Zane was done.
Not just "done for the day" done. He was just fucking done.
The fluorescent light in the cubicle hummed like a cicada. It was the soundtrack to his life. That, and the stale smell of burnt coffee and cheap carpet.
Ring.
He stared at the phone.
Ring.
"Fuck."
He put on his headset. "HopeLine, this is Zane. Are you calling with a plan?"
Standard greeting. Scripted and Safe.
A man was weeping on the other end. A wet, gasping sound that Zane had heard a thousand times before. It was 3:00 AM.
The weeping hour, as the others referred to it.
"She... she left," the man choked. "Took the kid. Wiped the account. It's... it's all gone, man. There's... there's nothing."
Zane muted his end. He took a long, slow drink of his cold, acidic coffee. Then, he un-muted.
"I hear you, Mark. That sounds... it sounds incredibly hard. Your pain is valid."
Script. Page one, paragraph two.
"You're not even... you're not even fucking listening!" the man screamed, his voice cracking. "You're just... reading! Reading from a goddamn card! You don't care!"
Zane's eye twitched.
'No shit, Sherlock. I'm on my third double shift. My back feels like a bag of broken glass. I don't care. I process.'
That's what he wanted to say.
What he did say though, "Mark, I do care. I'm here. I'm listening. Tell me what you're feeling."
"I'm feeling like it's over!" Mark yelled. "I'm looking at the pills. The whole bottle. It's... it's just over. I'm done. I'm just... done."
The man's voice was flat. Resigned.
The "Red Flag" tone.
Zane sat up straight. The script vanished from his mind.
This was that kind of call.
"Mark. Wait. Don't," Zane said, his voice dropping. "Listen to me. Just... just wait. We can talk about this. The pills... that's not the answer."
"It's the only one I've got," Mark whispered. "You don't get it. You're just a voice. It's fine. It's over."
Click.
The line went dead.
Zane ripped the headset off and threw it against the beige, fabric-covered cubicle wall. It fell to the desk with a pathetic clatter.
"Fuck!"
He slammed his hands on his desk.
"FUCK!"
He fumbled for the phone, dialling the trace-line. Busy. He dialled again. Busy.
He slumped back, the cheap office chair groaning in protest.
He had failed.
Again.
They'd give him a plaque at the end of the year. "In recognition of 947 'saves'."
Zane didn't remember the saves. He remembered the clicks. The dial tones. The ones who didn't wait.
Mark was... fuck. Mark was just gone.
Zane's chest felt tight. A hot, sharp pressure right under his sternum.
He'd been ignoring it for weeks and now it felt worse.
He tried to breathe. The air was too thick. Too stale.
"Nine hundred and forty-seven..." he whispered, his vision blurring. "But who... who saves... me...?"
The pressure in his chest exploded.
It was a white-hot spike of pure, crystalline agony.
His hand spasmed, knocking his "World's Best Listener" mug to the floor. It shattered, spilling cold coffee across the industrial-grade carpet.
Zane stared at the dark stain.
"Ah... shit," he managed.
Then, the humming of the fluorescent light faded.
And the world went black.
Zane woke up.
He wasn't on the floor. He wasn't in a hospital.
He was in... a cubicle.
It was grey. The walls were the same beige fabric as his office. The air smelled of stale paper and... was that ozone?
A single, flickering fluorescent tube hummed overhead.
"No," Zane moaned. "No, fuck me. This isn't heaven. This isn't hell. It's just... more of this."
"It's worse," a new voice said. "It's the Intake Office. Sit."
Zane turned.
In the adjacent cubicle, a man sat behind a mountain of paperwork. He was thin, wearing a cheap, grey suit, and had the most profoundly, existentially bored expression Zane had ever seen.
He tapped a grey pen against a grey desk.
"Zane Carter," the man said, not looking up. "Welcome to Terminus, Sector 7-G. I'm Mortis. Your new manager. Sit."
Zane looked at the grey, plastic chair in front of the desk. He sat.
"I... I'm dead," Zane said.
"Observant," Mortis droned, finally looking up. His eyes were like two burnt-out bulbs. "Aneurysm. Very messy. Lots of paperwork were involved. We were expecting you. Eventually."
"Expecting me?"
Mortis sighed, a sound like dust falling from a forgotten shelf. "Yes. But you were scheduled for exit 30 years from now. Cardiac failure. Predictable and clean."
He jabbed his pen at a stack of files. "But no. You had to overwork yourself. You just had to care. And now, here you are. Off-schedule. A logistical nightmare."
Zane was still catching up. "So... God? The Devil?"
Mortis actually laughed. It was a dry, hacking sound. "God? Please. Do I look like I'm in that pay-grade? I'm a middle-manager, Zane. I process 'Scheduled Departures.' And you..."
He levelled the pen at Zane.
"...are a fucking catastrophe."
"I... I saved people," Zane stammered, falling back on his one, broken defence.
"You saved 947 souls," Mortis snapped, his voice suddenly sharp. "You're a paperwork nightmare. Every time you 'talked someone off the ledge,' you created an un-filed variance form. You single-handedly created a backlog in Scheduled Departures that's going to take decades to sort out."
Mortis leaned in, his eyes hollow. "Their suffering was scheduled. Their exit was permitted. You offered 'hope.' Hope is a chaotic variable, Zane. It fucks up the projections. And I'm the one who has to process it."
"So... what now? Hell?"
"Worse. You've been reassigned. You're going to pay off your karmic debt. Soul Essence Collection Division. You're an intern."
"A... what?"
"You're going to a new world. A real shithole. Nuln. We love it. High productivity, fantastic projections. And you get a new 'Cheat'."
Mortis said the word "Cheat" with profound disgust.
"You'll have Soul Siphon," Mortis continued, reading from a memo. "You'll feed on the negative energy—the 'Soul Essence'—released upon a person's death. It's your new sustenance. You'll need it to survive. To grow stronger."
Zane's blood ran cold. "Feed? You want me to... eat souls?"
"Don't be dramatic. You're absorbing the byproduct. The... emotional exhaust. And here's the part I personally greenlit, the poetic-justice clause..."
Mortis smiled, and it was the most terrifying thing Zane had ever seen.
"Your hotline skills are... inhibited. You're not saving them anymore, Zane. You're farming them. You're a reaper now, not a therapist."
"You... you want me to kill people."
"No!" Mortis snapped. "God, no. Suicide is a logistical mess. Reroutes, rescheduling... ugh. No. You're farming the naturally dying. The ones in the plague blocks, the ones in the gutters, the ones in the back-alley gang fights. The ones who are already... despairing."
Zane's mind was reeling. "Despairing..."
"Yes. You just have to be there. Nudge them along. Get them to... accept their fate. Get them to give up that hope you're so fucking fond of. The more despair, the richer the essence. It's simple."
Mortis looked at his watch. "Oh, and there's a leash."
"A what?"
"Management's idea. You have to be within a one-kilometre radius of the asset when it expires to claim the essence. Ensures you're... proactive. You can't just camp out in one place. You have to hunt."
Zane stood up. "No. I won't. I can't. This is insane."
"It's not a request," Mortis said. He slammed a large, red button on his desk that just said 'RE-QUEUE'. "It's your new job. Quota is high. Pay is shit. Don't fuck this up."
The floor beneath Zane's chair vanished.
"Wait!" Zane yelled, flailing into the grey void. "I CAN'T—"
Zane woke up.
The first sensation was the cold. It was a wet, seeping cold that chilled his bones.
The second was the smell. A chemical, acrid stench that burned his nostrils. Rot, shit, and acid.
He was lying on his back in an alley. Filthy, black water trickled over his cheap, new-old tunic. Acid rain sizzled on the cobblestones.
He pushed himself up. His body felt weak. Hollow.
This wasn't a cubicle.
"This... this is real," he whispered.
A wave of nausea hit him, but it wasn't sickness. It was hunger.
It was a feeling he'd never experienced before. Not for food. Not for water. It was a profound, soul-deep void.
An ache that demanded to be filled.
He stumbled out of the alley, onto a street choked with greasy smog.
The city of Nuln.
It was a nightmare of rusted iron, black smoke, and hunched, miserable-looking people.
The hunger gnawed at him.
And then...
The Pang.
It wasn't a sound but a feeling. A fishhook, pulling at his gut.
A signal.
Someone was dying.
And Zane was fucking starving.