2:15 AM. The city breathed in neon and exhaust fumes, its pulse fading into the dead hours where only ghosts and delivery drivers still moved.

  David sat in the back corner of a 24-hour fast-food joint that smelled of stale grease and industrial bleach. The plastic chair stuck to his skin. Somewhere behind the counter, a mop bucket leaked a slow, rhythmic drip that had been driving him insane for the past forty minutes.

  On the wall-mounted TV, a news anchor recited something about abnormal geological activity and coastal micro-earthquakes. David wasn’t listening. His attention was fixed on the pristine white box sitting on the table in front of him—an iPhone 17 Pro Max, still sealed in its factory plastic.

  He ran his thumb along the edge of the box. The pad of his finger caught on a tiny imperfection in the cardboard, and for a moment the sensation grounded him—this was real, this was solid, this was the only thing in his life right now that had gone according to plan.

  Three months. Ninety-one days of four-hour sleep cycles, of split shifts between the campus canteen and the delivery app, of skipped meals he logged in a spreadsheet on his phone because his CS-trained brain couldn’t help quantifying even his own hunger. He’d calculated it once during a slow Tuesday: 247 ringgit in missed meals. The phone cost 5,799. The math worked out, if you didn’t factor in the cost to his body.

  David’s reflection stared back at him from the dark window. Hollow cheeks. A bruise-colored shadow under each eye. Fingers that trembled when he held them still—not from cold, but from the kind of exhaustion that lived in the marrow of your bones.

  “She’ll love it,” he whispered to the box. And the whisper was so quiet, so worn, that even he barely heard it.

  He thought of Nicole’s face. Not the real Nicole—the version of her he’d been carrying in his head for five years. The girl who used to sit next to him in the library during exam week, who once fell asleep on his shoulder and left a tiny drool stain on his hoodie that he never washed out. That Nicole. The one his mind kept rendering in soft focus, even as the real-world version had become someone he barely recognized.

  A small, ugly thought surfaced—the kind he’d been pushing down for weeks. She hasn’t texted you in three days. She said she was studying tonight. Since when does Nicole study on a Friday?

  He crushed the thought. Filed it in the mental recycle bin where he kept all the other things he didn’t want to debug.

  Ding-dong. You have a new premium delivery order.

  The notification chimed from his phone like a cattle prod. David sighed, rubbing his eyes until he saw static. He was at his physical limit—his app’s health tracker had been flashing red warnings for two weeks straight. But the late-night premium bonus was 45 ringgit, and 45 ringgit was another 0.78% of next semester’s tuition.

  He slid the iPhone box carefully into his backpack, sandwiching it between his laptop and a folded rain jacket. Then he pushed through the greasy glass door and stepped into the humid night.

  His motorcycle was a 2014 Honda that wheezed like an asthmatic cat. He’d named it Segfault—short for segmentation fault—because it crashed at least once a month. Tonight, though, it started on the first kick.

  The delivery destination made him blink. The Grand Sterling Hotel. The city’s most expensive landmark, a forty-story glass needle that David had only ever seen from the outside, usually while stuck in traffic on the highway below.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  He rode through empty streets, past shuttered storefronts and flickering traffic lights running their cycles for nobody. The hotel appeared on the horizon like a golden blade stabbed into the skyline.

  When David entered the lobby, the air conditioning hit him like a wall of silk. The marble floor was so polished he could see his own tired face looking up at him from below. A concierge in a suit that probably cost more than David’s semester fees glanced at his yellow delivery jacket, then deliberately looked away.

  David pressed the elevator button. The doors opened with a whispered hiss that sounded nothing like the grinding screech of his apartment building’s lift.

  As he stepped inside, something caught his eye.

  A small, laminated card was taped next to the floor buttons. It didn’t look like a standard hotel notice. The font was wrong—jagged, almost vibrating, as if the letters had been printed while the printer was having a seizure.

  [GUEST SAFETY NOTICE — RULE 0]

  If the elevator stops at Floor 4.5, do not step out. Do not look at the ceiling. Close your eyes and count to ten. The “Manager” only takes those who acknowledge him.

  David frowned. Floor 4.5? A twelve-floor hotel didn’t have half-floors. His brain—trained by two years of Data Structures and Algorithm Design—immediately flagged the anomaly. Invalid input. Out-of-bounds index.

  He reached out to tear the card off, the way you’d rip out a line of junk code that had no business being in production.

  His hand froze.

  The text on the card shifted. Not moved—shifted, the way a UI element glitches when the rendering engine hiccups. The black ink pooled and swirled like smoke trapped under glass, then snapped back into its original form.

  David pulled his hand back. His heart rate, already elevated from exhaustion, kicked up another ten beats per minute.

  Before he could process what he’d seen, the elevator lurched. Not a normal acceleration jerk—a violent, lateral shudder that felt like the entire shaft had been grabbed and shaken by something enormous.

  The floor indicator screen flickered.

  [4.4... 4.5... 4.6]

  For a split second, the doors began to slide open at a floor that shouldn’t exist.

  Through the widening gap, David caught a glimpse of a hallway. Dark. The wallpaper was the wrong texture—organic, pulsating, like the interior of something alive. The air that seeped through the gap was ten degrees colder than the climate-controlled cabin, and it carried a smell that David’s mind couldn’t categorize. Not rot, not chemicals. Something older.

  A cold, wet breath brushed against the back of his neck.

  David’s finger found the ‘Close Door’ button by pure muscle memory. He hit it once, twice, three times—the frantic triple-click of a user trying to force-quit an application that had stopped responding.

  The doors hissed shut. Just as they sealed, something caught the light at the edge of the gap: a long, multi-jointed finger, pale as waterlogged bone, curling around the brushed steel frame—

  And then it was gone. The elevator continued upward, smooth and silent, as if nothing had happened. The floor indicator read [6] in calm, white digits.

  David stood in the center of the elevator, his delivery bag clutched to his chest, his breath coming in shallow bursts. His rational mind was already assembling explanations: Sleep deprivation-induced hallucination. Visual cortex malfunction. Pareidolia—the brain’s tendency to perceive patterns in random stimuli.

  But his hands were shaking. And the back of his neck was still damp.

  He forced his breathing to slow. Checked his backpack. The iPhone was still there. Room 602. That was the mission. Everything else was a bug in his own wetware, and bugs could be patched after you shipped the deliverable.

  Ding. The doors opened onto the 6th floor.

  David stepped out, heading toward the room where his heart—and the last stable variable in his life—were about to suffer a fatal exception error.