The office smelled like recycled air and broken dreams.
Darren Nova sat in a white leather chair—the expensive kind that cost more than his monthly rent and tried to remember if he'd done anything particularly wrong in the last quarter. Filed his reports late? No. Missed a deadline? Also no. Told Jenkins from Accounting that his tie looked like a screaming geometry problem?
Okay, yes, but that was three months ago.
"He couldn't possibly still hold a grudge?"
Across the frosted glass desk, Margaret Chen from Human Resources, she hadn't looked up from her tablet once. Her manicured finger swiped through what Darren assumed was his personnel file with the casual disinterest of someone scrolling through a takeout menu. Behind her, the floor to ceiling windows viewed downtown Seattle in all its fucking glory, the Space Needle barely visible through the morning fog.
"Mr. Nova," Margaret said, her voice carrying the practiced sympathy of someone who'd done this exact conversation forty seven times this quarter. "Thank you for meeting with me on such short notice."
Short notice. Right. The invite had arrived at 8:47 AM with the subject line: "Quick Chat - Your Future at Axiom." Darren had been halfway through his second coffee when his stomach dropped. Everyone knew what "Quick Chat" meant, It was corporate speak for "we're dumping you, but we'll pretend this is a mutual conversation."
"Sure," Darren said, aiming for nonchalant and landing somewhere near nauseous. "What's up?"
Margaret's eyes finally lifted from the screen. They were brown, perfectly pleasant and completely empty of anything resembling human warmth. She tapped twice on her tablet, and a holographic display came to life above the desk. Charts, graphs, bell curves in red and green, all of them, Darren noticed with growing dread, had his name at the top.
"As you know, Axiom Technologies prides itself on maintaining an optimized workplace culture," Margaret began, her words flowing with the rehearsed quality of a script she'd memorized.
"We've been utilizing Harmonia—our proprietary AI-driven personnel analytics platform—to ensure every team member aligns with our core values of collaboration, positivity and sustainable productivity."
Darren's jaw tightened, he'd heard about Harmonia, everyone had. The system that monitored "Slack" messages for tone, the algorithm that tracked how long you spent in the break room, the software that somehow knew when you were faking enthusiasm in morning stand ups.
"Okay.." he said slowly. "And?"
Margaret gestured to the hologram, a red line zigzagged across a grid like a chart reading of someone having a particularly bad day. "Your emotional volatility scores show a 23% variance from company culture benchmarks over the last six months."
"My... what?"
"Emotional volatility." She said it like it was a perfectly reasonable metric to use on a human being. "Additionally, your sarcasm frequency disrupts team cohesion metrics by an average of 8.7 interactions per week, your contributions to the general Slack channel demonstrate a pattern of—" she paused, checking her notes, "—'ironic detachment that undermines collective morale.'"
It all sounded like bullshit.
Darren blinked. Once. Twice. "So let me get this straight, you're firing me because I'm sarcastic?"
"We're transitioning your role because your personality matrix is statistically incompatible with Axiom's cultural optimization targets." Margaret tapped her tablet again and the hologram disappeared. "Your severance package includes two weeks' pay, continued health coverage through the end of the month, and access to our career transition resources."
Two weeks. Darren did the math instantly: $2,000, rent was $1,200, Student loans were $400, that left $400 for food, utilities and the increasingly slim hope that the universe wasn't actively conspiring against him.
"This is insane," he said, though even as the words left his mouth, he knew they wouldn't matter. Margaret had already moved on, mentally at least, her finger hovered over the tablet, ready to swipe to the next poor bastard on her termination list.
"Security will escort you to collect your personal items," she said, standing. The meeting was over. "We wish you the best in your future endeavors, Darren."
The walk back to his desk felt like a death march.
It was only forty seven steps—Yes, he had counted them once during a particularly boring Tuesday—but today each one stretched into an eternity. His coworkers, brilliant software engineers who could debug legacy code in their sleep, suddenly became fascinated with their monitors. Eyes darted away, Conversations died mid-sentence, someone in the next row over actually turned their chair to face the wall.
The security guard, a big guy named Luis who'd always nodded politely at Darren in the lobby, now stood three paces behind him like a bouncer waiting for trouble.
Darren's desk was exactly as he'd left it twenty minutes ago: cluttered, cramped and decorated with the bare minimum of personality required to prove he was a human and not another instance of the company's optimization algorithms. He grabbed the cardboard box that had been sitting under his desk, still labeled "FRAGILE: SERVER COMPONENTS" from the IT department and started loading his life into it.
A chipped coffee mug with "World's Okayest Developer" printed on the side. A gift from his ex-girlfriend, back when they'd both thought his career trajectory was going somewhere other than straight into a dumpster.
A framed photo of his college friends at Pike Place Market, all of them grinning like idiots, arms slung over each other's shoulders. That was five years ago, he couldn't remember the last time any of them had texted him back.
A foam stress ball shaped like a brain, he'd never actually used it, the irony wasn't lost on him now.
"That everything?" Luis asked, his voice gentler than Darren expected.
"Yeah," Darren said. "That's everything."
As he walked past the rows of identical cubicles desk, past the motivational posters that screamed "INNOVATE!" and "DISRUPT!" in aggressive sans-serif fonts, Darren realized something: nobody would remember him. In a week, his desk would be reassigned. In a month, his login credentials would be removed from the system. In a year, he'd be nothing but a data point in Harmonia's vast database, a cautionary tale of what happens when your personality metrics doesn't align.
The elevator doors closed and Darren Nova became unemployed.
His apartment was a shoebox.
That wasn't self deprecation, but architectural fact. Three hundred square feet in the University District, carved out of what used to be a storage closet in a building that predated zoning laws, the "kitchen" was a hot plate and a mini-fridge, the "bathroom" required strategic body positioning to close the door, the "bedroom" was wherever he decided to unfold the futon(bed).
Rent: $1,200 a month. Why? Because Seattle.
Darren dropped the cardboard box by the door and collapsed onto the futon. The springs groaned in protest, everything in his life groaned in protest lately.
His laptop—a six year old Dell that sounded like a jet engine whenever he opened more than three tabs—sat on the folding table that served as his desk, dining table and general headquarters. He flipped it open and created a new spreadsheet.
FINANCIAL APOCALYPSE - Q4 EDITION
Income:
- Severance: $2,000
- Savings: $340
- Loose change in jacket pocket: $2.73
- Total: $2,342.73
Expenses:
- Rent: $1,200
- Student Loans: $400 (minimum payment, because the full amount would require him to sell a kidney)
- Utilities: $80
- Phone: $50
- Food: $200 (if he got really creative with ramen)
- Total: $1,930
Surplus: $412.73
Days until eviction if he didn't find another job: 17.
Darren stared at the numbers, the red cells glowed like warning lights on a sinking ship. He'd been so careful, No eating out, No subscriptions, No life basically and still, somehow, the math didn't math.
His phone buzzed, a notification from LinkedIn: "Congratulations! You've appeared in 12 searches this week."
Twelve searches. Zero messages, the algorithm was mocking him now.
Another buzz, an email from Axiom's automated system: "Your access to company resources has been revoked. Please return any company property within 48 hours."
Company property, he glanced at the chipped mug, did that count? Was Margaret going to send a SWAT team to retrieve a $4 piece of ceramic?
Darren laughed. It came out bitter and dry, echoing in the tiny apartment. "Well," he muttered to the empty room, "at least my personality is statistically significant, that's something for the tombstone."
He leaned back on the futon, closing his eyes. Maybe if he slept for sixteen hours, he'd wake up and discover this was all some elaborate prank. Maybe—
His vision glitched.
Not his eyesight. His actual vision, reality flickered like a corrupted video game and suddenly there were words floating in the air in front of him. Golden text, crisp and bright in a font he'd never seen before.
[GOLDSCRIPT PROTOCOL: SCANNING...]
Darren's breathing slowed, he blinked hard but the text remained.
[USER: NOVA, DARREN - STATUS: ACUTE LIQUIDITY CRISIS]
[ANALYZING SKILL SET...]
[CALCULATING OPTIMIZATION PATHWAYS...]
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION: 3%]
"What the hell.."
The golden text pulsed, lines of code scrolling past faster than he could read. His heart was hammering against his ribs, this wasn't real, this couldn't be real. He'd finally snapped, too much stress, too little sleep and his brain had decided to blue screen in the most elaborate way possible.
But the text kept loading.
[PROTOCOL MATCH FOUND]
[ENTREPRENEURIAL APTITUDE: 67%]
[DESPERATION INDEX: 94%]
[INITIATING BOOTSTRAP SEQUENCE...]
The apartment lights flickered, his laptop screen went dark then blazed back to life, displaying lines of code he hadn't written. The numbers on his budget spreadsheet began rearranging themselves, shifting and multiplying like they had a mind of their own.
And then, just as suddenly as it started, everything stopped.
The golden text hung in the air, a single prompt blinking like a cursor waiting for input:
[WELCOME TO THE GOLDSCRIPT PROTOCOL]
[WOULD YOU LIKE TO START A BUSINESS?]
**[YES] / [NO]**
Darren stared at the impossible question hovering in his vision.
Seventeen days until eviction.
$412.73 in the bank.
And apparently, a hallucination offering him a way out.
"...Yes?" he said aloud, his voice cracking.
The text flared up.
[EXCELLENT CHOICE]
[GENERATING STARTUP PARAMETERS...]
[LOADING...]
And Darren Nova's life stopped being ordinary.