Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first thing you noticed was the ceiling.

Specifically, the glow-in-the-dark stars on it.

You blinked. Once. Twice. You did own glow-in-the-dark stars but you were a twenty-something corporate employee with a carefully curated over-the-top aesthetic and an unrivalled laziness such that you were too inactive to actually place those stickers in the ceiling despite having two packs of them that you bought three years ago.

And yet.

There they were. A whole galaxy of them, arranged with suspicious thoughtfulness above your bed, dim in the morning light but unmistakably present.

You sat up slowly, the way you did when you weren't entirely sure reality was going to cooperate with you.

Your room looked like yours. Same layout. Same general energy. But the furniture was — different. Subtly, wrongly different. Your bedside table had a sleek, almost seamless quality to it, no visible handles, no clunky edges. Your wardrobe looked like someone had taken your wardrobe and run it through a design upgrade. The lamp in the corner was the same, but also not the same lamp. It was your lamp if your lamp had gone to a better school.

And then the hologram appeared.

It materialized above what used to be your regular, humble kitchen counter — a soft, blue-tinted projection of what appeared to be a very calm AI assistant wearing a digital approximation of a chef's apron.

"Good morning," it said pleasantly. "Based on current refrigerator inventory, I recommend congee for today's breakfast. You are low on most perishables. A grocery restock is recommended for tomorrow during your usual weekly run. I have prepared a shopping list if you would like to review it."

You stared at it.

It waited, patient and unbothered

"...Thanks," you said finally, because you were nothing if not polite to things that could theoretically control your appliances.

You got dressed on autopilot — your clothes were still your clothes, at least, hanging in the same order you kept them, your corporate staples and your off-day hoodies coexisting in the same organized chaos you'd cultivated over the years.

Normal. Fine. Everything was fine.

You made the congee. It tasted normal. The kitchen operated mostly the same, except the stove responded to gesture controls, which you figured out by accident and chose not to examine further.

It was only when you stepped out into the hallway that things started tilting.

Your building's hallway looked like yours — same proportions, same slightly-too-narrow corridor, same faint smell of someone on the third floor cooking something aggressively savory at all hours. But the walls had a different texture, smoother, with subtle embedded lighting along the baseboards that pulsed a very gentle blue-white. The elevator buttons were haptic. The noticeboard by the mailboxes had a digital display instead of the corkboard covered in passive-aggressive notices about parking.

"Oh, good morning!"

You spun around.

Your neighbour. Mrs. — well, your neighbour. The elderly woman from next door who had been living there since before you moved in and who had a small dog named Oda Nobunaga and who always, always knew when you'd had a bad week and left tangerines outside your door without comment.

She looked the same. Sweater, sensible shoes, small dog on a leash, the whole picture.

"Morning," you managed.

"Sleep well? You look a little pale, dear."

"Fine," you said. "Completely fine. Love your outfit today."

She beamed, said something about the weather, and shuffled toward the elevator with her dog trotting ahead of her, utterly unbothered by the fact that the elevator buttons were now haptic and the hallway looked like the set of a near-future drama series.

You turned and walked, very calmly, to the stairwell and went outside.

The exterior of the building stopped you cold.

It was your building. You knew it was your building — the name was right there above the entrance in the same font, the same slightly pretentious serif lettering the landlord had insisted upon. The layout of the entrance, the position of the steps, the specific way the front door swung slightly heavy on the left side — all of it was yours.

But it looked like someone had taken your building and put it through a retrofuturist filter. The architecture had a quality you could only describe as charmingly wrong — curves where there used to be corners, materials that caught the light too cleanly, a roofline that suggested function and aesthetic had been considered equally. It was almost cute. It was deeply alarming.

You went back upstairs.

You went directly to the drawer where you kept your documents — passport, ID, lease, the folder of important papers you'd been maintaining since you moved out of your parents' place with the solemn energy of someone who had been lectured about adulting. All of it was there. Your name. Your photo. Your lease. Your employment contract with the same company, same title, same HR contact who never answers emails on Fridays.

You sat on your retro-futuristic bed under your unsolicited glow-in-the-dark stars and breathed.

Fine.

Everything was accounted for. Identity: intact. Home: technically intact. Job: intact. You would go to the grocery store — because the AI had given you a list and you were not the kind of person to waste a shopping list — and you would assess this situation like an adult.

The grocery store was not where it was supposed to be.

It was in the general direction you expected, but the city kept being — different. Not dramatically, not in a way that made you feel like you'd walked onto a film set, but in small, accumulated ways that pressed at the back of your skull like a persistent notification you couldn't swipe away. The roads were cleaner than they should have been. The infrastructure had a coherence to it that cities rarely achieved in real life. The fashion of the people passing you was — contemporary, mostly, but every so often something was slightly ahead of itself in a way you couldn't pin down.

You took a wrong turn somewhere around the third block.

And that was when you saw the billboard.

It was a large one, the kind that dominated the side of a building, and it was advertising something — a concert, based on the design. An idol group or a solo artist, you couldn't tell, because you didn't recognize a single face on it.

You were a huge idol music fan, so this was very strange to you since you couldn't recall anyone named Otsu-chan being this famous. Not even vaguely. The names were unfamiliar. The aesthetic was unfamiliar.

You stood on the pavement and looked at it for a long moment.

Then you found the grocery store two blocks later. It was there, recognizable, a little more streamlined than you remembered, but there. You would have felt relieved if you weren't already numbly cataloguing evidence.

You looked at the storefront. You looked at the signage above it. You looked at the smaller text beneath the store name that listed the district and the city.

Linkon City.

The sound your brain made was not a word. It was more of a very long internal ellipsis.

You had read enough isekai to know where this was going. You kept up with astrology. You had, at various low points in your life, gone down deeply unhinged rabbit holes about dimensional travel, parallel universes, and the theoretical mechanics of cosmic punishment. You had watched every relevant anime, read every relevant genre, and consumed enough transmigration web novels to have developed opinions about the tropes.

You knew exactly where you were.

You knew exactly where you were, and it was the one place — the one place — that your spite and your pettiness and your completely reasonable emotional grievances had apparently conspired to send you.

You stood in front of the grocery store in Linkon City, in the world of Love and Deepspace, with your identity intact and your shopping list in your hand and your entire soul filing a formal complaint with the universe.

You thought about your review.

"Dumbf*ck game, dumbf*ck developers, dumbf*ck men, dumbf*ck fans."

You thought about the five men whose names you had been hearing for two years. You thought about the mobile game you had downloaded and played for exactly 3 days before uninstalling it, and reviewed it out of pure spite on a random day. You thought about the cosmic accounting of whatever divine entity had looked at your one-star review and decided yes, this one, she needs a lesson.

Your knees hit the pavement.

"AAAHHHH," you said, to no one, to the grocery store, to Linkon City, to whatever higher power was responsible for this. "FUCK MY LIFE."

A nearby pigeon regarded you without sympathy and walked away.

You sat there for another moment.

Then you picked up your shopping list, stood up, dusted off your knees, and went to buy groceries.

You were not going to be dramatic about this.