My name is David. I was a software engineer for twelve years. I worked for a company that liked to say we were a family.
They talked about loyalty, passion, and innovation. I believed them. I stayed late, fixed broken code on weekends, and helped cover for managers who couldn't explain their own products.
Then I got cancer. Stage II at first — something treatable easily survivable. I told HR. They told me to take medical leave and that it would all be handled.
Two weeks later, I got an email saying my position had been "restructured." No severance, just the usual "thank you for your service" template email.
They called it a financial decision. The company was doing well — record profits, record bonuses for executives — but apparently, keeping me insured was too expensive.
That's how my treatment stopped.
That's how I ran out of money.
That's how I lost my apartment.
I spent the next few months trying to stay alive. I applied for every kind of aid, every freelance job I could find.
Nobody wants to hire a guy who can't promise he'll be able to work next month. When you're sick and homeless, everything turns into a waiting game — waiting for a clinic, waiting for a bed, waiting for the painkillers to kick in.
The loyalty I gave was worth less than the paper my termination notice was printed on. I thought being good at what I did, doing it honestly, would protect me.
It didn't. It just made it easier for them to trust I'd take the hit quietly.
I don't have much left to say. I don't even know how long I've been sleeping on this sidewalk.
The pain comes and goes. Mostly, I think about how easy it was for them — how a person's entire life can be reduced to a number on a profit margin.
Then when the day of his death finally came all he felt was relief.
Even his will to live had been quite corroded, after all, he had no friends, all justified in his mind to being a team player working 80-hour weeks. His family was dead, parents taken in a car crash.
What do I even have to live for? That was David's last thought before death took him.
He felt like both a million years had passed and yet also an instant in the amount of time it took him to wake up.
The first thing David saw upon waking up was a flash of light so blinding it felt as though the force of ten thousand suns was searing his eyes. Yet that wasn't what drew his attention, it was the wave of incomprehensible images assaulting his mind.
Books and scrolls written in languages he could not comprehend, bloody battles between statues that dwarfed mountains—all of it flashed before his eyes in chaotic succession.
And then came the pain. Pain unlike anything he had ever felt before, as though his skull was being torn apart from within. His brief moment of consciousness was fleeting; before he could even process what was happening, darkness swallowed him whole.
His second time waking up, he found himself in a room not unlike any other he had ever been in, however with one remarkable difference—it was enormous. He felt like a gnome in a room made for giants.
When he tried to speak, all that came out was incomprehensible cries. "Where the hell am I?" Just as he thought that, however, he was assaulted with what could only be described as awareness of everything around him.
He knew what the room looked like without even using his eyes; he knew how the house looked. What could only be described as waves of information appeared in his consciousness, describing everything around him with clinical detachment.
There was one more thing stirring in his mind—another presence. It wasn't physical, but a calm, authoritative awareness that seemed to steady the chaos around him.
Even as the world remained a haze of shifting colors and muffled sounds, he felt that someone was leaning over him.
His vision was so blurred that the man's face was little more than a light and shadow, and every faint noise struck his newborn ears with painful clarity.
Yet somehow, despite the confusion, waves of information flooded in and he understood who the man was.
Images and impressions bloomed in his mind—sharp features worn by sleepless nights, eyes gleaming with quiet intellect, and the stillness of someone who studied everything with curiosity.
"Calm yourself, Nicholas," the man murmured. The words were distorted to his ears, but perfectly clear in his mind. Nicholas… my name is Nicholas? he thought, the realization flickering faintly through the fog of newborn awareness.
He wanted to cry, to move, but every sound felt too sharp, every sensation too loud. And yet, beneath it all, he sensed something else.
The man watching him was his father. He could feel the curiosity in his gaze, the quiet thrill of discovery, but also the steadiness of someone who would not let harm come to him. Though he didn't know how, Nicholas knew he was safe.