Flashback: Three Months Ago
She remembered that night, three months ago.
He was slouched on the couch, flipping through some ad forum while half-watching TV.
"Didn't you write something called meta…something? That proposal?"
"Mind if I use it for reference?"
She didn't say anything. Just nodded.
He chuckled and kept scrolling.
"This idea's kind of interesting… but your ending's way too aggressive. I'll tweak it a bit."
At the time, she didn't realize—
he wasn't just tweaking the ending.
He rewrote the name, the context, and the authorship.
He erased her—entirely.
When she opened the final PDF later, she saw the tagline she'd written had been replaced.
Rewritten into something more "neutral."
And then she got it.
He wasn't dismissing her copy.
He was afraid her sharpness might bleed through and cut the client.
He liked her softer.
More agreeable.
More… normal.
"Like one of my coworkers said, you'd be better off doing lifestyle content.
Strategy's too much for someone like you."
That moment felt like a verdict.
He never knew her memory was disturbingly sharp.
Every time he muttered, "That's not important,"
every deleted file she quietly copied from his laptop,
the day he built a pitch deck off her draft,
She remembered all of it.
She wasn't trying to win.
She just didn't want him to stay the same.
That lukewarm, reasonable, well-adjusted man—
as harmless as warm water, and just as capable of drowning her.
The man who stole fire and still had the nerve to say:
"You're overreacting."
Her leaving wasn't disappearing.
It was a calculation.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
She knew society would call it "crazy."
But she no longer needed society's language to define her.
She wasn't Aria Lin, a 35-year-old female ex-UX strategist at a Tokyo agency anymore.
She was a free variable.
An unlabelled anomaly.
A packet of Error 404: Not Found in your system.
She sat at the edge of a love hotel's projection bathtub,
typing out one final command:
Detonation Time: September 1st, 08:45 a.m.
Anonymous Email: scheduled
Twitter Auto-post: scheduled
Hook Text: "Who really made Metamind? Let's talk truth."
September 1st, 2:30 p.m. Breakroom
Yuji had just finished making a cup of instant latte when his phone started buzzing nonstop.
Slack notifications piling up.
He opened Twitter.
A headline smacked him in the face:
#Metamind #PlagiarismGate #CreditControversy
His company was tagged.
He was tagged.
His LinkedIn profile had already been screencapped into a four-tile meme under the viral thread.
A blog link was being spammed across every channel.
It was a blog post, elegantly brutal.
Title: "The Metamind Draft Was Never Yours"
It opened with a timeline,
complete with IP addresses, edit history, and time stamps.
Then:
Visual comparisons.
Original sketches.
Pitch framework diagrams.
Three forwarded emails.
30 images + a registry record.
No cursing.
No theatrics.
Just clean, devastating precision.
"April 3, 2015, the name first appeared in my chat with Yuji."
"May 27, I sent an unread draft PDF."
"August 15, I discovered his agency intended to pitch a version with 80% overlap."
She even included the similarity index diagram.
Yuji's pupils dilated.
The coffee in his mouth almost choked him.
First thought: Who did this?
Second: Someone's sabotaging me.
Third: …Aria?
He didn't dare confirm it.
The comments were already on fire:
"So this is how the ad world eats now? Your girlfriend makes the deck, and you just copy-paste?"
"This isn't theft, it's postmodern parasitism. Nice try, bro."
"Yuji, stop pretending, your face is all over this."
HR Meeting, 5:00 p.m.
He was called into a meeting room by HR.
The rep wore rimless glasses. Spoke like a weather report.
"The client has emailed, requesting clarification on the 'creative origin.'"
"Online discussions are impacting brand risk. We recommend you avoid public statements for now."
The air felt suffocatingly still.
As he stepped into the hallway, two younger colleagues walked past, then slowed, whispering:
"…It's him?"
A laugh.
Like a needle.
Yuji's face went pale.
He didn't speak.
For the hundredth time, he opened WeChat.
Aria's avatar was grayed out.
No reads. No replies.
Texts unanswered. Emails bounced.
Then suddenly he remembered.
He grabbed his bag and ran to her old apartment.
The building looked like a yellowed newspaper.
He rang the bell.
No answer.
A white paper was taped to the door:
"Unit under management cleaning. Do not enter."
Bilingual. Neat.
She came. She lived.
She erased herself.
The lock had been changed.
Even her black canvas sneakers were gone.
She was like a playing card pulled from the bottom of a deck,
No noise, but the entire stack collapsed.
Late Night
Yuji sat on the carpet in the dark.
No ceiling lights.
Only the glow of a single screen.
He scrolled through the comment section of the blog post.
And then he saw it, the most liked comment:
"A crazy person doesn't schedule delayed posts.
Doesn't back up three sets of evidence.
Doesn't factory-reset their phone, quit social media, cancel leases, and vanish."
"She's not crazy.
She just left."
It finally sank in.
She hadn't screamed.
Hadn't broken down.
Hadn't used emotion as a weapon.
She simply launched him, his persona, his labels, his polished little image,
into a shredder disguised as a blog post.
No echo.
No warning.
He suddenly thought of her old notebook—the one she never lost.
He pulled it out and flipped to the back.
On the inside cover, a single pen line:
"I'm not trying to win.
I'm just trying to be remembered."
He stared at it for a long time.
In silence.