Prolouge
The pack sits on the table. Bold letters: Smoking Kills. I’ve read it a thousand times. It’s wallpaper now. The room is dark. My laptop throws a dim rectangle of light onto the ceiling. Tea steams beside me, still hot. The ashtray holds a mountain—grey Everest, built slowly, puff by puff through the night. Smoke drifts up. Dissolves into nothing. Visible for a moment.
Proof something was there.
She’s beside me.
“Do you believe in God?” she asks.
I take a puff. Think about it honestly.
“No.”
I pause.
“But I believe cigarettes kill. I believe the universe is vast—beautiful the way dangerous things are beautiful.”
Another drag.
“I believe a Greenland shark can live for centuries in cold darkness and never once wonder why.
No purpose.
No dread.
Just time.”
“Maybe that’s freedom,”
I say.
“Maybe that’s the problem.”
Silence.
“And somewhere in that same ocean, there’s a jellyfish.
“Turritopsis dohrnii.”
"When it grows old—or when it breaks—it doesn’t die the way things are supposed to.
It resets.
Back to the beginning.
No memory.
No weight of what it was.”
“Just existence starting again.”
I exhale. It feels like the room gets quieter.
“Do you believe in fate?” she asks.
I watch the smoke rise.
“No.”
“But I believe in luck.”
I tap ash into the tray.
“Not the kind people pray for. The kind that replaces probability. Randomness with consequences.”
“Good luck. Bad luck. The universe rolling dice with no concern for who wins.”
“You act—because action is the only way into the probability. Without it, your odds are zero.”
“But the outcome…”
I pause.
“Doesn’t belong to you.”
Silence stretches again.
Outside, nothing important happens.
Inside, everything feels like it might.
Tesla lit the modern world and died alone in a hotel room.
Someone who never asked the right questions owns everything.
Somewhere in between, the rules never made sense.
I look at the cigarette burning down between my fingers.
The label says it will kill me.
It probably will.
That doesn’t change anything.
I take another puff anyway.
And somewhere far away— the jellyfish resets. Beginning again. It doesn’t know what dying means.
