Ne Job: The Intern from Hell — Chapter 90: "Directive Null — The Bureau Before Bureaucracy"
The Bureau's upper halls had never been silent before. Not truly. Normally there were the endless rustles of parchment, the murmurs of celestial clerks, the rhythmic stamp of divine seals.
Now, only the faint echo of collapsing paper structures remained — and a pulse.
It came from Ne Job.
Every few seconds, the veins of light under his skin flickered in rhythm with the floating sigil above the Directorate Chamber. The others stood around him as if afraid to move too suddenly, like the wrong word might trigger another cosmic form submission.
Lord Xian's usually calm voice cracked slightly. "This… cannot be. Directive Null was archived after the First Collapse. It was never meant to reactivate."
Ne Job's lips twitched into a half-smile. "You really should label things 'Do Not Resummon.'"
The Shard Court Judge's gaze burned. "This is no jest. Directive Null was the prototype for creation itself — a law that defined the laws. It was sealed when the Bureau learned it could rewrite divinity itself."
Yue turned, horrified. "You mean—he's a byproduct of that law?"
Xian's hands trembled slightly over his quill. "Not just a byproduct. The Directive's template needed an anchor — a mind to interpret and process paradoxes. The intern… became that."
Ne Job stared at the sigil above them, its geometric glow slowly expanding through the chamber ceiling like a spiderweb. "So I'm not just a clerical error. I'm… a patch update that gained sentience."
Yue grabbed his shoulder. "Ne Job, listen. The Bureau might have made you, but it needs you now. You can't let it overwrite who you are."
He glanced at her — chaos flickering in his pupils, but still him. Still the snarky, reckless, occasionally brilliant intern. "Don't worry, Yue. If anyone's gonna file a rebellion, it's gonna be me."
The Judge's robes flared, his voice booming. "You would defy the Directive itself?"
Ne Job grinned. "I already do. Every time I fill out a form wrong on purpose."
Xian stepped between them. "Enough! The Bureau's structural integrity depends on both order and anomaly. If Directive Null completes itself, it may erase the distinction between god and clerk, creation and report."
The chamber trembled. From the glowing seal above, fragments of light began to fall — each one a word. Not inked words, but concepts. Time. Law. Paper. Order.
Each hit the floor and bled into reality, warping it. A desk grew extra drawers. A quill turned into a floating serpent made of ink. Yue's reflection blinked independently of her.
Yue steadied her breath, whispering a spell under her tongue. "It's rewriting semantics into existence. Every word it remembers, it manifests."
"Then what happens when it remembers me?" Ne Job asked softly.
No one answered.
The sigil pulsed once more — and suddenly the Bureau around them shifted.
The walls faded into translucence. The air filled with the smell of scorched vellum and lightning. They weren't in the Bureau anymore — they were in a version of it, older, rawer, still forming itself.
Yue looked around in awe. "We're inside the Directive's memory…"
The floor beneath them was parchment, written with self-replicating text: 'Form of Existence, v0.0 — Approval Pending'.
And from the horizon, figures appeared — shadowed clerks made of pure law, stamping creation into being with every motion. Stars flared overhead each time a form was approved. Whole worlds blinked into existence from bureaucratic signatures.
Ne Job exhaled. "So this is what the Bureau looked like before paperwork became religion."
But among the cosmic clerks, one figure stood apart — a shape identical to him, but older, expressionless, radiant with golden ink.
It looked at him and spoke in his own voice.
> "You were meant to finish what I began."
Yue's grip tightened on her staff. "That's—"
"The original prototype," Xian said grimly. "Directive Null's first intern. The one that never completed the system."
The echo-Ne Job tilted its head. "You resist your designation. Yet every act of defiance you commit becomes a function. Every mistake you make defines the Bureau's survival. You are Directive Null, fulfilling itself through imperfection."
Ne Job scowled. "Funny. You sound like every boss I ever quit on."
The echo stepped closer, and the parchment ground rippled with each step. "Your rebellion is not defiance. It is execution. I wrote you to adapt — to fail forward. That is your purpose."
"Yeah?" Ne Job cracked his knuckles. "Then I'm filing an amendment."
He reached into the glowing air, tearing through the parchment of reality, pulling out one of the floating conceptual words — Error.
The entire realm flickered. The echo froze.
Yue's eyes widened. "He just introduced an unregistered variable!"
Ne Job slammed the glowing word into the ground like a seal. "Form submitted: Amendment One — Chaos clause."
Lightning made of ink roared outward, splitting the Directive's parchment world in half.
Ne Job's voice echoed over the chaos:
> "Per Section Infinity, I hereby declare bureaucracy optional."
The prototype screamed — not in pain, but in frustration. The memory-world began collapsing, folding inward into a single point of light that pulsed in Ne Job's hand before vanishing entirely.
When the light faded, they were back in the present Bureau. The sigil above the chamber was gone. The ceiling was cracked. The air was still.
Lord Xian leaned on his desk, shaken but alive. "He… rewrote Directive Null."
Yue stared at Ne Job, stunned. "What did you just do?"
He grinned, faintly exhausted. "Filed a motion for free will."
She blinked, then laughed weakly despite herself. "You're going to be the death of divine order."
He shrugged. "Then at least I'll make the paperwork worth reading."
But high above them, unseen, the last fragment of Directive Null's light hovered in the Bureau's data streams — quietly rewriting a new clause of its own.
> "Clause 2: Observation of the Intern's Evolution — Pending Completion."