The paramedics didn't know he was standing right there, as he stared at his lifeless body right in front of him.
That was the first thing Kai understood, and he didn't plan to fight it, he knew what happened to him and he just forced himself to watch look at it. The two paramedics moving around his apartment with the specific efficient urgency of people doing a job they had done many times before, and neither of them looked up nor did they look at him, and he was standing four feet away from both of them.
He watched them work on his body, as scanned for certain things, analyzing his body while also trying to determine his time of death and what caused it.
His body was on the floor between the desk and the chair. The chair had caught him on the way down and then he had slid off it. He could see the position he had landed in and it was undignified in a way that, if he thought about it too hard, was going to become a problem. So he didn't think about it too hard. He looked at the monitors instead. All four of them still lit. The call still connected on the speakers. Someone had muted it at some point, or it had dropped on its own, he couldn't tell which.
He wasn't panicking because he couldn't bring himself to panic yet. He was too far inside the confusion of the thing to have found the edge of it.
One of the paramedics said something to the other and the other one nodded and kept working as Kai watched their hands and understood from the way they were moving and the way they were not moving that there was nothing to undo here. Whatever had happened was finished.
He looked at his own face, which he knew but it somehow looked unrecognizable for him.
Which was strange because he had never seen his own face from the outside before aside from mirrors, which were approximate. This was just him, from a position he had never occupied, and the face was still and the eyes were open slightly and the coffee from earlier had soaked into the collar of his shirt and dried there.
He had been in the middle of a deal.
The thought arrived without emotion attached to it, that he had been in the middle of a deal and now he wasn't and the deal was going to close without him, or it wasn't going to close at all and either way he wouldn't know.
That was the part that didn't fit, the fact that he didn't know what came next.
He was still trying to make the not-knowing fit into something manageable when the room changed.
It didn't change dramatically and nothing was moving. The paramedics kept working and the monitors stayed lit. But something entered the room that had not been in it before, and Kai felt it the way you feel a shift in pressure before a storm — not a sound nor sight, just a quality of the air becoming different in a way that meant something was different.
He slowly turned around to look what this eerie presence behind his shoulder could be.
The figure standing near the doorway to the hallway did not look like anything Kai had expected. He hadn't known he had expectations until they were violated. The figure was simply wrong and it's presence was but not quite solid. Like someone had taken a person and run them through a process that got most of the details right but missed something fundamental about the way things were supposed to exist in the physical world.
The two looked at each other as neither of them said anything for a moment. One of the paramedics moved between them without seeing either of them and then moved away again.
The figure spoke and its voice was not loud, and it was not dramatic, but it had the specific quality of something that had explained the same thing many times and was not going to change how it explained it just because the audience was new.
''Unfinished business,'' it said. ''You have unfinished business here on earth.''
Kai was confused and didn't respond.
''You can't cross until it's finished and you'll have a system has been installed to you that will help you reach it. You'll understand what that means when you read it.''
Kai processed this and he was good at processing things fast. He had built a career on it.
''What's my unfinished business?'' he finally asked.
The figure looked at him in the way it looked at him was not quite the way anything had ever looked at him before, with something that was almost like finding a question worth a moment of attention.
It finally responded ''You wanted to be the most powerful being alive, weren't you? So, finish what you were set out to do.''
Kai didn't say anything.
The figure didn't wait for him to say anything. It was already doing something he couldn't fully see — an adjustment, an installation, something that didn't have a physical form but that he felt happen in whatever he was now. And then it was moving toward the door.
''Wait'' Kai called.
The figure didn't stop as it kept moving forward.
He had so many questions. The questions he had were the questions of someone handed the rules to something without getting enough time to read them and then left the room. He started with the most important one.
''How long does it take.'' he said ''To finish it.''
The figure was already gone as it disappeared in mid air
The room was the same as it had been with the paramedics and his body on the floor in an undignified position with coffee dried into the collar of his shirt.
Kai stood in the middle of it and thought about what the Reaper had said.
You wanted to be the most powerful being alive.
He had never said that to anyone and he had never said it out loud, not in those words, not in any words, because there was no version of saying it out loud that didn't end with someone looking at him the way people look at something they find excessive. He had kept it inside where it functioned cleanly, a clear fixed point that everything else oriented around. And the Reaper had just said it back to him like a fact.
One of the paramedics said something to the other. They began to move his body. He watched them do it. He watched his own hands hang at the angle gravity had arranged them and thought about everything those hands had been in the middle of, and he thought about the deal still sitting open on the first monitor, and he thought about the picture in his head of a height he had not yet reached.
He was not finished yet, and he also had a system now that was apparently going to help him do something about that.
He looked down at whatever part of himself was visible to him now — the answer to that question being unclear and somewhat unsettling — and felt something he didn't have a clean word for. Not fear. Something with more forward motion in it.
He would read the system and understand it, and he would also work with it the way he worked with everything.