Chapter 1: Tuesdays suck. This is a hidden rule of the universe. Everybody always talks about how Mondays are the worst day of the week, but they only say that because they’re nursing their hangovers. At least on Wednesday, the week is halfway over. Thursday is a prelude to the upcoming weekend, and Friday is freedom. Monday brings hopes of a fresh start–until Tuesday crushes them by showing you that nothing has changed.

  Simon entertained himself with this thought as he sat at a desk in the dimly lit basement of the hospital. He watched the painful growth of the progress bar on the dusty computer. No matter how often he had brought up updates and potential other solutions, the higher-ups had deemed them unneeded. He was sure they either didn’t know or didn’t care to fix any of this. This is just another reason why Simon hated Tuesdays. Every other Tuesday, patient files would go missing on the main server. Of course, it had taken days for Simon to find the root cause, but he had finally figured it out. He still remembered that day months after it happened.

  “I found the problem!” Simon exclaimed, walking into Matthew’s office. The heavy-set older manager turned his chair to face the excited employee.

  “The… problem?” Matthew asked slowly, looking at Simon with an unimpressed gaze.

  Simon paused briefly, confused by his boss's response.

  “The reason the patient data keeps disappearing every other Tuesday?” Simon stated.

  “Oh right, that was quick. Well, don’t keep me waiting; spit it out,” Matthew responded, looking even more uninterested.

  “Uhh.. So it has to do with a computer managing some of the servers in the basement. The software is horribly out of date. Honestly, I don’t think the company that made it is even in business anymore. It tries to update every other week, but the connection to the server fails. I checked, but they didn’t respond, and I can’t find any evidence of the company online. It will keep trying to connect until failing, and then a prompt needs to be clicked to fix it.” Simon explained.

  Matthew seemed to ponder this new information for a few seconds before he said.

  “That would explain why a complete server restart would fix it. The computer must be on that list and restart with everything else clearing the prompt.”.

  “That is exactly what I thought. So, should I replace the software?” Simon asked.

  “Why would we do that?” Matthew replied, raising an eyebrow, then turned to his computer and pulled up a program. “I see the missing files are visible again from whatever you did. Speaking of, what did you do?”

  “I hit no and then waited for it to continually fail to connect… then hit no again,” Simon said carefully, suddenly regretting the direction this talk was taking.

  ‘Oh no,’ he thought to himself as Matthew looked at him and had a small smile.

  “We should really update or remove the software if at all possible I could...” Simon quickly started to speak but was cut off by his manager.

  “Oh definitely, I'll put it on our backlog and put a high priority on it. Until then, couldn’t you just go down there every other Tuesday and babysit it through the process?” Matthew said while adopting an innocent look.

  Simon scoffed. ‘Yeah, right. The backlog’ he thought to himself. That backlog had items on it waiting to be fixed. Over a thousand items the last time he had checked. He was pretty sure that some of those items had a ‘high’ priority and had been there for over a year.

  With a sigh, he replied to Matthew.

  “Sure, Matthew, I'll add it to my calendar,” resigning himself to his new basement appointments as he added the repeating tasks. ‘Just great. What more could a man want than to sit in a dusty basement for several hours.’ he thought. Well, he was sure some of the people in his department would see this as a dream assignment. Until they realized the unique features of the basement.

  “Perfect. Great work!” Matthew nodded and then continued, “Is there anything else? I need to get back to my busy work day.”

  “No, that’s it,” Simon replied, but his boss had already turned back to his computer.

  ‘Ah, yes, his very busy work day,’ Simon thought bitterly as he began to leave the office. He was sure he had seen the glint of a card game on one of his boss's monitors. Simon left feeling defeated.

  So Simon sat, on this stupid Tuesday, waiting for the screen to show him the confirmation. He would acknowledge its loneliness in this world as it had been left behind by the times. This was the problem with sitting down in a dimly lit basement. The walls and flooring were built in who knows what decade. Cell phones, wifi, it all stopped working down here. The only connection to the world above was through the wires traveling the floor and walls. This led Simon to hate his time down here. It was dumb, he knew it, but something about this software continually reminded him of his current existence. Much like the software, Simon felt he had grown detached from the world at large. The monotony of his day-to-day job ground away at his psyche. He had tried to stop it, but as year two at this dead in position was firmly behind him, it had worsened. Simon had picked up hobbies, revisited old past times, and gone on nice walks in forested areas. But day after day, these activities seemed to almost… lose the color in them. That was the best description he could give. He had kept up exercising, which had been a great suggestion from the kindly therapist who had worked with him. This had evolved into mixed martial arts, fencing, kendo, and pretty much anything he could try along those lines. These he had taken to with gusto, and yet they faded fairly quickly. He kept up with them but still lacked the ambition to take them through to anything more than a hobby. Simon was incredibly talented at these hobbies, this caused him to scoff at the internal thought. Of course, this was a blessing and a curse. While things requiring the movement of his body seemed to just be effortless for him to learn, this had an unfortunate side effect. They bored him.

  He found himself growing to an adept level in half the time as most people. Now, this didn’t mean he was some savant; it just felt like he could grow to a personal ceiling incredibly quickly. This had given him some pretty bad habits, and he would soon find that his joy in a newly discovered physical art would quickly fade. It wasn’t always like this, he thought. He had dreams as a child, he wanted to travel the world and learn everything he could. In school, he had been decent enough; college was a bit of a challenge, but his business degree had been a walk in the park in comparison to the moaning of his classmates. The level of confidence he had after walking across the stage and getting his diploma had been a high point in his life. He had friends, a decent outlook on life, and a ridiculous high expectation of where he could go.

  Of course, this was when the global economy had taken a massive nosedive. It had been rough for months that summer. His friends had all moved away from his city, taking jobs in their fields and outside of them. Housing went through the roof, and Simon had struggled to find a new place that didn’t absorb every dollar he made. This had been the issue; sure, other cities had better jobs and better prospects for Simon. This, in turn, required that he have money laid aside to handle the move to better pastures. Simon only had himself, something he wished wasn’t the case. There were parents, but he hadn’t spoken to them since… well, he hated thinking about that. His therapist, Jim, had nudged him towards dealing with that aspect of his origins. Simon knew he was right. Simon also knew that anytime his brain even began to think about that aspect of his past, it would blank out. One day, he was going to deal with it, but that was not this day.

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  So this is how he found himself in a dimly lit basement of a hospital. It had been a decent position, better than most options. He had even had the delusions that given enough time he could use his overpriced piece of paper to make his department more efficient! Given enough time, he would rise to a management position and fix all of the inefficiencies that plagued this place of medical practice. Yeah right. The people who worked at this place were woefully inefficient, purposely so. Simon knew of the backlog of things that needed to be fixed. The heads of various tech departments liked it that way. They had years in this gig and had no intentions of changing or leaving their positions. He had to give it to the recruiter from HR, Calvin. That man had made it sound like this was the first step in a journey to newer heights in the medical tech field. Maybe Calvin thought that was how it worked, or maybe it was all complete dog water. Simon came to find that the reality was no one moved up, no one moved down, Seriously some people barely moved during their entire work day. Everyone was busy for sure, studying the ins and outs of the various systems of the hospital computers. The most popular had to be the various forms of card games that were on each computer throughout the hospital. Simon had sworn he was going to be different after getting the whole picture at his workplace. He was going to show just how helpful and useful he could be and climb the ranks. Little had he known that this would ultimately land him as a glorified gopher. There was busy work hidden in busy work that his manager was all too happy to send him on. Simon's existence had turned into a glorified delivery boy who knew how to set up replacement versions of existing computers. Disconnect, remove, replace, and repeat. He had been proud when he had led a team to install new phones across the hospital in his first year. It had felt slightly outdated, but still, he had finally added to the place. After months, he had finished and booted everything up. Then, a month later, all the medical staff had been issued smartphones. It had been a horrible day, he hadn’t realized that something could suck the life out of his work satisfaction so efficiently. Another prime example that showed without a doubt that Tuesdays were the absolute worst.

  **TING**

  A pleasant chime echoed in the quiet basement. Glancing up from his sullen thoughts, Simon looked at the computer that was showing its failure notice.

  “No server detected, update canceled. Would you like to continue? Yes - No”

  Sighing, Simon pressed yes. A moment passed, and the computer seemed to contemplate its existence just like its user. Then a pop-up and the progress bar began again.

  “Attempting to connect to the backup server. Please wait”

  Simon leaned back, sighing again. Maybe this time, the program would realize its inevitable fate. It wasn’t going to get a response as it reached into the void. It was truly alone in this world.

  ‘ You know, Jim would probably tell me that these thoughts were more than just thinking about my job,’ Simon thought to himself. He deeply knew that his growing sympathy for this silly computer and its defunct software had to be more of an inner self-reflection than anything. But a small part of him was almost glad that his manager hadn’t replaced this dumb computer. At least it was a way to avoid some of the awful things that Tuesdays had in store for him. Job rejection letters seemed to have an unhealthy habit of emerging on this fateful weekday. His car engine block had almost exploded on a Tuesday. That event had been dramatic and led to him visiting his workplace in an entirely new manner. Simon knew that he didn’t want to die, as evident by his thoughts through that whole ordeal. The recovery period had almost been a highlight, as morbid as it sounded. Multiple fractures, broken bones, and a variety of deep gashes had ended up with him spending weeks recovering. It had been a new challenge for him, one he had taken to with gusto. His physical therapist was astounded by how stubborn and determined he had been to regain his normal way of life. Simon had gone from a seemingly grim diagnosis that he may never return to his physical activities to making a complete recovery. People had reconnected with him for a while, wishing their best for him, and he had done it. Now, the only remaining reminders of the whole ordeal were the jagged scars on his back and the large medical debt that had accrued.

  Tuesdays sucked.

  Simon's thoughts began to go in the perpetual circle that he had grown used to in this basement. Now was the part of the update process where he would look over his plans for how he was going to break this cycle of monotony. If he made enough this year, it would…

  **DING**

  “Huh?” Simon was shaken from his next mental tangent by a sound he did not recognize. He quickly sat up from staring at the ceiling and stared at the computer in front of him.

  Nothing

  ‘Well, this was a new development,’ Simon mused, looking at the progress bar that never moved. He was sure he had just heard a sound. It wasn’t the soft, slightly static sound he was so used to hearing from this hardware. Looking around, he carefully examined the room around him. All of the various humming pieces of technology looked the same. He was sure of it. He had stared so deeply into this room that he was pretty sure that if someone even moved one of the various server pieces around, he would know.

  **DING**

  There it was again.

  ‘Oh great, now I'm hearing things. Neat. That should only be a good sign of my current mental health.’ Simon scoffed. That sound had felt like it was coming from all around him but also inside of him. He needed a break from this basement. It had finally gotten to him after the hours and hours he had spent down here.

  He stood up and stretched, popping his back in the process, and glanced at the never-growing progress bar on the glowing computer screen. Mentally, he felt like he should tell the computer he would be right back… Yup, he had been in this basement for far, far too long. Time to go emulate his colleagues and take an undefined break from his workday. He strode across the room, heading towards the elevator. He only made it halfway before…

  ** DING **

  This time, he knew this sound wasn’t in his head. It seemed to reverb through his whole body. Additionally? His entire body froze, and the world turned gray. Simon’s brain went into panic mode. Was this it? Was his brain mentally breaking down in real time? The world took on the mental gray color that he had always associated with activities he lost interest in. No, this would not do. No way that this was how he was going to meet his end, mentally shattering in some basement in a hospital next to a computer that he had gotten way too acquainted with. Simon had many problems but he was stubborn to a fault. He had considered joining the military years ago but had concluded that he would never do well with people telling him what to do.

  It felt like the universe itself heard his thoughts and laughed as a glowing incandescent box appeared in his vision. The text appeared as if typed in by an unseen observer.

  —--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  > STABILIZATION CONFIRMED - CONNECTED TO REALM

  Attention.

  This universe has achieved stabilization.

  You are now within the lattice.

  Do not be alarmed. Localized time has been halted outside of sentient.

  This is not an emergency.

  Environmental scans are ongoing.

  If you are in mid-transit, assistance protocols have been activated to ensure uninterrupted safety. The Safety of all thinking beings is assured.

  > Scanning for catastrophic states… Negative.

  > Scanning for transit issues…. Negative.

  > Scanning for mental distress…. Adjusted.

  All scans indicate the subject is safe and sound.

  [ No additional override necessary.]

  Harmony is offered. Growth is earned. Limits are unknown.

  Welcome to the integrated universe.

  Transferring…

  Please wait…

  —--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  ‘See, this is the problem with Tuesday. Figures it's the day I go insane.’

  Simon thought as his vision of yet another progress bar dominated his view. The last thing he saw made him pause. Did that progress bar just complete?