Kenji (Narrator): I died optimizing a spreadsheet that nobody else cared about. It was 11 47 PM on a Tuesday. The fluorescent lights of the server room hummed with a sound that drilled into the base of my skull. I wasn't thinking about my family. I wasn't thinking about the girlfriend who left me because I process emotions like a compiler. I was thinking about the fiscal year projections.
Kenji (Narrator): My coworker Gary treated data like finger-painting he hard-coded values into a formula that required dynamic arrays it was an atrocity it was sloppy I hit F9 to force a recalculation and my chest tightened.
Kenji (Narrator): [gasp] It wasn't a sudden pain. It was a collapsing variable. My heart fluttered... a butterfly trapped in a jar... and then stopped. As I slumped forward the screen didn't fade to black. It flashed white. A dialogue box popped up in the center of the abyss.
System: Microsoft Excel is not responding.
Kenji (Narrator): My last conscious thought wasn't fear. It was a cold jagged spike of fury. The data was still dirty. The equilibrium was unresolved. I was dying with a circular reference error in my soul. I didn't float away. I fell. I fell through the floor through the earth through the code of the universe. I fell into the Grid.
Liora: Wake up!
Kenji: [groan] [cough]
Kenji (Narrator): The voice was sharp. Grating. I gasped. Inhaling air that didn't smell of ozone and stale coffee. It tasted of iron rust. Wet hay. And horse manure. I opened my eyes. I wasn't in my cubicle. I was lying on cold uneven stone in a cavernous space that stretched upward into darkness. Sunlight stabbed through high narrow windows illuminating dust motes that danced in the air like unorganized data points.
Kenji (Narrator): I sat up. My suit was gone. I was wearing a rough tunic made of some itchy burlap-like material. But I didn't just see the room. I saw the structure. It was faint at first. A translucent lattice overlaid reality. Thin glowing green lines bisected the floor the walls the crates stacked around me. The world was divided into cells. And it was a mess.
Liora: Are you deaf peasant?
Kenji (Narrator): I looked up. A girl stood over me. She looked to be about eighteen encased in polished silver armor. Her face was contorted in a mixture of fear and adrenaline. To anyone else she would have looked like a desperate warrior princess. To me? She looked like a variable.
System: Entity: Princess Liora. Class: Active Variable. Status: Sub-optimal. Panicked.
Kenji: [clear throat] Princess? You're loud. Noise. Is. Inefficient.
Liora: Inefficient? [gasp] The Northern Gate is breached! Goblins are slaughtering my patrol! The Quartermaster says we have no weapons yet this room is full. Find me swords or I'll cut you down for incompetence!
Kenji (Narrator): I looked past her sword. The warehouse was a disaster. Thousands of crates barrels sacks of grain and piles of loose spears were heaped in chaotic mounds. It looked like a hoarder's mind turned inside out. There were no aisles. No labels. No logic. Entropy. It made my teeth ache. This wasn't just a messy room. It was a database with no primary key.
Kenji: The Quartermaster isn't incompetent. He's unstructured.
Kenji (Narrator): I walked past her. She swung the sword to block me but I stepped to the side... into the adjacent cell on the floor grid... and she missed. I walked to a massive leather-bound ledger resting on a rotting wooden podium. I touched the page. I didn't read the ink. I felt the data. It rushed into my mind a stream of raw dirty inputs. It felt like drinking sludge.
System: Row 402: Sword... Iron... maybe? Row 403: VALUE Error. Row 404: Missing Reference.
Kenji: Garbage. The data integrity is zero.
Liora: My men are dying out there! There are fifty crates of iron longswords in this room. Somewhere! Find them! Now!
Kenji (Narrator): I looked at her. I should have felt pity. I should have felt fear. But the analyst in me took over. She was an emotional variable. Creating noise. I needed a clean signal.
Kenji: Stand back. I'm going to sort the reality.
Liora: Sort? It will take hours to move this!
Kenji: I don't need to move it. I need to query it.
Kenji (Narrator): I raised my hand. I didn't chant. I focused on the green grid lines overlaying the room. I reached out with my mind and seized the concept of the space. Select All. The air shimmered. A heavy humming vibration filled the warehouse like a high-tension wire about to snap. The green grid lines flared turning from faint translucent overlays into hard neon boundaries. The entire room... every crate every barrel every speck of dust... was suddenly enclosed in a selection box. The edges of the room pulsed with the marching ants of a selected range.
Liora: What magic is this? It feels... cold.
Kenji: It's logic.
Kenji (Narrator): I saw the Ribbon in my mind. Home. Insert. Page Layout. Formulas. Data. I mentally clicked the Data tab. I looked at the mountain of trash. I didn't want to dig through it. Digging was manual labor. Digging was inefficient. I wanted to delete the noise.
Kenji: Command: Filter.
Kenji (Narrator): A gray downward-pointing triangle appeared floating above the concept of Inventory. I focused on the criteria. Criteria 1: Material equals Iron. Criteria 2: Category equals Sword. Criteria 3: Condition greater than 50%.
Kenji: Hide.
Kenji (Narrator): I snapped my fingers. Vrrr! Thwack! The sound wasn't magical. It was the sound of the universe slamming shut. It was the sound of air rushing into a vacuum. Reality folded. The piles of junk didn't vanish into smoke. They were forcibly compressed folded into the hidden rows of existence between the dimensions. The space they occupied collapsed. The floor literally rippled the stone tiles sliding under one another like a deck of cards being shuffled by a giant.
Liora: [gasp] I... I can't breathe!
Kenji: It's just the hidden rows. Don't look at the seams.
Kenji (Narrator): In less than a second the warehouse was empty. The thousands of tons of garbage were gone. Hidden. Filtered out of the view. Except for one stack of crates. They hovered in the center of the room suspended in the air where they had been buried deep beneath the piles of junk. They glowed with a harsh white light.
Liora: Where... Did you banish them to the Void? Is this necromancy?
Kenji: I filtered the view. The rest is just hidden. Irrelevant data.
Kenji (Narrator): I reached the stack. I ripped the lid off the top crate. Inside packed in straw were pristine iron longswords. Oiled. Sharp. Lethal.
Kenji: Here. Fifty units. Iron. High durability. Why are you still standing there?
Liora: Who are you?
Kenji: Kenji Sato. I'm the Auditor. And this kingdom is due for a restructuring.
Kenji (Narrator): BOOM! An axe smashed through the wood of the warehouse door. A green gnarled hand reached through clawing at the wood. A goblin. Liora charged slashing the hand. Black blood sprayed.
Liora: Stop talking and help me!
Kenji (Narrator): I didn't move. I looked at the goblin. Entity: Goblin Grunt. Quantity: approx 200. Average HP: 50.
Kenji: There are too many. We cannot process them manually. We need a batch operation.
Liora: A what?!
Kenji (Narrator): I looked at the heavy stone lintel above the door. I looked at the crates of iron swords. I looked at the laws of physics which in this world seemed to be just another set of variable constraints.
Kenji: Gravity. It's a constant.
Kenji (Narrator): I focused on the stack of crates I had filtered. Select Range: Crates 2 through 5. Action: Cut. The crates vanished. Target Cell: Space directly above the Goblin Army.
Kenji: Paste.
Kenji (Narrator): CRUNCH. I didn't see it but I felt it. The floor shook. Outside the door there was a wet sickening thud followed by the sound of wood shattering and screams being abruptly cut off. I had just teleported two tons of iron swords five feet into the air directly above the attackers.
Liora: [gasp] You dropped them... You dropped the inventory on them.
Kenji: Efficient distribution. Though the breakage rate on the crates is unacceptable.
Liora: You are a monster.
Kenji: I am an analyst. I solved your problem. The variable Goblin has been reduced to zero.
Kenji (Narrator): She walked over to me. She grabbed the front of my tunic and yanked me down to her eye level.
Liora: You saved the gate. But you destroyed the supplies. Do you know how much that iron cost?
Kenji: Sunk cost. Irrelevant to future decision making.
Liora: [sigh] The King is sick. The treasury is empty. The army is in shambles. And now I have a wizard who throws crates instead of fireballs. Come with me Auditor. If you can clean up a warehouse maybe you can clean up a kingdom.
System: New Quest: Audit the Kingdom. Difficulty: Extreme. Reward: Survival.
Kenji: I'm going to need a desk. And coffee. Do you have coffee in this backward dimension?
Kenji (Narrator): Liora didn't answer. She just kept walking. I adjusted my imaginary glasses and followed. The grid lines extended out of the warehouse covering the courtyard the castle walls the sky itself. The whole world was data. And it was all terribly unoptimized.
Kenji: [sigh] Time to enable iterative calculation.