I
There was no pain.
That was the only thing Calvin’s mind could confirm with any certainty.
No pain, no fear…
only a strange, near-weightless lightness, as if his entire being had been slowly lifted out of some thick, viscous water and set gently adrift.
If life really did flash before your eyes at the end, he’d always assumed it would show something momentous.
What actually surfaced, though, was almost embarrassingly mundane: the loading bar of his ticket system, the red exclamation mark on a complaint page, and that one sentence he’d said what felt like ten thousand times.
II
He didn’t see his parents’ faces.
He didn’t see any single relationship play out in full.
The realization stirred something faint in him…
not quite regret, not quite relief, just a quiet acknowledgment that his life had, in fact, been this thin.
This entirely made of work.
He’d never had a relationship serious enough to call his own.
He couldn’t think of more than one or two friends he’d have called at 2 a.m.
just to talk.
If there was anything in his life that came close to resembling a bond, it was those disembodied voices on the other end of a headset…
strangers he’d never once seen, asking for help in the most real way people ever ask for anything.
Was my whole life really this thin?
The thought passed through and didn’t linger…
lingering, at this point, already felt like a luxury he could no longer afford.
III
Somewhere in the fog of his fading consciousness, a memory he’d nearly forgotten floated up on its own.
Back in university, late one night in the library, he’d helped a girl he barely knew fix a system error that had been about to fail her out of a required course.
He remembered the way her eyes had gone red with gratitude.
He’d remembered it for years, actually, without ever quite realizing what it had been: one of the rare moments in his life where helping someone had felt purely, uncomplicatedly good.
He hadn’t even caught her name properly, he realized now.
Just the shape of her relief, and the strange warmth it had left behind, entirely disproportionate to how small the favor had actually been.
That feeling had nothing in common with the eight years that followed…
the kind of “help” that came bundled with KPIs, with the grinding obligation to resolve the issue no matter the cost to himself.
Somewhere between that library and this headset, helping people had stopped being a choice and become a job description, and he’d never quite noticed the exact moment the two had come apart.
If there’s a next life, he thought, hazy and half-formed, drifting deeper into the fog, maybe I should try living it for myself, just once.
The thought dropped like a stone into a still, dark pond, sending out one small ripple before the deeper darkness swallowed it whole.
IV
When awareness returned, it came with blinding white light.
A hall so vast its ceiling disappeared into the dark, countless pillars of light pouring down from somewhere far above, each one holding a figure standing in eerie, motionless silence…
like a line of people waiting for a routine physical exam.
Calvin looked down at himself.
His body had taken on a translucent quality.
No shadow beneath his feet.
“Welcome to the Temple of Fate.” A voice rang out from everywhere and nowhere at once, solemn to the point of sounding almost rehearsed.
“Every soul born into the world of Reversal has their fate inscribed the moment they arrive.”
Calvin felt nothing in particular, if anything, he had enough detachment left to think: do they really have to recite that every single time?
Doesn’t it get old for them too?
He shuffled forward with the line, his eyes drifting over the other “new souls” ahead of him as they were, one by one, formally judged and found himself struck by a bizarre, almost theme-park sense of absurdity, like watching strangers take turns on some elaborate, cosmic amusement ride, waiting his turn to be handed a wristband that would decide the rest of his existence.
Somewhere behind that detachment, though, a small, stubborn curiosity had already started to stir; not fear exactly, but something close to it, dressed up as idle interest.
Whatever came next, he suspected, was going to matter a great deal more than he currently had the sense to be nervous about.
He glanced down the line ahead of him, trying to guess, out of habit, what sort of “system” this whole operation might be running on.
Some kind of matching algorithm, maybe, sorting souls into categories the way his old company’s software used to route incoming tickets by urgency and department.
Old habits, it seemed, followed a person even past the point of death.