Chapter 1
943words
Ellie stared at her monitor, but her eyes weren't focused on the half-written ad copy. Instead, they fixated on a shameful little window open in the corner—the ominous red balance in her banking app.
$73.14.
The number mocked her. Today was the 25th. Rent was due in a week, and New York City was brutally realistic and stingy, not giving a damn whether her paycheck would arrive in time.
Money was digital shackles, a constant reminder that she walked a tightrope between survival and collapse.
She could almost feel the weight of overdue bills pressing down, suffocating every last inch of air in her lungs.
A sharp, arrogant voice sliced through her private fears. "Ellie, got a minute?"
Ellie minimized the app, her heart skipping a beat. Sarah stood next to her cubicle, casually leaning against the thin partition with an effortless air of ownership. She wore a suit jacket that cost more than Ellie's monthly rent, her smile a well-practiced, predatory curve.
In her manicured hand was a printed copy of a storyboard. Ellie's storyboard.
"Just wanted to thank you for those sketches you drew for the 'Aura' case," Sarah said, her voice pitched loud enough for the surrounding cubicles to hear.
"They were a nice starting point. I took your initial ideas, refined them, and really pushed the concept to the next level. Davis loved it."
A cold knot formed in Ellie's stomach.
Taglines, visual narratives, emotional arcs—she'd written them all during a caffeine-fueled burst of creativity at 3 AM two days ago.
And now they were all stolen.
"Oh." Ellie could only utter that single pathetic puff of air. She wanted to scream, to hold up her original files with their two-day-old timestamps, to expose this lie. But her throat constricted with that familiar cocktail of fear and compliance. Sarah was Davis's favorite, a master of office politics. And Ellie... was dispensable. A hardworking little bee whose honey was always harvested by others.
Sarah patted the partition, a gesture both condescending and dismissive. "Keep up the good work. Nice to see a junior designer who can contribute."
She sauntered toward Davis's glass-walled office, leaving Ellie in the wake of her expensive perfume and stolen victory. The office buzz returned, but now it sounded like mocking laughter.
The journey home was a blur of misery. New York's vibrant night chaos—the wailing sirens, the clamor of sidewalk cafes, the dizzying heights of skyscrapers—felt like a personal affront. The city stood as a monument to ambition and success, while she was merely a ghost lingering at its edges.
She trudged along a quieter side street in the Village, lost in a fog of self-pity, when something hard struck her shoulder.
She cried out, more from surprise than pain.
A dirty empty beer bottle clinked on the pavement beside her, thrown from a passing car—a casual, thoughtless act of malice.
Something inside Ellie snapped.
It wasn't the bottle that broke her.
It was those $73.14. It was Sarah's smug smile. It was the bland microwave dinner waiting in her small, overpriced apartment. It was years of silence, of hard work, of being told her time would come, only to watch it materialize as a printed sheet in someone else's hands, taken away.
Pure, unadulterated rage—cold and sharp—surged through her body. This anger burned away all fear, anxiety, and fatigue. With a primal scream torn from the depths of her soul, she grabbed the bottle from the ground. Her arm swung back like a compressed spring of frustration before she hurled it violently. The bottle traced an arc through the air, not aimed at the long-gone car, but toward the brick wall across the street, shattering with a satisfying, explosive crash.
The sound echoed through the narrow street. Her chest heaved. In that brief moment, there was no anxiety, only the clean, crisp release that came with action. Then the emptiness surged back, heavier than before. She trembled, wrapping her thin coat tighter around herself, and continued walking home.
That night, she couldn't sleep at all. Ellie lay in the darkness, city lights filtering through her blinds, tracing patterns on the ceiling. Her anger had subsided into a bitter, familiar despair. None of this meant anything. Tomorrow, she would return to Apex, to her $73.14, to continuing her existence as an invisible person. The thought weighed on her heart like a block of lead. Perhaps she was finally about to break.
That's when she heard the voice.
It wasn't a sound from the street or the neighboring apartment. It was in her mind, as clear as a notification alert, yet completely unfamiliar.
[System initialization... core directives activated.]
The voice was crisp, genderless, devoid of any emotion. It was the voice of pure data.
Ellie sat up abruptly, heart pounding. She looked around the empty room. Had she imagined it? An auditory hallucination caused by stress?
[Beyond baseline survival expenses, for every additional dollar spent on personal improvement, you will be paid a proportional return on investment.]
She covered her ears with her hands. The voice wasn't diminished. It was inside her head. Panic bubbled in her throat. This was it. She had finally lost her mind under the pressure. The city had chewed her up and spit out a madwoman.
She curled into a ball, pulling the sheets over her head, trying to drown out the polite, calm insanity echoing in her mind. This must be a dream.
She thought she had finally been driven insane by stress.
She ignored it. She would fall asleep, and by morning, it would be gone.
