🆕 New User Detected

Alice woke up to the noise of the laptop’s fan. She fell asleep with the movie still running and her forehead stuck to the keyboard. Her body ached as if a truck of poorly paid routines had run over it.

Sensing her body's protest, she carefully closed the computer and made her way to the bathroom. Took a shower, changed her clothes, and picked up a random banana lying in the kitchen fruit bowl.

It was still early for her work hours, but not enough for her to go to sleep again. So she decided to take the opportunity to get ahead of the game at the company and gain some time, as she had promised to prepare a new battery of tests that day.

Back at her desk, seated in her stall as cold as the soul of her manager, Roger, Alice stared at the computer screen with half-closed eyes. Although it wasn’t an official load test day, she still needed to configure a new simulation for the next week. Another all-nighter was on her way. Another evening of feeling like a ghost inside the company.

The office lights were partially out. Most of her coworkers were already gone, including Roger, thanks to all the corporate gods. It was that hour when the building seemed suspended in time. Only her, along with the whispering servers and the pipeline notifications blinking in yellow.

In the middle of coding, her bladder protested. She got up and went to the tiny little shared kitchen, where the walls had old coffee stains and the microwave seemed to have been bought at a bankruptcy auction.

And, of course, who else was there?

Peter.

Wrinkled flannel shirt, headphones hanging around his neck, and an “I just don’t exist” expression on his face.

“Oh,” he said, faking surprise. “Still here?”

“Yeah. Unlike certain people, I don’t have anyone else to cover these crazy schedules,” Alice answered, grabbing herself a plastic cup from the shelf.

Peter bit the edge of the sandwich he had prepared and looked away.

“See that I'm also working these shitty hours. I'm no one's favorite.”

“Of course not,” she said with a cold smile. “Of course the manager doesn’t praise you in every meeting because he’s your fan.”

He sighed.

“It’s not my fault if he...”

“If he does protect you? I know. And I also know you don't talk about it either. Not a comma. Never mention I don't deserve this or that I’m handling everything alone. For God's sake, you didn't even send me a single supportive emoji on Slack all this time.”

Peter froze in silence for a while.

“So what? What if I did it?”

Alice stared at him, face-to-face.

“Then I wouldn't need to be here now, doing the work of three people, while you make a snack as if nothing was happening.”

Peter dropped the sandwich in the sink, as if that might prove something. Alice was already turning away.

"I know this is wrong," he said, almost in a whisper.

"Knowing doesn't change anything," she replied, without looking back.

And left.

Alice and Peter had been college classmates. They'd joined the same internship program together, excited and a little ridiculous, wearing badges with crooked photos and giggling nervously during their first meetings.

Peter was one of the few people who could make Alice laugh without her having to fake it. In the first few months, they ate lunch together in the dining hall, exchanged memes about platform bugs, shared chocolate on deployment days, and complained about bad coffee as if it were the most tragic thing in the world.

Then everything changed. The team split. He went to the Platform team. She stayed on that cursed testing team. He gained a great mentor. She gained Roger. And, over time, Peter stopped responding.

First, he took a while to reply, giving excuses like he just forgot it or that he was busy. And finally, he just went completely silent. Like an app notification you accidentally mute and never see again.

Alice didn't quite understand what happened. She never asked either. She'd already learned that some people disappear out of nowhere, and if you chase them, all you get is them disappearing faster. And she would rather not spend her life running.

Back in her cubicle, Alice was adjusting one of the test parameters when she felt the world go dark around her. First, there was a sudden dizziness, then a slight pressure in her ears. Her whole body felt lighter. A humming sound spread through the room, like the muffled sound of a television being turned on.

"It can't be a lack of coffee. I had three," she thought aloud, trying to concentrate. But her vision began to blur.

The edges of the laptop screen flickered. The monitor's light grew, dilated, as if someone were opening a curtain from the inside out. A white glow began to emanate from the system interface.

"What the..." she tried to say.

And then, the screen exploded with light.

A wave of light flooded the room, and Alice was pulled forward as if swallowed by the machine itself.

The world spun. Or she spun. Or all the codes were spinning with her. It was impossible to know. When she finally regained some sense of balance, Alice felt her feet touch the floor. A very clean, smooth, and synthetic floor.

She looked around, breathless. She was standing in a vast space, lit by floating panels. It was as if she were inside a 3D digital catalog.

Colorful corridors stretched in every direction, each marked with familiar icons: romantic comedy, thriller, drama, psychological horror, home improvement reality show, cooking show, competition show.

A sign rotated above it all, in translucent letters:

WELCOME, ALICE. WE'RE GLAD YOU'RE BACK.

Her eyes widened.

"No. No. No, no, no. This is a breakdown. This is a nervous breakdown, a burnout with visual effects. Am I in the catalog?"

Yes. The catalog. The company's catalog.

More specifically, in that infamous test account she always used.

A new alert popped into the air, floating before her eyes like a digital notification. Alice frowned and began to read.

"New user—"

But before she could finish her sentence, someone responded.

A sweet voice, too artificial to be human and too emotional to be a machine.

"Hi, Alice. So glad to see you again."

And then, from the center of the virtual space, something began to materialize.

A shimmering hologram, with androgynous features and a body made of floating pixels, dancing gears, and script scraps, appeared, smiling at her.

A digital fairy had just entered the scene.