The journey home felt utterly different from any he had experienced before. Outside, the city was the same loud, bustling, suffocating place. Cars honked. People rushed past, a constant stream of humanity. The air remained thick with the familiar urban dust.
But inside Raghav's head, a violent storm was brewing—a tempest of confusion and burgeoning possibility. His mind kept jumping frantically between two huge, unsettling puzzles that refused to be ignored.
First, the dream. The impossibly red sky. The broken, crumbling buildings. Priya's desperately scared face. The grotesque, shadow-lurking monsters. It was blurry now, like a chaotic, half-finished painting, but the core feeling of pure, soul-shaking terror and the chilling idea of a world ending stayed with him—a cold knot in his stomach. He still couldn't remember all the fine details, and that absence of clarity made him more worried, more desperate to understand.
What was that message? What did Priya mean? And why can't I recall the exact sequence of horrors?
Then, there was what happened at the office. The spreadsheet. The impossible way it had moved and changed, dancing to a silent, unheard tune just because he thought about it. It defied logic. It defied every law of physics and technology he knew. It was impossible. It was, if he dared to think it, magic. His own secret magic—suddenly, terrifyingly real.
He kept thinking, replaying the moments over and over: Did that really happen? Was I finally cracking under the pressure of this dull life? Was I imagining it all, a hallucination born of exhaustion? The questions chased each other around his mind—a relentless, dizzying spiral.
He got off the bus, the familiar screech of its brakes jarring him slightly, and walked the few blocks to his apartment building. He barely registered the usual street vendors calling out their prices, or the shouts of children playing a chaotic game of cricket in a narrow alley. His feet moved on their own, guided by years of unchanging habit, while his mind raced, completely detached from his surroundings.
The heavy bag on his back, usually a burden by the end of the day, felt strangely lighter. Or perhaps he just didn't notice its weight anymore, lost in the overwhelming clamor of his thoughts.
When he finally reached his small apartment door, fumbling with the keys, the usual quiet didn't feel comforting. It felt empty. Waiting for him. Watching. He pushed the door open with unusual urgency, stepping inside without even bothering to take off his shoes properly, kicking them loosely by the door.
He didn't think about dinner, even though his stomach felt hollow, gnawing with hunger. His usual, comforting routine was a million miles away, shattered by the day's impossible events. All he could think about was the humming sensation in his hands, the shocking obedience of the screen.
He walked straight to his old laptop, which sat on a small, wobbly table in his cramped living room. The screen was dark, a black mirror reflecting his tired, anxious face back at him.
His hands, which had trembled with fear and disbelief in the office, now felt strangely steady—a quiet resolve hardening in his gut. He reached out, his fingers brushing the smooth plastic, and opened the laptop. The familiar whirring sound of the old machine starting up seemed extra loud, almost a roar, in the sudden quiet of the room—a prelude to his private experiment.
He waited, impatiently, for the laptop to finish loading. Every second felt like an hour. He bypassed his usual folders and programs, going straight to a simple text document. A stark, blank white page stared back at him from the screen—a canvas for the impossible.
This was it. His chance to prove it. To test it. Alone. Where no one could see, no one could judge, no one could think he was insane.
He leaned forward, eyes fixed intently on the blank screen just as he had in the office, his brow furrowed in concentration. He thought of the word "Shrink." He focused, trying to make his mind strong, trying to push the word out with pure mental effort. He pictured the empty page, imagined the text, then willed it to compress.
Nothing happened. The text document stayed blank, mocking him with its emptiness. No subtle shimmer, no tiny ripple. Nothing.
He frowned, a ripple of doubt washing over him. "Maybe I need to type something first," he muttered to himself, his voice sounding oddly small in the quiet room.
He typed a simple sentence, his fingers moving stiffly on the keys: "This is a test." The words appeared, plain and black, on the white page.
Then, he stared at the words, his gaze unblinking. He closed his eyes tightly, willing them to shrink, to disappear, to do anything at all. He concentrated. Thought "Shrink" with all his might, just as he had believed he'd done in the office. He imagined the letters shriveling, crumbling.
Still nothing. The words sat there, unchanging, stubbornly defiant, refusing to bend to his will.
A cold wave of disappointment, sharp and bitter, began to replace the initial excitement. Was it all a hallucination after all? Was I just incredibly tired?
Frustration flared, sudden and hot, like a spark igniting dry tinder. A hot wave of anger washed over him, not just at the unyielding screen, but at the stubbornness of the words, at the vanishing dream, at his own mundane, predictable life that offered so little escape.
Why isn't it working? What did I do wrong? Was it just a fluke? Am I really going crazy?
He slammed his hand on the table, a small tremor going through the flimsy wood, making the laptop wobble precariously. He leaned back, breathing heavily, his chest heaving with suppressed emotion.
He squeezed his eyes shut, desperate, trying to remember the exact moment it had happened at the office. It wasn't when he calmly thought of a command. It was… when he was furious. When he was so utterly fed up, so overwhelmed with the messy spreadsheet, the boring job, and his stagnant life, that he had screamed in his mind:
I wish this stupid data would just fix itself. I wish this whole day would just disappear!
It wasn't a calm request. It was a desperate, raw, unfiltered surge of pure will. That was it. That was the key. It wasn't about telling the computer what to do like he was typing code or giving a vocal command. It was about forcing it. About a raw, pure, overwhelming burst of emotional will. A feeling. A desperate desire. Not just a casual thought.
The electric tingling in his fingers, that faint hum beneath his skin, hadn't been a sign of a new ability, but a reaction to an intense internal state. The power wasn't a switch he could flip. It was a torrent he had to unleash.
He opened his eyes, a new kind of energy sparking within him—not calm, but a potent, almost dangerous resolve.
He looked at the words "This is a test" on the screen, seeing them now as a challenge, an obstacle. He let the frustration build again, deliberately this time—not just about the words, but about his dull, trapped life, about the terrifying dream that haunted him, about everything he couldn't control, every burden he carried.
He gathered all that pent-up feeling, all that pure, burning mental force, and focused it into a single, overwhelming, burning desire:
Disappear!
The words on the screen didn't just disappear. They dissolved. It was a violent, instantaneous erasure. Like ink being violently washed away in water, they blurred and faded into nothing, disintegrating into thin air, leaving the page perfectly, terrifyingly blank once more. There was no delete key pressed, no backspace, no cursor indicating an action. Just an empty screen.
Raghav gasped, a sharp, choked sound. A cold shiver—both of fear and an unbelievable, intoxicating rush of power—ran down his spine, prickling his scalp.
It had worked. Not by speaking a command. Not by calm, careful thought. But by sheer, burning, overwhelming will. His thoughts, when truly pushed, when fueled by intense emotion, could bend the digital world to his will.
The dream was a warning. The office had been an accidental, terrifying spark. This was something profoundly real. And he was just beginning to understand what it meant for him—and for the world.