Ricardo looked around, hoping to see at least someone like him who had stayed behind. He found none.

Without drivers to hit the brake, a few cars on the streets resumed going forward just to crash on others, while the engines of most simply died down, the advantage of a country that had too few cars with automatic transmission.

The insects were still frozen, but still there. Whatever the system was, it didn't seem to care for anything but sapient species.

As the dizziness and the illness receded, he looked down at his vomit-covered body. He used the sandwich paper to try to clean himself, failed to do so, and ended up taking his shirt off.

After some consideration, he also took his pants off. There was no one around to see him in his underwear anyway, and to be honest, he felt even a little glad to have an excuse to take off his suit and show his body forged through fifteen years of pulling weights at the gym and counting his carbs, even if there was no one to appreciate it.

There was a clothes shop on the other side of the street. Still feeling some weirdness from the surrounding emptiness, he started moving towards it.

He knew he was focusing too hard on stupid things like walking semi-naked, but it was his way of coping. That was his solution to not just keep sitting in shock forever. To not think that some alien force had moved the universe around as if it was nothing, that it had abducted everyone he had ever known, that he was likely alone in an entire world with no purpose...

Slap.

He hit himself hard on the face. He couldn't allow himself to break down. Not in the middle of insect-covered streets. Not with no clothes on.

No.

Find clothes. Take clothes. Put clothes on. Find shelter. Allow himself to have a mental breakdown in there.

He hit the street and for a moment, like an idiot, he waited for the traffic lights to turn green for him. He shook his head and slapped himself one more time.

Focus on the pain of his face. Focus on the insects. Focus on getting clothes.

He crossed the street, stepping on many of the frozen insects on the way, and got to the clothing store. He didn't waste time picking, just took the first things he saw in front of him, but he did briefly check himself in the mirror out of habit.

His black skin was covered by a white T-shirt, blue jeans and black shoes. The T-shirt was tight, showing his large physique well. His honey-colored eyes were still the light focus of his bald head, while his black beard completed the stereotypical thug look.

It wasn't a coincidence that he looked like what most white people would define as a thug. Girls loved the look, especially his sister's friends back in California. The only reason he also hadn't gone for tattoos was that his skin was dark enough that they would barely appear unless he used other colors, but even those didn't go well in black skin.

He had gotten his clothes. Now, to find shelter.

That's when the white box came back.

World Assimilation

Exception Handler

Relocating species POF-12742-333... Done.

Warning! 99 individuals refused to relocate. Further action required.

Commencing Directive Godparent... Done.

Contacting potential Godparents... Done.

96 individuals meet Godchild requirements. Compulsory relocation required.

Compulsorily relocating 96 individuals... Done.

3 individuals remaining. Further action required.

Calculating best course of action...

He was breathing hard. Ninety-nine people had resisted the system, just like him. But now, ninety-six of them had been forced to move no matter what they thought about it.

So there was such a thing as compulsory relocation. In hindsight, it was obvious he wouldn't have been able to resist something capable of changing the location of a universe if it wanted to move him around. He blamed his shocked mind for thinking he was some kind of great defier. Speaking of which, that very universe-moving concept still sounded too absurd to even think about, much less understand.

Now, only three people remained, the trash of the trash, the unwanted, not even meeting the requirements to be taken to the Godparents — whatever they were. He was part of them.

World Assimilation

Exception Handler

Calculating best course of action... Done.

1. Directive Culling - 99% effectiveness

2. Directive Forced Growth - 10% effectiveness

3. Directive Dedicated Tutorial - 2% effectiveness

4. Directive Special Training - 0.1% effectiveness

5. Other Directives too ineffective to list

Checking Directive Culling... Done.

Directive Culling goes against Supreme Directive. Directive Culling denied.

Checking Directive Forced Growth... Done.

Directive Forced Growth engaged.

Ricardo felt grateful that culling him was against the so-called Supreme Directive. The window disappeared, soon replaced by a new one.

Species Directive: Forced Growth

Warning! G species detected. Directive adaptation required.

Calculating best course of adaptation...

1. Relocate to another world - 99% effectiveness

2. Change world - 33% effectiveness

3. Other options too ineffective to list

Checking relocation possibilities... Done.

36 worlds fitting Directive Forced Growth found.

Analyzing... Done.

36 worlds judged too valuable to waste on a G species.

Checking world change possibilities... Done.

World change engaged.

Be advised: destroying soft technology in three seconds...

Soft technology? What was considered soft technology? Three seconds later, he had the answer.

Coldness washed over him an instant before he heard explosions. The TV, computer, and lights in the store exploded, so did the interior of the bundle of vomited clothes he had brought along with him, where he had kept his smartphone.

That was the least of his problems though, as all the cars, traffic lights, and lamps in the street also exploded at once, creating a huge shockwave that pushed him to the floor.

It was good the shockwave made him fall, for pieces of metal and glass came flying from the street, turning the store into a sieve. The clothes on the way doing little to stop the shrapnel from going further into the room.

His ears ringing and his head back to feeling a little dizzy, he slowly stood up. He had been lucky he had come to the store; he didn't think he would have survived unscratched in the park.

But the system wasn't done.

Species Directive: Forced Growth

Be advised: destroying soft technology in three seconds... Done.

Be advised: destroying unchallenging weaponry in three seconds...

He didn't like where that was going. The system was taking the technology and what he guessed were firearms from the world. He didn't have one to check, but that was obvious enough.

More importantly, if forced growth was all about taking away anything that could make his "growth" easier... He better get out of there.

Walking with some difficulty because of the dizziness, he went for the exit.

Species Directive: Forced Growth

Be advised: destroying unchallenging weaponry in three seconds... Done.

Be advised: destroying sapient-made shelters in three seconds...

He didn't stop to think about it; despite having a lot of difficulties, he ran. He ran for his sweet life, barely having time to look around for somewhere safe, before deciding on getting under a truck carcass that wasn't on fire like most of the other exploded vehicles on the street and was high enough to fit his hunky build.

He hit the ground right beside the truck and he rolled inside. The asphalt had been blackened by the previous explosion, was still hot, and was filled with broken glass and dead insects, but he didn't care.

Then the world exploded.

As if all the buildings in sight had been packed full with explosives for controlled demolition, they exploded in layers, from down upwards. Under his unbelieving sight, they all fell.

He was curled into a fetal position to protect himself in the only manner he could, but he had calculated wrongly. Not only were the buildings considered artificial shelters, but the very cargo hold of the truck above him also was, and so were the small tunnels of the sewer system below the street.

Debris and dust rose and came at him, most of the former hitting the truck, a lot of the latter covering the entire city like a thick brown and gray fog. When the cargo hold exploded, the shockwave pressed him hard into the ground, and the heat burned him painfully; only the truck's chassis saved him. The middle of the street imploded slightly, the truck's carcass tilting sideways into it enough to make the truck move a little, and he almost lost his cover.

Debris covered one side of the truck, while on the other side, the one that had tilted down the imploded street, was blessedly unimpeded. A sizeable chunk of concrete had pushed him further into the street and luckily hadn't hit him too hard. He had suffered, his skin open where pieces of concrete and bricks had hit him, burned from the explosion of the cargo hold, and he was coughing hard due to all the dust, but at least he was alive.

Species Directive: Forced Growth

Be advised: destroying artificial shelters in three seconds... Done.

Be advised: forcing 30% of non-sapient living beings to evolve in three seconds...

He was still coughing when a white light appeared close to him, also below the truck. It started as a tiny dot, but in a few moments, it was the size of a baseball. When it reached that size, he understood what was going on. The light had been enveloping a minuscule ant, one of those that required a magnifier to see. That was the ant that was the size of a baseball now. He didn't want to think how big larger animals might have become.

Species Directive: Forced Growth

Be advised: forcing 30% of non-sapient individuals to evolve in three seconds... Done.

Be advised: forcing 30% of evolved individuals to evolve a second time in three seconds...

Panicking, he didn't wait to see if the ant would be aggressive towards him. No, when an animal fears something unknown, something in reach, something they consider dangerous, the animal either fights or flees. Absolute fear has a way to make humanity fall to its most base instincts.

He felt around with his hands, found a piece of concrete big enough to require both of his big hands to hold, and used it to bash the ant.

Well, that was the plan. As the concrete closed in on the ant, the latter shone in white light again, and the rock rebounded harmlessly off of it. Apparently, the system didn't want people meddling with its plans. Instead of insisting on it, he took the chance to, still coughing, roll from under the truck.

It was hard to see through the ridiculous amount of dust that came from the demolitions, and his eyes hurt like hell, but he couldn't allow himself to wait for it to go away. Looking around with great effort, he saw lots of living beings evolving even with his very limited field of view. The ground insects, the plants in the park, the flying insects that seemed to be frozen in place mid-flight.

Some of them were growing larger, others were changing, spikes growing from their bodies, carapaces getting harder, colored goo — green, red, yellow — appearing on their mouths... The changes were myriad.

He didn't stop to sightsee. Instead, he got to his feet and, still coughing and having a hard time seeing through the settling dust, moved to the safest place around.

If there were no artificially made shelters around, the best place would have been a naturally formed cave. But those could only be found in forests, and there were none around. Not that he would enter any place with trees even if he could, considering the shadows of moving vines he could see through the dust in the park.

The second best place, the one he chose, was over the closest pile of concrete that had been a building just a moment before. There, he would be able to detect any oversized insect coming for him. He would also have a terrain advantage and could escape if needed. Ricardo awkwardly ran to it and started climbing.

He would be vulnerable to flying insects up there, but so would he in the ground, where ants, roaches, and spiders were looking like stuff from nightmares.

Adrenaline and absolute panic kept him going despite all the pain and shallow cuts on his body. His throat and eyes were burning the most. He moved stiffly, yet the important part was that he moved.

There were also non-glowing insects everywhere, who still weren't moving. Even among those of the same species, there were some evolving and others not. He had been expecting beings of the same species to evolve together since humanity itself had been judged as a group, but it looked like sapient and non-sapient beings were treated even more differently than he had first thought.

Even stranger was that many of the insects evolving the second time simply... exploded. Forcing them to evolve wasn't a guaranteed golden ticket to power for them.

Species Directive: Forced Growth

Be advised: forcing 30% of evolved individuals to evolve a second time in three seconds... Done.

Be advised: forcing 1% of twice-evolved individuals to evolve a final time in three seconds...

The text told him of the world becoming even more dangerous, and he swore in his mind. He would've done so aloud, but his mouth was too dry for it.