The clock on the bottom right of my monitor read 10:47 AM. I stared at it for a while, watching the colon blink between the numbers, willing it to move faster through some act of desperate concentration. It didn’t. The projections spreadsheet glowed in front of me, rows of numbers that supposedly meant something to someone, somewhere, though I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I was supposed to care about them.

Meridian Tech. Software as a Service. We sold subscription-based solutions to enterprises that needed to streamline their workflows, or optimize their synergies, or whatever other buzzwords the marketing department had cooked up that quarter. I’d been here four years. Four years of fluorescent lighting and recycled air and the same conversation about the weather repeated eight thousand times.

The ceiling tiles were the color of old teeth. I’d counted them once, during a particularly brutal conference call about Q3 targets. Two hundred and forty-seven tiles visible from my cubicle, give or take a few obscured by the air conditioning vents that hummed their eternal, droning song. The sound was supposed to be white noise, soothing, a gentle backdrop to productive work. Instead, it felt like being slowly smothered by a pillow made of tedium.

I checked the clock again. 10:48. God, this day was taking forever. And it was only Tuesday.

My desk was a monument to organized desperation. A cup of paper clips sat to the left of my keyboard, which I’d arranged by size during yesterday’s afternoon lull. Next to it, a small container of rubber bands sorted by color. Blue, red, green, yellow. The red ones were thicker, better for bundling documents, though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bundled a document. Everything was digital now. The rubber bands were artifacts, relics of a more tactile age.

I picked up the paper clip cup and began the sorting process again. Small clips to the left. Medium clips to the middle. Large clips to the right. It wasn’t productive, strictly speaking, but it gave my hands something to do while my brain slowly calcified.

“Hey, Mark! How’s it going?”

I looked up to see Dave from accounting walking past my cubicle, coffee mug in hand, wearing the same forced cheerfulness that we all wore like a uniform. I arranged my face into something approximating warmth.

“Living the dream, Dave. Living the dream.”

He laughed, a brief bark of recognition at the shared joke that wasn’t really a joke, and continued on his way to whatever awaited him in accounting. Spreadsheets, probably. Different spreadsheets than mine, but the same fluorescent purgatory.

The gray fabric walls of my cubicle rose just high enough to create the illusion of privacy while offering none of the reality. I could hear Cheryl two cubes down explaining her weekend plans to someone who clearly didn’t care. Something about a farmer’s market. Someone else, possibly Jim from operations, was complaining about the copier on the third floor—it jammed constantly, apparently, though fixing it was somehow beyond the capacity of a company that sold enterprise software solutions.

I was a prisoner. That was the thought that kept surfacing, unwelcome but persistent. Not literally, of course. I could stand up at any time, walk out the glass doors, and never come back. But there were the bills. The rent. The student loans that would follow me like a patient creditor into the grave itself. So I sat, and I sorted paper clips, and I watched the clock struggle toward 11:00 like a wounded animal dragging itself toward water.

The sound of heels on the thin industrial carpet made me look up again. I recognized the rhythm before I saw her—precise, confident, the walk of someone who knew exactly where they were going and pitied those who didn’t.

Jessica Oberdeen.

She was tall, beautiful in the way that office policies about professional appearance seemed designed to contain but couldn’t quite manage. Today’s outfit was a charcoal suit that followed the lines of her body with architectural precision, the skirt ending just above the knee, her legs smooth and impossibly long in sensible but flattering heels. Her black hair fell straight past her shoulders like a curtain of dark water, and her blue eyes had the kind of clarity that made you feel examined rather than seen.

She stopped at the opening of my cubicle. Not quite inside, not quite outside. Occupying the threshold like she owned it.

“Mark.” A greeting that wasn’t quite a greeting. “Did you send the Hendricks proposal to accounting?”

I had. Yesterday. I remembered specifically because I’d triple-checked it after the last time she’d publicly questioned my attention to detail.

“Yesterday afternoon. Dave should have it.”

Her eyebrows rose slightly, a performance of mild surprise. “Hm. He mentioned he hadn’t received it. You might want to follow up.” She paused, just long enough for the implication to settle. “Or I can take care of it, if you’re too busy.”

I wasn’t busy. She knew I wasn’t busy. The half-sorted paper clips and blank spreadsheet made that abundantly clear. But accepting her offer would be admitting incompetence, and refusing it meant potentially looking defensive.

“I’ll handle it,” I said.

“Great.” She smiled, bright and professional and utterly without warmth. “Oh, by the way, I saw the team numbers from last month. You were ... fourth, right?”

Fourth out of six. She didn’t need to mention that she’d been first. Everyone knew she was first. She was always first.

“Something like that.”

“You know, if you ever want some tips on client engagement, I’m happy to help. I remember when I was starting out, it took me a while to find my rhythm too.” The condescension was so perfectly wrapped in professional courtesy that you could almost miss it. Almost. “Just let me know.”

“Thanks, Jessica. I’ll keep that in mind.”

She smiled again, nodded once, and continued down the corridor, heels clicking their confident rhythm against the carpet. I watched her go, feeling the familiar mix of resentment and helplessness that her presence always inspired.

This wasn’t new. Jessica had been finding ways to remind me of my inadequacy since she’d arrived two years ago, fresh from some prestigious business school, already marked for the fast track. Our sales numbers were posted weekly, and she had a gift for mentioning them at exactly the moments guaranteed to maximize my discomfort. During team meetings, she’d reference my accounts as examples of “opportunities for growth.” In the break room, she’d loudly discuss strategies that had worked for her, glancing in my direction to make sure I was taking notes.

The worst part was that she wasn’t wrong. Not entirely. My numbers were mediocre. My client relationships were adequate but not exceptional. I had what the self-help books called “soft skills”—I could talk to people, make them comfortable, remember their kids’ names—but somehow it never translated into the kind of performance that mattered on spreadsheets.

Jessica’s talent was making sure everyone noticed the gap between us.

I turned back to my computer, mechanically clicking through emails I’d already read, when a shadow fell across my desk. I looked up to see Gloria Winters, my direct supervisor, standing just outside my cubicle with a tablet clutched to her chest like a shield.

Gloria was a small woman who somehow managed to occupy more space than her physical form suggested. It was something in her posture, the set of her shoulders, the way her eyes tracked constantly like she was measuring everything against some internal standard and finding it wanting. She wore her long blonde hair in a severe bob, and her suits were always immaculate in a way that made everyone else feel slightly disheveled by comparison.

“Mark. Do you have a minute?”

It wasn’t really a question. I nodded and half-rose from my chair, but she held up a hand.

“Here is fine. I just wanted to check in about your Q4 progress.”

“Of course.” I settled back down, trying to look attentive rather than nervous. “I’ve got three proposals out, two follow-up meetings scheduled for next week—”

“I’ve seen the pipeline.” She glanced at her tablet, scrolling through something I couldn’t see. “I wanted to talk about your engagement metrics.”

“My engagement metrics?”

“Client touchpoints per account. Follow-up frequency. Response time windows.” She looked at me over the edge of the tablet, eyebrows slightly raised. “You’re tracking these, yes?”

I had never, in four years at Meridian Tech, heard anyone mention engagement metrics. I’d certainly never been asked to track them.

“I ... can pull those numbers together.”

“Please do. I’m putting together a performance summary for the regional meeting next month, and I want to make sure we have a complete picture.” She paused, and her next words carried the weight of something carefully rehearsed. “I want to help you succeed, Mark. But I can’t do that if I don’t have accurate data.”

“Of course. I’ll have something to you by end of week.”

“Wednesday would be better.”

“Tomorrow? All right, tomorrow then.”

She nodded, made a small note on her tablet, and walked away without saying goodbye. I watched her go, a cold knot forming in my stomach.

This was the third time in two weeks she’d come by with some new metric or requirement I’d never heard of. Last time it was “proactive outreach ratios.” Before that, “satisfaction correlation scores.” I’d asked Dave about it, and he’d looked at me blankly. Asked Cheryl, who’d shrugged. Either Gloria had access to performance frameworks the rest of us didn’t know about, or she was building a paper trail.

The thought settled into my bones with a familiar weight. She was building a case. Had to be. Documenting deficiencies that didn’t exist so that when the time came, she’d have a folder full of missed targets and unmet metrics to justify whatever decision had already been made.

The strange thing was, I wasn’t sure I cared anymore.

I looked around the office—the gray cubicles stretching toward the windows where pale sunlight struggled through tinted glass, the hunched backs of coworkers staring at screens, the faded motivational posters that no one had bothered to update since the Clinton administration. THIS IS YOUR YEAR, one proclaimed, above a picture of a mountain climber reaching a summit. The irony was so heavy it practically bent the frame.

Four years. What did I have to show for it? A modest 401k. A one-bedroom apartment that cost too much and offered too little. A handful of professional acquaintances who would forget my name within weeks of my departure.

Maybe getting fired wouldn’t be the worst thing.

The clock read 11:23. I turned back to my spreadsheet, scrolling aimlessly through projections that projected nothing I cared about, when the first flicker of pain lanced through my skull.

It was sharp, sudden, like someone had pressed a hot needle into the space behind my right eye. I winced, raised a hand to my temple. Probably tension. I hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and the fluorescent lights always gave me headaches.

But the pain didn’t fade. It grew.

Within seconds, it had spread from a point behind my eye to encompass my entire skull, a pulsing, throbbing agony that made the office lights seem impossibly bright. I squeezed my eyes shut, but that only made the pressure worse, like my brain was trying to expand beyond the confines of my skull.

Something was wrong. This wasn’t a headache. This was—

I tried to breathe and found that I couldn’t quite manage it. My lungs wouldn’t expand properly. Air came in short, ragged gasps that didn’t seem to provide any oxygen. The room tilted sideways, and I grabbed the edge of my desk to steady myself, but my hands weren’t working right either, fingers clumsy and unresponsive.

The coffee mug. I watched it happen in slow motion, my elbow catching the ceramic edge, the mug tipping, spinning, brown liquid arcing through the air. Papers scattered. The mug hit the floor and shattered, but I barely heard it over the roaring in my ears.

“Mark? Mark, are you okay?”

Someone was talking to me. Cheryl, maybe. Or Dave. The voice came from very far away, muffled and distorted like hearing through water. I tried to respond, but my mouth wouldn’t form words. My vision was tunneling, the edges going dark and fuzzy while the center of my sight filled with strange lights, phosphenes dancing in patterns that almost seemed meaningful.

I was dying. That was the thought that penetrated the fog of pain, clear and calm and strangely detached. I was having a stroke, or an aneurysm, or something, and I was dying at my desk in this fluorescent hellscape surrounded by spreadsheets and scattered paper clips.

The floor rose to meet me. Or I fell. It was hard to tell which. The industrial carpet was rough against my cheek, smelling faintly of cleaning chemicals and old coffee. Above me, faces swam into view—Cheryl’s round features twisted with concern, someone else whose name I couldn’t remember, a cluster of bodies blocking out the ceiling tiles I’d counted so carefully.

“Someone call an ambulance!”

The voice was distant, barely audible over the roaring in my ears. I wanted to tell them not to bother. Wanted to explain that this was fine, actually, that maybe this was the escape I’d been waiting for without knowing I was waiting for it. Four years of gray cubicles and gray days and gray futures, and now here was something that wasn’t gray at all—here was black, pure and total, rising up from the edges of my vision like water filling a sinking ship.

“Mark! Mark, can you hear me? Stay with us!”

I couldn’t answer. The pain was everything now, my entire existence compressed into a single point of white-hot agony behind my eyes. But somewhere underneath the pain, somewhere in the part of my brain that was still capable of thought, a strange calm settled over me.

If this was the end, was that a bad thing?

The question hung in the darkness, unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. The voices above me faded to whispers, then to nothing. The fluorescent lights dimmed, and dimmed, and dimmed.

The last thing I heard, before the black took everything, was someone shouting about an ambulance.

And then there was nothing at all.

I woke slowly to the sound of beeping. Steady, rhythmic, clinical. The kind of sound that immediately tells you something has gone wrong, even before you open your eyes to confirm it.

The fluorescent lights hit me like a physical blow when I finally managed to pry my eyelids apart. I winced, turning my head away, which sent a dull throb rolling through my skull. The ceiling was that particular shade of institutional white that seemed to exist only in hospitals and government buildings—places designed to strip away any sense of warmth or personality.