Ajay Ghale’s life can’t get any worse. He had just lost his job. He had been kicked out of his apartment. Obviously. He had a 5 month rent overdue. His life was a mess. He was only 26 and had already hit rock bottom. He reminisced his life so far as he sat on the pavement outside his apartment complex. He had erected a small tent with a tarpaulin and a few sticks. He laid his bags around him to make himself cosy. It was cold. Very cold. To make matters worse, it started raining. He had been a total failure so far. The classic middle bencher. He was a ghost. Very few people knew Ajay existed. He didn’t score like the first benchers. He didn’t attract attention like the back benchers. He scored average marks, got to an average college, an average job.
He hated being average, but he couldn’t help it. That’s all he could achieve. He hated it that he left his hometown in the hopes of making it big. At least they had a farm there. His dad had taken the risk of selling it hoping to give his son one last chance to redeem himself. He had failed. Again. He felt horrible. His parents had disowned him and moved away with their retirement savings. Little to no women in his life. His crush had chosen his best friend and Ajay lost them both. His ONLY best friend, for the record. And her decision was pretty reasonable. His best friend worked in Wipro, had a 5 digit salary, a car and an apartment. Why wouldn’t she? Being chosen over was one of Ajay’s characteristic traits now. Not exactly something he could put on his resume.
Where did he mess up? What did he do wrong? He had no idea. It was frustrating to live such a life. The second time his business failed, it was the time he had lost all his father’s money. It was at that moment, he lost all faith in life. He took up an all-night job at a call centre, which closed down soon. Of course. Why wouldn’t it close down? Over the years, Ajay had come to believe that life was cruel to him on purpose. He had all the reasons to suspect that. Nothing had gone according to how it should have gone. He had always had this lingering feeling in his heart that “God has a plan”. But with all that had happened in his life so far he felt he could give god some pointers on how to write a better story. As he thought about how messed up his life was, he had not been noticing his environment. It was raining much heavily and although his little tent was dry, it was freezing.
Suddenly, he heard tires screeching and a violent engine roar. Ajay was startled. He crept out of the enclosure and peeped outside the small tent only to be met by a glaring headlight speeding towards him. Ajay barely had time to scream. The SUV was already upon him, crashing into him with breakneck speed. Ajay was thrown backwards, already dying from a broken neck. His limp body slammed into the wall behind him. But the SUV roared forward, sandwiching him with the wall. The force crushed his body, with his eyes popping out of the sockets and his intestines bursting out from his abdomen, Ajay died.
Ajay awoke with a gasp. “Basic life package completed. Please upgrade your pack for a better experience” was flashing on the screen. “Fuck,,,,,” Ajay muttered as the simulation pod opened. The year was 2177. Humans lived in specialized bunker enclosures. The outside world had been rendered uninhabitable after a powerful solar flare had hit earth, combined with the damage that humanity had already done. They had been living this way for 50 years now. A normal life had blossomed in the bunkers. The only way to experience the life before the apocalypse were the simulation pods. The better the package, the better the quality of life in the simulation. Ajay’s basic package, was well, unimpressive.
He slowly rose from the simulation pod and walked away. The mistakes of his forefathers had landed humanity here. Led it to the pathetic state of having to pay to experience a normal life. Now Ajay had to save up again to buy the gold pack. And that was a lot of work. Slowly exiting the simulation centre, he walked away, lamenting his fate of having to pay for the sins of his ancestors, for they had thought of nothing, but themselves.
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