In a hospital room like any other, among the sick and dying, Clover stared down at his phone with a wide grin, blind to the world around him. On the screen, an old re-run of his favorite sitcom played out. There wasn't any other way he would rather spend his Friday night.

That was a lie.

The hours slipped by, and he never once looked away. There was a desperation in his gaze - in his attentiveness as if the fate of the world hinged on whether or not he could memorize every detail on the screen.

It did not.

Clover coughed. Out of habit, he covered his mouth with a fist. Once, then twice more, his lungs contracted, enveloped by an odd and painful fuzziness. Something was wrong with him, and no matter how many tests the hospital ran, they could never pinpoint the source.

A dull laugh track played through his wired earbuds. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He had missed his favorite part of the episode.

The clock struck eight, and a nurse entered the room with two food trays. She dropped them off with a brief exchange of pleasantries. After the nurse left, Clover poked at the soggy exterior of a tuna sandwich. He had never been a fan of hospital food. Not that he'd complain about it to anyone - that wouldn't accomplish anything.

"You want it?" a man - his temporary hospital roommate asked with hunched shoulders while holding out a plastic cup of red jello. "I'm not going to eat it."

Clover turned with a barely hidden flinch.

"Sure." He scratched his head, embarrassed at his poor second impression.

Twelve hours ago, he had ruined the real first impression when the man had been first carted into the room. Of course, Clover had intended to greet him, but by the time he had puzzled out what to say, an uncomfortable amount of time had passed, and at that point, he figured it would be awkward to say anything at all. So, they had sat in silence, ignoring each other for the greater part of a day.

The older man, too skeletal to be healthy, clumsily tossed over a jello container. It arced through the air crookedly and expertly evaded Clover's attempts to grab it, eventually landing on his leg with a plop. He didn't feel the impact.

"Thanks," Clover said with a nod, fighting back the urge to laugh at how comically unathletic the sequence had been.

The man shrugged, fighting back a laugh of his own. "I could never stand the stuff - ya'know, it's made out of melted bones. Just the thought of it makes me sick."

He peeled off the top and scooped up a spoonful. "Lucky for me, I'm already sick." Clover blinked once, then grinned. He had accidentally said something cool! He mentally patted himself on the back. Usually, he wasn't nearly so eloquent.

A quarter second later, his enthusiasm waned, and doubts of whether his earlier statement had actually been stupid crept into his mind.

The man chuckled good-naturedly. "Sick in the head, maybe. But, who am I to judge?" He took an exaggerated bite of his soggy tuna sandwich.

As they ate, the two fell into an easy conversation. They talked about nothing in particular, circling the safe and predictable topics that strangers frequented. But a genuine conversation like this felt new and exciting for Clover, who had spent almost the entire summer wheeling in and out of the hospital. If he closed his eyes, he could almost pretend he was a character in one of his favorite sitcoms.

Almost - his wheelchair stuck out like a sore thumb parked in the corner of the room, a reminder that he could never truly forget.

Clover's smile strained, falling at the edges. Like usual, he did his best to ignore the dark thoughts swirling around his head.

They talked and talked, and an hour and three minutes later, the conversation lulled. Clover recognized with only halfway forced enthusiasm that this was the longest he had ever spoken to a stranger for, beating out that one time with the chatty cashier by a long margin. He figured an accomplishment like this required celebration, but the only applause he received came from the monotonous haunting sounds of the medical equipment attached to him and the incessant clock ticking on the far side of the room.

They finished their meals in silence. Clover didn't like silence; it gave too much room for his thoughts to run wild. He unwrapped his headphones and settled in for another long night of television.

"Do you ever get tired of just watching?" the man asked while looking out the window, gazing up at the night sky.

A long gap of silence punctuated his question.

The slight grin Clover forced himself to wear faltered. Normally, he would lie, but today, he was too tired to muster up the effort. "Yes. I do," he finally said, his throat sore from all the talking he had done. He tapped his fingers on the screen, pausing and unpausing the video - a nervous habit. "It feels like my whole life I've been able to do nothing but watch."

The older man nodded.

"Sometimes I wish that that'd change - that I'd wake up one day, and everything would be different - like one of those superhero movies. My choices would matter, and anything would be possible." He sighed. "But I know a world like that will never exist outside of television. No matter how hard I try, when I wake up the next day, I will still be the same old me. In real life, nothing ever changes," Clover trailed off, not having meant to say even half of what he had said.

He shouldn't have said anything.

"I used to think the same thing, but over the years, I've found it's not that we don't change: it's that we don't notice until it's too late." The man retrieved a well-worn notebook and flipped through it till he stopped at the last page. "Will you humor an old man and listen to his ramblings? Maybe you'll find them useful."

Clover nodded and followed the man's gaze out the window; between the heavy cloud cover and the bright light of the city, he could barely make out a single constellation.

"When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. I figured that up there, I'd be so small and insignificant that my problems wouldn't know where to find me. That dream never came true, but I always figured that one day I'd go skydiving as a sort of consolation prize. That while I didn't make it to the moon, maybe I could get close."

The man clicked a pen and then began to diligently work on a sketch of the night sky - copying it down bit by bit between glances as he talked.

"I always thought that I'd go skydiving one day. I honestly believed that. It's not like it's uncommon; people do it all the time. For me, it was always on the horizon, just one payday, just one holiday away." He stopped for a moment, going back to sketch over a stray line. "But it never happened."

Clover's phone felt a bit warmer in his hand.

"You're not dead yet, right. You still have time," Clover said, more to himself than anyone else.

"Time is a funny thing, you never realize how little you have till you reach the end." He paused for a moment. "Forgive the dramatics; I enjoy pretending to be older and wiser than I really am."

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Clover didn't know how to respond. "That's alright," he said, settling for the first acceptable thing that crossed his mind.

"My dream of sailing amongst the stars may have passed me by, but it's not too late for you. What do you want? What do you dream about?"

"I want…" Clover was interrupted as a series of loud coughs tore through his lungs. After it ended, he rubbed his chest but didn't verbally pick up where he left off.

"Don't worry about it too much. It's easy for me to sound wise when I don't have to follow through on my advice. You don't have to find an answer tonight."

Like usual, the right words had slipped away from Clover, so he settled for a simple nod. It didn't matter what he wanted. He knew he'd never get it.

Late into the night, Clover watched old sitcoms on his phone, and the man sketched out the constellations - each resigned to their own lonely little worlds.

The following morning, Clover woke up coughing blood. By the time he gathered himself, he had realized that the other man was long gone, and the only proof that he had even existed rested on the blue sheets of the bed, still open to its last page.

Clover frowned. In the end, the two had never even exchanged names.

…..

The world spun and not in the astronomical sense. Ever since Clover had woken, his condition had taken a turn for the worse. A constant nausea assailed him, and every time he coughed, it felt like someone had stabbed a knife into his chest.

The hospital had run him through a series of tests, but he didn't expect them to find anything useful.

He paused the news broadcast he had been watching, looking at the results of his most recent coughing fit splattered across his bed sheets was making him nauseous. Well, more nauseous than he already was. Which was quite the accomplishment.

Taking a napkin from his untouched tray of food, he got to work cleaning up.

According to the news, there had been a bunch of freak weather events today: a giant tornado had blown through Kansas, picking up trees, and up north, in New York, there had been a blizzard. There was even a volcanic eruption in California. It was end of the world type of stuff, but interesting stuff - more interesting than cleaning, at least.

Finished with his task, Clover crumbled the napkin into a ball and tossed it toward the can with masterful technique. The ball arced over the trashcan and bounced off the sterile white wall, then eventually rolled to a stop on the glossy tile flooring next to his motorized wheelchair. He had missed.

"Clover, it's good to see you're keeping active."

Clover turned towards the familiar voice. A tall doctor with a messy hairstyle that might have resembled something fashionable thirteen hours ago but had since been knocked out of place by a hard day's work stood in the doorway. He carried a pen and clipboard in one hand, the usual sort, and a paper bag with a neon fast food logo in the other.

"Though your aim needs a bit of work." The doctor smiled as he reached down and stabbed the napkin with a pen. He flicked it into the trash.

Clover returned his hands to his lap. "Doctor White, I thought you said you were going home for the night; why are you still here?" he said softly.

The tired-looking man had been his doctor for as long as he had remembered, and even though he was something of a big shot in the medical community now, he still made time to drop in whenever Clover made a visit to the hospital.

The doctor plopped down heavily on the corner of the bed and placed the paper bag in Clover's lap. "We're short-staffed. Somebody had to pick up the slack." Dark bags hung under his eyes.

"Sorry," Clover said.

"Don't be; I get paid to be here." He poked the bag. "Enough of that. Open the bag already. Susan brought me this, and I thought I'd share. I know how much you dislike hospital food; just don't let anyone else find out, or I'll be in big trouble."

Clover curiously uncrumpled the opening and looked inside. Inside was a carton of French fries and chicken nuggets. Finally having something palatable to him, he took a bite out of a chicken nugget.

"Thanks; they're good," he said with his mouth full. An annoying sense of nausea built in his stomach. "You want one?" He held out a chicken nugget.

"Sure." The doctor took a bite out of the nugget and then stared intently at the clock on the wall. The tired man sighed. "The preliminary results from the tests we ran this morning came back."

"Oh yeah, what's the damage, doc?" Clover asked, halfway quoting a show he had watched last week, only halfway listening for a response. He already knew what it would be.

"The tests indicate you have an advanced stage of lung cancer." What? Clover must have misheard. The gentle murmur of the heart rate monitors intensified, becoming a constant shrill screech to his ears. The clock counted down the seconds, each louder than the last.

"We've never seen anything like this. When we tested two months ago, we found no malignant cells," the doctor continued speaking, but Clover had trouble making sense of what he was saying.

It was all so loud. Clover could see the doctor's lips moving, but he couldn't make out a word.

He could feel it in his chest – the cancerous cells slowly growing in number. Each tiny pinprick was like an itch he couldn't scratch, slowly multiplying in intensity until it felt like a fire was burning in his chest. He hoped that was just his imagination.

The doctor gripped his shoulder. "Clover, we have systems in place to help. With modern medicine, we can fight this." He held out a small stack of papers. "I contacted a neighboring research facility; they have a new experimental treatment that could help you. It wouldn't cost you anything."

He took the papers and looked them over. "How long do I have left?" he forced the words out of his unwilling mouth. Part of him didn't want to know.

"It's hard to put an exact number on it because we have never seen a case develop as quickly as yours." He paused for a moment, not wanting to say what came next. "If your condition followed an average progression, I'd say you would have around 3 months, but in your case.” He cleared his throat. “In the unlikely event that it continues to spread at the same rate you could expect to live ten, maybe seven days.”

That wasn't nearly enough time - for anything, really.

Clover hurriedly skimmed through the papers, ignoring the complex medical terms he didn't know, halfway listening to the doctor as he tried to reassure him that the worst case scenario was unlikely to unfold. As he reached the end of the page, he sighed and put the papers down. He didn't want to feel the pain of his hopes being crushed again.

"It's a long shot, but it could work. As long as you don't give up, there's a chance this could work. This new technique shows real promise."

A nurse burst into the room, her uniform slightly burnt. "Doctor White, come quickly; there's been an emergency. You're needed."

He waved her away. "Tell them to wait. I'll handle it later."

"No, it's urgent; you need to come now. There's been a fire in an operating room."

The doctor narrowed his eyes in disbelief. "Think it over. We'll be ready to start the experimental procedure in the morning if that's the route you want to go." He clenched his fist. “Whatever you decide, I’ll support you.” Clover watched him leave, too numb to do anything.

For a long while, he simply sat in his bed, too shocked to think or move. During this time, his only companion was the constant ticking of the clock, counting the seconds till his end. It was strangely peaceful – a state of numbness that no emotion could penetrate.

"Cancer," he mulled the word over in his mouth. He sighed. He wanted to run away – far from here, to live freely before he died. There were still so many things he wanted to do. So many simple things he hadn't had the chance to experience yet - stupid and childish desires filled his mind.

Clover had to face the facts; that type of life wasn't in the cards for him. The odds were he'd sit in a small room like this till the end of his days. He was stuck. There was nothing he could do. His condition couldn't be beaten by willpower.

With shaking hands, he put his earbuds back in and turned the mediocre sitcom he was watching back on at full volume. The characters talked, laughed, and danced across the screen; they did all the things he wished he could. It didn't matter how poor the delivery or execution of a joke was; he laughed along as if he were in the room with them. He wanted to be like them.

He wanted to live a normal life.

In that dark and lonely hospital room, their life was so loud that if only for a moment, he could forget his own. Unmoving, he stared at his phone with empty eyes till the late hours of the night. With the smallest of smiles on his face, the character's voices lulled him to sleep.

That night, he slept fitfully, haunted by a strange dream that seemed to last for a lifetime.

…..

Clover woke in a cold sweat to the sound of a fire alarm blaring in the distance. Hard tile pressed against his face, and as his eyes slowly blinked open, his confusion grew. Why the hell was he on the floor?

He pushed himself off the cold tile with his arms and immediately noticed something was profoundly wrong.

A light dimly flickered overhead, casting the room in long shadows. But that wasn't what concerned him; he wasn't afraid of the dark. No, what concerned him was the dark red blood pooling beneath the door to his room.

A blue screen snapped into existence and hovered in front of him.

Welcome to the System.