Everything in Tran Vinh An's world was defined by straight lines. The slender blue lines on an A0 blueprint, the sharp, cold edges of the glass skyscraper outside his window, even the impassive streak of light the fluorescent bulb cast onto his desk. Logic was concrete, was reinforced steel, was numbers precise to three decimal places. Logic was what kept buildings from collapsing, and An believed, it was also what kept a human being from going insane.
But recently, the straight lines had begun to warp.
It all began with a sound. A dripping.
Drip...
It wasn't coming from the leaking faucet in the restroom. An had checked. Not from the air conditioner. He had called maintenance. It came from somewhere inside his skull, steady and patient, like a water clock counting down to a moment he did not know.
Drip...
Amidst the rhythmic tapping of keys, regular as the heartbeat of a machine, amidst the murmur of colleagues' discussions, it was still there. A dissonant note in the symphony of order.
An tried to ignore it. He buried himself in the detailed drawings of the "Azure Tower" project, a modern block of architecture, clean and entirely without hidden corners. He moved the mouse, zooming in on the cross-section of a lobby. Vectorial people walked about, soulless and purposeful. He felt a strange envy for them.
Then a feeling of déjà vu struck. Mai from HR walked past his desk, holding a stack of documents, her high bun quivering slightly. An shuddered. He had seen this scene before. Not a vague "looks familiar" kind of memory. He knew exactly, down to the millisecond, that just as the heel of her shoe crossed the third floor tile (the third tile from his desk, exactly 1.8 meters away), Minh in the corner of the room would sneeze.
Achoo!
An froze. The black coffee in his hand trembled slightly. He looked around. No one noticed. Everything continued, smoothly and logically. Only he was the gear that had slipped a cog.
The accident at the old hospital in Da Lat had been almost a year ago. He had told everyone he was lucky, that a sudden intuition had made him pull Kien, the young graduate colleague, out of that spot just seconds before the ceiling collapsed. People called him a hero. The Tuoi Tre newspaper even ran a long article about the "Hero architect who saved colleague in the nick of time."
But that was a lie.
What he experienced was not intuition. It was certainty. It was a time loop that had lasted several hours, where he had witnessed that section of ceiling crash down twenty-seven times, each time from a different angle. He had memorized the sound of shattering concrete, a low, dry sound like distant thunder. He memorized the trajectory of every fragment, the largest piece falling at a 37-degree angle to the room's vertical axis. Until he knew exactly which direction to pull Kien, at which second, for both of them to escape death.
He had never told anyone about it. He had tried to bury it, labeled it "hallucination due to post-traumatic stress" and locked it tight in a mental drawer never to be opened. But fragments of that memory seemed to be leaking out, like that dripping sound.
Drip...
A drop of coffee fell onto the blueprint.
It wasn't just a dark spot. It spread, slowly and deliberately, not like how a normal liquid would soak into paper. The stain was dark brown like dried blood, almost Pantone 448C, the ugliest color in the world according to a 2016 survey. The outer edge was paler, like old India ink. It wasn't round. It elongated, twisted into a bizarre shape. A shadow. The shadow of a gaunt figure reaching out to him.
An held his breath. He blinked hard, hoping the image would disappear.
But it didn't.
The shadow was still there, a perfect crack on the pristine white surface of the 120gsm Conqueror paper. An absurdity that could not be erased.
A chill ran down his spine, a coldness not from the air conditioner. He felt as if he was being watched, not by the flesh-and-blood colleagues sitting around him, but by something on the other side of the windowpane. He turned.
The city was still there, a network of straight lines in steel and concrete under the afternoon sun. But for a brief moment, his own reflection on the glass was not him. The face was familiar, but the eyes were empty, deep, and terrifyingly still. As if the person inside the glass was looking at somewhere very far away, a place with no buildings, no roads, not even time.
An image flashed in An's mind, not a memory, but more like a longing. A small café hidden in an alley, always submerged in the amber light of twilight. The smell of old wood, of books, and of a kind of coffee he had never tasted. No noise, no cold straight lines. Only stillness. A safe station amidst the storm beginning to rise in his mind.
He shook his head, chasing the strange image away. It was just his imagination. He was tired. He needed rest.
But when An looked back at the blueprint, the human-shaped shadow on the coffee stain seemed to have inched a little closer. The outstretched arm was now longer, nearly touching the edge of the paper.
And the dripping sound in his head, still steady.
Drip...