John always hated mornings.
Not because they were early or loud or because of any particular event that occurred during them. He hated them because they reminded him that time was still moving, that life hadn't yet forgotten about him. Each sunrise was a cruel reaffirmation that he was still expected to participate.
For as long as he could remember, John had felt out of sync with the world. The thrum of its heartbeat never matched his. People moved fast, wanted fast, died fast. He existed in the periphery, untouched, unnoticed, like furniture in a room no one used anymore.
He wasn't angry about it. Anger required energy, and John rarely had the reserves for that. He had long since learned to live in the shadows of effort. He didn't dream anymore. Didn't hope. Didn't reach. He existed in the same way a rock existed—still, unmoved, forgotten by the rushing river around it.
That Wednesday had been colder than usual, despite the calendar's insistence that spring had arrived. Clouds hung low and heavy, the kind that choked the light and made everything seem too quiet. The kind of day where people wrapped themselves tighter in their coats and kept their eyes low. The kind of day John preferred. When the world was miserable, it was closer to how he felt inside.
He found the park empty, save for a few skeletal trees and the occasional fluttering of trash caught in the breeze. He liked it this way—open, unjudging, still. The bench near the edge of the hill was warped, the wood split and splintered from too many winters, but it held him without protest. He lay back slowly, easing himself down like an old man folding into bed.
The sky above him was gray without variation. A dull, lifeless thing. John stared into it for a while. Then he closed his eyes.
Sleep came easily, as it always did. It wasn't a gentle drift into dreams but rather a kind of falling. A surrender. He felt the familiar numbness settle over him, like moss creeping over a forgotten statue. There was no fear, no resistance—just the quiet slide into nothing.
Then the world ended.
He didn't hear the engine until it was too late. Didn't see the car. Just the impact.
A sound like thunder, but closer. A sudden weightlessness, then pain—not sharp, not even loud, but final. A sensation of being shattered, but only for a moment. Then not even that.
There was no light at the end of the tunnel. No warmth. No welcome.
There was only white.
It wasn't a room, not really. It had no walls, no ceiling, no floor. Just an infinite space that bled into itself in every direction. John found himself standing, though he didn't remember standing. There was no breeze, no noise, no temperature. It felt less like he was somewhere and more like he had been erased.
He blinked once. Nothing changed.
He blinked again, and a blue screen materialized before him, as if summoned by his confusion.
It hovered in the air, perfect and unnatural. The text began to type itself out slowly, mechanically, like the voice of a machine trying to mimic human pace:
"System activating: Rebirth Protocol…"
John said nothing. He didn't move.
The words glowed in the void. He could hear them in his mind somehow, not like speech, but like a memory being downloaded into his thoughts.
Then, another line:
"Previous life terminated. Cause of death: External impact trauma. Classification: Accidental. Relevancy: Low."
The words struck him harder than the car had.
Low relevancy.
That was it, then. His entire existence boiled down to a label. A statistical entry in some cosmic database. All those years drifting through life, waiting for something to change, and now the universe itself had confirmed what he had always suspected—he hadn't mattered. Not even a little.
Another line appeared, unfeeling:
"Processing soul integrity… Fragmentation detected. Will attempt reconstruction."
Soul?
John didn't believe in things like souls. But now, faced with the clinical tone of something vastly beyond human, he wondered if perhaps belief was irrelevant. If souls were less about faith and more about data—something quantifiable, measurable. And his was damaged.
Of course it was.
He had lived hollow. He had poured nothing of himself into the world. What was left to reconstruct?
Then the screen flashed. Not brighter—just deeper. The blue turned to something like the color of drowning, and the words began to scroll faster, as though whatever process had begun could no longer be stopped.
"Memory fragments: 67% retrieved. Emotional core: Weak. Identity anchor: Incomplete. Personality file: Passive/Detached."
"Assigning new parameters…"
John took a step back, but his feet made no sound. There was nothing to step on. He felt a sickness begin to churn in his stomach—something more primal than fear. This wasn't heaven. This wasn't hell. This was a machine.
And it was remaking him.
He opened his mouth to speak, to object, to scream—but there was no air. No breath. He wasn't breathing. He realized, then, that he hadn't been breathing since he arrived.
Another screen materialized beside the first. It showed something like a model—an outline of a human form, hazy and glitching. His name floated beside it: John [NULL]
The system was trying to build something from the pieces of him that remained.
"Host body: Expired. Rebirth environment: Allocating…"
"Warning: Compatibility suboptimal."
"Assigning world shard: 0237-Delta."
The void around him began to vibrate. The white turned gray, then black, then something… worse. Shapes formed at the edges of sight, too distant to identify, too fast to track. And beneath it all, a sound—low, rhythmic, like the beating of a mechanical heart.
John felt himself coming apart. Not physically. It was more like unraveling. Like threads of himself were being pulled in every direction, like the system was breaking him down into something it could use.
His memories flickered in front of him, one after another.
His father's silence.
The taste of cold cereal in a dark apartment.
The time he almost jumped from the fourth-floor balcony but didn't, not out of fear, but because he couldn't be bothered.
The way people looked at him like he was already halfway gone.
The way he never really disagreed with them.
They passed by him, not with warmth or regret, but with surgical detachment. Not a life flashing before his eyes—just files being sorted. Corrupted data. Weak signals. Echoes of nothing.
Then, the final line:
"Integration in progress. Stand by."
Everything stopped.
Time halted.
And then he felt something for the first time since he arrived—not physical, but deeply internal. A pressure. A weight.
Something was waking up inside him.
Something else.
He wasn't reborn, not yet. But in that liminal space between nothing and something, John understood something he had never truly admitted to himself.
He had wasted it.
The life.
The chance.
He had been so afraid of the pain, the noise, the failure—that he had simply opted out. Quietly. Gradually. He had died long before the car ever hit him. That final impact was just paperwork being filed.
Now, something else was claiming him. Rebuilding him. Not out of mercy, not out of design—but out of function. He wasn't chosen. He was recycled.
And as the last of his awareness was pulled away into the cold machinery of rebirth, John felt an emotion he hadn't felt in years.
Regret.
Not because he had died.
But because, for the first time, he wanted to live.
And it was too late.