My boss had been talking for forty-three minutes.
I knew this because I had spent the first ten minutes pretending to take notes, the next eleven calculating how much of my life he had wasted over the last three years, and the remaining twenty-two watching the second hand on the conference room clock crawl toward freedom.
"The key," he said, pointing at a slide covered in arrows, circles, and words that had almost certainly been generated by throwing business terminology into a blender, "is to leverage our proactive synergies and create a disruptive, client-centered paradigm."
Everyone around the table nodded.
The woman from accounting had been staring at the same blank page for half an hour. The marketing intern's eyes had stopped focusing. Yamato from sales wore the peaceful expression of a man whose soul had already left his body.
But we all nodded.
That was what good employees did when exposed to managerial nonsense.
Meanwhile, I dreamed of the day our boss's head might spontaneously explode from the pressure of containing so much strategic innovation.
"Are we aligned on this, Kotaka?"
Every face turned toward me.
I looked at the slide.
INTEGRATED VALUE OPTIMIZATION THROUGH CUSTOMER-FOCUSED VERTICALITY
Underneath it was a stock photo of five people stacking their hands together.
One of those hands had six fingers.
"Yes," I said solemnly. "Completely aligned."
My boss narrowed his eyes. "And what would you say is the principal takeaway?"
That the company should stop paying for presentation software until someone learns how to use it.
I leaned forward and folded my hands.
"We must avoid approaching the issue horizontally."
Silence.
My boss stared at me.
The accounting woman's pen stopped moving despite the fact that it had not been moving in the first place.
Then my boss's eyebrows rose.
"Exactly."
A fresh wave of nodding traveled around the table.
I nodded with them, privately astonished that my mouth had once again committed fraud.
My boss turned back to the presentation. "That is precisely the kind of strategic awareness we need going forward."
I am the greatest office worker alive.
The meeting continued for another seventeen minutes.
By the end, we had agreed to maximize something, streamline something else, and create a task force to determine why the previous task force had failed to create a task force. Nobody had received an actual assignment. Nobody knew what our company's new strategy was.
Productivity had been achieved.
I was almost through the conference room door when my boss spoke.
"Kotaka. Could you stay for a moment?"
Every instinct in my body screamed.
Yamato passed beside me and placed one hand on my shoulder. His eyes carried the sympathy normally reserved for terminal diagnoses.
"Your sacrifice will be remembered," he whispered.
Traitor.
I sat across from my boss while the conference room emptied.
He took off his glasses and cleaned them with a folded cloth.
"Kotaka," he began, "you have been with us for three years."
"Three years, four months, and twelve days."
He paused.
I smiled politely.
Not that I have been counting.
"You have always been a reliable employee," he continued. "Punctual. Adaptable. Highly effective under pressure."
A spark of hope appeared.
Perhaps I was getting promoted.
Perhaps they had finally recognized my talents.
"However," he said.
The spark died.
"Due to the company's ongoing restructuring initiative, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate your position."
I stared at him.
He stared back.
Behind him, the six-fingered stock-photo hand remained frozen on the projector screen, as if offering me one additional finger with which to express my feelings.
"Eliminate," I repeated.
"Yes."
"My position."
"Yes."
"After you said I was exactly the kind of strategically aware person the company needed going forward."
His face remained impressively still.
"The restructuring is not related to your performance."
Of course not. Why would employment be related to performance?
He pushed a white envelope across the table.
Inside were my termination papers and a severance package whose generosity could best be described as legally adequate.
"We greatly appreciate your contributions."
"You're firing me."
"We prefer the term transitioning."
"And I'm being transitioned into unemployment."
His left eyelid twitched.
"Yes."
There it was.
Three years, four months, twelve days, and one hour of unpaid overtime reduced to a white envelope and corporate vocabulary.
I should have shouted. I should have flipped the table. I should have used the projector cable to create an integrated, client-centered noose.
Instead, I bowed.
"Thank you for the opportunity."
My boss visibly relaxed.
Then I collected the pastries left over from the meeting.
He watched me stack six wrapped cakes, four sandwiches, and an untouched carton of orange juice in my bag.
"Those are company property," he said.
"I'm transitioning them."
His mouth opened.
I bowed again and left before he could optimize my face with security personnel.
The cardboard box containing my belongings was light enough to carry under one arm. A mug. Two pens. A phone charger. A tiny plastic cactus Yamato had given me.
I stepped out of the office building into the evening rush and stood among hundreds of people who still had jobs.
Wonderful.
My rent was due in nine days. My savings could carry me for perhaps two months if I ate carefully and canceled every subscription I owned. Maybe three, if I learned how to photosynthesize.
Still, I wasn't completely doomed.
My girlfriend, Mina, had a stable job. We shared a tiny apartment with one bedroom, a bathroom that required strategic breathing, and a kitchen so narrow that opening the refrigerator blocked the front door.
But it was ours.
We would talk. We would cut expenses. We would make it work.
This is fine.
I boarded the subway and found a space between an elderly man asleep on his feet and a schoolgirl fighting a mobile game boss with an intense grimace.
My cardboard box rested against my shoes.
The train lurched forward.
I took out my phone and checked my bank account.
The number remained the same.
I refreshed it.
Still the same.
Apparently, money did not multiply when I stared at it.
I opened a job-hunting site instead. Every listing wanted five years of experience, three programming languages, two professional certifications, and "a go-getter attitude toward overtime."
I had twenty minutes before my stop.
That was when the advertisement appeared.
It filled my screen with a black sky, a burning city, and a silver title.
AGE OF CIVILIZATIONS
Beneath it, armies clashed across a landscape rendered with absurd detail. Elves fired arrows from a crumbling wall. Stone giants marched through volleys of magic. A dragon rolled over a castle and flattened three towers with the casual inconvenience of someone turning over in bed.
A narrator spoke in a deep voice through my earbuds.
"Rule them. Guide them. Save them. Or watch them perish because of your incompetence."
I frowned.
"That feels unnecessarily personal."
The video shifted to a peaceful village populated by tiny, realistic people.
CREATE A LIVING CIVILIZATION WITH NEXT-GENERATION ADAPTIVE AI.
EVERY CITIZEN THINKS.
EVERY CITIZEN FEELS.
EVERY CITIZEN REMEMBERS.
The game had been appearing all over the internet for weeks. Streamers claimed its artificial intelligence was unlike anything they had ever seen. Characters formed relationships, betrayed each other, invented new technologies, founded religions, overthrew governments, and occasionally became obsessed with building chairs.
No one knew who had developed it.
The publisher was listed simply as Pantheon Interactive.
I tapped download.
Age of Civilizations installed in seven seconds.
The app opened.
I still couldn't log in. A small banner warned that the beta servers were about to reset.
The screen went completely black. No company logo. No loading bar. Only my own reflection staring back at me.
Then silver text appeared.
I raised an eyebrow.
The first question appeared.
A. Fight with honor.
B. Protect the innocent.
C. Develop a clever strategy.
D. Leave.
I tapped C.
The next question replaced it immediately.
A. Challenge the beast.
B. Negotiate with the beast.
C. Gather allies.
D. Determine whether the beast pays taxes.
I hesitated.
Then tapped D.
A. Give them everything.
B. Divide the food equally.
C. Search for more food.
D. Sell the food at market value and reinvest the proceeds into agricultural infrastructure.
I tapped D.
A pause followed.
Longer than before.
"Hey."
A woman across from me glanced up.
I lowered my voice.
"That last one was… hurtful."
The screen ignored me.
I had not selected anything.
The silver letters dissolved. A rotating wheel appeared, flashing through silhouettes of different species.
Humans.
Elves.
Dwarves.
Orcs.
Lizardfolk.
Celestials.
Demons.
The wheel slowed.
It clicked past Dragonkin.
Past High Elves.
Past something labeled Abyssal Devourers.
It stopped.
A pair of triangular ears appeared on the silhouette.
I stared.
"Cats?"
The screen brightened.
Clouds parted beneath my viewpoint. I descended through a pale blue sky toward a green valley surrounded by jagged mountains.
The graphical quality was absurd.
Individual leaves trembled in the wind. Sunlight reflected from a stream. Birds scattered from the branches as the viewpoint swept over them. I could even see insects floating above wildflowers.
At the valley's center stood a village.
Calling it a village was generous.
There were twelve wooden huts, a crooked palisade, three vegetable plots, one well, and a building that looked like a temple.
Figures rushed into the open as shadows appeared above them.
Cats fell from the sky. Cat-people.
They had human bodies, human faces, and mostly human features, except for the soft triangular ears on top of their heads and long tails extending behind them. Some landed on their feet. Others landed in bushes. One struck a roof, bounced twice, and vanished through the temple's ceiling.
A moment later, his voice emerged from inside.
"I'm alive!"
I brought the phone closer.
There had to be thousands of animation cycles involved. Every person moved differently, clothes and ears and tails all doing their own thing.
One man landed in a crouch, looked around, and immediately tried to act as though he had meant to do that.
An older woman fell into a hay pile. Only her legs remained visible.
Two children dropped beside the well, clung to each other.
One looked at the other.
"Again!"
"No!" shouted an adult.
A golden marker appeared over a young woman near the temple.
She looked to be in her early twenties, with long white hair, blue eyes, and matching white ears. Her clothes had once been elegant, but the hem of her pale dress was torn and stained. A slim silver circlet sat crookedly on her head.
She rose from one knee and looked up.
Her eyes met mine through the screen.
A speech bubble appeared beside her.
The villagers turned toward her.
A broad-shouldered man with orange ears looked at the collapsed temple roof.
From the hay pile came a muffled voice.
The princess clasped her hands before her chest.
Her tail had puffed out to nearly twice its normal size, but her face remained dignified.
Taro looked around.
The villagers' ears drooped.
A panel slid open on the side of the screen.
I stared at the last two lines.
"Who wrote this?"
The princess knelt before the ruined temple.
Her stomach growled.
The princess's ears slowly folded sideways.
A glowing prompt appeared.
Below it was smaller text.
There it was. Anything free during a tutorial became devastatingly expensive the moment the tutorial ended.
Still, thirty-seven starving cat-people were staring hopefully at the sky.
I tapped the screen.
A circle of golden light appeared above the village.
The villagers gasped.
Sacks fell from the clouds.
One landed perfectly in the center of the village square.
Another bounced off Taro's head.
He crumpled.
Three villagers ran to him.
"Taro!"
His hand emerged from beneath the sack, thumb raised.
"Divine methods," he croaked, "are beyond mortal understanding."
The bags split open, spilling grain, dried fish, salt, and beans across the square.
The entire village froze.
Then chaos erupted.
People cheered. Children danced. Two elderly men hugged each other. Farmer Mira finally extracted herself from the hay pile and sprinted toward the food.
Princess Nyara remained on her knees.
Tears filled her eyes.
The celebratory noise faded.
She bent low until her forehead touched the dirt.
A tremor went through the villagers.
One after another, they knelt.
Thirty-seven people bowed toward me.
My thumb hovered above the screen.
I knew they were artificial.
But I could see the relief on their faces. The tears. The fear slowly leaving their bodies. A little boy clutched a dried fish to his chest like the most precious object in the world.
"Headaches?"
The panel vanished before I could read it again.
I tapped one of the villagers.
The screen zoomed in on the little boy holding the dried fish.
I tapped the orange-eared guard.
I tapped Farmer Mira, who was shaking straw from her clothing.
I pulled the phone back and moved across the village, tapping at random.
A carpenter was worried there was not enough wood to repair the palisade. A teenage girl secretly disliked dried fish but feared this opinion might be offensive. An elderly priest wondered whether my divine symbol should be a paw, an eye, or a half-eaten bird.
I tapped him again.
Conversations continued even when I moved the camera away.
Meanwhile, Princess Nyara organized the supplies.
"We must ration everything," she said. "The grain should last twelve days if we supplement it with foraging."
A red symbol began pulsing over the palisade.
I tapped it.
A tooltip appeared beneath the last entry.
The villagers had begun discussing the same dangers.
"The wolves will search for survivors," Taro said.
A hush fell over the square.
Several people clutched their children closer.
Princess Nyara's expression tightened. "They cannot know where we landed."
"They followed us across three provinces," Mira said. "If they find this valley—"
"They won't," the princess interrupted.
She spoke firmly, but her tail curled around her ankle.
I tapped her.
Her face remained calm while thirty-six frightened people looked to her for certainty.
A notification appeared.
Three icons appeared.
I stared at the third option.
The icon was shaped like a pink paw.
I tapped it.
The ability icon pulsed.
The screen highlighted a dead tree stump near the village.
I glanced around again.
I pointed one finger at the stump.
Quietly, I muttered, "Tap tap nyan."
My eye twitched.
I raised my voice slightly.
"Tap Tap Nyan."
The train announced my station.
The doors opened.
People surged around me.
I grabbed the cardboard box and allowed myself to be carried onto the platform before I could see whether the skill had worked.
By the time I escaped the station, my phone had slipped into my pocket.
My thoughts returned to practical matters.
Rent.
Food.
Job applications.
Mina.
She would be surprised to see me home early. Maybe we could order something cheap and talk. She would be angry on my behalf. She would call my boss an idiot.
We would be all right.
This is merely a temporary setback.
I climbed the stairs to our apartment.
The building elevator had been broken for six months. The landlord claimed he was "waiting on a specialized component," though I suspected the specialized component was money he did not want to spend.
I unlocked the door.
Then I stopped.
The apartment looked wrong.
Mina's shoes were gone from the entrance.
The framed photo beside the television was missing.
So was the small lamp she had bought when we moved in. Half the kitchen utensils had vanished. The potted plant from the windowsill was gone.
A suitcase stood beside the sofa.
Mina stepped out of the bedroom.
She froze.
Her face went through three different emotions in under two seconds.
Surprise.
Panic.
Guilt.
Then the rigid determination of someone who had already rehearsed an argument.
"Kotaka?"
I set the box down.
"Last time I checked."
"What are you doing home?"
"I live here."
"That isn't what I meant."
Her eyes dropped to the cardboard box.
Understanding flickered across her face.
"You're home early."
"I was transitioned."
"What?"
"Fired."
She closed her eyes.
For one brief, foolish second, I thought she might come over and hug me.
Instead, she looked at the suitcase.
"This would have been easier if you had come home later."
I glanced again at the missing objects.
The gaps on the shelves.
The empty hooks.
The half-cleared closet visible behind her.
My brain placed the pieces together one at a time.
"How much later?" I asked.
Mina folded her arms.
"Can we not do this?"
"I don't know what this is yet."
Her jaw tightened. Then she exhaled.
"I met someone."
I looked at the suitcase.
"How long ago?"
"Kotaka."
"How long?"
"Four months."
While we ate dinner together.
While we watched movies.
"I didn't want it to happen," she said.
"That must have made scheduling difficult."
Her expression hardened. "This is exactly why I couldn't talk to you."
"Because I make observations?"
"Because you turn everything into a joke."
That is unfair. Sometimes I also turn things into grudges.
She gripped the strap of her bag.
"He understands me."
"Does he?"
"Yes."
"Did he understand you were in a relationship?"
She looked away.
That answered that.
"He makes me feel complete," she said.
The sentence floated between us.
Somewhere outside, a dog barked.
I looked down at myself as if checking for missing components.
"I wasn't aware you came in sections."
"This is serious."
"I am being serious. Which part did he complete? Was it the part responsible for honesty?"
A vein appeared near her temple.
"I didn't want to hurt you," she said.
"You packed the good frying pan."
"You never cook."
"I could have started."
"You burned instant noodles."
Mina pinched the bridge of her nose.
For a moment, we stood in our tiny living room among the visible holes her life had left in mine.
I had lost my job less than two hours ago. Now the woman I had planned to rely on was leaving with our lamp, our plant, the expensive frying pan, and apparently most of the bathroom towels.
It was almost impressive.
Life had not merely kicked me while I was down.
It had checked my pockets afterward.
"I already moved most of my things," Mina said more quietly. "I'll send someone for the rest."
"Someone?"
"You don't know him."
"I assume he's the completion specialist."
Her lips pressed into a thin line.
She picked up the suitcase.
"I'll transfer my share of this month's rent."
She walked toward the door.
For half a heartbeat, she paused beside me.
"I really am sorry."
The door closed.
Her footsteps faded down the hall.
I remained standing in the middle of the apartment.
The refrigerator hummed.
The wall clock ticked.
I looked at the cardboard box from work.
Then at the empty shelf.
Then at the door.
Well.
My life had achieved remarkable efficiency.
In one afternoon, every stable part of it had been eliminated.
No job.
No girlfriend.
Half a kitchen.
Even the healthy plant had chosen her.
I walked to the window.
Below, Mina emerged from the building, dragging her suitcase behind her. A black luxury car waited at the curb.
The driver's door opened.
A man stepped out.
Tall. Expensive coat. Carefully styled hair.
Of course.
It would have been too merciful if the other man were ugly, unemployed, and living inside an overturned refrigerator.
He smiled at Mina.
She smiled back.
Then he took her suitcase and placed it in the trunk.
I watched from the fifth floor as he opened the passenger door for her.
Look at that posture. That completely unpunched face.
My phone vibrated.
I ignored it.
The man walked around to the driver's side.
My phone vibrated again.
I pulled it out.
Age of Civilizations remained open.
I looked from the phone to the luxury car.
The man climbed inside.
Mina sat beside him.
Through the windshield, I saw them turn toward each other.
He leaned closer.
My eyebrow twitched.
The pink paw icon pulsed.
A stupid thought entered my mind.
I pointed at the car.
With all the dignity available to a newly unemployed, newly single man standing alone in a half-empty apartment, I said,
"Tap Tap Nyan."
The air above the street split open.
Reality tore with the sound of fabric being ripped by a very large and deeply irritated tailor.
A gigantic cat paw emerged from the distortion.
It was translucent, golden, and wider than the car.
Pink pads glowed beneath it.
For one second, the paw hovered in the air.
My former girlfriend looked up through the windshield.
The rich man followed her gaze.
His jaw dropped so far that medical intervention seemed needed.
The paw descended.
WHAM.
The front of the luxury car collapsed.
The hood folded. The engine block smashed into the pavement. Both front tires burst at once, firing hubcaps in opposite directions.
The alarm began screaming.
The windshield remained intact.
So did the passenger compartment.
Then it vanished.
Silence lasted half a second.
Mina and the man erupted from the car.
She stumbled onto the sidewalk, shrieking and pointing at the sky. He threw himself out of the driver's side, tripped over the curb, rolled across the pavement.
The car alarm continued screaming.
Lights came on in nearby apartments.
Windows opened.
A cyclist swerved into a hedge.
An old woman across the street leaned over her balcony and shouted, "I told you people the cats were organizing!"
I stood at my window with one finger still extended.
My mind emptied.
Completely.
I slowly lowered my hand.
Below, Mina looked up.
Our eyes met.
Her face was pale.
My phone chimed.
I looked down.
Notifications began stacking so quickly they covered the entire screen.
Another window appeared.
I stared at the words.
"My paw?"
Another notification appeared.
"Then why did you let me do it?"
"That is a terrible policy."
The screen flashed red.
A low tone sounded from the phone.
A crimson map spread across the screen.
At its center was a blue dot.
My apartment.
Three red circles converged around it.
The blood drained from my face.
A final notification appeared.