Part 1: Everything We Left Behind

Before every impossible adventure, there comes a moment that feels completely ordinary. Episode 1 introduces Oliver, a regular office worker living an entirely reasonable adult life, until one small, impossible event begins unraveling everything he thought he knew.

Maybe the worlds we built as kids never disappeared. Maybe we just stopped looking.

Welcome to the beginning of the Shitshow Universe by Aparna Sangam.

With comedy, kindness, and connection,

Cap’n Kramm

Oliver was currently spending his Tuesday afternoon doing what he did best: killing his own soul to make a PowerPoint presentation look “visionary.”

It was 4:12 PM. The office AC was making a depressing rattling noise, and the kitchen down the hall smelled like someone had burned microwave popcorn again. Oliver’s right hand was clicking a tiny arrow on his mouse to align a company logo. His left hand, however, had gone completely rogue. Without his brain even realizing it, his blue pen had drawn a very stressed cartoon potato wearing a top hat and crying on his notepad.

Oliver wasn’t even looking at the potato. He was staring at his slide. If his margins were off by even a millimeter, his boss would look at it during tomorrow’s update call and say something passive-aggressive like, “Is there a specific formatting logic we’re deploying here, Oliver, or are we just vibing?”

A sharp ping rattled through his cheap office headphones.

A notification popped up from Gary Vance (VP, Systems Optimization):

“Oliver, do you have two minutes? Step into my cabin before you wrap up for the day.”

Oliver looked at the crying potato. He felt a sudden, childish urge to scribble over it so Gary’s ghost wouldn’t see it, but he just closed the notebook, stood up, and tried to wipe the wrinkles out of his pants with his hands.

The walk to Gary’s office was always a nightmare. Gary’s office had big glass walls designed to look modern, but mostly they just allowed everyone to watch you get chewed out. When Oliver walked in, Gary actually looked up and offered a tired, totally normal sigh. He wasn’t a cartoon villain; he just looked like a regular guy who had three more of these meetings before his 5:00 PM golf simulation.

“Sit, Oliver,” Gary said, pointing vaguely to a leather chair that gave a loud, incredibly realistic fart sound the exact second Oliver sat down.

Oliver froze, his face burning hot. Gary didn’t even blink. He had clearly heard that chair do that to twelve different people today. He just capped his fountain pen with a sharp, casual click.

“Oliver, I’m going to keep this brief because HR has a hard stop,” Gary said, leaning back comfortably. “We’re doing a routine structural realignment. The multi-year digital roadmap you’ve been building... look, the data is clean. Love the arrows. But the executive committee decided to sunset the entire division. We’re outsourcing the whole department to an AI startup in Chicago that operates out of a literal garage.”

Oliver blinked. The calm, relaxed delivery of the words made his brain click into a safe mode. Gary wasn’t angry; he was talking about deleting Oliver’s career with the exact same casual energy he’d use to talk about the weather.

“The severance is six weeks,” Gary continued, entirely quiet, entirely polite. “You’ll get the formal documents in your personal inbox by midnight. I just need you to drop your security badge on the desk before you pack up your desk ecosystem.”

“Right,” Oliver said. His voice sounded like it had been run through a paper shredder.

He stood up, unclipped the plastic badge from his belt, and laid it quietly on the mahogany wood. He didn’t say goodbye, and Gary didn’t offer any fake corporate well-wishes. They just exchanged a brief, awkward nod, and Oliver walked out.

He packed his backpack in complete silence and left the building, blinking in the bright afternoon sunlight, officially unemployed.

Since he could no longer justify spending money on a subway ticket, he walked.

The afternoon air was warm and smelled like car exhaust. Halfway to his apartment, his feet took a familiar detour past the neighborhood park. A group of kids—maybe eight or nine years old—were running wild across the playground. But they weren’t using the swings or the slides. They were climbing over benches, scrambling up the borders of the sandbox, and clinging to the iron fences like tiny monkeys.

“Don’t touch the grass!” a little girl in a giant yellow t-shirt screamed, her face twisted in absolute, life-or-death seriousness. “The floor is lava! It’s literal hot magma, Tommy! Your shoes are melting right now!”

Oliver stopped by the iron fence, clutching his backpack straps. He couldn’t look away. He watched a boy in a striped shirt take a massive, terrifyingly brave leap from a wooden bench to a plastic picnic table, waving his arms wildly in the air just to avoid touching a perfectly harmless patch of green grass.

Oliver stood completely still. The playground noise seemed to dim into a low hum. He remembered the exact texture of his parents’ living room sofa. He remembered how he used to pull the heavy cushions off the base, arranging them across the carpet like stepping stones. Back then, the danger was real. He had known the exact weight of a world he built out of nothing.

The boy on the picnic table landed safely, panting. When he looked up, he caught Oliver staring. The game ground to a sudden halt. The three kids stood totally still, looking at a grown man in a wrinkled dress shirt, staring at them through the iron bars like a ghost.

“Hey,” the boy called out, squinting in the sun. “You want to play? You can be a safe island. If we touch your shoes, we get our life back.”

A tiny, involuntary smile tugged at the corner of Oliver’s mouth. For a second, he actually felt his right foot shift. He pictured his leather dress shoes hitting the top of that wooden bench. He wanted to say yes. He wanted it more than he had wanted anything in a decade.

“Come on,” the little girl in the yellow shirt yelled, balancing on the edge of the sandbox. “Tommy’s winning and he cheated twice. We need an island.”

Oliver took a breath, opening his mouth to speak—

And then his phone violently buzzed in his pocket. It was a sharp, aggressive vibration that shattered the entire afternoon.

The screen showed an automated notification from LinkedIn: 12 new optimization manager roles match your profile.

The magic in the air vanished. The weight of his empty bank account, his rent, and his reality crashed back down onto his shoulders. The tiny smile fell completely off his face.

“No,” Oliver said, his voice quiet. “No. I... I have to go home.”

The kids didn’t argue. They just looked at him with that quiet, devastating pity that children have for adults who have clearly given up on life. Oliver turned away, keeping his eyes locked onto the cracks in the sidewalk, walking fast, running away from a playground.

His apartment was quiet and dark. He didn’t turn on the lights; he didn’t want to see the space he could no longer afford. He dropped his backpack, walked into the small bathroom, and flipped the plastic switch. The single light bulb above the mirror flickered violently before settling into a low, irritating buzz.

Oliver leaned over the sink, turned the tap to absolute cold, and splashed water onto his face. He held his hands there for a long time, letting the cold numb his skin before looking up.

The reflection in the mirror looked like a stranger. His eyes were bloodshot, and his shoulders were permanently slouched into the shape of an office chair. He felt completely empty.

He sat down on the closed lid of the toilet, pulled out his phone, and opened his email. No severance package details yet. Just an automated notification that his premium subscription to a calendar scheduling app had successfully auto-renewed for eighty dollars.

He let out a dry, miserable laugh.

Staring at the screen, a sudden, uninvited memory cracked open in his mind. He remembered being seven years old, sitting on his bedroom floor with a big blue sketchbook, drawing blueprints for a subterranean city ruled by hyper-intelligent hamsters. He had genuinely believed he was going to grow up to build impossible, magnificent things. He hadn’t thought about that sketchbook in fifteen years. He looked down at his phone screen again. Eighty dollars to organize meetings he no longer had.

The bathroom was completely silent except for the low hum of the bulb. Time just kind of stretched out and lost its shape. He stared at the digital clock on his screen. It felt like he had been sitting there for hours, but it had only been eleven and a half minutes.

Suddenly, a weird smell made him look down.

It didn’t smell like his cheap lavender hand soap anymore. It smelled like old wooden floorboards, crushed Crayola crayons, and that sharp smell that comes exactly three seconds before a heavy summer rain.

He wiped his face with a towel. “I’m having a medical emergency,” he muttered to the empty room. “This is a textbook panic attack.”

He stood up, his knees cracking loudly, and reached for the chrome handle of the bathroom door. He pulled it open, fully expecting to see his boring, narrow apartment hallway.

He didn’t.

There was no hallway. There was no coat rack. There was no apartment.

Instead, Oliver was staring into a vast, impossible sky of deep purple twilight. The bathroom floor just... ended at the doorframe. Where his hallway should have been, there was an endless field of neon green grass under a sky filled with two separate, tiny moons.

Sitting right on the grass, exactly three feet from his bathroom threshold, was a small wooden desk. And sitting behind that desk was a fat, green bullfrog wearing a perfectly tailored, microscopic corporate business tie.

The frog blinked its large, golden eyes, adjusted its tie with a webbed finger, and looked up at Oliver.

“You’re late,” the frog said in a deep, raspy, human voice. “And just so you know, the kitchen ran out of the turkey club sandwiches you like. You’ll have to settle for the soggy wrap.”

Oliver stood totally frozen. His brain completely broke down.

Okay, he thought, his internal voice rising in a stiff panic. You are having a massive stroke. Extreme stress causes hallucinations. WebMD says check your symptoms immediately.

Keeping his eyes locked on the business-suit frog, he reached into his pocket with a shaking hand, unlocked his phone, and opened a Google browser.

He typed: S-T-R-O-K-E S-Y-M-P-T-O-M-S.

He read the screen while the purple sky glowed against his face. Face drooping? No. Arm weakness? No. Blurred speech?

“The frog knows my lunch order,” Oliver said aloud to the open fields. His voice sounded completely normal, clear, and terrifyingly sane.

He slammed the bathroom door shut. Click.

He stood in the small, windowless bathroom. The light hummed its peaceful, irritating buzz. The sink was there. The white towel was there. The toilet paper roll was half-empty. It was completely normal. Safe. Real.

“Right,” Oliver breathed, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He leaned his back against the wooden door and slid down until he was sitting on the floor, pulling his knees to his chest. He let out a breathless, nervous laugh. “A hallucination. A total mental breakdown because I got fired. Panic makes you see weird things. I probably just ate some bad takeout.”

He sat on the floor for a full minute, watching the digital clock on his phone click forward, waiting for his brain to reset.

He stood up. His knees were shaking. He took a deep breath, counted to three, and grabbed the chrome handle again. He threw the door open, determined to force his eyes to see his normal, safe, boring apartment hallway.

The frog in the tie was still there. It was currently tapping a webbed foot against the leg of its desk, looking incredibly annoyed.

Oliver didn’t look at the sky. He didn’t look at the distance. His entire mind shrank down to the doorframe. He looked down. Half of his feet were resting on his bathroom’s cheap plastic linoleum flooring. The other half of his feet were directly casting a shadow onto bright neon green grass.

His phone slipped from his hand, hitting the bathroom floor with a dull clatter. He didn’t look down to see if the screen had cracked. He couldn’t look away.

The hallway wasn’t coming back…