of Defense, and something called the Bureau of Awakened Affairs that had been created by executive order on Thursday and that existed, as far as Jake could tell, primarily as a website and a mailing address.
633 South Spring Street. Downtown. The old AT&T building — Jake knew it, had walked past it a hundred times, a Beaux-Arts tower from the 1920s that had been converted and reconverted and was now, apparently, the headquarters of an organization dedicated to managing people who could shoot fire from their hands and dissolve monsters with blue light.
He should go. The System was telling him to go. The video was making anonymity impossible. And the warmth in his chest — the compass — was pulling south, toward Downtown, toward the building, toward whatever waited inside.
He should also eat breakfast.
He ate breakfast. The last of the galbi-jjim. Standing at the counter, eating cold galbi-jjim with his fingers because the chopsticks were in the sink and the sink was full and cleaning the sink required energy that he was allocating, at the moment, to the more pressing task of deciding whether to register himself with a government organization that might want to study him or weaponize him or both.
He drove Downtown.
The Hunter Association’s LA branch occupied the third and fourth floors of the AT&T building. The lobby had been converted — hastily, with the aesthetic sensibility of a government operation working under a deadline. Folding tables. Paper signs. A line of people that extended from the elevators to the front door and out onto Spring Street, moving with the glacial pace of any line in any government building in any city at any time in history.
Jake joined the line. He was wearing the same hoodie from the video, because he owned two hoodies and the other one was dirty, and because the concept of disguise had not occurred to him until he was already in line and a teenager in front of him turned around and said:
“Holy shit. You’re the Blue Light guy.”
Jake did not respond. The teenager showed his phone to the woman next to him, who showed it to the man next to her, and within thirty seconds the line had developed a current — a ripple of whispers and stares and phones raised to head height that traveled from Jake’s position to the front door like a wave, like a signal, like the subsonic frequency of the creatures except human and digital and impossible to stop.
“Please don’t,” Jake said to the teenager, who was recording.
“Bro, you’re famous. You literally vaporized three monsters.”
“I’d rather not be famous.”
“That’s the most famous-person thing anyone’s ever said.”
The line moved. Slowly. Jake kept his hood up and his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor, which was the specific, introverted-person strategy for becoming invisible in a crowd and which worked approximately zero percent of the time when you were the subject of a forty-million-view video.
The elevator. Third floor. A waiting room that looked like a DMV that had been redecorated by someone who had seen a DMV but had never been to one — the chairs were too nice, the lighting was too warm, and there was a water cooler with cucumber slices that suggested someone on the setup team had confused “government efficiency” with “wellness retreat.”
Jake took a number. 847. The screen above the counter said: NOW SERVING 612.
He sat. He waited. The warmth hummed.
Two hours later — two hours of sitting and waiting and watching the screen increment and listening to the conversations around him, which ranged from “I can move things with my mind” to “I’m pretty sure I got a rash, is that a power?” — his number was called.
The woman behind the counter was Black, mid-thirties, with close-cropped hair and the expression of a person who had been processing Awakened registrations for four days straight and who had developed, through repetition, an immunity to the extraordinary. She looked at Jake the way a postal worker looked at a package: with professional detachment and a desire to move to the next one.
“Name?”
“Jake Morgan.”
“Date of birth?”
“June 12, 2001.”
“Awakened ability?”
“I, uh — energy projection. Blue light. From my hands.”
She typed. Did not look up. “Rank assessment?”
“What?”
“Have you been rank-assessed? The System app provides a preliminary classification.”
“It said E-rank. For the Rift. But my — it said my mana capacity was—”
He stopped. The word “infinity” sat in his mouth like a marble — hard, round, impossible to say in a government waiting room to a woman who was processing him like a package.
“Was what?”
“It gave an error.”
She looked up. For the first time. The professional detachment flickered — not gone, but cracked, a small fissure in the bureaucratic veneer through which something human and curious peered.
“What kind of error?”
“It said infinity. Three times. Then it said ‘anomaly detected’ and flagged me for review.”
The typing stopped. The woman leaned back. She looked at Jake with the assessment of someone who had, in four days, processed two hundred Awakened registrations and who recognized, in the space between his words and his posture and the specific, uncomfortable way he was standing at the counter, that something about this one was different.
“Wait here,” she said.
She picked up a phone. Dialed a number. Spoke in a voice too low for Jake to hear. Hung up.
“Someone from the Assessment Division will see you. Room 412. Fourth floor.”
“Is that — is that normal?”
“No,” she said. “It’s not.”
Room 412 was an office. Not a waiting room — a real office, with a desk and chairs and a window that overlooked Spring Street and the line of Awakened that was, even now, extending around the block. The desk was occupied by a man.
The man was Korean. Mid-fifties. Silver-haired. He wore a suit that was too good for a government office — the fabric, the cut, the specific quality of tailoring that distinguished a $200 suit from a $2,000 suit. His face was lined but not old, the lines of a man who had spent decades outdoors or under stress or both. His hands were on the desk, folded, still, with the specific stillness of a man who knew how to be still because he had spent years in situations where movement was inadvisable.
“Mr. Morgan. Please sit.”
Jake sat. The chair was comfortable — more evidence that this was not a standard government office.
“My name is Kang Jihoon. I’m the Director of the Los Angeles Assessment Division. Which means I’m the person who evaluates Awakened individuals to determine their rank, their capabilities, and their appropriate deployment.”
“Deployment?”
“Assignment. Role. How you fit into the structure that we’re building to respond to the Rifts.”
“I’m a freelance web developer.”
“I’m aware. I’m also aware that yesterday afternoon, in the intersection of Western and Wilshire, you single-handedly cleared an E-rank Rift in approximately eleven seconds, using an energy projection ability that vaporized three Rift Entities without leaving residue. I’m aware because the video has been viewed forty-three million times and because the System flagged your registration attempt with a code that I’ve never seen before.”
“What code?”
“∞. Infinity. Your mana capacity registered as infinite. The System tried to recalibrate three times and returned the same value. Then it flagged you for review. In five days and twelve thousand registrations worldwide, you are the only individual who has received that flag.”
The warmth in Jake’s chest pulsed. Not from fear. From the sensation of being seen — truly seen, not as a video or a hashtag but as a data point, as an anomaly, as a thing that did not fit the categories and that required its own category.
“I don’t know what it means,” Jake said.
“Neither do we. The System — whatever it is — is new to all of us. We’re learning its rules as we go. But I can tell you what the data suggests.” Kang leaned forward. The suit shifted with him, expensive fabric moving with the body it contained. “Every Awakened we’ve tested has a mana capacity. A number. It determines how much power they can channel before they need to rest and regenerate. The highest capacity we’ve recorded so far is a woman in Seoul — S-rank, the first confirmed S-rank on the planet. Her capacity is 47,000 units.”
“And mine is infinite.”
“And yours is infinite. Which means either the System is malfunctioning — possible but unlikely, given that it hasn’t malfunctioned for anyone else — or you have no upper bound. No ceiling. No point at which your power runs out.”
Jake thought about the intersection. About the three bolts. About the way the warmth had split and duplicated without diminishing. About the way it felt afterward — not depleted, not tired, but settled. As if it had used a teaspoon from an ocean and the ocean hadn’t noticed.
“I want to understand something,” Kang said. “The video shows you clearing three E-rank entities. That’s consistent with a B-rank Awakened. Maybe A-rank, given the speed and efficiency. But your mana reading is infinite. The gap between B-rank performance and infinite capacity is… significant.”
“I was holding back.”
“Were you?”
“Not intentionally. I mean — I didn’t push. I aimed and fired and the creatures died. I didn’t try to push harder.”
“What do you think would happen if you pushed harder?”
Jake looked at his hands. The palms that had glowed in a bathroom and an apartment and an intersection. The hands that had held pork and chopsticks and his mother’s galbi-jjim containers and a dead creature’s absence.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The System told me to exercise caution.”
Kang nodded. Not the dismissive nod of a bureaucrat. The slow, weighted nod of a man who understood that “exercise caution” was, in the context of infinite power, possibly the most important instruction that had ever been given.
“We’re going to need to test you,” Kang said. “Controlled environment. Graduated assessments. We need to understand what infinite means in practice, not just in theory.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. We have a facility in El Segundo — converted aircraft hangar. Reinforced. We’ve been using it for B-rank and above assessments.”
“And what happens after the test?”
“That depends on the results.” Kang stood. Extended his hand. The handshake was firm, professional, the handshake of a man who had shaken many hands and who calibrated his grip to the specific situation — not too strong (not a dominance display), not too weak (not a dismissal), but precise. “Mr. Morgan. Can I give you advice?”
“Sure.”
“The video is out. Your face — or close enough to your face — is out. You’re going to be contacted by media, by military, by governments, by private interests, by people who want to use you and people who want to study you and people who want to fear you. My advice: don’t talk to any of them. Come here. Let us assess you. Let us build a profile that we control, not the internet. Because right now, the internet is deciding what you are, and the internet is not known for accuracy.”
“What if I just want to go home and fix a landing page?”
Kang almost smiled. Almost. The smile of a man who had heard variations of this sentence from every Awakened who had walked through his door — the “I just want to be normal” sentence, the “I didn’t ask for this” sentence, the specific, universal, deeply human sentence of a person confronting the gap between who they were and who they were becoming.
“You can fix the landing page,” Kang said. “But tomorrow, 8 AM, El Segundo. We’ll send a car.”
“I have a car.”
“We’ll send a car anyway. For the route security.”
“Route security? I’m going to a test, not a war.”
“Mr. Morgan. You are the only individual on Earth whose mana capacity reads as infinite. As of this morning, six governments have requested your file. The car is not optional.”
Jake left the office. Took the elevator down. Walked through the lobby and the line and the Spring Street afternoon. The hoodie was up. The hands were in the pockets. The warmth was humming its constant, patient hum.
He drove home. Not to his apartment — to Glendale. To his mother. Because the world had decided that Jake Morgan was the Blue Light Guy and the Hunter Association had decided that he was an anomaly and the System had decided that he was infinite and six governments had decided that he was interesting, but Jake had decided that he was hungry and that his mother was making something and that the table was set and that the chair — the real chair, the one in the kitchen, the one that didn’t lean — was waiting.
He parked. Knocked. The door opened before his knuckles hit the wood the second time.
“You hung up on me,” his mother said.
“I’m sorry.”
“You drove Downtown.”
“How do you know I drove Downtown?”
“I’m your mother. I know everything. Also, the GPS on your phone. I check it when you don’t answer.”
“Mom.”
“Don’t ‘Mom’ me. Sit. Eat. Tell me everything.”
He sat. He ate. He told her everything — the line, the registration, the woman behind the counter, Kang Jihoon, the infinity flag, the test tomorrow, the car, the six governments. He told her about the video, the forty-three million views, the hashtags. He told her about the teenager in line who had called him “bro” and the man with the briefcase who had shown him the footage and the old chestnut vendor who had nodded.
Misuk listened. She ate. She refilled his rice without being asked — the automatic, pre-conscious action of a Korean mother feeding her child, the hand that moved the rice from the cooker to the bowl without interrupting the conversation, without breaking eye contact, without the son even noticing until the bowl was full again.
“You’re going tomorrow?” she asked.
“I don’t think I have a choice.”
“You always have a choice.”
“Mom, six governments want my file.”
“Six governments can wait. Have you called your client?”
“My — what?”
“The dog treats man. Bradley. Have you sent him the dark mode page?”
Jake stared at his mother. The woman who had just been told that her son was the only infinitely-powered Awakened on Earth, that six governments were interested in him, and that a government car was coming for him in the morning — and whose response was to ask about the dog treats landing page.
“No,” he said. “I haven’t sent the dark mode page.”
“Send it tonight. A client is a client. The Rifts don’t pay rent.”
“Mom. I might be the most powerful person on the planet.”
“You might be. You’re also behind on your deliverables. Send the page.”
She stood. Cleared the dishes. Ran the water. The kitchen sounds — the specific, dinner-is-over, dishes-are-happening sounds that had been the soundtrack to every evening of Jake’s life from birth to eighteen and that remained, despite everything, the most comforting sequence of sounds he knew.
He opened his laptop. He built the dark mode page. It took forty minutes. The dog treats looked fine against a black background — organic, earthy, exactly the “dark like the earth” vibe that Bradley had described. He sent the link.
Bradley responded in fourteen seconds.
BRADLEY: Love it!! Can we add a parallax scroll to the hero section?
Jake closed the laptop. Put his head on the table. The warmth hummed.
“Good boy,” his mother said from the kitchen. “Now go home and sleep. Big day tomorrow.”
He drove home. The 134. The 101. The streets of Los Angeles at night, normal again, traffic again, the headlights and the taillights and the sodium-vapor orange and the specific, never-ending, beautiful, terrible hum of a city that refused to stop moving regardless of what fell from the sky.
He went to bed. The warmth went with him. The System app sat on his phone, dark and silent. Six governments wanted his file. Forty-three million people had watched him glow. Tomorrow, a car would come.
But tonight, he had sent the dark mode page. And his mother had said “good boy.” And the galbi-jjim had been warm. And these things — the small things, the human things, the things that existed in the space between the infinite and the ordinary — were the things that mattered.
They were always the things that mattered.