My old man still keeps a phonebook.

  Not a digital type, either. He had that yellowing, ink-stained relic with curling pages and names that mean nothing to anyone under forty. The old fella said it was good to know who was still around. He never checked that half of them are dead.

  He’d sit at the kitchen table every Sunday morning with a mug of builder’s tea, flipping through it like it was scripture. “Might give Alan a ring,” he’d say. Or Pete, or Ronnie, or some other name I’d never met but somehow still owed him a pint. Half the time he wouldn’t even call, but instead just find the number, nod to himself, and shut the book again like he’d done his duty.

  I found myself staring at his name in my own phonebook (the digital kind, of course). Dad.

  There’d been a time I’d have called him first. Before the ban. Before we both decided silence was safer.

  We’d talked after it happened, but not properly. Him telling me to keep my head down, me telling him I was. The usual performance.

  After that, calls turned into texts, and texts turned into nothing.

  So there I was, thumb hovering over his name, knowing I wouldn’t press it. What would I even say? Hey, Dad, remember that time I broke your heart and the FA agreed with you? Yeah, right.

  I put the phone down, then picked it back up again and started scrolling.

  Most names on the screen were ghosts—lads I’d played with, managers, agents, journalists who still owed me a favour or thought I owed them one. All the football lot; the kind of people who’d turn a conversation into a leak before the line even went dead.

  I needed to talk to someone, but not someone who “knew ball.” I needed someone who didn’t care about offsides or corner counts or the bloody Sports Compliance Authority.

  If word got out about the FMSim simming inside my head, it’d be front-page mockery before morning. I’d be “Ex Match Fixer Loses It, Sees FIFA Ratings in Real Life.”

  Then I saw Stella Turner’s name. My cousin never watched football. Her idea of physical activity was rage-quitting over bad Wi-Fi.

  My cousin. Occasional nuisance. Certified loudmouth. But she’d keep her gob shut if I told her to.

  Stella was a freelance QA tester by trade and an exploit archaeologist by calling. From what I’d heard, she could sniff a memory leak from three builds away, reverse-engineer a save file blindfolded, and crash a live server with a single malformed packet just to watch the logs scream. If anyone could treat the floating HUD in my skull like a rogue debug overlay and the ticking stats like live RAM values begging to be poked, it was her. And if she believed me (which she would, because she’d once patched a dragon into a teacup and called it Tuesday), she’d keep it locked tighter than a dev console on release day.

  The phone rang once. Then came that bright, caffeinated voice, like she’d necked ten cans of Red Bull and chased them with a triple espresso just to stay baseline.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “Bloody Jamie!” she chirped, already laughing at something, probably on her second monitor. She was always at her desk, headset clamped to her skull, three screens glowing like a cockpit—freelance QA tester by day, raid leader by night, spotting game-breaking bugs in her sleep and pulling all-nighters to fix them before the patch dropped. “How you doing, love? And before you ask, no, I still haven’t returned your hoodie from 2019.”

  I said, rubbing my temple. “I, uh, just needed to talk.”

  “Oooh, talk,” she said, in that mock-serious tone she reserved for gossip. “You knocked someone up? Sold the Bentley to buy crypto again? Don’t say it’s football, I’m begging you.”

  “Not football,” I lied. Then, “Well, sort of football.”

  She groaned so loud I could almost smell the energy drink. “Christ, I said don’t say football. What’s happened now? You get possessed by FIFA’s ghost?”

  I shuddered at how close to the truth that sounded. “Something like that.”

  “You know I’m in the middle of a ranked match, right?” she said. “There’s a twelve-year-old across the world who’s about to learn why I’m banned from three servers.”

  “Still gaming, then?” I asked.

  “Still married to Gary,” she shot back. “It’s either this or talking about garden decking.”

  “I’ll wait,” I said. “End of the match, ring me back.”

  “Give me five.”

  The line clicked dead. I stared at the ceiling, thinking about how she’d bothered to actually answer me mid-game.

  There were so many things about the UI that made no sense. Every overlay felt like it had been designed to punish me personally. The Reputation Level was right there in the corner, glaring like some neon warning, but trying to drill down into it was like punching air. Click the button, type the command, hover over the icon—nothing worked.

  There was no way to see how it was calculated, no way to access the different tiers or what points were even worth. I’d tried every permutation like reputation, rep, or even street cred, yet was met with silence every time.

  It was almost impressively bad. The UI felt like a trap, a cruel joke designed to frustrate anyone who got close to understanding it. The only feeling worse than navigating this joke of a system was trying to set training routines on FMSim 26 Beta during launch day without punching a wall.

  Exactly five minutes later, my phone buzzed.

  “Alright,” she said, breathless but focused now. I couldn’t hear the clatter of keys anymore. “Match over. Twelve-year-old’s in therapy. God, that felt good. Anyway, you won’t believe the day I’ve had. Client sent me a build at four a.m. with a note that just said ‘urgent hotfix.’ Urgent? The bug was a floating teacup in the tutorial. A teacup. I nearly invoiced them for emotional distress. And Gary—don’t get me started on Gary. Comes in last night, stands in the doorway like he’s about to announce the lottery numbers, and goes, ‘I’ve been thinking we should rip up the patio.’ The patio, Jamie. We don’t even sit on it. The cat uses it as a toilet. I told him if he wants to dig up concrete he can start with the driveway and bury his own ego in the hole. He just stared at me like I’d asked him to solve world hunger.”

  I opened my mouth, but couldn’t find a gap to talk. She never even stopped to take a breather. Every breath she took was just fuel for her verbal diarrhea.

  “—and then this morning he leaves his mug in the sink again, right next to the dishwasher he swears he can’t hear running. I swear the man’s got selective deafness, only works when I’m—”

  “Stella,” I cut in. My voice crackled like a bad headset mic, “I see floating UI above people’s heads.”

  Dead air. For the first time in my life, Stella Turner was silent long enough for the fridge in my flat to hum louder than her.

  I braced for the laugh, the ‘mate, you’re proper fucked in the head’ I’d been dreading.

  Then she said, “For real?”