Closed Loop

I stared at the chip for a long time. Long enough for the neon buzz outside to start drilling holes in my skull.

I didn't use. That was the first rule. Dealers don't sample the product. Not if they want to stay in the game.

But tonight...

The rain had been mean, the customers meaner. Every face that stumbled into my shop had been chasing something they couldn't name. I'd spent hours selling them ghosts. Smiles. First loves. Family dinners that probably never happened.

Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was spite.

Maybe I just wanted to know, for once, what the hell they were all running toward.

"One taste," I muttered. "One time."

I slotted the chip.

For a second, nothing. Just black. Then the world cracked open like an egg.

Sunlight.

Real sunlight, bleeding through a canopy of green leaves so bright it hurt. The air smelled... clean. Not filtered, not burned. Alive.

She was there, barefoot in the grass, laughing at something I hadn't said yet. The sound hit me like a memory I didn't know I was missing.

I stumbled forward, blinking against the golden sky, and the ground beneath me was soft. No cracked asphalt, no metal. Just earth. Real earth.

She turned, sunlight catching in her hair. She held out a hand.

And somewhere, tucked behind her voice and the hum of unseen bees, a word slipped loose in my mind.

Jasmine.

I breathed it in. God, I breathed it in like it was the last clean thing in a dirty world.

The scent wrapped around me, sweet and sharp, a kind of gold in the air. I didn't know how I knew the word. Nobody sold anything that smelled so sweet in this part of the city. Nobody sold anything that wasn't fried, frozen, or rotting on the vine.

But the memory whispered it anyway, soft and certain: jasmine.

She smiled like she'd been waiting forever, like there was no one else in the whole damned world but us. And for a second, for a breath it didn't matter that I wasn't him. It didn't matter that I was borrowing this life like a suit two sizes too small.

I could feel the weight of her hand when she caught mine. Warm. Real.

"Stay," she said, voice threading into the wind, into the leaves, into the memory itself.

I didn't answer. Couldn't. The memory ended before I could speak, snapping back like a broken rubber band, dumping me onto the floor of my shop with the static buzz of dead neon burning the inside of my skull.

I lay there for a long time, staring up at the cracked ceiling, the scent of jasmine still clinging to the back of my throat.

Reality came back slow and ugly. The hum of the city, the stink of rust and old oil rising through the floorboards.

I wiped at my eyes before I even realized they were wet.

I told myself it was the static burn. I told myself it didn't mean anything.

I told myself a lot of things that night.

And every one of them was a lie.