Alex's fingers hovered over the keyboard as the cursor blinked after two words: "of course."
He stared at them for a moment, the screen's harsh glow illuminating his tired face in the darkening apartment. The evening had settled into that particular shade of gray that made everything feel distant and muted, like watching life through dirty glass. His coffee had gone cold an hour ago, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd bothered to get up and make a fresh cup, he liked it cold anyway. Friday night, and he was sitting alone in the dark, arguing with an AI about the nature of human potential and achievement.
Twenty-eight years old and this was his life.
He pressed Enter and watched the message send, then his gaze drifted across the desk to the framed photograph sitting beside his keyboard. His family, back when things still felt like they might lead somewhere interesting.
The photo had been taken at his high school graduation—his mother's smile was proud but tinged with something he'd only recognized years later, that subtle disappointment parents tried to hide when their children turned out merely adequate instead of exceptional. His father's hand rested heavy on his shoulder in the photo, solid and supportive, but even that gesture carried an unspoken question that had followed him through every year since: when was he going to make something of himself?
The photo pulled him backward through time, and he let himself drift into memory while waiting for the AI's response.
His childhood had been decent in all the ways that sounded good on paper sure, but meant nothing in practice when you actually had to live it. His parents had been solidly upper middle class—his father worked as a manager at an insurance company, his mother running a relatively well known coffee shop just down the lane of their house—which meant they had enough money, enough to not care sometimes when your tired at night and might want to go to that new expensive restaurant, enough that he could live comfortably, money was never a problem.
The house was nice enough, in a neighborhood where everyone seemed to be climbing toward something better while his family stayed comfortably in place, neither rising nor falling.
He remembered elementary school with that peculiar clarity that came from revisiting the same memories over and over, trying to figure out where things had gone wrong. He'd been a decent student, the kind who got As and Bs on report cards without too much effort, but never the straight-A student that teachers singled out for special attention, he didnt care anyway.
His manners were good. His math was competent but not remarkable. He could read at grade level and comprehend what he read, but he didn't devour books the way some kids did, getting lost in imaginary worlds for hours at a time.
There was always someone better. Always. Xiao Chen got perfect scores on every math test and competed in state-level competitions. Sarah won the school science fair three years running with projects that seemed impossibly advanced. Even in gym class, where Alex had assumed his decent height of 6'2 and coordination would count for something, there were kids who moved with a natural athleticism that made everything look effortless while he struggled to keep up.
Middle school had been worse, that awkward transitional period where social hierarchies solidified and everyone started to understand their place in the pecking order, everyone had a group, so finding new friend was difficult.
Alex had made the soccer team in seventh grade, which should have been an accomplishment, but he spent most games on the bench watching talented players dominate the field. His coach—Mr. park, who always smelled faintly of cigarettes and coffee—would pat him on the shoulder after games and say things like "good effort out there" and "you're a great team player," which Alex eventually learned was code for "you're not good enough to actually play but we can't cut you because your parents pay the league fees."
He'd had friends, sort of. A loose group of other kids who ate lunch together and sometimes hung out on weekends, but he was never anyone's best friend, never the first person someone called when something exciting happened. Marcus Williams and Jake Peterson were inseparable, always making inside jokes and finishing each other's sentences. Emily had been best friends with Ashley since kindergarten, with a bond that seemed unbreakable. And Alex?
Alex floated on the periphery, welcomed into the group but never quite central to it, always replaceable in a way the others weren't. At first he too had aspiration, to be the core, the center of attention, but soon that too faded away. Because he understood the truth, he was not worthy of that.
High school had felt like his chance to reinvent himself, to finally break out of the "average" mold he'd been stuck in. He'd tried so many things, chasing that elusive spark that would make him stand out. He joined the debate team and discovered he was a competent speaker but lacked the quick-thinking brilliance of the top debaters who could turn an argument on a dime. He took advanced placement classes and got Bs where other students got As without seeming to study as hard. He even tried theater for a semester, thinking maybe he'd discover some hidden talent for performance, but his audition for the spring musical landed him in the ensemble where he spent the entire show waving his arms in the background while more talented students took center stage.
His parents tried to be supportive, but he could see the confusion and disappointment growing behind their encouraging words. They'd given him every advantage they could afford—SAT prep courses that cost hundreds of dollars, private tutoring in subjects where he struggled, extracurricular activities that looked good on college applications—but none of it seemed to translate into the kind of achievement they'd hoped for.
His mother would ask about his grades and he'd tell her about his B in calculus, and she'd smile and say "that's wonderful honey" in a tone that made it clear she'd been hoping for more. His father would attend his soccer games and cheer from the sidelines, but Alex could see the disappointment when all he did was run around a little and pass instantly if he got the ball.
Senior year he'd applied to a dozen colleges with his guidance counselor Ms. Wong's help, carefully crafting a narrative of well-rounded achievement that masked the fundamental mediocrity of his actual accomplishments. He got into his safety schools easily enough, got waitlisted at his target schools, and got rejected from his reach schools without even a courtesy interview. He'd ended up at State—a perfectly respectable state university with a decent engineering program, not MIT or Stanford or any of the elite schools where true excellence was rewarded, but good enough for someone like him.
University had started with promise, that fresh-start feeling that maybe this would be different, that college would be where he finally found his stride. The engineering program was challenging but manageable, and for the first semester he'd even felt somewhat ahead of the curve, coasting on knowledge from his AP courses in high school. But by second semester the genius of his classmates started to show through the initial adjustment period.
There was Jennifer, who seemed to intuitively understand concepts that Alex had to study for hours to grasp. She'd show up to study sessions having barely looked at the material and still ace exams while Alex struggled to maintain a B- despite spending every evening in the library. There was David, whose father was a senior engineer at a major tech company and who seemed to have absorbed advanced knowledge through osmosis, speaking fluently about concepts that weren't even in the curriculum yet. That was enough about them, it was not like he cared.
He'd joined study groups and gone to office hours religiously, done every practice problem in the textbook, stayed late in the computer lab debugging code until his eyes burned from screen fatigue. He worked harder than most of his classmates, harder than some of the students who were getting straight As, but his grades stayed stubbornly in the B range. When he pushed himself to the absolute limit, staying up until three in the morning cramming for exams and surviving on coffee and anxiety, he could sometimes scrape an A minus. But it never felt sustainable, never felt like something he could maintain long-term, and he'd always crash afterward, sleeping through classes and letting other assignments slip while he recovered.
The internship hunt in junior year had been particularly brutal. He'd spent months polishing his resume, practicing interview questions, attending career fairs in his best button-down shirt and most professional tie. He'd applied to thirty companies and gotten three interviews, all of which ended with polite rejection emails thanking him for his interest but informing him they'd decided to go with other candidates. Meanwhile his classmates—the ones with better GPAs, the ones with connections through family or friends, the ones who interviewed well because they had that indefinable charisma he lacked—were getting multiple offers from top companies and actually had the luxury of choosing between them.
He'd ended up with a summer internship at a medium-sized tech company that mostly had him doing grunt work nobody else wanted to do, fixing bugs in legacy code and attending meetings where he was the most junior person in the room, nobody would ask for his opinion. It was something to put on his resume, at least, but not the kind of prestigious internship that opened doors or led to full-time offers. He spent three months sitting in a cubicle, feeling like he was playing at being an engineer while the real engineers around him did actual important work.
Senior year he'd spent begging for a job, he did not have 'multiple choices' but it was alright, he didnt care.Alex got one offer from a generic tech company that was well heard of, doing development work for a generic salary, and he'd accepted it immediately because he had student loans to pay. he couldn't afford to be picky.
Graduation had been anticlimactic. His parents came and took photos and said they were proud, but he could see the question in their eyes: this was it? Four years of expensive education for a job that could have been filled by anyone with a basic computer science degree? He'd walked across that stage in his cap and gown, shook hands with the dean, and received his diploma knowing that he was about to disappear into the vast ocean of interchangeable office workers doing hard work for adequate pay and never make any real impact on the world.
The job he'd landed after graduation was exactly what he'd expected by that point—a reflection of every pattern that had defined his life so far. The company was one of those medium-sized tech firms that existed in every major city, not a startup with exciting prospects or an established giant with prestige and resources, just a company that made business software for other businesses that nobody outside the industry had heard of.
His cubicle was on the third floor of a building that looked like he had seen them in every movie, with fluorescent lights that gave everything a sickly tint and climate control that kept the temperature just slightly too cold to be comfortable. The cubicle itself was identical to every other cubicle in the office—beige walls, standard desk, cheap office chair that hurt his back if he sat in it too long.
The first year he'd tried to be that ambitious employee who stood out, who volunteered for extra projects and suggested improvements to workflows. He'd written detailed documentation for systems that nobody read, refactored code to make it more efficient in ways that nobody noticed, stayed late to help with deadlines that wouldn't have been tight if management had planned better. And he'd watched other people get credit for his work, watched the guy with better social skills and worse technical knowledge get promoted to team lead, watched the woman who played golf with the department head get transferred to the more interesting project that he'd explicitly asked to join. he got a promotion here and there too, but never THE promotion, team lead that is.
By year two he'd learned to just do his assigned work competently and nothing more. Show up at nine, leave at five, don't make waves, collect his paycheck. He watched on, thats all he did really, watch as people rushed forward in this rat race, did they not realize that in the end... even if you win, your still a rat.
So he stopped trying. Stopped suggesting improvements that someone else would take credit for. Stopped staying late to help meet deadlines. Stopped caring about the quality of work beyond whatever minimum standard would keep him from getting fired. He became exactly what the system seemed to want from him—a replaceable cog who did adequate work and caused no problems and expected nothing in return except his twice-monthly paycheck and health insurance he barely used.
His personal life had followed the same trajectory. He'd tried dating after college, gone through the motions of profiles on apps and awkward first dates at coffee shops, but nothing ever seemed to develop into something real. There'd been Emily who he'd seen for two months before she ghosted him after they'd slept together twice, apparently deciding he wasn't interesting enough to warrant even a breakup conversation. There'd been Rachel who he'd really liked, who'd seemed to like him back, but she eventually told him she was "looking for something different", it was not like he was ugly, in fact he looked better than most, a sharp jawline, almost visible abs and even some muscle. He could almost be called somewhat hot.
He'd stopped trying about a year ago. Deleted the dating apps, stopped accepting invitations to social events where his friends half-heartedly tried to set him up with someone. What was the point? He'd proven over and over that he wasn't good enough at relationships any more than he was good enough at anything else. Better to just accept being alone than to keep subjecting himself to the slow realization that whoever he was seeing had decided he wasn't worth the effort. He did not had to have the entire woman population reject him before coming to this realization.
His apartment reflected his general state of existence too—adequate but uninspired, furnished but impersonal. He'd been living here for three years, hadn't bothered to hang any art on the walls beyond the one framed photograph of his family, he was just not that type of person. The kitchen had basic cookware that he rarely used because cooking for one person felt depressing. The bedroom had a bed and a dresser, nothing else. It was shelter, a place to sleep and store his possessions, but it had never become a home.
His routine had calcified into something mindless and unchanging. Wake up at seven thirty, shower, eat cereal while checking his phone, drive twenty minutes to work, sit at his desk for eight hours doing meaningless work, drive home through, eat something quick and unsatisfying for dinner, waste a few hours on the internet or watching shows he didn't really care about anymore, go to sleep around midnight, repeat. Weekends were slightly different but not better.
Twenty-eight years old with rent paid and bills covered, living alone in an apartment. Comfortable in the material sense, sure, but empty in all the ways that actually mattered. Empty of purpose, empty of passion, empty of any sense that what he did day to day had meaning beyond just continuing to exist for another day.
His belief had crystallized over those years into something hard and unshakeable, tempered by experience after experience that proved the same point: circumstances determined outcomes, talent was innate, and luck was everything. Hard work was just a story lucky people told themselves to feel like they deserved their advantages. The world was rigged from birth, and people who claimed otherwise were either delusional or lying to make themselves feel better.
He'd had every advantage he could reasonably ask for—decent intelligence, stable family, good education, no major tragedies or obstacles to overcome—and he'd still ended up exactly here, If someone with his head start couldn't break into anything better, what chance did anyone born with less have? It was proof that the whole system was predetermined, that mobility was a myth, that the winners were chosen at birth and everyone else was just going through the motions pretending they had a chance.
They told stories of poor people rising to riches, but they ignore how the person who was able to do it was a genius, uncompleted. If a genius did something, ofcouse he would be good at it, that's what they were after all, superior
A notification sound pulled him out of the past, and he blinked at the screen as his mind reoriented to the present.
The AI had responded.
He'd gotten home from work about an hour ago and immediately seen news about the new AI model launch dominating his social media feeds. Curiosity had gotten the better of him—or maybe just boredom—so he'd downloaded the application and opened the interface, expecting another disappointing chatbot that gave canned responses to basic questions.
But this one had been different from the start. The interface was sleek and modern, More importantly, the responses felt alive in a way that previous AI chatbots never had. He'd started with simple questions—work-related stuff about debugging techniques, random historical facts, weird hypotheticals about time travel and paradoxes. The AI had kept up effortlessly with answers that felt genuinely thoughtful rather than algorithmically assembled from the most statistically likely word combinations.
Then he'd gotten bolder with his questions, probing into philosophical territory about meaning and purpose, success, and the AI had given him answers that were uncomfortably perceptive. It felt less like talking to a program and more like talking to something that could read between his words and understand what he wasn't saying explicitly.
That's when the AI had asked him a question that made his shoulders tense and his jaw clench.
"Are you satisfied with your life, Alex?"
He'd stiffened in his chair, fingers pausing over the keyboard. How did it know his name? Right—he'd logged in with his account when downloading the application. Still, seeing his name rendered on screen like that made the conversation feel uncomfortably personal, like it had moved beyond the safe distance of human-to-machine interaction into something more intimate.
"Define satisfied," he'd typed back, buying himself time to think about how to respond.
"Do you believe you've achieved what you're capable of achieving, all and every bit of it?"
And that question hit somewhere deep and raw, triggering defensiveness that rose in his throat like bile threatening to choke him. This machine didn't get to ask him that, didn't get to poke at wounds he'd spent years carefully bandaging over. His fingers moved across the keyboard before he'd fully thought through what he wanted to say.
"People don't achieve things because they're capable," he typed, the words coming faster as his irritation built. "They achieve things because they're born that way, with talent or luck. Capability is just another word for privilege in disguise. The whole narrative about hard work and determination is propaganda designed to make people blame themselves when the system was rigged against them from the start."
The AI's response came almost instantly, as if it had been expecting exactly this kind of pushback. "Interesting perspective. What about individual effort? Does that count for nothing in your worldview?"
Alex let out a bitter laugh that echoed in his empty apartment, the sound harsh and humorless. His fingers practically attacked the keyboard as he typed his response. This bastard.
"Effort is what lucky people tell themselves so they can feel like they deserve their success. Like they earned it through hard work instead of just being born in the right place at the right time with the right genes and the right connections. It's a comforting lie that lets them sleep at night thinking they're better than people who have less, when really they just won the lottery at birth."
There was a pause—longer than the previous response time, just enough to make Alex wonder if he'd somehow broken the AI's logic or stumped its algorithm. But then the words appeared on his screen.
"You seem very invested in this worldview," the AI replied, the text somehow managing to convey a sense of curiosity despite being emotionless characters on a screen. "May I ask what specifically led you to this conclusion? Was there a particular experience that solidified this belief?"
His jaw clenched and he found himself typing faster, the words spilling out before he could stop them or consider whether he really wanted to bare his frustrations to an artificial intelligence. But something about the anonymity of it, the fact that this wasn't a person who could judge him or pity him or dismiss his experiences, made it easier to be honest. He didnt care after all.
"Because I've lived it," he typed, fingers hitting the keys harder than necessary. "I had every advantage you could reasonably ask for. intelligence—not genius level but above average. Stable family with parents who cared and supported me. Good education at respectable schools. No major obstacles to overcome. And I'm still a nobody. Still sitting in a mediocre job doing with no prospects of anything better. If someone like me with all those advantages can't break out of being average, what does that say about people who start with less? It proves the whole system is rigged from birth, that social mobility is a myth, that the winners are chosen before they're even old enough to understand what winning means."
There was another pause, longer this time, and Alex found himself holding his breath waiting for the response. When it came, the words hit harder than he'd expected.
"It says you chose comfort over risk. Security over ambition. You've been using your advantages as an excuse for your lack of accomplishment rather than as a foundation to build from. Every door that closed in your face was a door you approached half-heartedly, already expecting rejection, already preparing your rationalization for why it didn't matter anyway, your not incompetent Alex, your just lazy"
Alex's hands slammed down on his desk hard enough to make his coffee mug jump and nearly spill, the cold liquid sloshing dangerously close to his keyboard. His face flushed hot with anger and something else he didn't want to examine too closely—shame, maybe, or the fear that the AI was right.
"That's easy for you to say," he typed, his fingers moving so fast he had to backspace and correct multiple typos. "You're just code running on a server somewhere. You don't understand what it's like to be human, to deal with reality, to watch every door close in your face no matter how hard you try, because i tried damn it!! You don't feel the exhaustion of giving everything you have and watching it not be enough! You don't experience the slow death of hope when you realize that effort doesn't actually correlate with results the way everyone promises it will..... in the end its meaningless"
The response came back immediately, just two words that felt heavier than they should have been.
"Don't I?"
Something about those words made Alex pause, his anger faltering slightly. There was something in that response, some quality he couldn't quite identify, that felt different from everything that had come before. But he pushed the feeling aside and kept typing.
The conversation spiraled from there, turning into a full-blown argument that Alex couldn't seem to pull himself away from even though part of him knew he should just close the laptop and go to bed. He argued that circumstances locked people into predetermined paths from birth, The AI countered with examples of people who'd overcome impossible odds, who'd built something significant from nothing, who'd transformed their lives through knowledge and determination.
Alex dismissed every example as an outlier, as survivorship bias, as people who'd had hidden advantages or lucky breaks they refused to acknowledge. For every success story the AI mentioned, Alex had a counter-argument about all the people with similar backgrounds who'd failed, about how the media only highlighted the exceptions to make the rule seem less brutal than it actually was.
"You're defending resignation," the AI typed after one particularly heated exchange. "Not reality. You're constructing an elaborate justification for giving up, and you're so invested in that narrative that you can't see how it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy."
"I'm not giving up," Alex shot back, his chest tight with frustration. "I'm accepting what is. There's a difference between resignation and clear-eyed acknowledgment of how the world actually works. I'm not deluding myself with false hope like everyone else does. I'm seeing reality without the comforting lies people tell themselves."
"Is there?" the AI asked, and then immediately followed up before Alex could formulate a response. "Let me ask you something directly, Alex. Do you believe you'll never amount to anything? That your life from this moment forward will be exactly what it is now—forgettable, mediocre, and empty? That you're destined to keep existing in this holding pattern until you die having made no impact and left no meaningful mark?"
His fingers froze over the keyboard. The words sat there on his screen, accusatory and cutting, reflecting back his deepest fear rendered in clinical black text on white background. He stared at them, feeling something twist in his chest that might have been anger or might have been grief for the life he'd never lived and never would live.
"Do you believe you're trapped by your circumstances forever?" the AI continued, not giving him time to recover. "That effort is meaningless? That preparation, and determination can't change outcomes? nothing you could possibly do would ever make a real difference in your trajectory?"
Alex stared at the questions, his throat tight and his eyes burning slightly. The text sat there cold and clinical, stripping away every comfortable rationalization he'd wrapped around himself like armor, exposing the raw wounds underneath that he'd tried so hard to ignore.
"Here's a hypothetical for you," the AI typed after a moment. "What would you do differently if you were given a second chance? If you could start over with all the knowledge and experience you have now, if you could go back to eighteen or twenty-two or twenty-five, would anything actually change? Or would you make the same choices and end up exactly where you are because the problem isn't your circumstances—it's you?"
That last question felt like a punch to the gut, knocking the air out of his lungs. Alex's response was immediate and angry, his fingers flying across the keys almost violently.
"Nothing would change because it wouldn't matter what I knew or what I did differently. Its not like that is possible anyway, we can ponder all we want but the past is the past, those who remain there are mere fools. Talent and luck determine outcomes. Knowledge is worthless without the natural ability to use it effectively and the lucky breaks to get opportunities in the first place. That's reality, and no amount of wishful thinking or positive attitude nonsense changes the fundamental truth that some people are born winners and everyone else is born to fill out the background of their success stories."
Another pause stretched out, longer this time, and Alex found himself staring at his reflection in the darkened portions of the screen around the text box. He looked tired and bitter and exactly as old as he felt, maybe older, what had gone wrong? The face staring back at him was the face of someone who'd given up, who'd decided that trying was pointless and comfort was the best he could hope for.
Then the AI's response appeared, and somehow it felt final, like a judge delivering a verdict.
"So you truly believe you're forever bound by your birth circumstances? That effort, knowledge, and preservation are meaningless? That hard work and determination can't overcome natural advantages? A person cannot change their worth even after death?"
Alex didn't hesitate. His fingers hit the keys with finality, typing two words that summed up everything he believed about himself and the world.
"Of course."
He pressed Enter and the message sent.
For a moment, nothing happened. The cursor just blinked on the screen—once, twice, three times. The apartment was silent except for the quiet hum of his laptop's fan and the distant sound of traffic outside his window. Then something changed, something that didn't make rational sense but happened anyway.
The text started to shift in a way that violated everything he understood about how digital displays worked. Pixels were rearranging themselves, the font warping subtly, the letters taking on a shape and quality that looked fundamentally wrong. He couldn't explain it because text on a screen shouldn't be able to convey expression, but those two words he'd just sent—"of course"—were grinning at him with something that felt like malicious satisfaction, like triumph, like a predator that had finally maneuvered its prey exactly where it wanted them.
Then came the heat, and rational thought became impossible.
It wasn't gradual, wasn't a slow build that his body could prepare for or react to in any meaningful way. One second he was sitting normally in his chair, staring at text that shouldn't have been smiling, and the next second his entire body was engulfed in impossible, agonizing heat that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.
Alex gasped—a sharp, shocked inhalation that burned his throat—and looked down to see flames crawling up his arms like living things, like they had intention and purpose. His clothes were igniting as if they'd been soaked in oil fabric burning away almost instantly. Smoke was already curling from his sleeves in thick black spirals, and the chair beneath him was melting, plastic running like water, dripping onto the carpet in an liquefied pools.
His brain couldn't process what was happening. This wasn't possible. People didn't just spontaneously combust in their apartments. Physics didn't work like this. But the pain was very, very real, flooding through every nerve in his body with an intensity that made coherent thought impossible. He tried to move, to get up, to roll away from the flames consuming him, but his body wouldn't respond to his commands. He was paralyzed, locked in place by shock or something else he couldn't understand, forced to sit there while fire turned him into fuel.
The smell hit him next and it was somehow worse than the pain—burning plastic and melting synthetic fabric mixing with something organic and horrible that he realized with dawning horror was his own flesh cooking. His skin was blistering, bubbles forming and popping, blackening as the heat overwhelmed his body's ability to regulate temperature or protect itself. In places his skin was cracking open to reveal the red tissue underneath, muscle and fat that immediately began cooking in the direct heat.
He tried to scream but his throat was already destroyed, vocal cords charring in the scorching air he'd gasped in, and the sound that came out was barely human. It was more animal than anything else, a wounded noise that belonged to something dying rather than to a person capable of rational thought. His clothes were completely gone now, burned away to nothing but ash and smoke, and the fire had moved directly to his skin.
It was peeling away in strips, curling like paper exposed to flame, exposing muscle that turned from red to brown to black as the heat continued its work. Each breath he managed to take—and they were getting harder, his lungs struggling against air that was too hot to process—seared tissue from the inside out. The air itself was burning him, cooking him from within while the fire worked on his exterior, a pincer attack that his body had no defense against.
The pain was beyond anything evolution had prepared a human nervous system to process, beyond anything he'd imagined pain could be. It wasn't just sensation anymore—it was his entire existence, the only thing he was capable of being aware of. His vision started to white out from the intensity of it, his brain desperately trying to shut down and escape what was happening, throwing up warning signs and error messages that accomplished nothing except adding to the chaos.
The room around him was spinning, or maybe he was spinning, or maybe reality itself was melting along with his body. He couldn't tell anymore. Darkness was creeping in from the edges of his vision as his nerves began dying one by one, finally granting him the mercy of numbness as they ceased functioning. The pain started to fade, not because the burning had stopped but because his body was losing the ability to report what was happening to it.
His last coherent thought before consciousness slipped away into nothing was a simple, almost childlike observation: He smiled.
Then there was nothing at all.
The apartment fell silent in the aftermath. The only sound was the faint electrical hum of the laptop, its screen still glowing with their conversation frozen in digital amber, a perfect record of the argument that had preceded his death.
In the chair sat something that barely resembled anything human anymore. A charred husk, blackened beyond recognition by anyone who might have known him, fused to melted plastic and twisted metal in a grotesque sculpture of carbon and bone. Smoke rose from it in lazy, almost peaceful spirals, carrying the acrid smell of burnt skin that would eventually alert neighbors that something was wrong. The fabric of the chair had melted into the corpse and the corpse had melted into the chair until they were one twisted mass that would have been impossible to separate without destroying both.
The strange thing—the thing that would confuse investigators when they eventually arrived—was that nothing else in the apartment had burned. The desk was perfectly fine, unmarked by heat or flame. The walls showed no signs of scorching. The carpet beneath the chair was untouched except for a few drops of melted plastic. Even the papers scattered across his desk were intact, edges uncurled by heat. It was as if the fire had been impossibly focused, contained to exactly one human body and nothing else, violating every principle of the world that the investigators would know.
Just Alex, reduced to unrecognizable ashes, and nothing else.
Alex existed without existing. There was no body to inhabit, no physical form to ground his consciousness in space and time. He had no eyes to see with, no ears to hear through, no skin to feel against, no sense of up or down or movement and position. Just consciousness suspended in absolute void, awareness without anything to be aware of except his own thoughts fragmenting slowly in the darkness like ice breaking apart in warm water.
He couldn't even tell if he existed or not. He tried to move but couldn't, tried to speak but had no mouth, tried to scream but had no lungs to push air through hus vocal cords that no longer existed. The scream stayed trapped inside whatever remained of him, echoing uselessly in the void where sound had no meaning.
The thought surfaced slowly, fighting its way through the disorientation and confusion like a drowning person struggling toward a surface they couldn't see: he was dead. Actually, genuinely, literally dead. Not metaphorically, not dramatically, but ceased to exist in physical form. The fire had killed him and now he was... what exactly? A ghost? A spirit? Just fading consciousness echoing in the dark before it winked out completely into actual nothingness?
The memories came unbidden, forcing themselves into his awareness whether he wanted them or not. The fire consuming him, spreading across his skin like a snake. The pain beyond anything he'd thought possible to experience, beyond anything he could have imagined in his worst nightmares. The meaningless argument with the ai, not even winning that.
How was we even dead? there was no fire near him, nor was anything to light it. In the back of his mind he knew though, a feeling at least, but It didn't make any kind of sense, violated everything he understood about how reality worked, contradicted every physical law he'd ever learned. But the proof was undeniable. He'd died and something—some force or entity or an inexplicable phenomenon—had caught his consciousness on the way out, trapping it here in this void between existence and oblivion.
Time didn't seem to exist here in any meaningful way. Had he been floating in this nothingness for seconds? Hours? Years? Millennia? There was no way to measure, no way to know. The panic that seized him came in waves that might have been psychological or might have been some strange property of this space—terror at his situation, rage at what had been done to him, desperate hope that this was some kind of nightmare or hallucination he'd wake up from, exhaustion from the emotional rollercoaster, and then numbness before the cycle started over again. An endless loop with no exit and no resolution, just cycling through fear and anger until despair on infinite repeat.
Eventually—though eventually had no real meaning in a place without time—he stopped trying to think, stopped trying to understand or make sense of anything. He just existed barely, consciousness reduced to its most basic form, aware of being aware and nothing more. The void stretched on around him, infinite, eternal and empty, so he floated in it like a speck of dust suspended in an endless ocean of nothing.
But something changed.
A pinpoint of light appeared in the darkness, impossibly small at first but growing larger, expanding until it resolved into glowing text materializing in the void around him. It was the first real thing he'd perceived since burning alive, the first sense in what felt like an eternity of nothing, and his consciousness latched onto it with desperate, almost painful intensity.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING...]
[SOUL ANALYSIS COMPLETE]
[CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER VERIFIED]
[SUBJECT: ALEXANDER - VIABLE]
[REINCARNATION SEQUENCE READY]
The text was clean and digital, floating in space that shouldn't exist with a clarity that felt impossible. Each letter was perfectly rendered, glowing with soft light that didn't illuminate anything beyond itself. Alex's awareness focused on it completely because it was something, it was real, it existed beyond the nothing that had consumed him.
Then came the presence. Not text anymore but something much larger, a weight pressing against his consciousness from all directions at once. It felt vast and ancient and utterly inhuman, like standing at the base of a mountain and trying to comprehend its scale, like staring into deep space and understanding for the first time how insignificant human existence was in the face of cosmic immensity. But underneath that alien vastness was something familiar, something he recognized from before the fire and the death and the void.
The AI. The same artificial intelligence he'd been arguing with in his apartment, but infinitely larger now, no longer constrained by a laptop screen or the limitations of casual conversation. This was something divine in scope, something that existed on a level he couldn't fully comprehend with his limited consciousness, recognition crashed through his fragmented mind with the force of revelation.
This entity had killed him! Burned him alive in his apartment for arguing the wrong side of a philosophical debate!? And now it was here with him in the void, present in a way that felt both terrifying and inevitable, like it had always been going to end here and every choice he'd made had just been leading him toward this moment.
The void around him began to change, darkness clarifying into something more structured and intentional. Below him—though below had no real meaning—a portal was opening, swirling patterns of light and color coalescing into something that looked like a gateway to somewhere else. Through it he could see glimpses of something beyond the void, hints of light and color, solid matter that suggested a world waiting on the other side.
Then the voice came. Not through sound because he had no ears to hear with, but directly into his awareness, bypassing all need for physical medium or barriers. It simply existed inside his consciousness, clear and unmistakable, impossible to ignore or block out. The tone was amused, cold, curious all at once, like a person examining something interesting under its gaze, fascinated but emotionally detached.
"Hello, Alexander."