CA: How do I even begin?The words clotted in his throat like dust. It had been so long since anything—since everything. He abandoned what he once called talent, left it rotting in some forgotten corner, and what remained now was vermin: a rat laboring beneath the Company's fluorescent hum.
CA reached instinctively for a cup—something to sip, something to break the silence—only to remember he was the coffee. A hollow vessel in a paper skin. What, then, was the point of thirst?
The screen before him bled a white so violent it seemed to erase his eyes. Bleached text shimmered and broke apart like dying insects. This is what you are fated for, the machine whispered in its silence. Pathetic, isn't it? But then again—you wouldn't know, would you, reader? You've never rotted in employment, never watched your marrow siphoned into endless tasks.
Reading had once been his gift. In a world of blind mouths and broken scripts, he was one of the few who could see the shape of words. Now, even that gift betrayed him. The sentences swam. He couldn't discern who employed him, where the work even led, why he was shackled to a chair whose shadow bit deeper than iron. All he knew was this: finish the tasks, and maybe—maybe—you will be free. A rat's dream.
Night pressed against the office windows, dense and unspeaking. Everyone else was gone. Overtime was his only companion. CA allowed his mind to wander—dangerous, treasonous—to an old lover. A face he had nearly erased from memory. Glory days, joy, fire—they had all been smothered into ash. Forgotten to the brim. That was the cruelty of nostalgia: its wildest part was that it once had been real.
Where was everyone?
The phone trembled. A faint buzz, insectile, summoning him away from the paperwork.
CA picked it up. His hands trembled as though carrying eyebags his body no longer bore. What an honor, to be given even the illusion of escape.
The screen glared back.
A message.
He didn't even bother muttering huh. There was no point in performing surprise when comprehension was already absent. His eyes stared into the text as if it were a mirror of static.
You've done well. Surviving this long after the Incident. You are invited.
CA (internally): Invited? Where?
His finger pressed against the message. Nothing. The screen swallowed his touch.
He placed the phone down. That was when it struck him—an imperceptible shift in the air. The oxygen grew thick. Gravity tilted. A heaviness entered the room like an unseen guest.
His instincts—those ancient feral remnants—flared.
He was not alone anymore.