Dinner at Floor Forty-Two

The elevator hummed as it ascended the crystalline column of Dorsun Consolidated, pausing only for those with clearance. Maro Bekt adjusted his badge, trying not to meet his own reflection in the mirrored walls. Outside, the city shimmered with neon haze, its streets lost in synthetic rain. Inside, the office tower was antiseptic—a realm of silent ambition and recycled air.

Forty-two floors up, Maro’s workspace waited: an open-plan module lit by a blue-tinted skywall and populated by the click-clack of neural interface gloves. The sky above was not real; neither was most of what Maro did from nine to seven each cycle. He parsed data for patterns he barely understood—patterns that apparently moved markets, or so he’d been told.

But today, something was different. There, atop his workstation’s glass surface, lay a physical book—an antique curiosity in a world that consumed stories through direct neural feeds.

Maro blinked. The cover read: “The Boyfriend: A Psychological Thriller.”

He glanced around. Co-workers hunched over virtual displays or stared into retinal projectors, oblivious. Who had left it? Maro picked it up. Its weight surprised him; books were rare artifacts now. He ran his finger along the spine, feeling the bumps and grooves. Someone had paged through this many times before.

He flipped open to a random chapter while waiting for a particularly dense data stream to compile. The story unfolded rapidly—dark secrets and unreliable narrators tangled in tense conversations. For the first time in months, Maro lost track of time.

A ping broke his trance: lunch meeting on Level 47.

***

The dining hall was all glass and chrome. Maro picked at a nutrient bar while his manager droned on about quarterly projections. Out of habit more than interest, he slid The Boyfriend from his coat pocket onto the table’s edge—its presence grounding him amid fluorescent unreality.

“You still read those?” whispered Lira from accounting, glancing at the cover.

“Sometimes,” Maro said, lowering his voice. “It’s… different.”

She smiled wistfully. “I remember paperbacks from my childhood. My mother said every good story holds up a mirror.”

The book felt heavier suddenly—as if Lira’s words summoned something beneath its pages.

After lunch, she passed him a folded slip of synth-paper: ‘Meet me after hours in Archive B.’

***

At 1900 sharp, Maro found Lira among shadowy shelves stacked with outdated tech and forbidden print media. She motioned him closer.

“I left you that book,” she confessed. “It’s not just fiction—it’s a clue.”

Maro blinked twice, uncertain whether this was another corporate prank or genuine connection.

Lira continued: “Have you noticed how everyone here is stuck? Going through motions without purpose? Read deeper—the story hints at secrets buried within this building.”

Maro remembered a passage from The Boyfriend: ‘We’re only as trapped as the stories we accept.’

His pulse quickened as they flipped through marked pages together—each annotation paralleling someone or something in the office tower: the silent security chief with an unreadable past; the janitor who never ages; even himself—a ghost haunting spreadsheets.

***

For nights afterward, Maro couldn’t sleep without reading more of The Boyfriend. The suspense bled into waking life; he scrutinized colleagues’ gestures for hidden meanings and questioned every routine interaction. His work improved—he found new angles in datasets by thinking like the book’s protagonist, anticipating twists instead of accepting surface truths.

One evening he caught Lira staring out at the neon city from an emergency stairwell.

“Do you think we’ll ever get out?” she asked softly.

Maro thought about it—the endless cycles, the corporate haze—and realized he’d been living inside someone else’s plotline for years.

“Maybe we write our own endings,” he said, holding up The Boyfriend as if it contained an answer within its worn pages.

She smiled—a real smile this time—and together they watched artificial rain streak down glass while sirens wailed below.

***

It wasn’t until weeks later that Maro noticed changes ripple through Dorsun Consolidated. Employees started leaving notes on each other’s desks: recommendations for old films or stories worth reading in paper form. Book clubs blossomed in forgotten break rooms; laughter echoed where silence once reigned.

Maro became known for lending out The Boyfriend—its battered cover now a badge of resistance against inertia and emptiness. In meetings, people referenced plot twists when brainstorming solutions; managers praised their teams for thinking outside algorithmic boxes.

Purpose became viral—not imposed from above but discovered within.

And when Maro finally reached The Boyfriend’s last page—its ending both shocking and perfectly inevitable—he saw himself reflected there: not a passive observer but an author-in-the-making.