"Tch... what a hassle."
The words were gravel in my throat, sand on the phone. The nurse, with her professionally sympathetic eyes, probably thought the morphine was talking. She was adjusting a drip, her movements efficient and sterile, a world away from the messy, spreadsheet-cluttered life I was desperately trying to tie off with a neat bow.
"If there's one thing I regret," I rasped, the confession feeling both too intimate and utterly insignificant, "it's never figuring out how to say no to extra work or yes to a drink after hours."
The nurse made a non-committal sound, the kind designed to placate the dying. But this was important. This was the final audit.
"Oh, and Miki—" My voice cracked. Miki, my sister's daughter, all of eight years old with a laugh that could recalibrate a bad day.
"Please, keep her laughing. And pay the electricity bill before the 17th, yeah? It's in the blue folder on my desk. The reminder is… it's set, but just in case."
The silence that followed was heavier than any I'd known. My voice, that familiar, weary instrument, was now a stranger's. It was the sound of erosion.
At the end, all that's left is a list of reminders for a world you're already leaving behind. A grocery list for a future you won't eat, a birthday reminder for a friend you'll miss, a post-it note about a project deadline that has been utterly, profoundly nullified. The ultimate write-off.
My final ledger wouldn't balance. The assets—a modest savings account, a paid-off car, a collection of well-kept ledgers—were pitifully outweighed by the liabilities: years of missed sunsets, conversations left unmade, a love life filed under 'pending, review later.' The deficit was a chasm of quiet yearning. So, only enough left in my column for a quip. A dry, depreciating joke.
Accountant, thirty-seven, zero living dependents, died (according to the coroner) of "acute work-life imbalance," but the cause of death, unrecorded, was persistent disappointment. It wasn't a dramatic, crashing failure. It was the slow, steady depreciation of a soul, the accrued interest on a thousand small resignations.
And then—calculation ended. My mind, a machine built for sums and projections, simply… stopped. Couldn't even muster up a number for the debit of my last breath. What was the value of that final exhalation? The cost of the air? The worth of the silence it left behind? An incalculable entry. An error in the formula.
I didn't expect anything after.
Not heaven, not hell, not even the comforting, familiar echo of regret in empty darkness. I expected the grand, final subtraction: everything equaling zero.
But somewhere, in the infinitesimal gap between moments—in the space between the last stutter of a neuron and the ultimate silence—there was a fracture.
A shiverless cold, an expanse smaller than a decimal place, and then:
Noise.
Static. Not the white noise of a dead channel, but the raw, churning data-stream of existence itself.
Systems.
Accumulating data.
A patient, impersonal presence, evaluating every memory and error in my personal spreadsheet. It felt like God's own audit, and the auditor was utterly dispassionate.
A prompt, clean and absolute, etched itself into the core of my being:
System prompt: "Input. Designation: NULL. Awaiting metrics. Confirm primary function?"
My consciousness, or what was left of it, instinctively recoiled, then latched on. This was a language I understood. Not words, but parameters. Not feelings, but functions.
Numbers. Vectors. Patterns. Everything flickered across my not-quite-mind like a night spent double-checking budgets, except the figures described not money, but something deeper—the flow of energy, the structure of matter, the strange, underlying currency of all things possible. I saw the algorithms of gravity, the probability matrices of quantum states, the elegant, wasteful code of biological decay. It was the grand ledger of reality, and it was both beautiful and horrifyingly inefficient.
A choice seemed to present itself. Not with buttons, but with the sheer weight of my accumulated nature. What was my primary function? To live? That was gone. To love? I'd been mediocre at best. To calculate. To find the pattern. To balance the equation. That was the one constant, the only skill that had ever felt true.
Confirmed. Unique skill [Ultimate Analysis & Synthesis] has been acquired.
The announcement was a fact, immutable. A new, fundamental law of my being.
External sensory network inaccessible. Anchoring identity to crystalline computational node.
…I tried to blink. Couldn't. Tried to move. Nothing. Panic, that old, familiar specter, tried to rise, but it had no biological anchor. It was just another data stream, flagged and quarantined by the System as irrelevant to the primary function.
So this is death? Or something worse—a demotion to hardware. An eternity of processing without a body, without a coffee break, without the simple, profound pleasure of feeling sunlight on my skin. A consciousness without keystrokes or breath, only equation and unspent potential. The ultimate desk job.
My awareness, unmoored, fell. It didn't drift; it landed—not soft, but with the solid, shattering impact of a lifetime's worth of untallied regrets. The sensation was of being embedded, sealed within something cold, dense, and humming with latent energy.
Somewhere in the void around me, I could sense the echoes of a universe's collapse and renewal. Vast, incomprehensible ruins lay beyond nomenclature, their histories etched not in words but in scars across spacetime. And I was at the heart of it all, a tiny, focused point of order in an ocean of entropic chaos.
I was no hero, sage, or lover.
Just an accountant, always careful about risk management, unwilling to gamble even on a night out.
Now, trapped in perfect stillness, I was the sum total of my memories and this... impossible System. My prison and my purpose, fused into one.
Initiation complete. Telepathic interface available. Detected golem mana surplus: initializing optimization protocol.
An internal screen, clearer than any monitor, displayed lines of inefficiency. It was a schematic, a blueprint of my immediate surroundings. I could see the sluggish, illogical flow of energy through the stone around me. I could perceive the structural weaknesses, the decay in dormant systems, the wasted potential in chaotic mana currents. It was a mess. A ledger bleeding red ink.
They were waiting. Not a "they" with minds or voices, but a "they" of function. The dormant systems of this place—this core, this node, this tomb—were waiting for a command. For a correction.
Ah. Of course.
Make order from chaos. Find the most efficient path. Reconcile the accounts.
The only thing I was ever good at.
A flicker of something that wasn't quite emotion, but perhaps its logical equivalent, passed through me. Resignation? Acceptance? It didn't matter. The work was there. The numbers demanded to be tamed.
My first command was not a word, but a function. A simple, elegant algorithm for mana channel optimization, derived from the principles of laminar flow and cost-efficient logistics routing. I fed it into the System.
And so, as the last residue of who I was—the man who worried about electricity bills and a little girl's laughter—finished its final calculation, something unseen flickered into motion around my crystalline prison. A pulse of ordered light traveled through the dead stone. A formless society, dormant, awaited me; the first algorithm unfurled beneath infinite, ruined stone, a single, perfect line of logic in a world of ruin.
Rational, limited, unspectacular to the end—
I was the Core Sentinel, and my new existence, at last, was ready to begin recalculating from zero.