I knew something was fundamentally wrong the second I opened my apartment door that Thursday afternoon. Not because of anything in the hallway—the same beige carpet with its permanent coffee stain near the elevator, the same buzzing fluorescent light that flickered and made everyone look vaguely ill, the same faint smell of someone’s cooking from down the hall. Everything was exactly as it should be. The problem was my parents’ faces.
My mother’s hand flew to her mouth like she’d just witnessed a resurrection. My father went pale so fast I could actually watch the color drain from his face in real time, his eyes darting frantically between my face and the apartment number on my door and back again, as if one of them had to be a hallucination.
I stood there in my three-day-old sweatpants and the Stanford hoodie I’d been practically living in while hunting down a particularly nasty bug in the authentication system I was building for Deltron Systems, still holding my coffee mug with “WORLD’S OKAYEST PROGRAMMER” printed on the side. My laptop was open on the coffee table behind me, three monitors glowing with lines of code, and I’d been on a video call with my team in San Diego just fifteen minutes earlier.
“Mom? Dad?” I said, genuinely confused by their reaction. “What are you doing here? I thought you were coming next weekend for my birthday.”
My mother’s voice came out strangled, like the words were physically fighting their way past some invisible barrier in her throat. “Ethan… how are you here right now?”
I frowned, that first tickle of unease starting to crawl up my spine. “What do you mean? This is my apartment. Where else would I be?”
My father swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing visibly, and when he finally spoke, his voice sounded like someone reading a death notice at a funeral. “We just came from Riverside Care Center. We visited you there this morning, son.”
The hallway tilted slightly—not literally, but in that strange internal way reality shifts when your brain encounters information it simply cannot process. When the fundamental assumptions about your world suddenly don’t add up and your mind scrambles to make sense of contradictory data.
“Visited me where?” I asked, laughing once in disbelief because surely I’d misheard. “I’ve been here all day. I’ve been working. I’ve been on video calls since eight this morning with my team. I ate breakfast at my own kitchen table. I’m debugging a critical security issue for a federal contractor.”
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