My phone buzzed in my hand.
I looked down.
Fired Through an App for Being Exactly 7 Minutes Late. Account permanently deactivated. Earnings suspended pending internal review.
The words felt unreal, like they belonged to someone else’s life. Around me, doctors worked on the boy I had just carried through floodwater, while I stood there officially unemployed, soaked, invisible.
Then a man burst through the ER doors — tall, commanding, wearing a drenched tailored overcoat that probably cost more than our monthly rent. His eyes scanned the room wildly before locking onto the trauma bay.
“Is he alive?” he demanded.
A nurse nodded and guided him inside.
No one asked my name.
After seven silent minutes, I walked back into the storm.
PART 2
Fired Through an App for Being Exactly 7 Minutes Late didn’t feel real until the next morning when I opened the delivery app and saw my account erased, rating gone, history wiped like I had never existed. I biked to the company’s Manhattan office anyway, hoping a human being might care more than an algorithm.
