The Overnight Prodigy

Chapter 2: The Dream

The dream didn't feel like a dream while it was happening, which Ethan would later decide was the strangest part of the whole thing.

He was standing somewhere that wasn't quite a room and wasn't quite outside gray in every direction, no walls he could find if he turned around, though turning around didn't feel like it should've been possible either. There was a light ahead of him that wasn't bright so much as present, the way a person standing close to you is present even with your eyes shut.

Ethan Chen, something said, and it wasn't a voice so much as the idea of one, arriving directly in his head without the trip through his ears.

"That's me," he said, because apparently in dreams you just go along with things.

You have been selected to receive the Prodigy System.

"Cool," Ethan said. "What's that?"

The light didn't answer directly. Instead, something unspooled in his mind the way an idea sometimes fully arrives all at once, no thinking required the way you don't reason your way to remembering your own name. He understood, suddenly and completely, that from this point forward, anything he read would stay with him. Anything he listened to, he'd grasp the first time. Anything he watched someone else do, he'd understand the shape of the mechanics, the how even if his own body couldn't do it yet.

Understanding is given freely, the light told him. Mastery is earned. The System teaches. It does not do the work for you.

"That seems like a lot of fine print for a dream."

This is not a dream.

"Sure it isn't."

The light didn't seem interested in arguing the point, which in hindsight should have told him something. It said a few more things something about trials, about tests it would set for him later, about the System weakening if he used it in ways that were cheap or cruel but by then Ethan's attention had already started to slide the way it did in dreams, toward nothing in particular, toward the gray going grayer, toward waking up.

His alarm went off at 6:45 like it did every day of his life, and Ethan lay there for a second with the ceiling swimming into focus, trying to hang on to the dream before it did what dreams did and evaporated the second he moved.

It didn't evaporate.

He could still feel it, weirdly not the gray place itself, but whatever it had left behind, like a room that's still warm after someone's walked out of it. He sat up. He looked at his hands, which was a stupid thing to do, because obviously they looked exactly the same.

"Okay," he said out loud, to nobody. "That was weird."

He got up, got dressed, went through the motions of getting ready for school with the dream sitting in the back of his skull like a held breath. He almost forgot about it twice once brushing his teeth, once looking for a matching sock and each time it came rushing back the second his mind went quiet enough to let it.

Understanding is given freely. Mastery is earned.

It was a strange thing to remember so exactly. Ethan wasn't the kind of person who remembered dreams past breakfast, usually. He couldn't have told you what he'd dreamed the night before, or the night before that, or basically any night in recent memory. But this one sat in his head whole, word for word, like something that had actually happened to him instead of something his brain had made up to pass the time.

He grabbed his history textbook off his desk on the way out not because he'd suddenly developed a study habit, but because a small, stubborn part of him wanted to test something, and testing it at school with witnesses felt safer than testing it alone in his room and having to explain the result to nobody but himself.

Downstairs, his mom handed him a granola bar and told him to have a good day, the way she did every morning, and Ethan said he would, the way he did every morning, and neither of them had any idea that today was going to be the first day in a long time that wasn't going to go the way every other day had gone.