Jake Morrison had always believed that death would come to him in one of three ways: a heart attack from too much caffeine, a car accident caused by someone texting while driving, or possibly choking on his own cooking. What he had never, not even in his wildest fever dreams, imagined was that his demise would involve a 1987 Panasonic microwave, a frozen burrito, and the kind of thunderstorm that would make Thor himself nervous.
But here he was, standing in his cramped Seattle apartment at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, staring at the ancient microwave that had been making increasingly concerning noises for the past three months. The thing was older than some of his coworkers and had the aesthetic appeal of a beige brick, but it was free—a hand-me-down from his college roommate who'd fled to Portland with his girlfriend and their shared Netflix password.
The storm outside was apocalyptic. Rain hammered against his fifth-floor window like an angry mob demanding entry, and lightning cracked across the sky with the frequency of a strobe light at a particularly aggressive rave. Jake had been trying to ignore it, focused instead on the quarterly reports that were due tomorrow and the fact that he'd eaten nothing but string cheese and stale crackers for dinner. Hence, the frozen burrito—his backup plan for when even takeout seemed like too much effort.
"Come on, you geriatric piece of garbage," Jake muttered, pressing the door closed for the fourth time. The microwave had developed an irritating habit of popping open mid-cycle, as if it were trying to escape its own existence. He could relate.
Jake Morrison was twenty-eight years old, five feet ten inches of what his mother generously called "lanky" and what his bathroom mirror less generously called "scarecrow adjacent." His brown hair had reached that perfect length where it was too long to look professional but too short to look intentionally messy, and his wardrobe consisted entirely of t-shirts featuring obscure programming jokes that he'd accumulated from various tech conferences. Tonight's selection read "There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't." He'd worn it three days in a row.
His apartment was a testament to the modern bachelor lifestyle: a murphy bed that he'd given up trying to fold back into the wall, a desk covered in empty energy drink cans and computer monitors, and exactly one plant that he'd somehow managed to keep alive for eight months through sheer accident. The place smelled like old pizza and the vague electronic ozone that seemed to emanate from too many devices crammed into too small a space.
The microwave made a sound like a dying robot when he pressed start—a grinding, wheezing noise that suggested internal components had given up on life but were too polite to mention it. Jake pressed his face against the door, watching his sad burrito rotate on the glass plate like a frozen log on the world's most pathetic carnival ride.
"Fifteen more minutes and I can go to bed," he told himself, which was the same lie he'd been telling himself for the past three hours. The quarterly reports weren't writing themselves, his code review was overdue, and his manager had sent him fourteen Slack messages since 5 PM, each one slightly more passive-aggressive than the last.
Ding!
The microwave's completion sound was less of a cheerful ding and more of a mechanical death rattle, but it would have to do. Jake opened the door and immediately regretted every decision that had led him to this moment. The burrito had exploded, coating the interior of the microwave with what looked like nuclear fallout in shades of brown and orange. Chunks of rice and beans clung to the ceiling of the compartment like stalactites in the world's most depressing cave.
"Oh, come ON!" Jake groaned, grabbing a roll of paper towels. This was exactly the kind of thing that happened when you bought frozen burritos that cost ninety-nine cents and had an ingredient list that read like a chemistry experiment gone wrong.
Lightning flashed outside, followed immediately by thunder that rattled his windows and made his laptop screen flicker. The storm was getting worse, if that was even possible. Jake glanced toward his window, where rain was now falling horizontally, and wondered if he should have paid more attention to the weather warnings his phone had been cheerfully ignoring all day.
He spent the next ten minutes excavating burrito carnage from the microwave's interior, muttering increasingly creative profanity under his breath. The paper towels disintegrated on contact with the mess, leaving him to scrape congealed cheese-product from the microwave's walls with his fingernails like some sort of demented archaeologist.
By the time he'd cleaned up the worst of it, his stomach was actively protesting the lack of food, his back ached from hunching over, and the storm outside sounded like the world was ending. Another flash of lightning illuminated his apartment in stark white, and Jake counted the seconds until thunder followed.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.
CRACK!
The building shook, and every electronic device in his apartment flickered simultaneously. His computer monitors went black for a terrifying moment before humming back to life, and his digital clock blinked 12:00 in the universal language of "something bad just happened to the power grid."
"Perfect," Jake sighed, looking at his laptop screen where his quarterly reports had vanished into the digital ether. Three hours of work, gone. He'd have to start over from his last save, which was... he checked... forty-seven minutes ago. He was going to be here all night.
His stomach cramped, reminding him that string cheese and the lingering smell of exploded burrito were not an adequate dinner. Jake opened his freezer, hoping to find something else that could be microwaved into submission, but all he found were ice cubes, a bag of frozen peas from 2019, and what might have once been a hot pocket but now looked like something that belonged in a museum of prehistoric foods.
"Screw it," he decided. "I'll order pizza."
He reached for his phone just as another lightning bolt lit up the sky, this one so bright it temporarily blinded him. The thunder that followed was immediate and so loud that Jake's ears rang. Every light in his apartment flickered, and he heard the unmistakable sound of electronic equipment struggling to maintain consciousness.
That's when he noticed the microwave was making noise again.
It wasn't the usual grinding, wheezing sound of a machine past its prime. This was different—a high-pitched whining noise, like a mosquito the size of a small aircraft. The display, which had been dark since he'd unplugged it to clean out the burrito explosion, was now glowing with numbers that didn't make sense: 88:88, flashing in angry red digits.
"What the hell?" Jake approached the microwave cautiously, the way one might approach a wild animal or a coworker on Monday morning. He hadn't plugged it back in yet, so where was it getting power?
Lightning flashed again, and in the brief moment of illumination, Jake could swear he saw electricity arcing between the microwave and the outlet, despite the fact that the plug was dangling uselessly from the cord like a dead snake.
The whining noise grew louder, and the display began cycling through numbers so quickly they became a blur of red light. Jake's engineering brain, the part that had gotten him through four years of computer science and six years of debugging other people's terrible code, was screaming at him to back away from the obviously malfunctioning appliance. But Jake's tired, hungry, stressed-out brain was curious about what kind of electrical phenomenon could cause a unplugged microwave to display impossible numbers.
"Just a quick look," he muttered, reaching toward the microwave. "Maybe there's a capacitor holding a charge or something."
He touched the handle of the microwave door just as lightning struck again, this time so close that the thunder was instantaneous. The world went white, then everything happened at once.
Electricity coursed through Jake's body like liquid fire, starting at his fingertips and racing through his nervous system faster than thought. Every muscle in his body contracted simultaneously, and he couldn't let go of the microwave handle—his hand was locked in place by the current flowing through him. The microwave's whining reached a crescendo that seemed to vibrate in his bones, and the red display numbers spun so fast they looked like solid light.
Time seemed to slow down, the way they said it did in car accidents or other moments of extreme crisis. Jake could see individual raindrops frozen outside his window, suspended in mid-air like tiny crystal spheres. He could hear his heartbeat, erratic and panicked, drumming against his ribs. He could smell ozone and burning electronics and something else—something like cinnamon and incense that didn't belong in his crappy Seattle apartment.
The electrical current was pulling something out of him, Jake realized with the kind of crystal clarity that comes with impending doom. Not just his life—something deeper, more essential. He could feel it leaving his body through his fingertips, streaming into the microwave like data uploading to a server he couldn't see.
This is it, he thought with surprising calm. This is how I die. Death by microwave. My obituary is going to be humiliating.
The microwave's door suddenly swung open, revealing not the burrito-splattered interior Jake expected, but something impossible—a swirling vortex of light and shadow that seemed to extend infinitely inward. The smell of cinnamon and incense grew stronger, mixed now with something that reminded him of his grandmother's kitchen: warm bread and woodsmoke and the indefinable scent of old books.
The electrical current intensified, and Jake felt his consciousness being pulled toward that impossible opening in the microwave. His vision began to tunnel, darkness creeping in from the edges, but the vortex grew brighter and more detailed. He could see shapes moving within it—figures in flowing robes, buildings with curved roofs, lanterns casting warm golden light across what looked like cobblestone streets.
Am I hallucinating? Jake wondered. Is this what dying feels like?
The last thing he saw was his reflection in his dark computer monitor—his hair standing on end from the electrical current, his eyes wide with terror and confusion, and behind him, the microwave glowing like a portal to another world.
The last thing he heard was the sound of his apartment building's fire alarm, triggered by the smell of burning electronics and ozone.
The last thing he felt was the sensation of falling, not down but sideways, through dimensions that folded in on themselves like origami made of light and time.
And then Jake Morrison, twenty-eight-year-old software engineer from Seattle, Washington, ceased to exist in the world he had always known.
The microwave finally went silent, its display dark. The storm outside began to subside, as if whatever cosmic force had been driving it had found what it was looking for. In apartment 507, the only evidence that Jake Morrison had ever existed was a half-written quarterly report on his laptop screen, a pile of burrito-stained paper towels, and the faint scent of cinnamon that would linger in the air for exactly three days before fading away entirely.
The fire department would arrive seventeen minutes later to investigate reports of electrical fire, but they would find nothing except an old microwave with a blown fuse and no sign of the apartment's tenant. The missing person report would be filed three days later when Jake failed to show up for work, but Jake Morrison would join the ranks of people who simply vanished without explanation, leaving behind only questions and the lingering suspicion that sometimes the universe has a sense of humor that borders on the malicious.
But that's not where this story ends.
That's where it begins.
Because somewhere else, somewhen else, in a world of silk and ceremony, jade ornaments and palace intrigue, a young queen was about to wake up with memories that didn't belong to her and a vocabulary that would make the royal court question her sanity.
And Jake Morrison, software engineer and future master of temporal mechanics, was about to discover that sometimes the universe doesn't just have a sense of humor—sometimes it has a very specific plan that involves frozen burritos, ancient Korean palaces, and the kind of love story that transcends both time and the basic laws of physics.
The last functioning streetlight outside Jake's apartment building flickered once and went dark, as if marking the end of one story and the beginning of another. In the distance, a siren wailed—the sound of emergency responders rushing to investigate a mystery they would never solve.
And in a palace half a world and five centuries away, Queen Soo-jin's eyes were about to open for the first time in three days, much to the relief of her worried servants and the confusion of her supposedly grieving husband.
But the person looking out through those eyes would not be the gentle, traditional queen the court expected.
It would be Jake Morrison, and he was about to make Korean history very, very interesting.