The year I turned thirty, people started calling me "retired."
They said it like a joke, but the money was real.
We'd just signed the papers that turned five years of insomnia, instant noodles, and meetings in cafés into a nicely padded bank account. The kind of number that makes your parents stop telling you to "think about stability" and start forwarding you links to real estate.
So of course there was a party.
Of course.
The bar we'd rented wasn't actually that big, but it had learned the ancient startup trick of pretending to be more than it was. Dim lights, fake brick, polished concrete. Industrial chic. Tables pressed together in the middle, snacks nobody touched circling the edges.
The name of the company I'd built was on a banner, printed slightly wrong. No one noticed except me.
"You're fussing again," Mari said, appearing at my elbow with a drink that probably had more sugar than alcohol.
"I'm not fussing," I said, straightening the corner of the banner.
"You're doing the face."
"What face?"
She imitated it. Brows slightly drawn, lips flat, eyes scanning the room. I looked like someone checking a fire escape in the middle of a wedding.
"It's a celebration," she said. "Stop trying to project manage the air."
"I'm just… taking it in."
"Uh-huh. Take in the fact you're rich now, idiot."
She clinked her glass against mine before I could respond and wandered off toward the developers. Her laugh blended into the music and the general crowded noise.
I checked the catering again.
Reflex.
Selling a company is funny.
People talk about "exits" like a door opens and you simply step through to a better room. In reality, someone hands you a number and a contract, shakes your hand, and gently slides your life out from under you.
It's not tragic. It's not heroic.
It's just… tidy.
Everyone here thought I'd won. Which, in a way, I had. No debt. No panic about payroll. My parents could brag. My LinkedIn was glowing radioactive blue.
If you asked me how I felt in one word, though?
Tired.
Not the "I need sleep" kind.
The kind where you've been holding a rope for so long that when someone finally tells you it's okay to let go, your fingers don't know how.
They pushed me toward the center of the room when the cake arrived. It had our old logo iced on top, slightly off-color, like it had a cold.
"Speech! Speech!" someone chanted.
I hate speeches.
I gave one anyway.
"You all know I'm bad at this," I started. People laughed because they were trained to.
"I could stand here and pretend I did this alone," I continued, "but the truth is I mostly watched you all carry this thing while I sat in a corner with a spreadsheet and anxiety."
More laughter. Someone whistled. Glasses raised.
"I'm glad we made it out alive," I said. "I'm glad I got to work with you. And… I don't know what I'm doing next yet, but whatever it is, it'll be hard to find a team as stupidly loyal as this one, so enjoy the drinks. That's an order."
Not a great speech. Not awful. Two out of five stars: would tolerate again.
Everyone cheered like I'd just announced free stock options.
I caught Mari's eye near the bar. She gave me a small, genuine nod that meant: "Okay, that wasn't totally terrible."
I relaxed, just a little.
The music was too loud, the air too warm. People kept patting me on the back, saying variations of:
"You did it."
"You're set for life now."
"Early retirement at thirty, huh? That's the dream."
Retirement.
As if I'd been mining coal with my teeth.
But I smiled, and I nodded, and I said the things you're supposed to say:
"It was all of us."
"We got lucky."
"Next round's on me if the acquisition doesn't fire you all."
Ha ha. Ha.
Every time I finished one conversation, another person materialized in front of me. They wanted closure, or reassurance, or to bask in the reflected light of whatever they thought I'd become.
I kept checking the exits without thinking about it.
Old habit.
If a fire alarm went off, where would people go? How fast could we clear this place? Was there any bottleneck?
I caught myself mapping the room and almost laughed. Even here, even now, my instinct was to plan for disaster.
As if I could somehow stay ahead of it.
The first strange thing I noticed was the chandelier.
It was one of those ridiculous things people hang in "industrial" spaces to make it look ironic. Too many bulbs, too much glass.
At some point between one toast and the next, one of the bulbs… dimmed. Then brightened. Then dimmed again.
Not flickering, exactly.
More like someone had taken a dimmer switch and started twisting it in slow, steady beats.
Nobody else looked up.
Why would they?
The music bumped, people shouted, someone dropped a fork. I stood there watching that single bulb breathe in and out while everyone around me pretended the world was behaving normally.
"Kendrick!"
I looked down. Koji, our backend lead, slapped me on the shoulder.
"You zoning out on us already, boss?" he said. "We're not even drunk enough to embarrass ourselves yet."
"You're plenty drunk already," I said.
"Lies. Anyway, investors want a selfie with you." He jerked his thumb toward an older man in a suit near the wall.
Of course they did.
The bulb went back to normal. Sensible, stable light.
I let Koji drag me away.
The second strange thing was the sound.
Midway through some EDM track, the beat stuttered. Not in a way a DJ would do on purpose. The bass just… stretched. A single note smeared longer than it should have, spilling over the next one.
People laughed and shouted over it. No one stopped dancing.
Mari caught my eye again from across the room and mimed a tiny shrug. "Cheap equipment," her expression said.
I wanted to agree.
The back of my neck prickled.
The third strange thing didn't look strange at all.
It was a paper napkin.
Someone had dropped it near my feet. The air conditioning draft caught the corner, lifted it gently, and pressed it back to the floor.
Up, down.
Up, down.
Like it was testing whether it wanted to fly.
I told myself I was being ridiculous.
Then the napkin didn't come back down.
It hung there, halfway between the floor and my shoe. Just hung. Not like it was caught on anything, not like it had been trapped in some invisible updraft.
It simply stopped obeying.
I stared at it.
"Kendrick?"
Mari again. She followed my line of sight, frowned, then blinked.
The napkin lay flat on the floor.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"I'm fine," I said.
Lie.
"Your face says 'panic attack.'"
"My face always says 'panic attack.'"
She snorted. "Fair. Drink something. You're too sober for your own party."
She pressed a glass into my hand and drifted away before I could answer.
I didn't drink.
If this was a movie, that's the point where ominous music would start. Shadows lengthen, color drains, the protagonist decides to go outside for some air instead of staying under the collapsing ceiling.
In reality, the DJ switched to an old pop song, and someone started a crude chant, and my old professor, of all people, walked in late and made a beeline toward me.
Life rarely pauses for foreshadowing.
I remember exactly what I was thinking a few seconds before the world folded.
I was thinking: If something did go wrong here, how fast could I get everyone out?
I had entrance width, table positions, and headcount already in my mental buffer. I was halfway to calculating rough times when everything… shifted.
Not like an earthquake.
More like gravity got bored of pointing down and decided to see what sideways felt like.
The chandelier didn't fall.
It bent.
The entire assembly leaned toward one point in the middle of the room, stretching, the metal arms drooping like they'd been made of hot wax. Glass shapes slid along their chains without falling off, as if they'd forgotten that was an option.
The music crawled. A syllable stretched until it stopped being sound and became pressure.
My glass tilted in my hand. The liquid tried to climb out.
For half a second, nobody reacted. Brains lag behind reality when reality breaks its contract.
Then someone screamed.
Then everyone did.
I moved on reflex.
"Door!" I shouted, or tried to. It came out slow in my own ears, like speaking underwater.
I grabbed the nearest person by the arm, turned them toward the exit, pushed.
Or thought I did.
My arm felt like it was moving through thick syrup. Their body dragged. The distance between us and the door didn't look like it was changing.
All the while, the room leaned, inch by inch, toward some invisible point in the air.
Glasses slid toward that point and rose into the air, liquid clinging to them. Confetti from earlier drifted upward like it had changed its mind about which way was down.
People clawed at the floor. Shoes squeaked on polished concrete, leaving no marks.
"Move!" I tried again. "Get to the—"
The word "exit" never finished inside my head, let alone out of my mouth.
The space in the middle of the room wrinkled.
That's the only way I can describe it. Like someone had pinched the air and given it a twist.
Everything followed.
Tables scraped, chairs toppled, bodies slid. Not outward, not away from danger like logic-trained animals, but inward, toward that pinched point. Not pulled by any visible rope. Just… compelled.
A man who'd been standing on the far side of the bar hit an invisible wall halfway across the room. His outline distorted, as if someone had tried to redraw him with an unsteady hand.
He didn't explode.
He folded.
His arms and legs curled inward, his spine bent, his whole body collapsed into itself like a collapsing tent. For a moment, he existed as a dense, human-colored knot, smaller than his own head.
Then even that knot thinned, thinned, and vanished.
The drink he'd been holding didn't spill until after he was gone.
The glass, freed from his hand, drifted, turned, and rotated toward the center.
Then it was its turn.
I was still standing.
Somehow.
People skidded past me, fingertips scraping my sleeves, my shoulders, my chest. Their mouths warped around sounds that never finished.
I tried to dig my heels into the floor. Useless.
I grabbed the nearest table. It stretched under my hands like rubber, its legs bending toward the point in the air. Wood doesn't bend like that, but this one did, complaining in a sound I felt in my teeth rather than heard.
"Kendrick!"
Mari's voice. Thin, stretched.
I saw her across the room, fingers dug into the doorframe. The door itself was warped inward, its edges bowing toward the center point while the frame stayed put. Her body was at an impossible angle, like she was being held horizontally by a magnet.
She reached a hand toward me.
I reached back.
The distance between us didn't look that big.
It also didn't change.
I've always hated being useless.
It's why I started my own company instead of being a comfortable cog. It's why I learned enough about every role that I could, at minimum, fill in badly if someone got sick. It's why I couldn't sit at home when production went wrong at three in the morning.
Now I was watching an entire room slide into nothing, and every instinct I had was screaming orders my body couldn't follow.
Get them out.
Push that table against the wall.
Break the window.
Do something.
I did nothing.
Not because I chose to.
Because the world had stopped accepting my input.
The point in the air grew brighter, not in color but in intensity—like a pixel being overexposed one frame at a time.
Napkins, confetti, shattered glass, plates, phones, belts, shoes, people. All of it drew in.
Folded down.
Disappeared.
Sound narrowed with them. Screams compressed into a single continuous note. Then even that note thinned into silence.
My feet left the floor.
For a fraction of a second, I was weightless.
Then the same pressure that had dragged everything else took hold of me.
Every part of me clenched without my consent. Not muscles—something deeper, like my whole existence was trying to huddle around a point in my spine. My field of vision shrank, corners drawing inward.
The last thing I saw clearly was Mari's hand, still reaching, fingers splayed, nails painted a color she'd joked made her look "less corporate."
Then her hand folded, too.
People say your life flashes before your eyes when you die.
Mine didn't.
Nothing played.
No montage, no regrets checklist, no slow-motion highlight reel of childhood summers.
Just one thought, rising up against the crushing, narrowing pressure:
If something like this happens again, I am not watching from the middle of the room. I am not standing here with my hands empty. I am not doing nothing.
Ridiculous promise to make when you're being crushed into a point.
But there it was.
That stubborn, idiotic refusal to stay a bystander.
The universe ignored it, obviously.
The pressure peaked.
The room, the people, my body, my name—
All of it folded.
Then there was nothing.
No dark.
No light.
No time.
If you've never existed as a single awareness without senses, good. I don't recommend it.
There was no pain. Pain needs a body, nerves, something to complain about. This place had none of those. No ceiling. No floor. No "place," even.
Just… a stretch of being with nothing to attach to.
For a while, I didn't even miss anything. Hard to miss what you aren't aware of not having.
Then the promise floated back up.
Next time, I won't just stand there.
Funny thing to cling to when you aren't even sure you have hands.
The thought echoed inside myself, over and over, until it stopped being words and became more like shape. A stubborn knot where a person used to be.
Next time. Next time. Next—
Something tugged.
Sound returned first.
Not words. Weight.
Deep, muffled vibrations through something soft. A rhythm pounding somewhere nearby, faster than mine used to be, like someone drumming their fingers on a table.
Then cold air on skin.
Then skin.
I had skin again.
Everything hurt—not like injury, more like I'd been poured whole through a narrow tube and left to dry. My limbs were too short, too small, too wrong. My chest convulsed.
Air shoved into me.
I made a noise.
Not a word. A raw, high-pitched sound I would've been embarrassed to make in front of anyone.
It cut through the muffled vibrations like a knife.
People answered.
Voices. Two? Three? I couldn't tell. Too loud, too close. They overlapped, wrapped around me.
I tried to ask where I was.
More noise came out instead. Wet, breathy, uncontrolled.
Someone lifted me. Hands, larger than I now was, slid under my back and head. I was pressed against warmth. Cloth brushed my face. My world shrank to the space between that warmth and the cold air on my exposed skin.
The language around me wasn't one I knew.
I'd learned two and a half languages back in my previous life, enough to negotiate contracts and apologize to foreign clients. This wasn't any of them.
The syllables flowed differently. Rounded, then snapped short. A pattern I couldn't place.
I tried to open my eyes.
Light stabbed through closed lids. My face scrunched on reflex. My throat worked again, producing another wail.
Someone laughed softly.
Someone else said something in that unfamiliar tongue—soothing, coaxing, a tone I recognized even if the meaning was opaque.
A finger touched my cheek.
Not a staple. Not a blade.
Gentle.
I realized, with the slow reluctance of a man accepting a bad business deal, what was happening.
I hadn't disappeared.
I hadn't been deleted.
I'd been… relocated.
Reissued.
Born.
The thought was ridiculous enough that for a second, my panic cut off. Then my new lungs decided they had opinions again and dragged in another breath.
I cried harder.
The universe had given me a next time.
I was not remotely ready.
But the promise I'd made while being compressed into a point clung to me like a second skin.
Next time, I won't just watch.
The hands holding me trembled with what might have been joy, or fear, or both.
Somewhere beyond my blurred vision and unfamiliar syllables, something vast and unseen watched back.
And the first day of my second life began with me screaming at a world I couldn't yet understand.