Tethered

Marcus sits across from me in the break room, his face illuminated by the ghostly blue light of his iPhone. He's been like this for months—sleepwalking through quarterly reports, speaking only in the monosyllabic grunts of the overworked, the professionally hollow. A corporate zombie, really. We used to be friends, back when this company still felt like a startup instead of a meat grinder. Now I watch him scroll through doomscroll, doomscroll, doomscroll, thumb flicking upward in an endless gesture of resignation.

'You know Elena's pregnant,' he says, not looking up from his screen. 'Saw it on Instagram.' Elena's his wife. I haven't heard her name pass his lips in six months. The vending machine hums its electric monotony. Outside, rain streaks the window in horizontal lines, gutters flooding, the whole city dissolving into water.

'That's great,' I say. 'Tell her I said congratulations.'

He finally meets my eyes. They're bloodshot, the deep red of someone who hasn't slept in days. 'I don't know if I can keep doing this. The job, the mortgage, the IVF treatments that failed three times.' His voice cracks. 'Sometimes I stand in the shower and I think about just letting the water rise.'

My coffee has gone cold. I want to reach across the table, to offer something more substantive than workplace condolences. But his iPhone pings—a Slack notification, probably—and he reflexively checks it. The moment collapses. He's gone again, absorbed back into the digital abyss where consequences are optional and everything is manageable.

'Sorry,' he mutters. 'Work stuff.'

'Always is.' I stand up, though I don't want to. The old version of myself would have stayed. Would have asked how he's really coping. Would have offered to grab a drink, decompress, maybe remember what it felt like to be human together. Instead, I say, 'I've got a call in five.'

'Right.' He's already back on his phone. 'See you at the all-hands.'

I walk back to my desk through the fluorescent-lit corridor, passing other zombies along the way. Some of them I used to consider friends. We're all just ghosts haunting our own lives, tethered to these black mirrors, waiting for something to change while we secretly pray nothing will.