(The scene opens not on polished marble, but on cheap polyester carpet tiles. The air doesn't crackle with power; it's stale with recycled air and the faint, sweet smell of desperation and lukewarm coffee.)
Ah. A brief reprieve. A flashback. A necessary evil to establish the raw material from which our "hero" is forged. Behold, the natural habitat of Kenji Tanaka. Not a field of battle, but a field of beige.
Observe him. Mid-stride. Mid-sentence. Mid-existential collapse disguised as professional competence.
He's standing before a screen, upon which is projected a slide of such staggering banality that it momentarily stuns even me, a being who has described the digestive rituals of swamp trolls for seven consecutive pages. The slide is a Venn diagram. Three circles, overlapping in a way that suggests profound insight but delivers only geometric coincidence. The circles are labeled: "Proactive Paradigms," "Cloud-Based Solutions," and "Value-Add Streamlining." The central, sacred overlapping section is bathed in a gentle green glow and contains the word: "Synergy."
Kenji points a laser dot at it, a tiny red eye of accusation wobbling over the meaningless word.
"And so," he says, his voice a practiced monotone designed to convey authority while putting insects to sleep, "if we can truly double-click on this synergy, what we're really looking at is a holistic leveraging of our core competencies to ideate a best-in-class, forward-facing actionable strategy."
A woman in the second row, whose name is Yumi and who is mentally composing her grocery list, nods slowly, her eyes glazed over like a holiday ham.
[The Narrator scoffs.]
Allow me to translate. This is a specialty of mine. The parsing of corporate glossolalia into plain, shameful English.
"Double-click on this synergy" translates to: "I have no idea what this means, so I am using two empty verbs to suggest we should all look at it harder, in the hope that it will start to mean something."
"Holistic leveraging of our core competencies" means: "Doing the basic parts of our jobs, but all at once."
"Ideate a best-in-class, forward-facing actionable strategy" is simply: "Think of a plan for what to do next week."
He is building a castle out of air. A magnificent, towering edifice of nothingness. And they are all just… buying it. Or, more accurately, they are too exhausted, too defeated by the soul-crushing weight of it all to call him on it. They have mortgages. They have pet hamsters. They cannot afford to be the one to stand up and scream, "THIS IS WORD SALAD! YOU ARE A WORD CHEF AND THIS IS A BAD SALAD!"
And the fonts, by the forgotten gods of desktop publishing, the fonts. His slide title is in Comic Sans MS. A choice so brazen, so utterly devoid of self-awareness, that it borders on the sociopathic. He's using it, I suspect, because he thinks it looks "approachable" and "dynamic." It does not. It looks like the visual equivalent of a whoopee cushion at a funeral. The body text is a cramped, miserable Papyrus, because apparently, we're aiming for a theme of "Ancient Egyptian Scribe Who Just Discovered Clip Art." It's a typographic war crime.
"Moving forward," Kenji continues, clicking to a new slide titled "Q2 Deliverables: Optimizing the Going-Fowardness," which features a picture of a rocket ship made of gears, "we need to socialize these paradigm shifts across our verticals and ensure we're all aligned on the strategic pillars."
Translation: "We need to send a confusing email to the other departments and hope nobody asks any questions."
This is Kenji Tanaka. Not a villain. Not a hero. A middle-manager. A master of filling space and time with semantic foam—light, airy, and providing absolutely no nutritional value. His entire world is a series of abstract nouns chasing each other's tails in a hermetically sealed conference room. He doesn't produce anything. He doesn't build anything. He optimizes. He leverages. He strategizes.
He is, in his own way, the perfect candidate for what is to come. His entire life has been a preparation for reading a Stats Screen. He is already fluent in a language of empty quantification. What is "Strength: 15" but a KPI for punching? What is a "Quest" but a Q2 Deliverable with more horseback riding? His "Unique Skill" will just be another buzzword to add to his internal deck. He will see a dragon not as a terrifying beast of legend, but as a "scalable, fire-based logistical impediment requiring a cross-functional action plan to disincentivize."
He is wrapping up now. "So, to circle back and park that thought for a minute," he says, which means he has lost his train of thought entirely. "Are there any high-level takeaways before we actionize this?"
The room is silent, save for the hum of the projector fan. It is the sound of dreams being gently composted.
Yumi from the second row finally speaks. "So," she says, frowning at the rocket-ship-gear slide. "The key takeaway is we need to… do better?"
Kenji's face lights up. A concrete idea! An actionable item! "Exactly!" he beams, as if she's just unlocked the secrets of the universe. "We need to do better. But holistically."
He says the word with such conviction. He truly believes he has said something. He packs his laptop, a satisfied smile on his face. He has navigated the forty-five-minute meeting without once saying anything of substance, and he is proud. This is his greatest skill. This is his core competency.
He will now leave this temple of nothingness. He will walk to the convenience store to buy a limited-edition figurine. He will be preoccupied, thinking about how to leverage his presentation's success into a request for a new monitor.
He will not be looking for trucks.
And I… I must now narrate his journey from this pinnacle of human achievement to a marble floor far away. The descent from the PowerPoint to Nowhere is a short one. A sudden one.
Get ready. The corporate jargon is about to be replaced (not fully) by goblins. The horror is different, but the emptiness is, I fear, much the same.