Houston Texas, is home to millions of people. Among the numerous companies, multiple companies still have their lights turned on even at around 1 am. Our focus is on one of the floors of a medium-sized company situated at the far end of the block.
'Tap, tap, tap ... tap' the clicking of keys echoed on the floor. A group of three people are still typing away on their computers completely focused.
"Finally, I am done. Just pushed it to the dev repo." said the man sitting on the far left of the group. He is of medium height, nearly 5"6 or 5"7, and can see a small lump of a newly developing pot belly. "I am leaving guys, see you tomorrow. And no Ron I will not help you today, finish your work by yourself, I am not going to help anyone again after the last appraisal," he said with finality.
The person sitting in the middle, was Ron, a tall buffed-up person whose muscles were bulging out of the t-shirt he was wearing, was trying to reach out his hand, but after hearing the tone and reply from the previous person reluctantly sat back and went back to typing again in despair.
"It's not fair Mike", whined the third person leaning back on his chair. "Why do we have to resolve the issue which was caused by an old dumb idiot who might not even know what a computer is?"
"Be careful bud" said Mike as he was packing up his bag, "The old dumb idiot you are referring to is this company's Chairman and it's the fault of Cyber's access and control team who f**ked up. I don't know which of their idiot gave full access to the prod repo to an old idiot who ended up mixing all the codes and scripts. It took me 4 hrs to get it refreshed from the backup storage."
"Shut up both of you. The office cameras also record audio, do you wanna get fired?" Ron frantically scolded them.
"I don't care. Let them fire, I will leave this place happily" replied Mike with a grin.
"You? Not a chance." said the third guy, "The PM will not let you go even if you put in your resignation, no one wants to learn this more than half a decade-old tech, and no one knows this application more than you"
"Nope, we are just resources for them. They will replace me easily in 1-2 months", Mike replied wistfully while looking out from the large glass window in front of him. "Anyway see you guys on Monday and hope you guys figure out your part soon",
"F**k you Mike", snarled Ron as Mike left with his bag.
'it's 1:30 am, I'll try to reach home by 2' Mike thought while clicking the elevator button for it to shut.
'Ding' the elevator's door shut and it started moving down. The LED panel showed the 42nd floor going down.
He took out his phone and started checking the call logs and as usual, found it empty apart from yesterday's call from a person who dialed the wrong number. He and his family are not close, as a middle child and only son, his parents gave all the attention to his sisters, and in return, he had to grow up without much love from his family.
Once he finished his school, his parents asked him to leave the house. He was glad he had saved some money from his part-time jobs and the prizes from the jams. He created his side hustle by modifying and selling the open-source software to local shops by creating their websites and making them sell their products online and some other minor billing and inventory management scripts.
He had enough to rent out an apartment and started applying for developer jobs even without a degree and worked as a freelance developer. The current job he is working on is he got from one of his freelance clients who was an HR recruiting talent for their workforce from freelancers and he got lucky. Now at the age of 26, he is living in a decent neighborhood with a decent house which is around 20 min drive from his office. His family never contacted him since he was kicked out and he is happy about that.
While thinking about his life he suddenly felt a pull from his back. When he turned back to check he saw a pitch-black dot floating in the elevator and sucking the surrounding air in it.
He moved till his back touched the door of the elevator and pressed the button to open the lift frantically. The dot started growing and once it reached a radius of half a meter it exploded all the air it sucked and something else was also thrown out of it.
The whole elevator shook and the foreign object stuck directly on Mike's stomach and he fell to his knees gasping in pain. His vision blacked out due to the pain and he was breathing shallow breaths heavily trying to get used to the pain.
By the time he felt better, the elevator was five floors from reaching to the bottom and he was able to take deep breaths and try to blink out his tears and calm down.
Once he was sure he could breathe properly he wiped the tears out of his eyes and looked around for the object that hit him. There, in front of him he saw the object and his eyes went wide open as the golden light reflected from the object.
'I think I am hallucinating' he thought while analyzing the object, 'but I am not on any kind of meds or have any kind of history'.
After a few seconds of analyzing he reached out his left hand(as his right hand is very important) towards the object, when he was sure nothing happened to him when touching the object, he picked it up properly.
'I can't believe it, this is supposed to be a fairy tale' he thought while checking the whole object.