The day was drawing to a close when Davin returned home.
A data analyst at a major corporation, he spent his days dissecting chaos to extract profitable probabilities from it. His mind, forged by numbers and cold logic, had no room for the unexpected.
The silence of the house felt familiar. His mother wasn't there—as was often the case lately, stuck doing overtime at the hospital. Before even taking off his shoes, he grabbed the small watering can by the bay window and stepped out into the garden.
The twilight air was heavy, almost stagnant. The leaves didn't even twitch.
Locked in his thoughts, mentally calculating the variables of a project left pending at the office, he watered his plants with a mechanical routine. Then, his gaze slid toward the back of the lot. Toward that stunted little apple tree that had never produced anything edible.
That's when he saw it.
A statistical anomaly.
Isolated on a low branch, an apple sat in the gloom. Its surface, of absolute perfection, caught the fading light and reflected it with the hard gleam of a polished stone. A deep green. Unreal.
"Looks like jade..." he muttered, his voice hoarse from fatigue.
Davin narrowed his eyes, searching for a logical explanation. A buried memory surfaced. A few months earlier, his mother had returned from a flea market: "I stopped by an old junk dealer's place. I found some ancient seeds there, they say they grow even in the worst soils. Look." She was wearing that vague little smile. At the time, he had only paid it polite attention.
With a tap on the frame of his smart glasses—his favorite work tool provided by his company—he activated his virtual assistant.
"AI, run a visual search. Is there a variety of apple with pigmentation and texture close to mineral jade?"
A faint hum resonated in the frame, but the retinal display remained blank. The AI didn't respond, unable to process the query or find a match.
"Hm, an unknown species, or is the AI bugging out?..." he mumbled. "Whatever, might as well take it."
He reached out and plucked the fruit.
Its weight surprised him. The apple was dense. And above all, unnaturally cold, as if it had just been extracted from a block of ice.
A few minutes later, he was sitting on the living room couch, the fruit in his hands.
He scrutinized it from every angle. The bluish glow of the powered-off television reflected off the emerald epidermis. Not a single blemish. Not the slightest geometric imperfection.
"This thing is way too perfect," he stated into the oppressive silence of the living room.
He was hypnotized by it, for no apparent reason. He rolled it between his palms. His analyst's mind was screaming at him to be cautious, to wait for his mother to return, and to do extensive research on this anomaly. But the strange chill radiating from the fruit seeped into his nerves, numbing his rationality, drawing him in irresistibly.
Abruptly, he stood up and walked toward the kitchen.
He placed the fruit on a ceramic plate and grabbed a paring knife. The blade scraped against the hard skin before sinking in with unexpected resistance.
The exposed flesh wasn't white at all. It was a diaphanous green, threaded with tiny silver veinlets that seemed to catch and hold the light from the ceiling fixture. It was beautiful. Hypnotic.
I'll definitely regret this if it's toxic, he thought.
He brought a slice to his mouth. And bit down.
His pupils dilated instantly.
"Good God..."
The explosion of flavors swept away all his reluctance. It was neither acidic nor cloying. It was an absolute freshness, almost... alive. As if water from the purest spring were flooding his palate.
Driven by an unfamiliar animal impulse, his rational mind shattered. He devoured the rest. He swallowed the flesh, the core, even grinding the hard black seeds beneath his teeth. Every bite erased the fatigue of his day, plunging his brain into a gentle euphoria.
Then, silence fell again. The plate was empty.
Davin stood motionless in the middle of the kitchen. The euphoria evaporated as quickly as it had appeared, giving way to a terrifying emptiness.
"It's already gone?" he marveled, slowly coming to his senses.
Confused by his own gluttony, he shook his head and went back to slump on the couch.
"Alright, AI, run a search for a good movie toni—"
His sentence died in his throat.
A heat flared in the pit of his stomach. No. Not heat. A burn.
Something was spreading through him. Sudden. Violent. Uncontrollable.
"Argh...!"
A painful hiccup tore through his chest. He doubled over, his hands clutched against his abdomen. It wasn't indigestion. It felt as if molten lead had just been poured directly into his guts.
"AHHH!"
He tipped off the couch and crashed heavily onto the floor. His breathing hitched sharply. His lungs refused to expand.
A searing burn radiated from his stomach to pierce his ribcage. Beneath his skin, his veins bulged. He tried to crawl toward the kitchen to drink and call for help. But his legs refused to obey him. He collapsed on his back, seized by violent convulsions.
The pain became total. Absolute.
Every cell of his being, from the marrow of his bones to the pads of his fingers, felt like it was being crushed, dissolved by an invisible force before being ruthlessly restructured.
"Help... Please!"
His cry was nothing more than a muffled death rattle.
"HELP ME! AAAAAH! IT BURNS!"
His eyes rolled back in their sockets. The internal combustion reached his brain, drilling into his skull like an incandescent bit. His body, hyper-extended, resembled a bow about to snap. He thrashed on the floor, violently slamming his head against the wood without even realizing it, desperately seeking any way to escape this internal torture.
The final piece of data his analytical brain managed to process was the absolute certainty of his own death.
Then, nothing. Silence.
With Davin's last breath, the combustion ceased. From his frozen body rose an ethereal flame, a brilliant jade green. A cold fire, consuming neither his blackened flesh nor the living room's hardwood floor.
The incandescent entity pulsed, then shot toward the heavens. Passing through the ceiling of the house as if it didn't exist, the flame tore through the layers of Earth's atmosphere to plunge into the abyss of space. Traveling at a speed defying all mortal logic, the jade comet streaked across the cosmos until it crashed into the orbit of a distant world.
It dove toward the surface of this new planet. In the mud of a squalid camp, beneath a broken cart, an emaciated young beggar slept a restless sleep.
The emerald glow slammed into him, violently plunging into his chest. The shock of heat and pain ripped the young man from his sleep. His eyes widened in terror, his jaw unhinging in a silent scream. The energy crushed his fragile soul in a fraction of a second, killing him instantly to claim the vessel.
The jade glow eventually dimmed in intensity, burying itself deep within his guts, then faded entirely.
A heavy silence fell once more beneath the cart.
After a long moment, the body moved again.