The morning Kai Maren died he was already awake.
He hadn't slept that night which wasn't unusual. Sleep had stopped being a regular part of his life somewhere around twenty-seven and he had made his peace with that the same way he made his peace with most things — by deciding it wasn't a problem and moving forward. There were pills for the fatigue and some for him to focus. There were pills for what the first pills did to his appetite and pills for what the second pills did to his heart rate, and he had a system and the system worked well enough that he had stopped questioning it.
At this time, he was twenty-nine years old.
He sat at his desk at five in the morning with three monitors open and a coffee going cold beside him and worked.
The company was four years old which he had started it at twenty-five with money he had spent three years accumulating through means that were aggressive and occasionally uncomfortable and entirely his own. He had no investors in the beginning and not even partners, it was just him and a decision he had made at seventeen that he was going to build something from nothing and own every piece of it when he was done. The company was real now, and it had weight along with a name that people in certain rooms recognized and responded to in the way that meant it was starting to matter.
Yet for him this still wasn't enough. That was the thing nobody around him understood and they saw the apartment and the accounts and the name and they thought he had arrived somewhere. But he knew he hadn't, because he could feel exactly how far he still had to go, and the distance wasn't something that intimidated him, it just motivated him.
He wanted power and nothing else. Power in every form it came in, whether it was financial, political or physical, he wanted all of it, the kind that meant when you walked into a room the room changed because you were in it and he was building toward that with everything he had. And his company was the foundation of him getting towards that power.
He worked through the morning the way he always worked. Being alone and isolated completely, without interruption, without the part of his brain that managed his own comfort getting much of a say in anything.
By seven he had answered forty-one emails, moved three positions in a deal that had been stalled for two weeks, all without consuming a single meal.
He noticed the nothing and filed it away and kept working.
His phone had seventeen missed calls from the previous day, from his assistant, wo investors and a man from a meeting three months ago who wanted something Kai hadn't decided whether to give yet. He scrolled through them without opening any and put the phone face down.
There was a specific order to things, and he was the only one who understood the order.
At eight-fifteen he stood up to get more coffee, and his vision went sideways for a moment. A slight tilt of the world, a second where the floor was not exactly where he expected it to be. He put his hand on the desk and waited until it passed.
He had been having these moments more frequently and hasn't told anyone about it. He had made a note of them in a document on his second monitor that he kept behind the other windows and checked every few days to look for patterns just to manage it, like he always does with things in his life.
He poured the coffee one of his favorite mugs that were just plain white and boring, like most of the things he owned. It just had to be plain because he never wanted attention for the things he owned, but for what he does.
He stood at the kitchen counter and looked out the window at the city below him. The window was on the sixth floor and he felt it was not high enough yet. He had a picture in his head of the view he was building toward, with the specific height, a specific kind of window, a specific quality of looking down at something that was below you because you had climbed above it and he could see it clearly. He had been able to see it clearly since he was seventeen and that clarity was the thing that kept him moving when the pills wore off and the fatigue came in and his body communicated things to him that he chose not to hear.
He dragged his feet back to his desk, and as he took each step he realized that his back aching a little and for him that meant he wasn't drinking enough coffee or drinking enough pain killers.
He worked through the morning and ate something at noon that was functional rather than good. He took the second round of pills at two and felt the familiar kick of them and opened the fourth monitor and started the afternoon.
At four he was on a call with three people in different cities when something happened.
It wasn't as dramatic as he expected and he had expected that if something was going to happen it would announce itself in a way that gave him time to respond to it and it did not.
His heart stopped doing what hearts are supposed to do and his body registered this information and everything went sideways again except this time it did not straighten. He had one moment of understanding what was happening — one clear second of knowing — and in that second the thing he thought about was not the deal on the first monitor or the call still going on the speakers or the view he had been building toward.
I was not even finished, He thought.
The chair caught him on the way down while the monitors stayed lit. On the speaker someone was still talking, waiting for his response, and they waited for a long time before they understood he was not going to give one.
The city moved outside the window, being indifferent and continuous and full of people going about the business of having time he no longer had.
Kai Maren was twenty-nine years old with a company and a plan with a picture in his head of a view from a height he had not yet reached. Although he thought he wasn't finished, his life was, as he was laying on the floor of his apartment, dead.