A Deal with a Cosmic Entity

I was a janitor at a high-tech physics lab, the kind with machines that hummed with the power of captured stars. One night, I spilled my coffee on a console. Bad move. There was a flash, a smell of burnt sugar and cinnamon, and then *it* was there. It wasn't a demon or an angel, nothing so simple. It was a being of pure geometry, a tesseract of shifting light and impossible angles that made my head ache. "You have broken my containment field, mortal," it resonated, not with sound, but directly in my mind. "The energy expenditure required to reconstruct it is... significant. You will compensate me." I thought I was a goner. I offered it my wallet, my car keys, my half-eaten sandwich. It scoffed, a ripple of condescending light. "I do not require your primitive trinkets. I trade in concepts." So we made a deal. For every concept I gave it, it would grant me a small wish. My first offering was "ennui." The entity swirled, tasting the idea of existential boredom. "Intriguing," it pulsed. In return, I wished for a pay raise. The next day, my boss gave me a 10% bump. It worked. I got bolder. I gave it "schadenfreude," the pleasure derived from another's misfortune. I wished for a new car. A cherry-red convertible was waiting for me in the parking lot. I gave it "nostalgia," "deja vu," "irony." My life became a whirlwind of fulfilled desires. But I started noticing things. People seemed... flatter. The rich tapestry of human emotion was fading. Laughter was a little less joyful, sorrow a little less poignant. The world was becoming bland, uniform, predictable. I was trading away the colors of the human experience for cheap, material gain. The entity was satisfied, its containment field almost rebuilt. It needed one last concept. "Give me 'love'," it pulsed, its light glowing with anticipation. I looked at the picture of my daughter in my wallet, her gap-toothed smile full of a pure, uncomplicated joy that was becoming rarer every day. I knew what I had to do. "No," I said. "That one's not for sale." I offered it something else, a concept I'd just invented myself. "Regret." The entity recoiled, its perfect geometry fracturing. The light dimmed. "This... this is... unpleasant." I smiled, a real, bittersweet smile. "Yeah, I know. Now, let's renegotiate."