The station was a vast, echoing vault of white tiles and flickering fluorescent lights. There were no clocks on the walls, and the departures board was a blur of shifting letters that formed no recognizable words. We sat on a plastic bench, two men in grey suits, separated by a distance of exactly three feet.

"I believe you owe me four thousand dollars," I said. My voice sounded flat, as if the air were absorbing the sound before it could travel.

The man beside me didn't look up. He was staring at his own hands, which were folded neatly in his lap. "I do. I remember the day I borrowed it. It was a Tuesday. It was raining."

"The repayment order," I continued, "stipulates that the interest is to be settled first. At the current rate, you owe me six thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars."

"Is that so?" he replied. "And what would you do with it? In a place like this?"

I looked around. There were other people in the station—shadowy figures who moved with a slow, underwater grace. Some were sleeping; some were staring at the ceiling. None of them seemed to be waiting for a train.

"I would buy something," I said. "A coffee. A newspaper. A ticket to somewhere else."

The man finally looked at me. His eyes were the color of a winter sky, empty and wide. "There is no coffee here. There are no newspapers. And the trains... the trains only come for those who have settled all their accounts."

We spent what felt like hours—or perhaps years—discussing the mathematics of the debt. We argued about compound interest, about the definition of a "business day," about the legal priority of the principal over the penalty. We built a complex architecture of logic, a cathedral of numbers that we used to shield ourselves from the silence of the station.

As we spoke, I realized that the argument was the only thing keeping me awake. The moment we reached an agreement, the moment the debt was "settled" in our minds, I would become as still as the others.

"If I pay you now," the man asked, "will you stop talking?"

"Yes," I said.

"Then consider the debt paid. I give you everything I have."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, smooth stone. He placed it in my hand. It was warm, and it felt heavier than it looked.

I looked at the stone, and then at the man. He had already begun to fade, his edges blurring into the white light of the station. He wasn't disappearing; he was simply becoming part of the background.

I sat back on the plastic bench and held the stone. I thought about the four thousand dollars, the interest, and the repayment order. I realized that the debt had been a tether, a thin, fragile string that had connected me to the world of men.

Now that the debt was gone, I was finally free. And as I looked up at the departures board, I saw a single word form out of the chaos: *Departure*.

I closed my eyes and waited for the train.

--- **Tensor Encoding**: OTMES_v2: {M4: 9.0, N1: 0.5, N2: 0.5, K1: 0.5, K2: 0.5, TI: 18.2, Theta: 270.0}