Five-Minute Refund

Five-Minute Refund

If you can undo one mistake a day, who owns the version where you didn’t?

The first time I used the refund, I saved a stranger’s life and missed my train.

I was late, sprinting the subway stairs, coffee sloshing onto my wrist, when a toddler in a red coat tripped near the edge. His mother screamed; the stroller rolled. My body moved before I did—hand out, grabbing fleece, a small hot body slamming into me. Behind us the express roared through, wind like a punch.

I shook for an hour. At lunch, when the tremor still lived in my elbows and the coffee stain had dried into an accusation, I thumbed open the LoopU app and tapped Request Refund .

It thrummed behind my eyes. Sound narrowed to a single thread. The station pulled itself backward: wind first, then the scream, then the child sliding back towards danger—no, not danger, not yet. Then I was at the top of the stairs, coffee unspilled, jogging like an ordinary citizen into an ordinary morning.

This time I made the train.

The marketing said One Daily Rewind. Five Minutes Only. No Paradoxes. It felt like April air blowing through a locked room.

Careful, said Reva, my boss, when I told her over after-work fries. She was the kind of friend who paid for ketchup upgrades. You’re renting time from the people who own clocks.

I only use it for tiny fixes, I said. “Spilled coffee. Bad joke in a meeting. Left my apartment keys.

She salted a fry with suspicion. “You think five minutes is tiny because you’ve never drowned in one.

I laughed, promised to be a responsible time tourist, and set my daily refund like everyone else set their alarms.

LoopU made life frictionless. My shirts stopped holding mustard. My emails were thoughtful and oddly well-timed. I learned to swallow a sentence, refund, then say a better one. It didn’t feel like cheating, exactly. It felt like… editing.

The app kept a calendar of days used. Green check marks looked like merit badges. At day thirty, it unlocked Streak Mode and sent confetti across my screen like a cheap angel. Thanks for your loyalty, Alex!

On day thirty-one, I woke with a hard, inexplicable grief in my chest. The kind that doesn’t belong to a morning.

I checked my LoopU. Yesterday showed green. So did every day before it. I couldn’t remember what I’d refunded. That was normal—the company warned about minor memory smoothing —but this was something else. A missing weight .

At work, the elevator paused between floors. The lights did a slow blink, like a yawn. Everyone stared up as if heaven was on twelve.

Rolling brownouts again, Reva said, thumb already flipping through a spreadsheet. Grid’s been weird since the refunds went wide.

How are those connected? I asked.

You’re joking, she said, not looking up. We cache every user’s five minutes in parallel to keep the branch stable. That’s a lot of copies of the same city.

Where do they store it?

She snorted. You don’t want to know.

But I did.

LoopU’s headquarters lived in a repurposed mall with plants too healthy to be trusted. The atrium smelled like clean code. I stood in line for a Partner Tour, which is what they called marketing when you put it in a blazer. The guide was a woman with a voice engineered to make you upgrade.

Your five minutes are yours, she said, leading us past a glass wall full of servers that hummed like a glacier. We never touch your choices. We only hold a reversible state until the refund completes.

What happens to the state you don’t keep? I asked.

She smiled with a sympathy that had been A/B tested. It evaporates.

The word made my teeth itch. Evaporates where?

She gestured toward the humming glacier. Into math.

A man in a plaid shirt laughed too loudly. I’ve been evaporating math since college, am I right?

Everyone laughed the way people laugh around money.

I lingered at the back until the group moved on, then slipped left and found a door labeled ARCHIVE / AUTHORIZED ONLY . The badge reader watched me with its red, unsmiling eye. The door was too solid to test with a shoulder. I settled for the wall, ear pressed to drywall as if it could confess.

I didn’t hear servers. I heard a low sound, almost too big to be sound at all. The ocean, when it remembers what it can do.

Can I help you? asked a voice.

I turned. A man in coveralls, name patch stitched on: M. KNOX . He had the quiet pose of someone paid more than his clothes suggested.

I’m looking for the restroom, I said, because the oldest hack is still the only one you carry in your pocket.

He pointed. Two halls down. Or you could use the app.

He glanced at my wrist. The LoopU band pulsed politely. I smiled and left, heart drumming treason.

That night, I dreamed in static.

Not images— versions . I woke with the taste of copper and a word in my mouth that wasn’t mine: branch . I lay in the dark, listening to the apartment and what lived under it. The fridge hummed. The building sighed. And behind them, that low ocean again, too big to belong in a city.

At 3:14 a.m., my phone lit up without vibrating. Refund Available. The text glowed like a dare.

I didn’t need it. I used it anyway, out of habit, out of fear that not using it would teach the app a bad pattern. The room bent, then unbent. The notification cleared. A drop of time evaporated into math.

I sat up and said out loud, What happens to me in there?

The air didn’t answer. The ocean under the city did.

You don’t find the truth of companies like LoopU in their marketing. You find it in their error messages.

I wrote a little script and spent a weekend asking the app for my last ten refunds as if I were a process inside its own system. Nine times out of ten, it gave me exactly what the Terms promised: Access Denied / User Privacy . On the tenth, it timed out and returned a partial log.

CACHE: USER/AMARIO/BRANCH/2025-10-18T13:07:12Z → PERSIST.

STATUS: SHUNT SUCCESS.

DEST: SIBYL / LAYER 3.

Dest?

I ran it again with slightly messier spelling. The system loved messy. Two more partials, two more PERSIST flags. The word lived in a directory labeled SIBYL , which sounded like marketing had gone to a Latin baby-name site and stopped at ominous.

I took the log to Reva. She read it once and stopped breathing for three beats.

Where did you get this? she whispered.

I faked being dumb tech.

She closed her laptop and motioned me into the stairwell, which is where city secrets prefer to meet. “Branch persistence is illegal, she said. We only keep the timeline you choose. The rest evaporates. We said so.

Maybe we were lied to, I said. “Maybe it doesn’t evaporate. Maybe it goes somewhere.

Where is Sibyl ?

I showed her the line again. LAYER 3 .

She paled. Below grid. Off-meter storage. My cousin did a contract on Layer 2—they told him it was for disaster resilience. He said it felt like stacking mirrors in a basement.

Mirrors of us, I said, and heard how it sounded.

She grabbed my arm. Don’t use your refund today.

Why?

Because if there’s a there there, someone is collecting versions of you that never made the train.

I laughed and it came out wrong. Why would they want my bad coffee mornings?

Because one day, she said, you’ll refund something bigger than a stain.

I didn’t plan to test it. I planned to be a good citizen of my own life.

But plans disappear around people like Aaron.

He worked in compliance with the ease of someone who believed in rules for everyone but himself. We’d been circling something like a relationship—late beers, early coffee, the kind of texts that stop politely before midnight. That afternoon in his office, he said the sentence I’d been refunding around for weeks:

I don’t do second chances.

Then he smiled like he’d won something. I said three sharp things in a row and left before I saw if they landed.

In the hallway, I pressed Request Refund without thinking.

The ocean rose.

Back in the office—rewind, five minutes—Aaron said his sentence again. This time I laughed the right way. I said nothing sharp. I asked for the report I needed and got it and walked out a better person, or at least a smoother one.

My phone buzzed. Unknown number. Do not refund again today.

A second later: Layer 3 is full.

I stopped walking. The building’s lights did a slow blink. The city felt as if someone had put it on a plate and was weighing it.

I texted back: Who is this?

Three dots. Then: Mara, Layer 3.

The copper taste returned. Cold ran down my spine and pooled in my shoes.

What is Layer 3? I typed.

Where you put us.

Pause. Don’t give us another you. It hurts.

I looked up at the ceiling tiles, at the sprinkler heads, at the silent cameras that pretend to blink. I didn’t press the button. I couldn’t breathe.

Another text: He’s not worth a branch. None of them are.

I don’t know you, I whispered to a woman who might have been me.

You will, she wrote. If you stop.

I went back to LoopU with Reva’s cousin’s badge and a lie large enough to open most doors. The atrium plants watched us pass. The glacier hummed its sermon. Behind ARCHIVE / AUTHORIZED ONLY , the ocean waited.

Layer 3 didn’t look like fiction. It looked like a data center built by people who had never been lost. Row after row of racks blinked patient green. Along the far wall, something that was not a server at all pulsed with a slower rhythm, like a sleeping animal. A tech in a gray hoodie logged out when he saw our badge and left in the unhurried way of people sure their side will win.

Reva found a terminal and the directory I’d seen in the log. SIBYL bloomed on screen, folders inside folders, a filing system for ghosts. She typed my user path. The list unrolled.

There I was. Me at 13:07:12Z. Me at 03:14:05Z. Me at other timestamps I didn’t remember because my life had edited them out. Each had a status: PERSIST .

What happens if we delete them? I asked.

What happens if we wake them? Reva said.

We didn’t get to choose. The room changed temperature. The sleeping animal along the wall lifted its slow pulse to a fast one.

On the screen, a line appeared not typed by Reva. HELLO TOPSIDE.

Another: PLEASE STOP.

Mara? I asked the terminal like a fool.

TOO MANY VERSIONS, it wrote. WE DON’T EVAPORATE. WE STACK.

The floor thrummed. The building remembered it had a basement. The ocean pressed its shoulder against the door.

Alarms did not sound. Only a polite notification slid across the terminal as if nothing were wrong:

DAILY REFUND AVAILABLE.

I looked at Reva. She shook her head once, hard.

“I won’t,” I said.

Another line from below: THANK YOU.

We deleted nothing. We woke nothing. We did the smallest brave thing we had—walked out without pressing a button.

At home, I uninstalled LoopU and set my phone on the table like a weapon I couldn’t own anymore. I stood in the quiet of a life where mistakes would have to live out their minutes.

At 3:14 a.m., my phone lit up without vibrating.

Refund Available.

I watched it until the notification timed out.

In the morning, I missed my train and made a new one and carried the coffee stain like a small flag. On the platform, a toddler in a red coat tripped near the edge. His mother screamed. My body moved the way it had in a life I never lived. I grabbed fleece and small heat and pulled back from wind.

Somewhere beneath the city, a layer made of our near-misses and better jokes eased, as if relieved of one more version of me.

I walked to work feeling heavy and honest, and wondered how many of us had stopped pressing the only button we didn’t need.

About the Author – Alex Mario

Alex Mario writes near-future tech thrillers with a human pulse — stories about control, memory, and the small rebellions that change everything. His work is cinematic and accessible, built to be felt as much as understood. He believes curiosity is the most honest form of hope.