Patterns exist everywhere, but the only pattern Lyra really knew was the downwards spiral of not knowing what she wanted from life.

Like many others that worked at the Patania laboratory, she had no idea what she was doing there. Day in and day out, all she did was look at ancient artifacts under a nanoscope.

And before anybody asks, no, there’s nothing hidden down there. Quarks and gluon say hello from the subatomic level, same as they’ve ever been. Unless something catastrophic happened, the lovingly married particles would stay at the same mailing address until the heat death of the universe. This immutable fact made her presence a waste of valuable tax-payer dollars, and more importantly, her time.

It wasn’t always like this. She graduated with a master’s in nanotechnology with a thesis about the best ways to arrange neural schematics at cloud level, a stunning work of academia that received four accolades from the Hashtar Prize Network.

Now she’s on the required internship for her doctorate, working in a world-acclaimed corporation.

It sounds very impressive really, but all she did was look at slides all day, every day. Sometimes she got to look at the experimental reactor and read reverberation patterns, big squiggly red lines on graph paper that didn’t mean much to her.

The others worked with animals. Experimental microbes. Artefact research. Cool things, neat things, the stuff you’d actually brag about.

Lyra read lines for a living.

A mandatory research of great distinction project, the Dean called it. It certainly did pay well, but Lyra might as well have been playing the stock market for how much actual intellectual stimulation the job gave.

She was popular in the scientific community and in the lab, no doubt. A person of some importance. Due to her minute in the sun, her friends asked questions about her life including, but not limited to:

“How much money are you making?”

“Have you bought a new house yet?”

“Have you found a nice guy to live with?”

To answer those with an example, today Lyra spent 12 hours looking at slides, reading textbooks, and listening to music. After her shift was over, she collapsed onto her bed and lay there for twenty minutes thinking of how to spend the last two hours of free time in the day. The floor was a minefield of instant ramen cups and dirty clothes. She thought about ordering some cheap wine and take-out, but in terms of budget, she had no budget. Not until she completed this job.

Today was Lyra’s 25th birthday.

Child prodigy yesterday, ordinary person today. There was no time to do anything else in her busy worker drone life than keep up appearances.

Though Lyra’s life was miserable and she had nobody but herself to blame, tomorrow would eventually come. Things would be different then, maybe.

In a year’s time, she’d receive a doctorate and a cushy tenured job at whatever university she desired. Three-hundred seventeen days to be exact. It would be the official start of her life, the freedom she desired ever since her parents shoved her into an accelerated learning program.

Until that day came, she was stuck in this miserable tower of internship.

Intelligence was sometimes a curse. One may be able to recognize a pattern, yet unable to influence it.

She only had so many hours in the day to herself. Two, to be precise. Since she was cut off from the outside world due to the secret nature of the research facility, the best she could do was entertain herself with trash. Pure and utter garbage, the stuff one could only enjoy underneath the covers and with the doors locked.

She went through all the good trash very quickly. Reread the best, got all the endings, cried tears of joy and sorrow from the comfort of her dirty room that would be eventually cleaned when she got really sick of the smell. They were damned good stories that would last for many generations to come, true masterpieces that forced her to confront her humanity and her ways of thinking.

But she ran out of good stuff. That day, there was only one genre left — one genre she avoided at all costs.

Romance. Female-focused romance, to be more precise.

There was a particular blight in her collection that she hadn’t gotten rid of yet, a digital game she had mistakenly downloaded and regretted every day since coming.

The Tale of Ys.

Cliched hackneyed gobbledygook that was only enjoyed by aging women who had never had any real romantic experience. This particular story told of a princess named Ys who collected boy toys and added them to her ever growing collection of cute or handsome men. Lots of steamy action sprinkled between, of course.

She read two scenes and broke into hysterics.

It sucked. It was bad. What kind of depraved lonely loser would actually enjoy this kind of content?

—It was with great horror that she realized she had somehow slipped into the target demographic.

This was troublesome to Lyra. This was not good at all. But she was very bored, and her digital collection was full of similar content.

There were still two hours left in the day.

You can learn from the bad as well as the good, she remembered hearing from a creativity podcast some time ago. And so, she sat up and intending on seeing why this horrible trash was a bestseller.

It was with even greater horror that she realized she finished the entire damned package in a single setting.

Her intuition was correct: it was fucking terrible.

Wish fulfillment, plain and simple. All the possessive men in the cast fought over you, an emotional ploy to make the reader feel special and treasured. There was even a dark and brooding wolf boy who could only be healed with the self-insert’s love because nobody else was willing to listen to him. Even though he was shown to have devoted friends mere scenes ago?

She enjoyed it in the same way one enjoys chowing down on a greasy hamburger. But once was enough — she wouldn’t let herself become pathetic enough to start reading these kinds of things on the regular.

She learned from the bad, all right. Motivated by just how bad that story was, she cleaned her room and vowed to make tomorrow into the day she wanted out of pure spite.

Lyra arrived at her station well and early next morning and cleaned the damn thing until it qualified as an art piece, polished the desk until she could see herself in the glass. This was going to be the foundation for living a life she’d be happy with, a belated new beginning for her to find something that wasn’t wasting her life at a desk. She brought a sketch-pad, intending on filling her downtime with productive exploration. Poetry, narrative, drawings; she could do it all if she sped through her work and maximized her work breaks.

Nobody else showed up. Her station didn’t even turn on.

That was strange. She checked her schedule and confirmed that it was indeed a work day. Her supervisor should’ve been here by now to fill out the day’s agenda with meaningless gunk. Checked the news and saw that the nights were getting longer, apparently, but that didn’t mean much to her. Nights were always a little strange around these parts, nothing to really be worried about.

This just means I have more time to myself! she thought. She decided to start writing whatever came to mind; the opportunity itself was a good time to come up with a little impromptu slam poetry.

Five minutes later, the facility went dark.

Flashing red exit lights blazed in the darkened halls. Lyra’s cell phone flashlight guided the way ahead, helping her keep her balance in the slow and wane of confusing light.

There was a melody in the empty halls. She heard it the moment she left her workstation: a mourning song played on a faraway flute, a yearning song that was beautiful in its own right.

Where was everybody? She didn’t know what was going on — she was only an intern.

She swiped her ID key at the exit gate to no avail; the locking mechanism was already overwritten by the automated security. Her backup network card that bypassed the local security system told her what was going on.

People were freaking out a little bit about emissions in the sky. Something that looked like an aurora borealis, brightly coloured fractures in the sky. Looking at it for too long gave people massive headaches and anxiety — there were warnings to avert your eyes as the government investigated further.

Lyra was safe from that. But down here, she had to deal with the melody instead. It was slowly building as time passed, slowing and intensifying according to the rhythm of her footsteps; Lyra broke into a run, not knowing what else to do. But she couldn’t outrun the music.

A sound that could never be heard, but one that anybody could listen to.

There was no source to the noise.

It was everywhere, an overwhelming performance just for her.

Lyra tripped on the last hallway back to her room. The cause was self-evident: her left leg was no longer directly attached to her body, having degenerated into a long smear of black tar flecked with fragmented white starlight. She looked at her hands and saw that half her fingers were gone, flesh and bone melting alike.

She didn’t feel anything. Clawing at her face to see if she could still feel anything only accelerated the process, spreading the corrosion to her cheeks and hair.

Lyra didn’t have time to feel fear or regret. All her frayed mind could muster was a vague sense of bewilderment and amusement at this comically bad turn of events.

It was a meteorite. A tsunami. A natural disaster nobody saw coming. This phenomenon operated by the same principle, an event that couldn’t be fought against or changed. Lyra was smart enough to know that she’d be gone in a few moments.

One may be able to recognize a pattern, yet unable to change it.

If this was happening to her, there was no reason it couldn’t happen to somebody else. Maybe she was already the last human alive and this was the end. One of the many apocalypses shown in her trashy stories.

Ah… this is bad.

If she were to be completely honest, Lyra saw this one coming. She was never great at committing to change — this new bout of motivation would only last a few days before she was back to her old ways.

It sucked. It was bad. But what could she do about it? She was only an ordinary girl with no real talents or passions besides her ability to study.

...Maybe somebody would have saved me if I was more important.

She was only an intern. Born to a lower middle class family. No real friends of influence, no noble blood. The people of most importance had already evacuated; she was deemed disposable and left behind.

This was troublesome. This was not good at all.

Realizing this was a hopeless scenario, Lyra lay down and sighed. She lost vision in her left eye and both her ears were gone, but the melody still played on.

—It was always like this. I was always left behind.

Working the hardest left no time for anything else. Maybe that’s the reason she sought replacement experiences in blatant wish fulfillment stories — the idea that you could get what you want by working hard enough was tantalizing.

How many times had she denied herself simple joys to keep working? It was all for the sake of a future that would never come.

Skipping drinking nights. Skipping parties. Relationships. Vacations. After some time, even her family gave up on reaching out. She was too busy.

But there were people in this world that received all they desired without any hard work. So many people avoided everything she did by a matter of birthright.

The rich. The powerful. Their descents got it easy. She couldn’t fault her own parents for not giving her the world on a golden spoon, but those people were out there.

She envied them.

Those who were born as stars could never understand the worms crawling in the ground.

Some like to think that heroes are made not born, but that would be glossing over matters of circumstance. Only a few could rise and reach for the stars. Even then, Lyra wasn’t one of those people. She wasn’t special, nor did she have any opportunities to become special. All she could do was laugh helplessly and lament the strange situation she was in.

If only I was somebody worth keeping alive.

Heart beats became clear. Faint, but pulsing with certainty.

Slowly. Let it sink into a foregone conclusion, a sickening despair.

Maybe next life, I’ll be happier. I’ll be somebody important from the very beginning.

Just as she thought that, as though answering her prayers, an inky hand came from the wall and crushed her head, killing her instantly.

And then, she heard a voice.

It spoke to her. It knew her. Everything about her.

Fears. Desires. What lay beyond the shell of her broken skin, the culmination of a life half-lived.

Eventually, it asked one question.

Who are you?

Lyra answered.

There was only interpretation.

Without time or reason, fantasy reigns.

On the day the new world began, her wish was granted.