Roppongi Hills Recursion: A Time Loop Micro-Novel
The single malt tasted of burnt circuits and existential dread. Not the peaty warmth I sought at the New York Bar atop the Park Hyatt, overlooking the glittering expanse of Tokyo from Roppongi Hills, but a harsh, metallic tang that clung to the back of my throat. The jazz, usually a soothing balm against the city’s relentless pulse, now sounded like a broken record, skipping on a single, discordant note.
I swirled the amber liquid, the city lights blurring into a hazy kaleidoscope. Something was wrong. Terribly, irrevocably wrong.
It started subtly. A fleeting sense of déjà vu. A conversation overheard, identical to one I’d had days, weeks, or was it months ago? The news playing on the bar’s muted television, reporting on an event I distinctly remembered occurring in the past. Each instance dismissed as a trick of the mind, stress, fatigue – the usual suspects.
But the anomalies grew bolder, more insistent. The same woman, with the same crimson scarf and haunted eyes, ordering the same dry martini at the same time every evening. The elevator music looping endlessly, a saccharine melody burrowing into my skull. And the taste… always the metallic tang of burnt circuits on my tongue.
The Glitch in the Matrix
Tonight, it escalated. As I raised my glass, a shard of glass fell from the ceiling, narrowly missing my hand. A construction worker’s yell echoed from a distance, instantly silencing the bar’s ambient noise, yet nobody reacted. They merely acted as if a drop of glass falling from the ceiling were normal. They continued their conversations, their laughter, their oblivious consumption.
I walked to the edge of the bar. The lights of Tokyo pulsed below, an endless grid of ambition and anonymity. I felt a wave of nausea, a sensation of falling, not physically, but through time itself.
The bartender approached, his face a mask of polite indifference. “Another single malt, sir?” he asked, his voice a perfect echo of his previous inquiry. The same question. The same intonation. The same vacant stare.
Escaping the Loop
Panic clawed at my throat. I had to break free. I had to disrupt the pattern, introduce a variable, anything to shatter the suffocating predictability.
I grabbed my coat, threw a handful of bills onto the counter, and bolted for the elevator. Down, down, down I sped, but it seemed to take longer than before. The elevator music twisted into a cacophony of grating sounds. When the doors finally opened on the ground floor, I didn’t see the familiar lobby. I found myself on the 52nd floor, back at the New York Bar, jazz music and all.
The bartender looked up, a flicker of something – recognition? Amusement? – in his eyes. “Another single malt, sir?”
Acceptance
Defeated, I sat back down, the metallic taste returning with a vengeance. Perhaps there was no escape. Perhaps this was my purgatory, my personal hell, a never-ending loop of stale whiskey and echoing conversations. I took a deep breath, raised my glass, and swallowed the burnt circuitry of eternity.
Tomorrow, I would come back to this bar. I’d drink the whiskey and talk to the bartender again, and again.