Chapter 1: A Man of Routine and Degeneracy

Gerald Pendleton was a man so predictable that scientists could calibrate atomic clocks using his morning routine. His life ran with the precision of a Swiss watch, if that watch was perpetually stuck in a midlife crisis and had an unhealthy obsession with feet.

Every morning, at exactly 7:03 AM, Gerald's ancient Nokia phone would emit its signature ringtone—a sound that hadn't been changed since 2004 because he genuinely believed smartphones were "a passing fad." The alarm wasn't necessary; his body had become so accustomed to the schedule that his eyes would snap open at 7:02:59 AM, just to watch the clock tick over. It was his one moment of daily excitement.

His studio apartment was a shrine to mediocrity, decorated in various shades of beige because he once read in a 1997 interior design magazine that beige was "timeless." The walls were adorned with exactly three items: a calendar from his local bank (still showing March 2023), a "Hang in There" cat poster that had somehow survived three moves and a divorce, and his prized possession—his accounting degree from the University of Phoenix, which he'd printed himself after completing his online courses.

At 7:05 AM, Gerald would shuffle to his kitchen, his slippers making that distinctive shuffling sound against the linoleum floor—the sound of a man who had given up on life but was still oddly content about it. His breakfast was always the same: one slice of toast, unbuttered, because butter was "too exciting." He'd once tried cinnamon sugar and had to lie down for an hour to recover from the sensory overload.

Then came his most sacred morning ritual. For exactly eighteen minutes—not seventeen, not nineteen—Gerald would open his carefully curated folder of feet pictures on his phone. He had them organized by arch type, toe length, and what he called the "general toe-to-heel ratio aesthetic." It was the kind of dedication that would have made him an excellent art curator if his interests had been literally anything else.

His ex-wife Linda had discovered this folder three years ago. She'd been looking for their tax returns on his phone (which took her two hours because Gerald refused to use folders for actual important documents) when she stumbled upon his "Feet Feet Feet" folder. The fact that he'd named it so obviously was, in her words during the divorce proceedings, "the least surprising thing about the whole situation."

Linda had left him for a man named Blade—a name that Gerald initially thought was a joke until he met him. Blade was everything Gerald wasn't: tall, muscular, confident, and employed in ways that didn't involve Excel spreadsheets. He was 6'4" of pure testosterone with a voice so deep it made Barry White sound like a soprano. The man had six different sources of passive income, none of which Gerald understood because they involved words like "crypto," "dropshipping," and "influencer marketing."

The most infuriating part? Blade didn't even have a real job. He'd once explained his career to Gerald as "basically being too sigma to participate in the traditional workforce," whatever that meant. Meanwhile, Gerald's most notable achievement at work was being known as the "Happy Monday Guy"—a title he'd earned by saying "Happy Monday!" every Monday for the past seven years, thinking it made him quirky and likeable. His coworkers had a betting pool on when he'd finally snap and stop saying it. The pot was currently at $3,427.

As Gerald sat at his tiny IKEA dining table that morning, mechanically chewing his dry toast while scrolling through his morning feet collection, he couldn't help but think about Linda. His life goal had crystallized into something both simple and pathetic: he wanted to sleep with her one last time. He was fully aware of how sad this was, in the same way that a goldfish might be aware of its bowl—vaguely, and without any real understanding of the implications.

He'd even made a vision board about it, though he'd had to use stock photos of feet instead of Linda's because she'd gotten a restraining order preventing him from keeping any pictures of her. The vision board hung in his closet, next to his collection of identical beige ties, each labeled with the day of the week despite being completely indistinguishable from one another.

What Gerald didn't know, as he sat there in his bland apartment, living his bland life, was that the universe was about to hand him the most unbland thing imaginable. But for now, he was just Gerald—a man whose personality could be summed up in a single word: predictable.

And he liked it that way.

Or at least, he thought he did.

Little did he know, his life was about to change more dramatically than that one time he accidentally bought medium-roast coffee instead of light-roast and had to call in sick to work to recover from the shock.