The Airtight Alibi (Or: Barty's Big Bang)
Bartholomew Button dedicated his life to not living it. His apartment was a hermetically sealed fortress against the cruel whims of fate, featuring triple-glazed windows against rogue meteorites, a HEPA filter system that could shame an operating theatre, and more padded surfaces than a consensual wrestling ring. He wore a full-body hazmat suit for grocery delivery (delivered by drone, naturally), and his daily nutritional intake consisted of a beige, fortified goo he personally synthesized to avoid the 'dangers' of diverse diets. Barty was, in his own mind, the apex predator of risk mitigation. No loose bannisters, no slippery pavements, no rogue coconuts for Bartholomew.
His greatest fear, oddly enough, wasn't death itself, but the *manner* of it. He dreamt of heroic, meaningful deaths, perhaps saving a busload of orphans from a runaway blimp (provided he could do it without touching anyone). The idea of a mundane, ignominious demise – like tripping over his own shoelaces or succumbing to a particularly aggressive hangnail – sent shivers down his spine.
One Tuesday, a critical component of his bespoke, hypoallergenic air purifier malfunctioned. Not disastrously, mind you, just a faint, high-pitched whine that grated on Barty's meticulously curated serenity. He spent the entire night meticulously disassembling the unit, a task that required tools he'd only ever used to calibrate his earthquake-proof bed. Hours passed. The whine persisted, an insidious needle drilling into his psyche.
By dawn, Barty, exhausted and twitching, had finally located the culprit: a tiny, almost invisible screw that had worked itself loose. With a triumphant gasp, he plunged a miniscule screwdriver into the mechanism. There was a faint 'zzzt', a puff of dust, and then… nothing. The whine stopped. Barty slumped against the wall, victorious. He had cheated fate again! He had averted a potential cascade failure, a domestic apocalypse of vibrating air.
He decided to reward himself with an extra-large serving of beige goo. As he spooned the viscous paste, a tiny, almost invisible screw, dislodged during his Herculean efforts, quietly sailed through the air, found its mark, and landed squarely in his pre-chewed, fortified nutrient sludge. Barty, still basking in his triumph over mechanical adversity, swallowed the mouthful without a second thought. The screw, not quite as digestible as processed algae, performed an impressive feat of internal blockage.
Bartholomew Button, the man who evaded every conceivable danger life could throw at him, died choking on a screw from his own air purifier, in the safest room on Earth, while eating the blandest food known to man. His last thought, probably, was "Well, *that* wasn't in the manual."