Outside, a waning crescent moon hung sharp in the sky, casting a pale silvery light over a small single-story house. A gentle wind stirred the eaves, coaxing the song from the assortment of glass, wood, and metal windchimes hanging near the front door and each of the windows. The white vinyl siding and dark wood trim looked basically monochrome at this early hour, neat and unassuming, a quiet facade that betrayed not a hint of the stress coiled within. To the side, the gravel of the driveway crunched under the hooves of a passing deer as it crossed in front of the dark, silent mass of the single car garage.

  Inside the modest home, three people slept. That is to say, in the main bedroom Daniel snored deeply like a raging freight train with mufflers that had long since surrendered into rusty uselessness. Beside him, his wife Rose grew increasingly frustrated, poking and prodding, urging him to roll from side to side in a vain attempt to bring the snoring to an end before exhaustion ultimately claimed her. In the basement bedroom, their nine-year-old daughter Emily slept peacefully like only the young can, Celtic rock murmuring from her cellphone on the bedside table, its volume set to an almost subliminal level.

  That mercy afforded by exhaustion proved to be all too short-lived, however, as an obnoxious wail cut through Rose’s rest. It wasn’t the scream of a newborn, as might once have been expected and even dreaded. Instead, it was the unrelenting klaxon of a cellphone alarm, unrepentantly sounding off at an hour still innocent of the sun’s rise over the horizon.

  Awakened rudely in this way, Rose was seized by a dark impulse to grab the offending phone and hurl it as hard as possible into the far wall. The spike of murderous rage aimed at her cellphone faded, however, before she could act on that whim of digital homicide. Instead, her sleepy voice mumbled thickly, “...five more minutes...,” before she slapped blindly at the screen with a half-awake limb until the noise stopped. Quiet settled back into place, punctuated only by Daniel’s uninterrupted snores and the muted chime of wind outside.

  After a few repetitions, Rose finally climbed out of bed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she took the phone with her, muttering imprecations under her breath. When she returned to the bedroom a few minutes later, she shook Daniel awake. “C’mon, sleepyhead. It is time to get up. I’m getting in the shower; go use the bathroom.”

  The snores faltered, then stopped. A groggy noise of protest emerged from somewhere beneath the blankets. “Mmmph,” Daniel replied eloquently.

  She smiled despite herself and left him to it. So the morning began, just another iteration made routine by many years of marriage. Breakfast was made. Coffee prepared. Rose left for work, driving away just as dawn finally crept into place. For Daniel, the morning required a careful descent of the stairs on protesting, creaking joints. Past the line of bookshelves built into the right wall, he made his way to the basement door.

  Daniel’s footsteps rang out on the hard, smooth concrete floor as he stepped inside, taking a few careful strides before turning left to face on Emily’s bedroom door. It was half ajar, and the cellphone continued to rock out gently, growing marginally louder as he nudged the door the rest of the way open.

  Emily lay sprawled across the bed in a tangle of blankets and limbs, one arm flung dramatically over her head, her pillow a barely seen lump on the floor.

  “Em,” Daniel said gently. “Rise and shine.”

  A groan answered him, followed by a weak plea. One he had heard before so often he ought to be paid a dollar each time, and be able to afford to quit his job. “Five more minutes,” she echoed her mother from earlier, her voice rough with sleep.

  “Yeah, sweetie,” Daniel replied, smiling despite the faint throb beginning behind his eyes. “Up. School waits for no one.” She cracked one eye open, scowled at him, then sighed. Almost sounding a dozen years older for a fractured second. “You’re the worst!”

  “Love you too,” he said, backing out before she could grab her pillow and deploy it. And there he waited, only to hand her backpack, lunchbox, and the day’s clothes from the table behind him, offering her an encouraging smile as she prepared for the short walk to her elementary school. It was a safe, brief stroll that elicited no hesitation on his part.

  When the house was finally empty, Daniel returned to the basement. Emily's bedroom on his left, the slim table, washing machine and dryer to his right. And before him... another door. Thick wood, almost as if out of a wizard's sanctum in a novel he read as a child. Charming, in its way, and once Daniel opened it and entered, he gave his study a quick once-over.

  Part workshop, part developer’s haven, and part home office, the study was really a second home for Daniel. The old nine-to-five... yeah, maybe when he’d first started with the company. Back when Metadyne Solutions was fresh and new, and work-life balance had still meant something... but now?

  Nowadays it was more like ten to twelve if he was lucky, and counting himself even more fortunate that he didn’t have to drive into the office an hour and a half away. He fired up the computer at his mahogany desk and watched the three screens come to life.

  It wasn’t long before the VPN started its connection sequence and made his smartphone ring. That always made him roll his eyes, discarding the call before digging out a little white keychain token and pressing the green button on its side. Typing this in to the provided box and hitting enter got him connected. That was when the flood began, as his computer synced up with the corporate systems. Emails downloaded from the server in a torrent of dings, each one making him wince in spite of himself. Each unforgiving ping, another usually pointless communication, demanding attention. Even small amounts of such demands added up, all leading to one message buried in the digital flood.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  [From: ] [To: Programming Team] [Subj: Deadline]

  Daniel stared at that unopened email for a long moment, tension rising, his hands shaking a little. Opening the message and reading it only made those reactions, those emotions, flare into a burst of fury sharp enough to make him draw one of his hands to his chest before he even realized he’d moved.

  Another. Goddamned. Status update. Thinly disguised as a gripe about how the programming team was falling behind.

  “If it wasn’t for all these fucking interruptions, this section of code refactoring would already be done,” he half?ranted, half?muttered to himself. “Instead, interminable meetings and a slew of trivial distractions, busting up my rhythm before I can even get into a proper flow state. And then you have the balls to put out an email like that? Fucking bastard...”

  He opened a reply and copied the last status update from the night before. The one he’d sent hours after the office had closed, just before his wife had finally dragged him to bed. He pasted it in and hit [SEND] with an angry jab of his finger.

  >CLICK<

  Not like anyone was going to read it. They hadn’t bothered to read the last one, nor the one before that. Such a pointless task, answering that email, you'd think it was a government job. But heaven forbid he ignored even one of them. They might not read the replies, but the absence of a reply would be held up as proof of inattentiveness. A dismissal of a planned raise, a withheld bonus that was rightly earned.

  Throughout the day and into the afternoon, another silent war was waged when moments could be stolen away to do so against the monolithic codebase that refused to come into coherent focus. Eliminate one bug, and three more sprang up to replace it. For the hundredth time this week, Daniel muttered to himself, "It would be easier just to rewrite it all from scratch. But James would never authorize that." Fucking James. Like any war, Daniel was caught in the crossfire, ducking into a virtual foxhole as tension and frustration steadily mounted higher and higher, from foxholes to a mountain heavy against his chest.

  Evening eventually came, a prelude into yet another brutal night, the glare of the monitors seemed to grow hateful. Malicious. Rows of dense code marched across the screens like a swarm of fire ants, threatening to boil over at any moment. Daniel blinked owlishly behind his glasses, fighting to maintain his focus as his left shoulder spasmed sharply.

  A quiet curse escaped him as he shifted in his chair. 'Must have slept at a funny angle or something,' he thought, briefly indulging the notion before discarding it as a luxury he couldn’t afford. Not under this impossible deadline.

  He removed his glasses and rubbed at his burning, dry eyes, then squinted back at the screens. The text swam, almost mockingly, before his weary eyes. A moment of confusion washed over him. Sitting back, he let out a deep, heartfelt yawn so widely that his jaw cracked like a gunshot in the small room.

  Beside his mouse pad, candle wax pooled around the base of a scented candle, filling the air with lavender and coffee, layered atop the constant hum of warm electronics.

  He took another brief moment, roughly hewn from the insanity, and fell into idle thought long enough for his screensaver to blank his screen. He reflected that at least he didn’t have a commute to worry about. No coworkers pestering him in cubicles or too?cold break rooms. Just silence, filled with his slightly ragged breathing and his hammering heart racing in his ears.

  After a moment, he scowled and angrily shook his mouse awake, the familiar clacking of his mechanical keyboard resumed, punctuated by Celtic rock filtering in from Emily's bedroom. A wry smile crossed his lips. "Emily has great taste in music," he thought to himself.

  Pain flared suddenly in his knee, sharp enough to make him gasp and halt his work. He stretched his leg out, flexing it a few times until it popped. A sharp crack that might have carried into the next room if not for the music. Relief followed, fleeting but welcome, and with it came the full weight of the exhaustion ravaging his body.

  He felt twice his age. At least.

  The urge to take a break, no matter how well deserved it was, pressed hard at him. But the next update wasn’t going to write itself.

  That was when it hit.

  Deep, sudden and electric. A violent shiver raced through Daniel from head to toe, it was almost like he had plunged headfirst into ice water and forgot to come up for air. His spine arched as his breath caught in his throat. And then...

  Nothing.

  No pain.

  No breath.

  No racing thumps in his chest.

  Just a sense of Nothing that faded into a growing weight in his chest. It became ever more unbearable with every passing second. Daniel clawed at his shirt as a sudden lance of pain slammed into him. Sharp, not dull, forking down his arm and into his jaw at the same time. His vision whited out as his right hand spasmed, slamming down onto the keyboard. Hard.

  The terminal window open on the computer filled with random characters for a moment before it threw an absolute hissy fit. But he didn't see it, as everything blurred. For a moment, he thought he’d screamed. Or maybe that had only happened in his head.

  His heart suddenly kicked wildly in his chest, stuttering like a panicked animal as darkness frayed at the edges of his vision. The world stretched and warped, then began to slip away entirely. He pitched forward bonelessly, face striking the desk before his body slid down to the floor.

  Hard concrete pressed against his cheek.

  Cold.

  So cold, yet for one brief, terrible moment, it felt good.

  Then everything began to slip away. In a sudden burst of clarity, terror took hold. A string of frantic denials raced through his mind... this wasn’t a cramp, this wasn’t exhaustion. This wasn’t something that would pass.

  It was worse than all that.

  His thoughts spiraled as he struggled to breathe, willing his body to move. He tried to push himself up, to get an elbow under him, to reach his cellphone on the desk. But it might as well have been a million miles away. Daniel collapsed again, shivering as sound warped and reality finally gave up, folding inward until there was nothing left but darkness.

  His thoughts drifted away from deadlines and his impossible boss.

  Instead, he thought of his wife. Rose.

  His daughter. Emily.

  The wind chimes outside, dancing in the night, singing their quiet lullaby.

  There was no afterlife waiting here. No departed loved ones to greet him. No guiding light.

  There was only darkness.

  There was an unspeakable absence.

  Daniel tried to speak, but couldn’t hear himself, not even the sound of his own breathing or heartbeat. He couldn’t be sure he’d made a sound at all, no matter how hard he tried to make even the softest of peeps. He couldn’t even feel himself draw in breath.

  And when he felt he could bear it no longer...

  He began to hallucinate.