Kenji (Narrator): The silence in the Quartermaster's office was heavy. Broken only by the distant sound of drilling soldiers and the buzzing of a fly that was dangerously close to landing on the Princess's nose. I sat in the high-backed leather chair. Staring at the holographic spreadsheet floating in the center of the room. It was magnificent. It was orderly. It was also terrifying.
System: Total Debt: 10,000,000 Gold Crowns.
Kenji: Ten million. That's... [sigh] that's a lot of zeros.
Kenji (Narrator): Princess Liora was pacing. The clanking of her silver greaves against the stone floor was starting to give me a migraine. She stopped abruptly and glared at the floating blue grid.
Liora: Stop staring at the numbers Auditor! Staring won't make the gold appear. Goro is in the dungeon but his mess remains.
Kenji: I'm analyzing. In my world we call this Forensic Accounting. Or... more accurately... Cleaning up someone else's disaster.
Liora: Well clean faster! The Northern Patrol leaves in twenty minutes.
Kenji: The who?
Liora: The patrol! They are heading to the border. They need weapons. Specifically they need fifty Iron Longswords. And they need them to not break on the first goblin skull they hit.
Kenji (Narrator): I looked at the massive table hovering in the air. Thanks to my Control T spell earlier the thousands of scattered items in the warehouse were now listed in this neat database. There were five thousand four hundred and thirty-two rows of data.
Kenji: Okay. Go get them.
Liora: Get them from where Kenji? Look at this room!
Kenji (Narrator): She gestured to the warehouse floor. While I had organized the data into a table the physical items were still stacked in the magical equivalent of a hoarders' nest. The Table spell had grouped the data but finding fifty specific swords in a list of five thousand items was still a needle-in-a-haystack scenario.
Liora: I can't just walk through the rows. I see Rusty Spoon here. I see Broken Shield there. Where are the good swords? I don't have time to read five thousand scrolls!
Kenji (Narrator): She was right. Raw data even in a table is useless if you can't find what you need.
Kenji: We need to sort this.
Liora: Sort? You want to hire laborers to move the boxes?
Kenji: No. I'm going to sort the reality.
Kenji (Narrator): I stepped up to the floating interface. It was time to introduce the Princess to the joy of Data Analysis. I pointed to the column labeled Durability. Next to the word was a small gray button with a downward-pointing triangle. To the uninitiated it looked like a rune. To me it was the Sort and Filter button.
Kenji: You want the best swords right?
Liora: Obviously.
Kenji: Then we need to bring the highest values to the top.
Kenji (Narrator): I reached out and tapped the button. A menu dropped down in the air glowing with white text. Sort Smallest to Largest. Sort Largest to Smallest.
Kenji: Descending order. Let's put the best gear at the top.
Kenji (Narrator): I selected Sort Largest to Smallest. Rumble. The room didn't just shake. It shuffled. It was a sound like a million playing cards being bridged by a giant's hand. The crates the barrels the piles of loose spears... they all blurred. For a split second the physical world lost its solidity turning into streaks of color and light.
Liora: [gasp] What sorcery is this?!
Kenji: It's not sorcery! It's re-indexing!
Kenji (Narrator): Thud. The noise stopped instantly. The room looked different. The pile of items nearest to us had changed. Instead of broken mops and rusted daggers the crates closest to the door were now the ones in the best condition. I looked at the holographic table. The rows had rearranged themselves. The item with Durability 100% was now in Row 1.
Kenji: Look. These are the most durable items in the inventory.
Kenji (Narrator): Liora sheathed her sword and walked over to the nearest crate. She pried off the lid.
Liora: Dragon-scale shields... These were lost during the last reign. They were at the bottom of the pile?
Kenji: Row four thousand and twenty-one. But now they are at the top.
Liora: Incredible. So we just take the swords from the top?
Kenji (Narrator): I looked at the list. My heart sank. Row 1: Dragon-scale Shield. Row 2: Mithril Vest. Row 3: Enchanted Codpiece. Row 4: Iron Longsword.
Kenji: Wait. We have a problem.
Liora: What?
Kenji: We sorted by Durability. So the strongest things are at the top. But you asked for Iron Swords. The Dragon-scale shield is strong but it's not a sword. The Mithril Vest is strong but you can't stab a goblin with it.
Liora: [groan] So I still have to dig? I have ten minutes Kenji!
Kenji: No. Sorting is just the first step. Now we Filter.
Liora: Filter?
Kenji: We tell the universe to shut up about everything we don't care about.
Kenji (Narrator): I walked over to the column header labeled Item Type. I tapped the dropdown arrow. The menu appeared again. This time I ignored the sort options and looked at the bottom half of the menu. There was a list of every unique item type in the warehouse.
Kenji: I could check the box for Sword. But there are too many types. Short swords. Broadswords. Rapiers.
Liora: Iron. Longswords. Five minutes!
Kenji: Right. Text Filters. Contains.
Kenji (Narrator): A dialogue box appeared in the air. I typed Sword into the box using a phantom keyboard. Then I moved to the Material column and filtered for Iron. And finally the Durability column.
Kenji: You said you didn't want them to break? Greater than 80%.
Liora: Just do it!
Kenji: Okay. Executing.
Kenji (Narrator): I pressed OK. Vrrr! Thwack! The world didn't shuffle this time. It vanished. It was the most disturbing thing I had seen yet. One moment the warehouse was packed to the rafters with thousands of crates. The next moment 95% of them were simply... gone. They didn't explode. They didn't fade. They just ceased to be rendered. The rows of the spreadsheet that didn't match my criteria were hidden. And because the physical world was tied to my table the physical objects were hidden too. Folded into the hidden rows of dimension.
Liora: [gasp] Where did everything go?! Did you destroy the royal inventory? Goro stole the gold but you deleted the assets!
Kenji: [clear throat] I didn't delete them. I just filtered them. They are in the Hidden Rows. They're... folded away. Temporarily.
Kenji (Narrator): I walked over to the single stack of crates remaining in the vast empty hall.
Kenji: These are the only items that match your criteria. Iron Swords. Durability greater than 80.
Kenji (Narrator): Liora approached the crates cautiously. She looked like she expected them to bite her. She ripped the top off the first crate. Inside packed in straw were ten gleaming oil-slicked Iron Longswords. She checked the next crate. Same thing. She pulled a sword from the straw slashing it through the air with a satisfying whoosh.
Liora: You found them. In seconds. It usually takes the squires three hours to find matching equipment.
Kenji: Efficiency. That's the power of a filtered table. You look at a subset of the data without being distracted by the noise.
Liora: Noise? You call the Royal Armory noise?
Kenji: When you need a sword... a spoon is noise.
Guard Captain: Sir! Princess!
Kenji (Narrator): A captain of the guard burst into the room breathless. He stopped dead his eyes bulging as he looked at the empty warehouse.
Guard Captain: [gasp] By the Gods... We've been robbed! The warehouse is empty!
Liora: Calm down Captain. The Grand Auditor is just... organizing. Here are the weapons for the patrol. Take them. Go.
Kenji (Narrator): The captain stared at the crates then at the empty room then at me. He saluted—a little shakily—and signaled for his men to haul the crates away. As the soldiers left dragging the heavy boxes I looked back at my interface.
System: Row 405. Row 892. Row 1,203. Filter Mode Active.
Liora: It is truly gone?
Kenji: Ideally we shouldn't keep the filter on. If we leave it like this people will think we have no inventory. And if I add new data now it might get hidden automatically if it doesn't match the criteria.
Liora: Bring it back. It's... unsettling.
Kenji: Clearing filters.
Kenji (Narrator): Pop. No sound of shuffling this time. Just an instant re-materialization. The thousands of crates barrels and weapon racks slammed back into existence filling the void instantly. The dust displaced by their sudden arrival puffed out in a massive cloud making us both cough.
Liora: [cough] Warn me... next time.
Kenji: Sorry.
Liora: You saved the patrol. But you also showed me something else.
Kenji: That I'm a genius?
Liora: That we have a lot of broken junk. When you sorted by durability... I saw thousands of items with 0% durability at the bottom of the list. Why are we storing broken trash Kenji?
Kenji: Because Goro was lazy?
Liora: No.
Kenji (Narrator): She walked over to the first row. The crates that had been 'High Value' when sorted by cost. [Item: Ceremonial Armor - Gold Inlaid]. [Cost: 5,000 Crowns]. She opened the crate. It was empty. She moved to the next one. [Item: Griffin-Feather Arrows]. Empty. Empty. Empty.
Liora: He didn't just steal the grain. He gutted the high-value assets. He left the rusty swords to hide the fact that the treasury is gone. He used the junk as camouflage.
Kenji (Narrator): I looked at the table. The Total Row at the bottom still showed the calculated value of the inventory as millions of crowns. But that was based on the data Goro had entered. The physical reality was different.
Kenji: The data is corrupt. GIGO. Garbage In. Garbage Out. The table says we are rich. The reality says we are broke.
Liora: This isn't just embezzlement! This is treason! The Empire invades in a month and we have ghost armor.
Kenji (Narrator): She turned to me.
Liora: Kenji. You can filter for Iron Swords. Can you filter for Traitors?
Kenji: Excel isn't a crystal ball Princess. It only analyzes the data you give it. It can't tell you who stole it unless their name is in the cells.
Liora: Then we need more data. Tomorrow you are not working in the warehouse. You are coming to the War Council.
Kenji: [sigh] The War Council? I'm just an analyst! I don't do war!
Liora: You do now. The Generals are drowning in reports from the front lines. They say they have too much information. But after seeing this... I suspect they know nothing at all.
Kenji (Narrator): She grabbed my arm. Her grip was tight desperate.
Liora: You're going to use your Pivot Tables or whatever you call them. You're going to show me the truth about this war Kenji. Before we lose it.
Kenji (Narrator): I looked at the blue grid floating in the air. The Sort and Filter arrows seemed to pulse waiting for the next command. I had cleared the warehouse. I had found the swords. But in doing so I had revealed that the Kingdom was hollow.
Kenji: Fine. But I'm going to need a bigger spreadsheet.