I hate my phone. Why does it have to ring and wake me up? Turning in my bed I reach for my phone resting on the nightstand. The word “bossman” flashes on the screen in tune with the ring tone. I manage to see that the time is just past 4 am and notice a large number of notifications before I slide my finger across the screen to answer.
“It’s 4 am boss, why are you calling me?”
“I’m calling you Tobias since you haven’t reacted to the servers going down. Did you disable your notifications or something?”
“Shit... Fuck... I’ll get there ASAP, do you know why they are down?”
“Sorry Tobias, I have no clue, just got up myself with calls from the dev and production teams about no one doing anything. I will head in myself and try to calm them down whilst you get the servers back up.”
“Thanks, boss, I really can’t deal with them this early when fixing shit. See you there.”
Putting my phone back on my nightstand I groaned before getting out of bed. Of course, the damned servers had to go down today. It’s always on weekends. And I regret staying up so late gaming last night. Or did I stop gaming today? I’m really not sure. I grabbed a shirt and some jeans that I had thrown on the floor that seem to be clean. Socks, fucking socks, I always end up without clean socks at the end of the week. Grumbling about my sock situation I head to the bathroom and rummage through my laundry basket, grabbing the first two socks I find. They look okay? I am not gonna smell them.
Having gotten the socks on I head from the bathroom through my living room. Seems like I forgot to turn off the PC. I don’t have time to turn it off though. So I hurry to the hallway and put on my shoes, grab my keys, and a jacket. I exit my apartment and lock the door before hurrying down to the parking lot.
It’s fucking cold. The damn air condition in the car is so slow. Another good reason why I should get a new car. Though the old dodge ram does wonders when I head out for some backpacking. Rubbing my hands together I start the car and head out from the parking lot.
The only benefit of driving to work at this time of day is that I can make it within 30 minutes. I think I might even have made Seattle in an hour at this time of day, though I’m kinda glad I don’t work there considering how much traffic there would be on a normal day.
Almost exactly 30 minutes later I pull into the parking lot at the office. Looking around there are only two other cars, so it seems that the bossman hasn’t arrived yet. Hopefully, none of the dev or production teams notices my arrival.
After parking the car I hurry into the building, stopping in the entrance to show my office ID to our security guy. Once past him I head to the elevator and can my office ID do unlock the server floor. The doors to the elevator close and it heads down. For some reason, I start humming some elevator music on the short ride down two levels.
Stepping out of the elevator I cross the hallway to the secure entrance of the server room. Again scanning my office ID before I input my code and the door unlocks.
As I enter the server room all I can hear is silence. Or no, there is some whirring coming from somewhere in the room, but not the good kind. All along the rows of server racks there are flashing red lights.
Shit…
I hurry towards the first terminal we have in the room and pull it out.
Come on… Why does the terminal have to take so fucking long to boo…
Finally, it is powered on. I quickly find the log file for the terminal server, reading through the file it seems like there was an error or something on one of the dev servers. Now to isolate the server before booting it and finding out why it seems to have killed everything. I leave the terminal and walk towards the culprit. Once there I unplug it from everything but a hard-line to the terminal and power it on.
Back at the terminal I remote connect to the culprit server. It boots fine at least and I manage to connect. Finding the log file on the server I start reading through it. Hmm. Not much to go on. After half an hour of searching through the log file and other files, I think I managed to locate what killed everything.
One of the fucking devs wrote some garbage code that manages to send a kill command to all the servers. It somehow even managed to get out of the isolated network the development servers run on.
“So, have you found out why everything is down yet?”
“FUCK! Don’t scare me like that boss. But yeah, it seems like one of the gods damned devs managed to write a fucking virus or some shit. We’ll most likely have to purge every server before we can get back up…”
“Of course they did.. I’ll go call in the rest of the team so you won’t have to deal with this alone.”
“Thanks, man, and please go tell those shits to stop fucking up the servers please.”
“Hahaha, sure Tobias, if you talk to the CTO and explain everything afterward.”
Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!
“Eeeeeh, no thanks… I’ll just get to repairing this shit.”
And so I spent most of my Sunday slowly purging and getting servers back up. By the time we managed to finish the work it was past 11 pm.
“Good work team, especially you Tobias, I think it is time everyone heads home and get some sleep. It’s Monday tomorrow after all… Tobias, you can come in later tomorrow so you can make sure to get a proper night’s rest.”
“Thanks, boss, see you tomorrow guys.”
I wave at the rest of the team and head to my car. It’s still fucking cold outside, and I am really tired… Maybe I should just go up to the office and sleep instead of heading home? Nah, better to sleep in a bed than on the floor or a couple of chairs.
I turn the ignition in the car and start driving home. Some might say I should have just stayed at the office to sleep, but I feel more than awake enough to drive the 30 minutes it takes to get home. And there aren’t that many people out driving at this time on a Sunday.
As I am driving along Pacific Ave S I see a weird flash in the sky. Continuing on no new flashes happens and there doesn’t appear to be anything else going on, though I pay some extra attention to the sky.
Time suddenly seems to slow down as I lose control of my car, it’s almost like someone or something is turning the wheel of the car towards the opposite lane. At the same time, another car is doing the same thing in the opposite lane towards my lane.
As the two vehicles approach each other I can start to make out the person driving the other car. It seems to be a young woman. She has shoulder-length dark hair, I can’t tell what color specifically, and wearing glasses. As we get closer and closer I can see the panic in her face, and I imagine she sees the same on my face. The next moment everything goes red, then white.
Pain is everywhere. Both white and black fills my vision. I can’t seem to hear anything. Darkness comes.
The pain is gone. Did I die? Did the woman die? Are we still in the wreckage of the cars? I try to open my eyes but my vision is filled with white. No, wait a minute, there is something there.
Slowly a figure starts to solidify? Take shape? I am not entirely sure how to describe what is happening. But after a few minutes a person, I think, is standing in front of me. Wait? That means I am standing right? I look down and see my legs, huh, I expected to be in the wreck or the hospital if I lived, not here, wherever here is.
“-lcome, it seems that you are confused. Well, the reason why you are here is that the accident wasn’t supposed to happen. Or at least not like that. You see, there appears to have been some bug with the system right now which caused this malfunction.”
Bug? Why would a bug in a system cause the accident? Does that mean that our world is a simulation?
“I see one of you is thinking what this means in terms of what this world is, the other just wants to get back home.”
Did they just say the other? Is someone else here? And this other person wants to go home? I turn to my right and see the woman from the other car. I can now clearly see that her hair is a dark reddish color. She appears to be only a few centimeters shorter than me at roughly 1.62 m. Her eyes seem to be a hazel green color. I don’t get much time to study her before the person that had been speaking speaks again.
“Oh, both of you thought you were to only one here? Well, the bug I was talking about caused the crash between the two of you, originally only one of you were to die in this reality. To fix this one of you will have to reincarnate in a ne-”
“I WILL DO IT!”
I almost screamed as the person described what would happen.
“I want to reincarnate in a new world!”
Just as I finished saying that a glow surrounded both me and the woman beside me. Looking over at her she reached towards me and hugged me.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you… I just want to go home to mom and dad.”
As the glow around us started to intensify I managed to catch a glimpse of the person that had been talking. What I saw I could only describe as a look of utter despair.
“Wha— No— Sto— Shi—”
Was all I heard as the darkness from earlier returned.
----------------------------------------
Again the darkness receded. Though what started coming into view was not the white surroundings of wherever that other place was. No, what came into view now was a mix of blue, green, and gray.
Slowly blinking my eyes I started to make out my surroundings. It appears that I am currently surrounded by a forest, or at least a multitude of trees. The blue is clearly the sky above me and the grey is the stones making up what appears to be a structure similar to Stonehenge.
Now, this is the point where my big blue box appears and tells me what kind of system I got right? Right? Apparently not. No box, no notifications, no system. Or at least nothing with automated messages. Do I have to initiate it myself? System, are you there? Maybe I have to speak it out? Ugh, that is going to sound so stupid.
“Uhm, status?”
Huh, weird, I think something is wrong with my voice. It sounds higher pitched than before. I grab my throat and feel around. I can’t feel any kind of swelling. Hmm, I think my Adam’s apple is gone? Does that mean I got younger in the reincarnation process? That is sweet, though if I am so young that my voice changed I don’t feel safe out wherever this is.
I think I better start heading somewhere else, at least somewhere less open. Looking to the sky I locate the sun. Okay, so the sun is there, given the time when I died? I think that it should be rising currently, which would make that east. In that case, I think I will head towards the west, so I can have the sun in my back.
Just as I start walking I stumble over something.
“Motherfucker!”
Yeah, that is really fucking weird. And what the hell did I just hit? I look down to locate what I tripped over. What greets me is, I don’t even, it’s just… Wow…
I’ve got breasts. No like, really. Boobs. Honestly. And no, I don’t think I’m just fat. At least I wasn’t fat before.
I grab the, my, breasts and squeeze them. Yeah, no they are definitely real. Oh, right, I hit something, didn’t I? Looking around behind me I find a stone plaque that I am sure wasn’t there when I first opened my eyes. Looking at the plaque the writing is definitely in English.
Dear Tobias, I assume you have noticed that you are no longer in your old body. Why are you in a female body you might ask? Well, that is because Alice was the one of you two who was supposed to reincarnate since her body was the least intact from the crash. However, when you shouted that you wanted to reincarnate into a new world you managed to trigger the transfer prematurely and realign the targeting matrix.
Yes, what you are probably thinking right now is correct. Alice returned to Earth in your body, whilst as you are in her new body. And before you even think of asking, not that I could hear you, I have no idea if it would be possible for you to return to Earth or switch bodies in your new world. One good thing though is that you are now younger, lucky you, instead of being 36 you are now a young, healthy 19-year-old girl. Congratulations, and good luck in your new life.
PS. You might want to hurry with getting out of the forest, it’s not safe at night and there are monsters here.
Shit.
Of course. Not only did I not a system or anything like that, but I am now a girl! Is that bad though? I don’t fucking know!? Gaaah. This is fucking with my head so fucking much. I better heed that warning in the end though. No time to wonder what this will mean until I get out to somewhere with people.
I stand back up and start heading in the same direction as before. This time I don’t stumble over any new stone plaques or anything else. I even made extra sure that it wouldn’t happen by carefully studying the ground in front of me.