The lobby was so clean it felt like it could disinfect thoughts.
White stone floors that never scuffed, glass walls that never held fingerprints for long, a scent that wasn't quite perfume and wasn't quite nothing. Even the air felt managed, filtered through vents hidden behind tasteful lines. A space designed to make every person inside it look calmer, more competent, more expensive.
Ling Liyu walked through it like a man trying not to wrinkle the illusion.
He had the posture down. Everyone did, here. Shoulders set, pace measured, eyes forward. If someone looked tired, they made it aesthetic—dark circles softened by concealer, hair deliberately messy, coffee cup an accessory rather than a crutch. The security guard nodded at him, polite and perfectly blank.
The badge reader chirped.
Welcome back, it seemed to say. Welcome to the aquarium.
The elevator mirrors did their usual work. Liyu saw a version of himself the company would happily put on a recruitment brochure if he smiled more: tall enough, neat enough, neutral enough. He wore the same kind of outfit the men around him wore—nothing loud, nothing wrong. The kind of clothes that made a person disappear into "professional."
His reflection's eyes looked slightly too awake for a Monday.
Of course they did. If he wasn't awake, he would be punished by a calendar.
The elevator rose without a sound. Twenty-two floors of quiet ascent, like a promise that if one simply kept moving upward, things might eventually become lighter. Liyu watched the numbers change, and his brain supplied the familiar internal commentary:
Floor 8: The marketing team that smiled like knives.
Floor 12: The finance people who talked like the world was a spreadsheet and they were offended it had feelings.
Floor 18: HR, where souls went to be laminated.
Floor 22: Design, where dreams came to be rebranded.
The doors opened. Light spilled out, bright and indirect, designed to flatter everyone equally. The office was already humming in the subdued way a place hummed when it was too expensive to be loud. Keyboards, low conversation, the occasional laugh that came out like it had been practiced in front of a mirror.
"Morning, Liyu."
He returned the smile his face had learned. "Morning."
A coworker offered him a small pastry from a box. Liyu declined with the correct level of appreciation and the correct level of restraint. He walked past the pantry, past the motivational poster that said KEEP ITERATING in minimalist font, and slid into his seat.
His desk was as clean as the lobby. Not because he was naturally tidy, but because messy desks were interpreted as messy minds, and messy minds were interpreted as liabilities. He placed his bag down, aligned it with the desk leg without thinking, and woke his laptop.
It took exactly six seconds for the first message to appear.
Project: Lark Kettle V3
Subject: "Small change" request from PM
Time: 8:14 AM
Small change.
Liyu opened it.
"Hi Liyu, quick one! Client wants the handle to feel more 'premium.' Also they're concerned the base looks 'a bit chunky.' Can we explore a slimmer profile, keep cost neutral? Need revised renders for tomorrow 10am. Thanks!"
Tomorrow 10am.
He stared at the words and felt his soul try to exit his body through his nostrils.
Cost neutral. Slimmer. Premium. Tomorrow.
There was a particular kind of politeness in that "Thanks!"—the kind that assumed a person's time was an unlimited resource, like water in a clean building, always there when you turned the tap.
He began typing a reply. Not the one he wanted, obviously. The one he wanted was:
Hi. "Premium" is not a material. "Cost neutral" is not a miracle. Tomorrow 10am is not a reasonable sentence.
Instead he wrote:
Hi! Got it. I'll explore slimmer base options and handle refinements. Will share directions EOD today and finals tomorrow morning.
EOD today. Like the end of the world, but with fewer fireworks.
He sent it. He sipped his coffee, which tasted like habit more than flavor, and opened the CAD file.
The kettle model bloomed on his screen in soft gray surfaces. It was, objectively, a decent design. Good proportions, clean part lines, manufacturing-friendly. It had won praise in the first presentation, which had been a small bright moment in a week otherwise filled with email.
And now it was wrong again, because design had nothing to do with right. Design was a negotiation with invisible forces: budget, ego, brand mood boards, shipping constraints, and the unspoken fear that if it didn't look "premium," someone higher up would be embarrassed in front of someone even higher.
Liyu zoomed into the base. He rotated it slowly, his mind slipping into the familiar problem-solving groove. Slimmer profile. Visual lightness. Could cheat the perception by adjusting the shadow line, thinning the edge, reducing the visible height, playing with how the foot met the surface. He could do it. He always could do it.
He just couldn't do it without paying a price somewhere else.
The morning passed in crisp slices. Standup meeting. Polite updates. A junior designer asked him a question about draft angles, and Liyu answered with careful kindness because he remembered how it felt to be new and terrified. A notification popped up: lunch at 12:30 in Meeting Room C. He clicked "accept" with the same resignation one accepted weather.
At noon, his phone buzzed with a message from his mother.
Have you been eating properly?
He stared at it a moment longer than necessary.
He typed: Yes, don't worry.
Then deleted it.
Typed: Been busy. I'll eat later.
Deleted that too.
He settled on: Yes. Love you.
It felt like a lie and a truth at the same time. He hit send quickly, as if speed could make it more honest.
Meeting Room C smelled faintly of salad dressing and money. People sat around a long table, smiling and nodding while a senior manager spoke about "alignment" and "stakeholders." A slide deck appeared on the screen, full of graphs and photos of smiling families using products that didn't exist yet.
"This quarter, we want to emphasize premium home living," the manager said. "Aspirational but approachable. Our users want to feel like they're taking care of themselves."
Liyu watched the slide. A woman in a white sweater held a cup, looking out a window at sunshine. Her hair was perfectly messy. She looked like she had never read an urgent email.
Aspirational, yes.
Approachable, sure.
Premium home living, while half the people in the room quietly counted the days until their next burnout.
"Design team," the manager continued, "we'll need you to elevate the visual language across the line. Make it feel less… mass market."
Liyu nodded along. Inside his head: Mass market is how you pay your salary. But okay.
After the meeting, someone clapped him lightly on the shoulder. "Hey, Liyu, nice callout earlier about the tactile points. Super sharp."
"Thanks," Liyu said, letting the compliment slide over him like water over glass.
Back at his desk, the afternoon was a blur of refinement and compromise. He adjusted curves by fractions of a millimeter. He tested reflections in render settings, because sometimes a design lived or died by how a highlight traveled along a surface. He made the base "slimmer" by making the foot darker, by carving a shadow groove, by doing exactly what product designers were trained to do: make reality look like a better version of itself.
Around 5:40 PM, his PM messaged again.
"Client loved the direction. Can we also explore making the spout slightly longer? They think it'll look more elegant. Also tomorrow's meeting moved to 9am."
Of course it did.
Of course it moved earlier, because mornings were where people stored their optimism, and no one wanted bad news in the afternoon when exhaustion made it harder to pretend.
Liyu closed his eyes for three seconds, just long enough to imagine a world where he could say no and not be punished by consequence.
Then he typed: Sure, I'll update.
He stayed after most people left. The office grew quieter. The lights dimmed automatically. The cleaning staff moved like ghosts, efficient and invisible, wiping away evidence that anyone had been there.
His screen was the brightest thing in his peripheral vision.
At 9:13 PM, he sent the updated renders.
At 9:14 PM, his inbox spat back a new thread from a different team.
Subject: Emergency review – heater concept
"Need your eyes tonight if possible."
Tonight if possible.
If possible, he thought. Like "possible" was a switch inside him someone else could flip.
He stared at the email, then at the clean office around him. The city outside the window was equally clean from this height—neat grids of light, cars like beads on strings. People moving through their lives in orderly lines.
He thought of his mother's message. Have you been eating properly?
He thought of the kettle, the spout, the handle, the base, the premium, the cost neutral, the tomorrow 9am.
He thought: It would be nice to fall asleep without calculating.
He picked up his bag and left.
Down in the lobby, the air was still scented and indifferent. The guard nodded again. Liyu nodded back. The glass doors slid open, and the night air hit him with a coolness that felt almost honest.
Outside, the business district was quiet but not empty. Buildings kept their lights on like a display. Streetlamps cast clean pools of brightness on clean sidewalks. Everything looked safe, designed, maintained.
He walked toward the crosswalk. The signal was red. A few people waited, staring at phones. Liyu checked his screen out of habit. No new messages yet, which meant they were simply gathering strength.
The light changed. Green.
He stepped forward.
He wasn't thinking about death. He wasn't thinking about fate. He was thinking about whether the new spout length would affect the internal flow rate, and whether someone would catch it and ask him to justify it at 9am.
A car turned the corner too fast.
At first it was just a bright sweep of headlights, a clean, white glare cutting across the neat night. The sound came a half-beat later—tires catching wet pavement, a sharp protest that didn't match the polished world around it.
Liyu's body reacted faster than his mind. He shifted, tried to step back, but his foot caught the edge of the curb, that tiny design flaw in the city's otherwise perfect surface.
Impact didn't feel like the movies. It was just sudden force, a violent interruption, like someone had grabbed his life mid-sentence and ripped the page.
His bag flew. His phone slipped out of his hand and skittered across the road, screen flashing, spinning, then going dark.
He hit the ground hard. The cold came up through the pavement into his bones.
For a moment, he couldn't breathe. His mind tried to form a thought and failed. The world tilted, smeared at the edges, sound turning muffled as if his ears had been filled with cotton.
He turned his head slightly, more instinct than choice.
The car's taillights were already pulling away, red and clean and shrinking. No brake lights. No hesitation. Just distance, smooth and fast, as if nothing had happened at all.
They didn't stop.
A laugh tried to claw its way out of his chest, but it came out as a wet exhale.
Of course they didn't stop, he thought. Why would they?
His vision swam. Above him, the glass towers stood bright and calm. The streetlamp light pooled around him like a spotlight on a stage no one had agreed to watch.
His last clear thought wasn't heroic. It wasn't about justice or revenge or meaning.
It was small and stupid and human.
Ah, he thought distantly. So this is my first fall.
Then the clean light went out.