ALL I DID WAS BUY MILK

The printer was screaming again.

Not metaphorically. Not some frustrating whirr. This one was shrill—an almost-human cry tearing out of Conference Room B, a sound so wrong it made the fluorescent lights buzz harder in sympathy.

Lance Mercer stood in the doorway with his coffee. Lukewarm, bitter, the kind that tasted like burnt cardboard and resignation. He sipped anyway, eyes half-lidded.

He almost smiled at the machine, like it might apologize if he looked at it long enough.“Ctrl+P wasn’t supposed to weaponize you,” he muttered.

The junior analyst beside him—pale, eyeliner smudged, hair pinned back with the desperation of someone barely hanging on—spread her hands defensively.“I swear, I only hit print.”

The printer’s shriek cut off mid-breath. It whirred, clattered, then hummed as if nothing had happened.

Lance crouched, flicking the panel open with one finger. A mangled paperclip dropped to the floor with a metallic tink. He held it up like evidence.“There’s your soul. Next time, maybe a prayer instead of reprints.”

She gave him the usual half-laugh. The laugh everyone gave him. Polite. Empty. Already moving on.

The lights above flickered twice—too slow to be random, too rhythmic to ignore.Lance rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, they do that.”

Then, softer, “Probably.”

By the time he made it back down the corridor, the office was already waking into its usual chaos. Phones ringing. Keyboards hammering like teeth grinding in unison. Somewhere, someone was microwaving fish.

Kronos Solutions: a temple to middle-tier IT misery.

His cubicle was a shrine to mediocrity:

A Mulder bobblehead, leaning like it had given up believing.

Three succulents—two alive, one fake, because Lance kept forgetting to water them.

A doodle pinned to the partition: How to Punch a Robot.

A single Polaroid of him and his dog Dario in matching hoodies. Dario looked betrayed.

Lance dropped into his chair and logged in. The ticket queue glared back—already stacked, already impossible.

PRIORITY: HIGH. PRINTER DOWN (Conference Room B).He snorted. Already done. Already back in the queue.

Another popped up: URGENT—VPN DOWN.Then another: URGENT—VPN SLOW.Then another: URGENT—VPN JUST “FEELS” WRONG.

It was always this way. Hydra tickets. Fix one, three sprouted.

He rubbed his temples, cracked his knuckles, and dove in.

By mid-morning, the place felt like an aquarium full of sighs and passive-aggressive coughs. People passed his cubicle without looking at him, or worse—looking just long enough to smirk. “Mercer, the Printer Whisperer.” “Mercer, Tech Support Messiah.” Every joke was the same joke, and every laugh cost him something small and irreplaceable.

His phone buzzed. A new message.

Reminder: Weekly metrics meeting @ 11am. Attendance mandatory.

Lance groaned. Meetings at Kronos were endurance trials disguised as productivity. Twenty people, one agenda, zero decisions. His boss, Mr. Dalca, was a man carved out of spreadsheets and nicotine. His eyes had the sharp, suspicious gleam of someone always waiting for the next screw-up.

When Lance slid into the meeting room—late—Thatch didn’t even bother with words. Just one long, flat glare across the table.

A few coworkers shifted, the scrape of chairs louder than the muted chatter. Lance muttered a half-hearted “Sorry,” and dropped into his seat. The apology hung there, unanswered, before being swallowed by the droning presentation.

Thatch finally cleared his throat. “Mercer, my office after this.”

And just like that, the air turned to lead.

The rest of the day blurred—resetting passwords for employees who swore they typed it “exactly right,” watching the ticket count climb faster than he could breathe, hearing coworkers mutter “rough night?” every time he passed.

By 5:01 PM sharp, he vanished. A ghost clocking out with precision, slipping past the stares.

Home smelled of lavender dryer sheets and warm concrete. The floorboards creaked their usual protest as he stepped inside. His apartment was small, drafty, and unkind—an echo of himself.

He dropped his coffee cup by the door. The dregs trembled, rippling in time with the building’s faint, ever-present hum.

The overhead light flickered once and died.

“Figures,” Lance muttered, tossing his jacket onto a chair.

Dario’s squeaky banana toy lay abandoned in the hallway. Lance bent to pick it up, thumb brushing the rubber. “Bet you regret this place more than me, huh?”

The microwave dinged. He froze. Its clock blinked 00:00. He hadn’t plugged it back in.

He shook it off, grabbed ramen from the cabinet, and boiled water. Steam rose, curling lazily—then whipped upward like it had been yanked before settling again.

He frowned. “Building vibes.”

The living room was a shrine of clutter:

Dog-eared paperbacks stacked like barricades.

A bookshelf leaning like it might give up at any second.

Rubik’s Cubes, most unsolved.

A sketchbook full of cryptic doodles and ciphers scattered on the table.

Lance froze, pencil hovering over a square. The quiet office world he had retreated from seemed… closer now. The echo of phones ringing, keyboards clacking, distant fluorescent flickers—he could feel them under the walls, beneath the floorboards, like a vibration that shouldn’t exist in his apartment.

He rubbed his eyes. Blinking didn’t help. The crossword squares seemed slightly off, their borders too sharp, the letters too precise. He could feel the normalcy straining, like reality itself was holding its breath.

Something wasn’t right.

And for the first time that day, Lance felt it: a quiet, insistent awareness that even here, in the “safe” sanctuary of his apartment, he wasn’t alone. Something—or some feeling—was watching him, waiting for a misstep.

Dario shifted, growling again, louder this time. Lance glanced down, and for a heartbeat, the dog’s eyes reflected a flicker of something that wasn’t there before—something hungry, patient, almost human.

Lance swallowed. Tried to breathe.

Everything outside the crossword was ordinary. But Lance knew: ordinary was a lie.