The fluorescent lights hummed with relentless indifference, casting Marcus's cubicle in a sterile, suffocating glow. Rows of figures scrolled past his tired eyes, each digit a meaningless cog in a machine that dictated every second of his waking life. His mind drifted, chained by routines he'd never chosen, shackled by a future he'd blindly stumbled into. This wasn't living, this was survival within invisible walls. Freedom was a fantasy he'd almost stopped believing in.
He'd followed every rule, climbed every rung, believing the promise that achievement meant purpose. Yet, now Marcus knew better: the view from the top was empty, the heights cold, and the fall terrifying. He feared death not just because of its inevitability, but because he had nothing to show for the life slipping inexorably through his fingers. Freedom wasn't his, not yet, and the idea of dying without ever knowing it twisted painfully inside him.
Late at night, after everyone else left, Marcus escaped the monotony in the only way he knew how. He pushed his body past exhaustion, muscles screaming, lungs burning, not for vanity or strength alone, but for that brief illusion of control, the ephemeral sensation that he could outrun fate, outpace mortality itself. Every stride, every lift, was a defiance, a whispered claim of autonomy in a life that otherwise belonged entirely to others.
That night, rain slashed mercilessly against his windshield, blurring streetlights into smeared halos. His body ached comfortably, proof he still had some dominion over himself. Yet in the space of one breath to the next, control vanished.
Headlights exploded into his vision, blinding, deafening. The world twisted violently, steel screamed, glass shattered, and Marcus was flung into chaos.
Pain, immediate and consuming, crashed through him, followed swiftly by fear, not of the agony, but of the unknown, of the unfinished.
Pain, immediate and consuming, crashed through him, followed swiftly by something worse: the realization that it was all ending, and he hadn't even begun.
He wanted to scream, to fight, but all he could do was think, over and over, "No, no, not yet." Panic surged. The spreadsheets. The sleepless nights. The empty successes. The carefully managed life that had never truly been his.
I built a prison and called it a life.
The thought came sharp and cold, as if spoken by something else inside him, and it shattered him.
Then silence, infinite and terrifying.
Marcus drifted, bodiless and boundless, in an abyss between breaths, where time fractured. Voices, countless and indistinct, whispered from every direction, judging, probing, suffocating.
Through the ceaseless murmurs, one voice crystallized,cold, absolute, and filled with alien recognition.
"Anomaly."
Then nothingness claimed him again, a void Marcus Kane had always feared but never truly expected to face so soon.