The very last thing Haru Tanaka heard before he died was his girlfriend calling him boring.
Not in a "we need to spice things up" way. No, she meant it. The actual, dictionary-definition word.
"You're so *boring*," Mika had said. She was standing in the doorway of their apartment—*his* apartment, he now mentally corrected—with Kenji. His colleague. Kenji wasn't even doing the decent thing and looking guilty. He just... stood there. Like a piece of furniture that had always been in the corner. Like Haru was the one interrupting *his* Tuesday.
Haru's brain, helpfully, supplied a single thought: *This is inefficient.*
Not: *My life is over.* Not: *How could you?*
Just... inefficient.
That was the real problem, wasn't it? His life wasn't a tragedy. It was just a badly written piece of code. A loop that didn't go anywhere. His girlfriend, his colleague. The apartment that smelled vaguely of old takeout and mildew. His job... God, his job. Explaining the same five functions to people who actively refused to learn.
His whole existence was a system failure, and he was just too tired to debug it anymore.
So when he walked out, phone still in hand, and didn't bother checking the crosswalk... it wasn't really suicide. It was just... optimizing. Deleting the corrupted file.
A truck hit him. Tuesday. 3:47 PM.
He probably would have had a crisp thought about how this was messing up the driver's delivery schedule, but he didn't get the chance.
One moment, walking. The next, not.
Then, just... white.
A clean, sterile, absolute white. The kind of white that suggested someone had finally managed to create a perfect void, or had just given up on design entirely.
Haru appreciated the tidiness.
Part Two: The Void Negotiation
"Oh, *finally*! You're up! Seriously, I've been waiting *ages*."
Haru tried to open his eyes, realized he didn't have any, and then just... perceived. The information was just *there*. Efficient. He had to admit, it beat fumbling for glasses.
He was in... nothing. Not blackness. Black implies an absence of light. This was more like the *concept* of an absence of... well, everything. It was confusing, sterile, and perfectly optimized.
"Who are you?" he asked, with a voice that didn't need a mouth. "Where am I?"
"Ooh, questions! Love 'em!" The voice snapped into focus. A woman—looked mid-twenties, maybe—with eyes that had way too many colors swirling in them and a grin that was probably illegal in several dimensions. "I'm Lady Ætheria! Cosmic Goddess of Mischief, Bad Life Choices, and Unintended Consequences!"
"I'm dead," Haru stated. Not a question.
"*Super* dead!" she chirped. "Truck. *Splat*. Honestly? Great sound design on that impact. A solid 9 out of 10. Anyway! You're here, I've got a proposal!"
*This is happening.* Haru's mind processed the data. *Post-death hallucination or cosmic bureaucracy. Either way, tedious.*
"I'm not interested in reincarnation," Haru said, cutting her off.
"You haven't even heard the offer!"
"Doesn't matter. I'm done. Life was a systems failure. Death seems... cleaner. I'll take non-existence, please."
Her grin got wider. "Oh, I *like* you. You're so... *boring*! In the best possible way! Like, divinely, transcendently dull. Most people cry. Or scream. Or beg. You're just... *meh*."
"Being dramatic is a waste of energy."
"See! This is why you get the deal!" She clapped her hands, and the void suddenly felt crowded. Another being flickered into existence—an older man who looked like he'd spent the last five millennia under fluorescent lighting. He was holding a clipboard that radiated pure, cosmic bureaucracy.
"This is Valthor. He handles the... ugh... *paperwork*." Ætheria gestured at him. "Valthor, look at this one. Isn't he great?"
"I'm looking," Valthor said. His voice sounded like printer toner smells. "He's dead, Ætheria. We have a backlog of trillions."
"But he's dead and *apathetic*!"
"Still trillions," Valthor sighed. "What's the ticket number?"
"Oh, forget the ticket! I'm giving him the package. Reincarnation. Fantasy world. Tier V causality manipulation—you know, the fun reality-editing stuff. *But*," she leaned in conspiratorially, "he *has* to agree to live a quiet life. No quests. No destiny. Just... peace."
Haru processed this. "...That's acceptable."
"I KNOW, RIGHT? And *then*... I'm giving him a glitch."
"No." Haru said it flat, instant.
"You don't even—"
"No. Glitches are inefficient. They are the *definition* of a problem. I agreed to peace. A glitch violates the terms."
"But that's the *joke*!" She was practically vibrating. "See, the power only works when he's annoyed. Or bored. Or, and this is the best part, *too comfortable*. His entire quest for a quiet life will be a nonstop parade of him accidentally breaking reality just by trying to *relax*!"
Haru just stared at her. "You are designing a system built entirely around my personal suffering."
"Yes! Isn't it great?"
"That is the literal opposite of what I requested."
"I know! Hilarious, right?" She turned to Valthor. "This is my best idea in seventeen thousand years."
Valthor looked at Haru with the first flicker of anything resembling emotion. It might have been pity. "Just... sign the form, kid. She's been planning this since before your great-grandparents were born. It's already filed."
Haru weighed his options. Non-existence was off the table. Bureaucracy was eternal. The glitch was non-negotiable. *This is the worst project meeting ever,* he thought.
"Fine. But I want a contractual guarantee of high-quality ramen in the new world."
"DONE!" Ætheria yelled. "Valthor, add the ramen clause!"
"Already added," Valthor muttered, ticking a box. "It's right under the amendment from last time about 'feline napping parameters.'"
"I was going to be a cat," Haru explained. "I needed to define the terms of responsibility. It was a sound logistical query."
Ætheria was laughing so hard the void flickered. "Oh, he's perfect. Okay, okay. Final terms. Reincarnation, god-powers, quiet-life-that-isn't, ramen. Anything else?"
Haru thought. "I want a binding opt-out on heroism. No prophecies. No chosen one nonsense. If anyone calls me a hero, I get to walk away."
"Oh, you can walk away all you want," Ætheria grinned. "You just can't escape the *consequences*. That's the glitch! You'll try to dodge a prophecy and end up fulfilling it by accident! It's going to be *hysterical*!"
"That's not an opt-out."
"Nope! But it *is* funny."
Haru realized he was negotiating with a hurricane. Efficiency meant accepting the inevitable.
"Fine. When?"
Part Three: The Glitch Demonstration
"Right... *now*!" She snapped her fingers.
The void... compressed. Not painfully. Just... tidily. Everything folded in on itself, with Haru at the center. His old life was being archived. The smell of his apartment. His mother's face. The precise, bitter taste of his morning coffee.
Fading.
"Don't worry!" Ætheria's voice echoed, "You'll be a baby! They don't remember squat. It's much more efficient this way!"
The last thing he felt was Ætheria tucking something into the core of his new soul. It felt... wrong. Like a time bomb. A bug in the base code.
*Feedback Loop Glitch,* the information downloaded into him. *Activates on annoyance. Triggers on boredom. Manifests on comfort.*
*This,* Haru thought, as his consciousness dissolved into seventeen years of un-lived memories, *is going to be a complete disaster.*
Back in the void, Ætheria was bouncing off the non-existent walls.
"Did you *see* his face? Or, his... conceptual-entity-face? He was *so annoyed*! The power was already trying to tick over! It's *perfect*!"
Valthor was rubbing the bridge of his non-existent nose. "This ledger entry is going to require seventeen cross-references. And his power... it's already causing rounding errors in the Fundamental Ledger. He's a god-level entity who is actively fighting his own existence."
"Exactly!" she sang. "He's going to spend his whole life trying to be a nobody and accidentally become a legend! It's the best show I've had in—"
"Seventeen thousand years. Yes, you mentioned."
"And the best part?" Ætheria's smile was pure, cosmic chaos. "He *knows*. He knows he's in a trap. And he's going to try to logic his way out of it anyway. He's going to fail, spectacularly, and he's going to be *so mad* the whole time."
"That sounds," Valthor observed, "like profound suffering."
"That," Ætheria corrected, "sounds like *premium entertainment*."
In the space between realities, a teenage boy in a quiet village, adopted by a nice family, was about to wake up with a headache and no idea he was a cosmic joke.
Valthor just sighed and returned to his clipboard, already trying to calculate the cascade failure of a god-tier being whose primary power source was irritation.
This was, he thought with absolute certainty, going to be a nightmare.
It was also, he admitted grudgingly, going to be the best thing on in millennia.