Alex Turner was born in the spring of 2000 in a mid-sized city that had already begun to forget how to care about people like him.
He came into the world quiet. Not the screaming, red-faced kind of baby—more the kind that nurses and doctors had to check twice to make sure he was breathing. His mother used to joke that he arrived "already tired." She stopped making that joke when he was eleven.
School was the first place the shape of his life became visible. He wasn't bullied in the cinematic, shoved-into-lockers way. It was quieter, more efficient. The other boys simply decided he didn't register. He wasn't athletic enough to be useful on any team, not funny enough to keep around as comic relief, not good-looking enough to borrow status from. He existed in a permanent middle distance—visible but irrelevant.
He learned early that silence was safer than trying to be seen.
By fourteen he had discovered the internet in its early 2010s form: forums, YouTube comment sections, anonymous chatrooms, and the first wave of Discord servers that felt like secret clubs. Online he could type fast, think before he spoke, disappear when he wanted. For the first time he felt something close to wit. He posted long rants about anime power fantasies, dissected isekai tropes with surgical bitterness, argued about power scaling until three in the morning. People responded. Sometimes they even agreed.
That was the peak.
He never quite noticed when the tone shifted from playful argument to something colder. When the replies stopped being "lol you're coping" and started being "just kill yourself already." When the people he considered friends began to ghost after he sent one too many voice messages that sounded too raw, too needy. He told himself it didn't matter. The internet was supposed to be like that.
At seventeen he graduated high school with grades that were technically passing but carried no momentum. No scholarships. No real plans. College felt like signing up for four more years of being ignored in slightly more expensive rooms, so he didn't go. Instead he took a series of jobs that required no interview: fast food, warehouse night shift, data entry from home when someone trusted him with a login. Each one ended the same way—quietly let go for "not being a culture fit" or "performance concerns" or simply because the seasonal rush was over.
Money was always short. Rent was always late. His mother moved to another state with her new boyfriend when he was nineteen; she still texted on holidays, but the messages grew shorter each year. His father had never been in the picture long enough to leave a forwarding address.
By twenty-three he had settled into a rhythm that felt almost sustainable if you didn't look too closely.
He lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a building that smelled permanently of burnt cooking oil and cigarette smoke. The walls were thin enough to hear every argument in the unit next door. He worked remote customer support for a budget VPN company—eight-hour shifts of reading from a script to people who were already angry before they called. He kept the camera off during Zoom trainings. No one ever asked him to turn it on.
Nights belonged to the screen.
He played the same five gacha games on rotation, rerolling accounts when he got bored, chasing five-star characters he would never actually build because he couldn't afford the pulls. He watched isekai anime on illegal streaming sites, volume low so the neighbors wouldn't complain. He read webnovels—hundreds of them—stories about losers who died and woke up with systems, harems, infinite power, women who wanted them without question. He didn't even feel shame about it anymore. The shame had calcified into something duller: recognition.
He knew exactly what he was consuming. Power fantasies written for people who felt like the world had already decided they were background characters. Every chapter was the same sugar hit: weak to strong, mocked to feared, alone to surrounded by beautiful women who knelt and called him master. He told himself it was just entertainment. He told himself he didn't actually want that life.
He lied.
The wanting lived in his body like a low-grade fever. It wasn't even primarily sexual—not at first. It was the idea of mattering. Of walking into a room and having every eye turn toward him with awe instead of indifference. Of someone—anyone—looking at him like he was worth keeping.
Sex itself remained theoretical. He had never kissed anyone. Never touched anyone who wanted to be touched. Porn was functional; it took the edge off for twenty minutes and left him feeling exactly the same afterward. He had tried dating apps exactly twice. Both times the conversations died after three messages. He told himself it was because he was bad at texting. The truth was uglier: he radiated the kind of quiet desperation that made people instinctively back away.
By twenty-five the days had begun to blur into a single gray smear.
He stopped going outside unless he had to buy instant noodles or energy drinks. The grocery store felt like crossing enemy territory. He kept the blinds closed even during the day. Sunlight made the room look dirtier.
He still read the novels. Still watched the anime. Still opened the games. But the hits were weaker now. The stories no longer transported him; they only reminded him how far the gap was between the protagonist and himself. He started skipping to the sex scenes—not because he was especially aroused, but because those were the only parts where something happened. Where someone was wanted.
He began to notice how much time was passing.
A year ago he had still believed something would change. A better job. A lucky pull. A girl who saw past the surface. Now he understood that nothing was coming. The future wasn't going to arrive wearing plot armor. It was just going to keep being more of this—more silence, more invisibility, more evenings spent staring at a loading screen while the clock ticked toward thirty, then forty, then fifty, until one day he simply stopped existing and no one noticed.
The thought wasn't dramatic. It was arithmetic.
On the night of February 8, 2026, he sat on the edge of his bed for almost four hours without moving. Rain tapped the window like fingernails. His phone lay face-down beside him; the screen had not lit up in three days.
He thought about writing something—a note, a post, anything. But every sentence he imagined sounded either pathetic or cruel, and he didn't have the energy for either.
Eventually he stood.
He walked to the balcony door. It stuck, the way it always did. He forced it open. Cold air rushed in carrying the smell of wet concrete and distant exhaust.
Twenty-seven floors.
He stepped out.
The railing was wet. His socks soaked through instantly.
He looked down once—really looked—and felt nothing except a tired kind of relief.
He whispered "sorry" to no one.
Then he leaned forward until gravity took over.
The fall was fast and quiet.
There was no moment of clarity, no montage of regrets. Just wind, then darkness, then a cold mechanical voice speaking inside the black.
"Soul transfer initiated."
And everything that had been Alex—every small humiliation, every swallowed word, every night spent pretending the stories were just stories—disappeared into the space between one heartbeat and the next.