Green eldritch characters danced across Elrik's screen in a mocking conga line.
Elrik blinked, and shook his head clear. He tried, for the umpteenth time, to read the code on his screen.
God. He really hated this part of the job.
The desk lamp cast its gentle glow over Elrik's keyboard. It was the only source light in the quiet, dark room. Outside, through the window, the Berlin sky was that inky utter black that only the deep night held.
In the preternatural, 4:00am silence, the gentle clack, clack, clack of his mechanical keyboard was the only sound in his apartment.
A glass of half-drunk whiskey sat on the desk, next to his monitor, tempting him. Next to it, his phone lay, face-up, untouched.
No calls. No messages.
The studio apartment was, to put it kindly, a dump. Empty potato chip packets lay strewn by the office chair. Boxes of half-eaten takeout littered the kitchen counter. Empty delivery package boxes piled up in a corner. Beer bottles lined the floor along the walls in some arcane tessellation.
...
5am.
It was now day six of crawling through some defunct codebase. Spaghetti code written over a decade ago, by engineers that had all since retired. Day six of trawling through a million lines of shitty pasta code to fix one frustrating little bug. A week of eye-gougingly soulless work. All that - for just enough scratch to make another month’s rent.
Elrik sighed. His mouth held the sour-bitter taste of too many coffees and too little sleep.
His life hadn’t always been like this...
Three years ago Elrik had been at the top of the game.
He was smart - scary smart - or so they told him. Top of his class at Berkeley. Blew the other engineers out of the water every place he went. When he started up his own software shop, the VCs on sand-hill-road were falling over each other to throw money at him.
He’d been that guy - an up and comer - destined for great things. They told him. His star had been ascendant.
Before it all went wrong.
Before he piled one mistake on top of another. Before he’d turned things from bad to worse and then from worse to utter disaster. Before he’d spiraled from there and made every single bad decision you could think of.
Elrik caught that thought from spiraling before the urge to throw his keyboard overtook him. He really couldn’t afford a new keyboard this week.
Tring!
The email notification on his phone echoed eerily through the utterly silent studio apartment.
Who could be emailing him this early?
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Huh.. it was that guy from the bank - what's-his-name.
Blearily, he shoved his mouse up the screen, and click-clicked the email open.
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~Sender: jsmitdt@bankofberlan
Hey Elrik,
I just wanted to reach out to you to give you a bit of news regarding your ongoing contract with us. Our legal team recently reached out to us regarding some rather unpleasant allegations about your work history..
I’m sure it’s just a mixup - and we’ll have this cleared up in no time. Just as a precaution though, we’ve gone ahead and temporarily suspended your contract while we get things cleared up-
----------------------------------------
Ah. The little lead weight in the pit of Elrik's stomach dropped. A sudden clearheadedness washed over him like a bucket of ice-water.
He would not be making next month’s rent then.
Elrik didn’t bother to read the rest of the email. It was a mix of legalese and office-polite scheisse business-speak that translated to: please don’t let anyone know you were ever associated with us in any way shape or form. Or we’ll sue you into oblivion.
Ah. The breath went out of him. So much for that then.
Elrik chuckled humorlessly to himself.
"Some rather unpleasant allegations…"
‘Rather unpleasant allegations’ was business-speak for ‘Jesus Christ! What the hell is wrong with you?’
The amazing thing about rock bottom - is that every time you think you’ve hit rock bottom - you fall deeper down the hole. Then ‘Ah!’ like a revelation - you realize - that where you were before wasn’t rock bottom after all - no, no, no.. this was true rock bottom. Then the cycle repeats itself.
You keep thinking, hoping - now, now - there's nowhere to go but up.. but no - there's always more down.
It settled on him then - the truth. That this was it. There was no rock bottom low that he'd crawl his way back up from. There were no second chances. There was no pulling up.
There was just the death spiral that was his life. It just went down, down, down.
All he could do was ride it down.. or speed it up. Lean into the stick.
And with that, suddenly, it felt like a weight had been lifted off him.
A smile crawled across his face, that had nothing funny in it.
Elrik opened the drawer in his desk, reached as far back as his hand would go and pulled out the little pill box in the back. He carefully set it down on the desk and reached for the whiskey.
Hmm.. he frowned. This was an occasion that called for something better.
Elrik grabbed a hoodie off the back of his chair and made his way down the apartment stairs. He figured the 24/7 bodega down the street should be open. They had a few decent bottles of rye, usually.
Elrik hummed as he walked, his feet light.
He checked his phone again. No calls. No other messages.
Tring!
Huh?
Elrik did a double take.
It was clearly a spam message.. But even for spam it was pretty weird
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Sender: 0001
Catastrophic Failure! For a retry: Follow Whiterabbit
----------------------------------------
Elrik actually stopped in the middle of the street and just stared.
Follow whiterabbit
Spam was getting soo weird these days. Elrik shook his bleary hung-over head and looked again but the message was just as mystifying the second time he read it. He closed his phone and walked across the street.
The bodega door had one of those old-school doors - the kind that played a sad little jingle when you opened it.
beep-beep-ba-boooop
He gave a nod to Hasan, the guy asleep at the counter and walked past him.
Elrik made his way inside, with an easy familiarity. This was, after all, his corner store bodega. His second home. He knew it well.
He made a beeline to the whiskey.
Just as he was browsing the humble one-shelf selection of bodega liqueurs - something caught his eye outside.
Through the plexiglass door, all the way across the street, he could see something blinking at him. Bright lights, strobing, in the dark Hermannplatz night.
Frowning, Elrik walked back out of the bodega, and stared.
The ATM machine on the other side of the street, the one that he passed every day, was doing something decidedly weird. The screen was lit up, brighter than he’d ever seen it. On the screen was a little cartoon rabbit dancing.
What the hell.
Follow Whiterabbit
Still frowning, Elrik crossed the street. The little cartoon rabbit was still dancing back and forth across the screen, waving its little hands. It seemed to be waving and pointing at something - something to the right.
What?
Elrik turned to the right.
And then the semi truck hit him.