The city outside his window was a smear of neon and rain, the sort of light that looked like somebody had tried too hard to cheer up a grey evening. Arjun let the door click shut behind him and stood for a moment in the doorway, listening to the sound his own life made: the soft, steady tick of the radiator, the distant rumble of a bus, the faint clank of dishes from the flat below. Ordinary noises. Everyone else going on.
He dumped his bag on the bed and sat on the edge, elbows on knees, palms pressed into the tiredness that lived in his hands now. The calluses from loading crates, the faint grease smudge under a thumbnail — tangible proof he was still doing things, still moving. But moving toward what?
Two years. Two fucking years since graduation. Two years since the day his parents had kissed his forehead and told him, with that ridiculous mixture of pride and expectation that parents wear, that he could do anything. He could still see them at the college gate: his mother tucking a stray curl behind her ear, his father trying not to cry like a man who knew exactly how proud he was. They had believed the brand would be his future — the label with their surname stitched into the collar.
Policy changes had come like rain in monsoon: sudden, heavy, and impossible to ignore. Tariffs, red tape, border hold-ups — the things that sank dreams for people who couldn't fight bureaucratic tides. Orders postponed, suppliers gone quiet, fabric that cost twice what it had the month before. He had watched the cashflow graph in his head like an obituary: once promising, then flat, then gone.
And then the phone call came. The word "accident" held itself up like a stone between him and the rest of the world. Rain, an unlit stretch, a truck that didn't slow. He had arrived to the scene late, because that's what bureaucracy and paperwork and fault lines do — they buy you time to be late. The paramedic's face was a book with two pages torn out: sorry, there's nothing, and we tried. He'd signed papers his hands refused to steady. He'd watched people fold himself around a coffin like a polite lie: "It was quick," they said. "Better that way." But he stayed with the question — better for whom? He had been told, more than once, to "enjoy life." They'd meant it as permission; now it sounded like an assignment they'd never finished.
Debt numbers stood in his head like a chalkboard from hell: 100,000 dollars. A number with too many zeros that turned sleep into an enemy. He tried to reckon it in small things. In months of rent. In years of odd jobs. In the exact number of times he had sold a shirt for less than it cost to make. If he closed his eyes he could do the math: how many days of packing parcels, how many nights of ferrying people across town. The answer always looped back to the same shape: not enough. Not even close.
There were nights he went over his parents' last words, searching for an instruction manual hidden in a careless joke. "Enjoy life," his mother had said, laughing as she cut a mango. "Don't work too hard." It was sarcasm and love braided the same way. He had tried to honor it — in the way people honor tombstones: by standing still in front of them, hoping standing is a kind of living. Except standing didn't pay debts.
He thought of endings sometimes, the way you think of clearing out a drawer. Practicalities: how to make it quick, how to make it painless. He rationalized it with the same clinical detachment he used to balance his accounts: less rent, less worry for the creditors, a clean ledger. He told himself his parents wouldn't have wanted him to suffer, and in the same breath wondered if the ledger would ever stop bleeding numbers.
The thought made his hands go cold. He imagined the stillness after — a silence that no one would have to fix. He pictured his parents' faces again: would they be relieved, or would their mouths form that same puzzled line that people make after they've been told a bad punchline? He didn't have the courage to find out.
The room felt smaller, the air heavier, like the world had folded in a little, waiting. He lay back and let his eyes close. The ceiling cracked into the same pattern it always cracked into — a map of small, inconsequential faults. His breath slowed. There was a small, perverse comfort in the way everything would stop if he stopped it. It was an absolute answer. And absolute answers are tempting when the rest of life is a bunch of messy "maybes."
He pictured the email drafts — the half-written explanations to suppliers, to the bank, to the unknown administrator who would somehow quantify his grief into forms. He thought of the business plan he once carried like a child and the empty storage unit he now paid to keep some unsold inventory. "Failure," he thought. "That's me." He said it aloud and the word tasted like stale coins.
Then, when the thinking had nowhere else to go, he imagined a small brightness — ridiculous, childish — a light like the kind that blinks on video games to tell you you've leveled up. He chuckled, a dry thing that startled him. If only there were cheats for life, he thought. If only someone would hand him an extra life or two.
That's when the ding happened.
At first he thought it was the kettle. Then the ringtone of his cheap phone. But the sound came from inside his skull, precise and impossible, a tiny bell with edges sharp enough to cut through the fog. His eyes snapped open.
A blue shimmer materialized above his bedside table like a thin slice of dawn. A holographic interface — translucent, humming — floated silently, drawing the air into itself. He felt it first as a pressure behind his eyes, like a gentle prod that said pay attention.
The message was clinical and absurd all at once:
[Welcome, User #001 — Daily Sign-In System Activated]
It should have been ridiculous. It should have been ignored. Instead it sat in the room with the weight of an accusation: the world had finally offered him something. A system. A promise of incremental help. It felt like an instrument panel on a broken spacecraft and, for reasons he couldn't explain, his pulse gave a small, hopeful kick.
"Sign in daily to receive rewards," said a voice — synthetic, soft, and curiously neutral. It didn't promise to remove grief. It didn't say, you'll be happy. It said something smaller, practical. Do a thing — show up — get something.
Arjun's throat tightened. "There's no such thing," he whispered to the empty air, half to persuade the universe and half to persuade himself. The hologram pulsed.
[Would you like to sign in for Day 1?]
He thought of every instruction manual he had read about business: consistency, service, branding, daily touchpoints. Sign in. Be consistent. Show up. He let the simplest, most exhausted kernel of belief in him decide.
"Yeah," he breathed. "Okay."