"They tell you dying is the ultimate tragedy. They lie. The most painful tragedy of life is the burden of surviving it"
The physical scars were the first things to lie to me. Within a week, the high-velocity med-bots at the sector clinic had finished their work, weaving my torn skin back together with silver-threaded synthetic fibers. My shoulder, once a jagged mess of red meat and white bone, was now as smooth as polished chrome. My ribs no longer clicked when I breathed. To anyone walking past me in the sterile corridors of the Minokia residential block, I looked like a survivor. I looked recovered. But as I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the dust motes dancing in the artificial sunlight of my window, I felt like a hollowed-out building waiting for its own controlled demolition.
My life had shrunk to the size of a three-room apartment. I stopped attending the virtual Class 11 lectures; the notifications for Accountancy and Business Studies piled up in my inbox like unread obituaries. I couldn't bring myself to care about profit-and-loss statements when my own world was stuck in a permanent deficit. My daily schedule became a mechanical, soul-crushing loop. I woke up at noon, the silence of the apartment ringing in my ears like a physical weight. I spent hours staring at the ceiling, tracing the faint cracks in the synth-plaster, waiting for the shadows to move just enough to justify getting up.
Housework became my only tether to reality, but even that was a ghost's errand. I swept the floors twice a day, obsessively chasing the fine grey dust that drifted in through the ventilation—dust that I was convinced was actually the powdered remains of the Inox Minar. I washed the same three dishes over and over until my knuckles were raw, the clink of the ceramic sounding like the snapping of mag-lev cables. I was a 16-year-old boy playing house in a graveyard, keeping the kitchen clean for parents who were never coming home to eat.
The shower was where the mask truly slipped.
Every time I stepped under the spray, the world dissolved. The rhythmic *patter-patter* of the water against the tiles didn't sound like a shower; it sounded like the heavy, wet thud of debris hitting the pavement. I would lean my forehead against the cold, vibrating wall of the stall, my eyes snapping shut as the flashbacks took hold. Suddenly, I wasn't in my bathroom. I was back at the perimeter of the collapse, standing behind the yellow holographic caution tape.
In my mind, I saw the rescue workers again. They didn't move with the urgency of heroes from the holovids. They moved with a grim, industrial precision, their heavy hydraulic exoskeletons clanking and hissing as they lifted massive slabs of reinforced steel. I remembered the spotlights of the drones cutting through the thick, ozone-heavy smoke, searching for heartbeats and finding only silence. I saw the body bags—endless, shimmering rows of black polymer lined up on the scorched grass like a harvest of shadows.
The image that burned the most was the extraction of my parents. I remembered the blank, reflective visors of the workers as they logged the "remains" into their tablets, assigning a barcode to the people who used to help me with my homework. There was no dignity in the future, only efficiency. They were loaded onto transport skiffs and carried toward the massive, high-tech graveyards on the city's edge, while the purple rift in the sky pulsed above us like a taunting, bruised heart.
Under the shower, the water felt thick and metallic. I would scrub my skin until it was beet-red, trying to wash away the phantom smell of ozone and burnt wires that seemed trapped in my pores. I could still see the workers' gloved hands dragging a neighbor's severed limb from the rubble, the movement as casual as clearing trash. I would stay under the water until the heater ran out, shivering as the cold reminded me that I was the only one left to feel the chill.
I retreated to my room, the damp towel heavy on my shoulders. The silence was interrupted only by the knocking. It started with a neighbor from the floor below—a man whose face I couldn't recall, offering muffled "condolences" and plastic containers of synthetic curry. I sat on the floor, my back against the locked door, holding my breath until his footsteps faded. I didn't want his pity; I didn't want to be a "tragedy" people talked about over dinner.
Then, the rhythm of the knocking changed. It was soft, hesitant, and familiar. Three short taps, a pause, and then one long one. **Sofia**.
My best friend. She had been calling and texting for days, but I had ghosted her like a coward. I could almost see her standing in the hallway, her brow furrowed, probably wearing that oversized hoodie she liked.
"Rian? I know you're in there," she whispered, her voice cracking through the wood. "I brought the notes from the CS lab. And... some real fruit. Just talk to me. Please."
I squeezed my eyes shut, my heart hammering against my ribs. I wanted to reach out, to turn the handle and let her light into my dark room, but I couldn't move. I felt like if I opened that door, the grief would spill out and drown her too. I was a radioactive zone, and she deserved to stay safe. I waited in the dark, a tear tracking a hot path through the dampness on my cheek, until I heard her sigh and walk away.
I reached for my phone on the nightstand, desperate to drown out the silence with a video or a game—anything to stop the thinking. But the screen didn't show my wallpaper. It was already glowing with a deep, bruised violet light.
Centered on the glass was an icon that hadn't been there when I went into the shower. It was a fractured hourglass, its edges dripping with a font that looked like ink bleeding into water.
**Soul Roulette.**
I tried to delete it, but my thumb slipped right through the icon as if it weren't a digital file, but a hole in reality. The phone grew unnaturally cold in my hand, the temperature dropping until my breath misted in the air. A single line of text flickered across the bottom of the screen, pulsing in sync with the purple rift I had seen in the sky:
*[Body Sync: 99.8%. Genetic Anchor: Locked. Initializing Transmigration in 3... 2...]*
The room didn't just go dark—it vanished. The floor beneath my feet dissolved into nothingness, and for a split second, I felt the terrifying sensation of falling back into the heart of the Inox Minar. My last thought, before the world turned into a scream of grinding metal, was of the app. It wasn't just on my phone. It was in my blood