The room had been designed to look timeless.
That, in itself, was a lie.
The walls were a soft, expensive white—engineered to calm, to reassure, to suggest permanence. The ceiling lights glowed without shadows. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic and money. Every object in the room existed to say the same thing: this man matters.
I had approved the design myself.
Now, lying in the center of it, I understood how fragile aesthetics were when stripped of power.
Beyond the glass wall, silhouettes moved with deliberate restraint. Doctors, aides, lawyers—men and women trained to speak softly around dying things. Their mouths formed careful words. Their eyes avoided mine. They thought I was asleep.
They were wrong.
"The board will convene within the hour," someone said. A male voice. Controlled. Nervous."They'll need interim authority," another replied. "If we wait, the markets—""—will panic," a third finished. "We can't afford instability."
I almost smiled.
Instability. The word they used when consequences arrived uninvited.
The institution I had built—layer by layer, compromise by compromise—was being dissected while its architect still breathed. Not out of malice. Out of habit. Systems did not wait for sentiment. That was something I had taught them well.
A machine beside my bed hummed steadily, translating my weakening heart into neat, obedient lines. I wondered, not for the first time, how strange it was that the body—this absurd, fragile machine—had been the one thing I never truly mastered.
I had mastered markets.Governments.Narratives.
But flesh? Flesh always defected in the end.
They said my name again. Reverent. Distant. As if I were already history.
You did everything right, they would write.You saved millions, they would claim.You changed the world.
And perhaps I had.
But lying there, listening to the future being divided like an inheritance, a quieter truth pressed against me—heavy, undeniable.
I had built something that could survive me.I had failed to build something that could survive itself.
The irony was almost elegant.
My breath shortened. The room dimmed at the edges. The machine's rhythm faltered, then corrected itself, loyal to the end.
My last clear thought was not regret. Regret required alternatives. What I felt was recognition.
So this is how civilizations end, I thought.Not with fire—but with paperwork.
Then the line went flat.
The first sensation of my second life was cold.
Not the clean, distant cold of climate control, but the intimate kind—the kind that seeped through skin and settled into bone. Something wet struck my forehead. Once. Twice.
Water.
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling above me was cracked, stained dark by old leaks and newer neglect. Each drop fell with quiet persistence, as if time itself had chosen this spot to practice patience.
My body felt wrong.
Too small. Too light. My limbs resisted me, responding with a delay that sparked immediate alarm. I tried to move my hand. It trembled, then stilled.
A sound broke the silence.
Crying. Not the sharp cry of celebration, but the exhausted, restrained kind—like grief trying not to wake the neighbors.
"No," a woman whispered. "Please… not now."
Another voice followed. Male. Older. Tired.
"How are we supposed to manage this?" he said. "Another mouth. Another risk."
I understood him instantly.
Understanding, it turned out, survived death just fine.
The woman—my mother, my mind supplied with uncomfortable certainty—held me close, though her arms shook. Her clothes smelled of smoke and cheap detergent. Fear clung to her more tightly than I did.
Outside, the city spoke.
Not in joy. Not in growth. In friction. Shouting. Metal striking metal. Somewhere distant, glass shattered. A siren wailed, then cut off abruptly.
This was not a world in decline.
This was a world already accustomed to falling.
I did not cry.
Not because I was composed. Because I was listening.
In my first life, silence had meant authority. It meant that others waited for you to speak.
Here, silence meant invisibility.
No one rushed in. No celebration followed. The world did not pause. It did not care.
And in that indifference, something inside me aligned with terrifying clarity.
This was the world I had left behind.
Stripped of the abstractions. Stripped of the speeches and metrics and quarterly reports. This—this leaking ceiling, this trembling woman, this calculation of mouths versus money—was the final form of every decision I had ever justified.
I had called it efficiency.I had called it realism.I had called it the cost of progress.
Lying there, unable to lift my own head, I understood the truth without mercy.
This was not rebirth.
This was accountability.
If I had once believed that power revealed character, then poverty revealed consequence. And I was staring at mine, written in cracked plaster and whispered fear.
I closed my eyes—not in surrender, but in resolve.
If this world was cruel, it was because it had been taught to be.If institutions rotted, it was because rot had been permitted.And if meaning had been replaced by survival, it was because someone—once—had decided that was acceptable.
I had made that decision.
And now, with nothing but time and a borrowed body, I would answer for it.