For twelve years, David was a software engineer. He worked for a company that liked to say they were a family. They spoke of loyalty, passion, and innovation, and he believed them. He stayed late, fixed broken code on weekends, and covered for managers who couldn't explain their own products.
Then he was diagnosed with cancer. It was Stage II at first—something treatable, easily survivable. He informed HR, and they told him to take medical leave and that everything would be handled.
Two weeks later, an email arrived. His position had been "restructured." There was no severance, just the standard "thank you for your service" template. They called it a financial decision. The company was posting record profits, with record bonuses for executives, but apparently, keeping David insured was too expensive.
That was how his treatment stopped. That was how he ran out of money. That was how he lost his apartment.
The following months were a battle to stay alive. He applied for every kind of aid and every freelance job he could find. But nobody wanted to hire a man who couldn't promise he would be able to work the next month. When you are sick and homeless, life becomes a waiting game—waiting for a clinic, waiting for a bed, waiting for the painkillers to kick in.
The loyalty he had given was worth less than the paper his termination notice was printed on. He had thought that being good at his job, and doing it honestly, would protect him. It didn't. It only made it easier for them to trust he would take the hit quietly.
Near the end, he didn't have much left to say. He barely knew how long he had been sleeping on the sidewalk. The pain came and went, but his prevailing thought was how easy it had been for them—how a person's entire life could be reduced to a number on a profit margin.
When the day of his death finally came, all he felt was relief. Even his will to live had been thoroughly corroded. After all, he had no friends—a sacrifice he had justified in his mind by being a team player, working 80-hour weeks. His family was gone, his parents taken in a car crash years prior.
What did I even have to live for?
That was David's last thought before death took him.
He felt like both a million years had passed and yet also an instant in the amount of time it took him to wake up.
The first thing David saw upon waking up was a flash of light so blinding it felt as though the force of ten thousand suns was searing his eyes. Yet that wasn't what drew his attention, it was the wave of incomprehensible images assaulting his mind.
Books and scrolls written in languages he could not comprehend, bloody battles between statues that dwarfed mountains—all of it flashed before his eyes in chaotic succession.
And then came the pain. Pain unlike anything he had ever felt before, as though his skull was being torn apart from within. His brief moment of consciousness was fleeting; before he could even process what was happening, darkness swallowed him whole.
His second time waking up, he found himself in a room not unlike any other he had ever been in, however with one remarkable difference—it was enormous. He felt like a gnome in a room made for giants.
When he tried to speak, all that came out was incomprehensible cries. "Where the hell am I?" Just as he thought that, however, he was assaulted with what could only be described as awareness of everything around him.
He knew what the room looked like without even using his eyes; he knew how the house looked. What could only be described as waves of information appeared in his consciousness, describing everything around him with clinical detachment.
There was one more thing stirring in his mind—another presence. It wasn't physical, but a calm, authoritative awareness that seemed to steady the chaos around him.
Even as the world remained a haze of shifting colors and muffled sounds, he felt that someone was leaning over him.
His vision was so blurred that the man's face was little more than a light and shadow, and every faint noise struck his newborn ears with painful clarity.
Yet somehow, despite the confusion, waves of information flooded in and he understood who the man was.
Images and impressions bloomed in his mind—sharp features worn by sleepless nights, eyes gleaming with quiet intellect, and the stillness of someone who studied everything with curiosity.
"Calm yourself, Nicholas," the man murmured. The words were distorted to his ears, but perfectly clear in his mind. Nicholas… my name is Nicholas? he thought, the realization flickering faintly through the fog of newborn awareness.
He wanted to cry, to move, but every sound felt too sharp, every sensation too loud. And yet, beneath it all, he sensed something else.
The man watching him was his father. He could feel the curiosity in his gaze, the quiet thrill of discovery, but also the steadiness of someone who would not let harm come to him. Though he didn't know how, Nicholas knew he was safe.