Many go to sleep wishing for a better tomorrow. A tomorrow with a beautiful wife, a fancy car, and a kept mistress somewhere far away.
Martin's wish was much simpler – he wished not to get fired from work for his underwhelming preformance in the sales department of a housing agency.
Wishes are beautiful for what they are – pure fantasies. Tomorrow arrived and as expected, he got fired. Worse yet, his current studio apartment was a company benefit.
Put bluntly, as soon as he left this office building, Martin was as good as homeless.
Looking at the "Smoking Prohibited" sign at the corner of his cubicle, Martin had one thought in mind.
Fuck it!
A man with nothing to lose has nothing to fear. With this enlightenment, Martin fished out a cheap box of cigarettes from his pants pocket, pulled one of five remaining cigarettes, and lit it up in the cubicle.
He watched as the minutes ticked by on his wrists watch, slowly approaching 12 O'clock at noon.
With five minutes to go, Martin turned off his work desk computer, stored the cigarette box and the lighter in his pocket, then got up and headed in the direction of the HR department.
He heard voices all around, discussing his matter in a not so inconspicuous manner.
'I can hear you guys', Martin thought to himself, chewing away at the cigarette's bud. I guess they don't care whether I hear them or not.'
With that in mind, his footsteps grew hurried as he navigated through the hallways, quickly finding that one small office down the corridor.
"To think I'd have such a day," Martin laughed to himself, feeling resigned. There wasn't a soul in sight, so he entered the small office at leisure.
At this point, feeling restless was pointless.
Soon, Martin found himself inside the infamous dead end office, seated across from the company's executioner.
The weapon of execution, a ballpoint pen, rested comfortably in her fair white hand.
She stared down at Martin with a critical eye as she laid out the conditions of release, one at a time.
As Martin listened absentmindedly, words entering one ear and out the other, a flash of golden light occupied the corner of his eye.
For a moment, Martin thought himself hallucinating as a floating countdown occupied a minimal portion of his viewpoint.
It wasn't too much but it wasn't too little either, just enough for him to notice the countdown that went from 00:59 and dwindled.
"This is the most important part of the settlement, your current lodging…" the department head's words caught Martin's full attention – at least this once.
"Your current studio apartment is owned by the company. However, looking at your circumstances, the company is willing to rent it out to you for the next three months at the expense of your expulsion bonus. All you need to do is sign here, and you can skip all the cumbersome paperwork procedures that await in case you want to get that money in less than three weeks."
"Do I even have a choice?" Martin took in a deep breath of smoke before letting it out in intermittent puffs.
His current balance was in the red. To be specific, his balance was a solid $480 in the negative. He couldn't survive the night without a place to stay, let alone three weeks.
Although Martin understood that they were charging him with the rates of prime high-end apartments for a lousy studio apartment, he still had no choice but to bite the bullet.
Looking at the cold executioner in the eyes, Martin reached for the ballpoint pen, and after hesitating for like fifteen seconds, he signed down his name.
Like this, the transaction was completed, and his welfare fund went down the drain.
Martin thought that this was it, but what do you know? He heard a soft bell chime in his mind, and the countdown that was three seconds shy of running out twisted into golden lines.
Martin watched absentmindedly as the lines twisted into floating words, a voice concurrently reading the sentences in his mind.
[You spent $1,200 and triggered 10,000x rebate!]
[Reward 1: $12,000,000!]
[Reward 2: High-end Lakeside Villa!]
For a moment, Martin stared off into space thinking that his mind had finally snapped – he began hallucinating in broad daylight.
Bemused, he willed a mental command to choose the second reward, as the overall value of a lakeside villa in the capital city wasn't something money alone could cover.
Even if he had twenty million, he might not have the necessary connections and channels to buy a piece of prime land from the government, let alone an entire villa.
Once Martin made his choice, two things happened simultaneously. First, the cold hearted executioner smiled and rolled the signed documents.
Second, his smartphone buzzed with a notification. Not caring whether it seemed rude or not, he fished the phone out to have a look.
A cheap M-series phone – sufficient to browse the web, download and upload documents, make phone calls, play low quality video files, and keep an eye on text messages and emails.
The lockscreen notifications indicated a new email. Curious, Martin opened the email to take a look.
It was an email from the city district's committee of legislation and real estate, with an attached PDF file.
Thinking back to the earlier incident which he attributed to hallucinations, Martin tapped on the file with trembling fingers.
It would have been fine if he didn't, but once he saw content, he sprang to his feet and with a bang – his knee hit the wooden desk, hard.
Martin winced in pain, the cigarette falling from his mouth and scorching a hole through his pants. However, he didn't care.
He gripped his phone tightly and sprinted out the office door, crashing into a water vending machine, three employees, and two security guards on his way while leaving the building.
To everyone else, Martin looked like the standard white-collar worker suffering from high pressure and anger management issues after getting fired.
As for Martin, he was experiencing a bout of confusion, fear, anticipation, naked trepidation, all the while questioning the foundation of reality as it was.
This wasn't as smooth as described in fantasy novels, where one would feel lucky go happy upon receiving the 'system cheat'.
Martin was an ordinary man living in an ordinary world – or so he thought.
When he suddenly realized the prospects of the supernatural existing side by side with ignorant citizens like him, possibly next door or residing inside his shadow on the wall, an unprecedented sense of danger loomed over him.
He could no longer look at the world through the lenses of the past, and suddenly, everything seemed distant and unfamiliar to his eyes.
Martin didn't know how he found his way near a public restroom, but the email on his phone told him that this wasn't an illusion – which only amplified the dissonance he felt – detaching his spirit from a possibly false reality.
Martin stumbled into the restroom, barely registering the harsh fluorescent lights that flickered overhead. His vision blurred at the edges, the tile floor tilting as if the ground itself had grown unsteady beneath him. His chest heaved, lungs aching for air, yet each breath felt shallow, useless, like he was inhaling through a straw. He slammed a trembling hand against the sink, desperate for something solid to anchor him. But even that felt distant, his fingers numb, as though they belonged to someone else.
His heart pounded so violently in his chest that he swore it would break through his ribs. The erratic rhythm drowned out every other sound—water dripping from the tap, the hum of a distant conversation outside, the low murmur of traffic. His pulse thundered in his ears, each beat a painful reminder of how little control he had.
The walls seemed to close in around him, his vision narrowing as his body shook uncontrollably. A dizzying sense of dread swarmed his mind—thoughts scattered like shards of glass. He couldn't focus. He couldn't think.
What was this? Was is real? What is fake?
He tried to swallow, but his throat felt tight, like an invisible hand was squeezing it shut. His skin prickled with a cold sweat, clothes clinging to his back, yet he felt suffocated, trapped.
The reflection in the mirror seemed to scream at him: No escape!
His legs wobbled beneath him, threatening to give way. Hold as he might, Martin ultimately failed.
Bile rose in his throat, but the nausea was the least of his concerns. It was the crushing weight on his chest, the sheer terror that wrapped around him, that made him feel like he was drowning. He closed his eyes, pressed his forehead against the cool porcelain of the sink, and prayed for it to pass. But the seconds stretched on, each one a lifetime.
Before he knew it, Martin fainted, a rush of hurried footsteps and fervent discussions bombarding his ears.
Then, everything went blank.