The printer was screaming again.
Not metaphorically. Not making noise like some frustrating whirr or beep. No. The printer in Conference Room B had, somehow, learned to scream.
Lance Mercer stood in front of it like a paleontologist encountering the first talking fossil. One hand clutched a steaming cup of terrible office coffee, the other dangled uselessly at his side.
The scream was high-pitched, shrill, almost human.
"...So," he said slowly, eyes locked on the cursed machine, "I'm guessing you didn't just want double-sided prints."
The woman beside him—a junior analyst with smeared eyeliner and the permanent expression of someone trying not to cry in public—shook her head rapidly. "I swear, I just hit Ctrl+P."
The scream cut off.
The printer whirred again. Calmly, this time.
Lance nodded, squatted, and opened the front panel. A paperclip fell out like a corpse from a closet. "There's your problem."
She blinked. "A paperclip?"
"Yep." He held it up like a surgeon removing a bullet. "You jammed its soul."
Lance didn't hate his job. But he didn't like it either. It was a job you slipped into like a lukewarm bath and then forgot how to climb out of.
He worked the basement floor of Kronos Solutions, a mid-sized tech firm that thought adding motivational quotes to the stairwell counted as wellness strategy.
His cubicle was a shrine to his own weird taste:
A bobblehead of Agent Mulder
A framed diagram of how to punch a robot
Three succulents, two of which were fake
And a single polaroid tacked to the divider: him and his dog Dario, both wearing matching hoodies. Dario looked like he regretted every decision that had led him to this moment.
Most days, Lance lived in a cycle of:
Fix printer
Reboot Karen's laptop
Argue with a man named Steve about how the Wi-Fi is not broken, Steve, you just keep clicking on pop-ups that offer you free Teslas
But Lance? He didn't complain.
He made sarcastic comments to cope.
He solved problems like a detective with a screw loose and a lunch break.
And at 5:01 PM on the dot, he vanished like a puff of smoke.
5:07 PM. Lance's Apartment.
Second floor, above "SpinCycle Laundromat." The scent of lavender dryer sheets seeped through his floorboards.
Dario, a hound mix with eyebrows expressive enough to win Oscars, greeted him at the door by hurling a plush banana at his shin.
"Good throw," Lance said, scooping it up and tossing it back. "But it lacked the emotional arc of your earlier work."
Dario grunted and waddled to the kitchen, where he immediately began staring at the treat jar like it owed him money.
Lance kicked off his shoes, dropped his backpack onto the couch, and flicked on the TV. An old black-and-white sci-fi movie played—aliens with bad posture threatening Earth in slow monotone.
He made dinner the way a person makes peace: leftover pad thai and one egg scrambled in a pan with total apathy.
He didn't talk to many people outside of work. Not out of shyness—he was just bad at theming. Everyone else had a thing: gym, clubs, sports leagues, brunch culture. Lance had, at best, weird facts about ancient encryption methods and a knack for sarcasm that came off as flirtation if you didn't know him (and as passive aggression if you did).
He wasn't unhappy. He had a dog that adored him, a steady if uninspiring paycheck, and enough time to work on his very slow, very chaotic passion project: a game about solving puzzles in a haunted laundromat where the machines told riddles and ate socks like sacrifices.
Dario snored beside him. The lights flickered once, but that happened all the time in his building. Lance made a note to not do anything about it.
He leaned back, flicked his phone off airplane mode. Two texts from his mom. One from someone named "KARA (TUESDAY DATE??)" which he'd forgotten to reply to and now felt way too awkward to fix.
He sighed.
"You know what," he muttered, glancing at the kitchen.
He was out of milk.
But that wasn't a big deal. Not yet. Not even inconvenient.
He'd go tomorrow.
After all, what's the worst that could happen?