Most offices have a few things in common.
At any given moment, the mechanical clatter of keyboards fills the space, sharp and relentless, enough to make even the most disciplined monk consider throwing one out the window. The scent of coffee lingers constantly, woven into the fabric of the day itself. Morning, first break, lunch, second break, third break... every break.
Fun fact: estimates place the Earth's population at around 8.2 billion. A number pulled from censuses and satellite or ml models. Accurate enough in cities, maybe. Less so in villages and the places the system quietly forgets. The real number is almost certainly higher, so assuming another billion isn't far-fetched.
And somewhere in that supposed 9.2 billion, it wouldn't be strange to find a person who collectively hates a very specific set of things. Things that might seem random, like:
The smell of coffee. The constant sound of keys being typed. The taste of coffee. Someone shouting across the office over an error in the code. The sound of people slurping their coffee. A manager who piles on more work the moment you think you're done. Coworkers who don't understand that cubicles aren't soundproof for their… personal activities.
And then, again, the worst thing of all: coffee.
Sitting in a cubicle was a man no older than twenty-four. Dark circles hung beneath his eyes as the glow of his monitor reflected faintly across his face. His desk was cheap and cluttered, scattered with papers, a dented pen holder, and cans of instant coffee strewn carelessly across the surface. Not because he liked it. But because at some point surviving on four hours of sleep had made even his most hated things feel necessary.
This man was one of those unlucky people who just happened to hate most things in life. And his name was Roswald.
He had been staring at the same function for forty minutes. Not because it was complex. Because his brain had quietly decided it was done for the day, even though the clock on the bottom right of his screen read 6:42 PM.
Just close the ticket. Just close it and go home.
"Hey, Roswald!"
The voice cut across the office like a fire alarm nobody wanted to respond to. Roswald closed his eyes for exactly three seconds. A silent, internal negotiation between the part of him that wanted to respond professionally and the part that was tallying up how many years in prison felt like a fair trade.
He turned around.
Derek Hollins, his manager, was already halfway across the floor, one hand raised like he was hailing a cab, the other gripping his phone. The man had a talent for arriving at the precise moment things felt almost manageable.
"Tim put in a sick leave," Derek said, stopping just short of the cubicle entrance, close enough that Roswald could smell the coffee on his breath. Of course. "I need you to stay on till nine."
Roswald blinked. "Till nine."
"The role-based access control rollout." Derek said it the way people say things they assume you've already agreed to. "We're pushing the permission tier update to production tonight. New user roles, granular access flags, the audit log integration, the whole thing. Compliance needs it live before the quarterly review and Tim was the one holding the deployment checklist." He paused. "Now you are."
Roswald looked at his screen. Then at Derek. Then at the cans of instant coffee on his desk.
He picked one up, cracked it open, and took a long, miserable sip.
"Sure," he said flatly. "Fine."
Derek pointed at him like that was the correct answer. "That's what I like about you, Roswald. Low drama." He was already walking away. "Tell Maya from QA to meet me."
Roswald stared at the space Derek had just vacated.
Low drama. Right. That's what it looked like from the outside when a person was simply too tired to perform it.
Though "performance" implied Derek was worth the effort. He wasn't. While the words coming out of Derek's mouth arrived in something resembling human language, Roswald had long since stopped processing them that way. In his head, Derek communicated exclusively in pig squealing. High-pitched, self-important, and completely convinced of its own authority. It wasn't difficult to understand why. Derek Hollins was the founder's son. Twenty-eight years old, a business degree from a university nobody asked about twice, and a LinkedIn profile that listed "visionary leader" under skills. Bossing people around wasn't something he'd learned. It was something he'd inherited, like the corner office and the parking spot with his name on it.
Roswald finished the can, set it down among its fallen brothers, and turned back to his monitor.
He pulled up the deployment pipeline and opened the staging environment dashboard. The repository belonged to ceroflit, a mid-sized SaaS company that built workforce management software. The kind hospitals, logistics firms, and regional governments used to handle shift scheduling, staff credentials, and internal compliance reporting. Unglamorous work. Critical infrastructure dressed in a boring interface. The clients weren't exciting but they were consistent, and consistent paid the bills, which was presumably why Roswald was still here at 6:47 PM on a Tuesday about to babysit a permission system rollout into production.
He pulled up the checklist Tim had left half-finished in the shared drive.
Environment variables-> staging verified.
Database migration scripts->reviewed.
Rollback plan-> drafted.
QA sign-off->
.... Blank.
Of course it was blank.
He picked up another can of coffee and looked at it for a moment with something approaching grief. The label was cheap. The contents were worse. He cracked it open anyway, because Roswald, despite everything, was a practical man. And practical men understood that hatred was a luxury you set aside when the alternative was falling asleep on a keyboard at seven in the evening. If it wasnt obvious, he didn't drink it because he wanted to. He drank it because life, as a general rule, was not in the business of offering better options.
Tell Maya from QA to meet me. Not us. Not you. Derek hadn't even left him a meeting room. Just a task, a checklist with a hole in it, and the ambient sound of the office slowly emptying around him while he stayed behind.
Powering his phone on, he tapped the messenger icon and stared at the blank text field. Being the introverted type, composing a message to someone he didn't know well took longer than it should have. The words themselves were simple enough. It was the weight of them. The awareness that he was about to reach into another person's evening and inform them it no longer belonged to them.
He typed a message to Maya.
"Hey. Derek needs us for the RBAC deployment. You around till nine?"
He stared at it. Then added:
"Sorry."
Then deleted the sorry, because it wasn't his fault, sent the message, and got to work.
- break -
The deployment finished at 9:47 PM.
Not cleanly. There had been a fifteen minute window somewhere around eight thirty where the audit log integration had thrown an unexpected error in production and Roswald had sat very still, the way a person sits when they are deciding whether to panic or not. He had decided not to. He had fixed it. Nobody had thanked him.
He packed up, rode the elevator down alone, and stepped out into the night.
The city had no interest in slowing down for him.
The underground station was loud and bright and full of people who had somewhere to be or had already been there and were carrying the good parts of the night home with them. Roswald descended the stairs with his bag on one shoulder and found a spot near the edge of the platform, away from the clusters. There were couples leaning into each other, laughing at something on a shared screen. Groups of friends in the loose, comfortable orbit of people who had chosen each other. A girl in a yellow jacket eating something from a paper bag without a care in the world.
He watched them the way you watch a film in a language you almost understand. Not with bitterness exactly. Something quieter than that. A mild, tired awareness of a life running parallel to his own that he hadn't quite figured out how to merge with.
He was twenty-four. Technically, he was one of them. Young, in the city, on a Tuesday night. On paper it looked the same.
It didn't feel the same.
The train arrived and he got on and found a pole to stand near. The carriage was warm and packed and smelled faintly of fast food and someone's too-strong cologne. He stared at the dark window opposite, watching his own reflection sway with the motion of the train, and then his eyes drifted and landed on someone sitting across from him.
The man looked roughly his age. Maybe a year or two older. His bag was in his lap, both arms folded over it like a pillow. His jacket was slightly wrinkled in the way that suggested it had been on since morning and hadn't been given much thought since. And beneath his eyes, dark and settled, were the same circles Roswald saw every morning in his bathroom mirror.
The man was already looking at him.
They regarded each other for a moment. Two people on a late train who had clearly both left somewhere they hadn't chosen to stay in.
Then, almost at the same time, they smiled. Small. Tired. The kind of smile that didn't need any explanation because the explanation was already written across both their faces.
We're miserable.
Brrr-! Brrr-!
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He already didn't want to answer it. He pulled it out and looked at the screen.
Phil.
Of course it was Phil. Phil from next door, who knocked too often and smiled too wide and had a habit of showing up at the door with some thin excuse about borrowing things he clearly didn't need. Roswald had known for a while that the visits had nothing to do with him. Phil was twenty six, reasonably friendly looking, and had made his interest in Rose about as subtle as a car alarm. Roswald had never said anything about it because saying something would require a conversation and a conversation with Phil had a way of lasting forty minutes longer than any conversation needed to.
He stared at the name on the screen.
The train swayed. Around him people scrolled and talked and laughed.
He answered.
"Roswald!" Phil's voice came through loud, too loud, the way it always was. Like the man had never learned that phones carried sound on their own. "It's your sister, man. It's Rose."
Right on target, Roswald thought. Whatever this was, it was about her. It was always about her with Phil.
He opened his mouth to say something flat and redirecting.
Then it hit him.
Not a thought. Something physical. A pressure behind his sternum, sudden and dense, like something had reached into his chest and made a fist. He exhaled sharply and grabbed the pole tighter. A cold sweat broke across the back of his neck almost instantly, his skin going damp and strange, and his left arm began to ache in a way that had no business being there, a deep radiating pull from shoulder to elbow that made no sense and made complete sense in the way that only the worst things do when they arrive.
His legs went first.
He didn't fall so much as come apart slowly and then all at once. His back hit the doors, his bag hit the floor, and his phone slipped from his fingers and clattered down beside him, screen up, and by some small accident of the impact the speaker clicked on.
The carriage shifted around him. Someone said something. A voice nearby said hey and then said it again louder.
Roswald stared at the ceiling of the train. The lights were very bright. The swaying felt different from down here. Slower.
Phil's voice came out of the phone speaker and filled the small space around him clearly, the way bad news always seems to find a way to be heard.
"Roswald. Rose is dead, man."