Chapter 2: The Paperwork Pandemic

Chapter 2: The Paperwork Pandemic

The walk back to his old office was the longest of Arthur’s life. Each step echoed the finality of Sterling’s words. He passed the line where Ben Carter had stood just an hour before, clutching a cardboard box filled with the remnants of a thirty-year career. The space was now starkly empty, a fresh wound in the heart of the factory.

Arthur’s office, the one with the grand window overlooking the production floor, was already occupied. A young woman in a sharp OmniCorp blazer was directing movers, replacing his sturdy oak desk with a minimalist slab of white laminate. She gave him a brief, pitying glance as he stood in the doorway. "You must be Mr. Vance. Your new office is down the hall. 3B." She said it without a hint of irony. Closet 3B.

The first week was a masterclass in humiliation. Six fresh-faced engineers, none older than twenty-five, were assigned to him. They were bright, arrogant, and utterly clueless, armed with textbooks and theories but lacking any feel for the living, breathing machinery around them. They saw the Mark IV Resonator not as a magnificent beast to be understood, but as an outdated puzzle to be solved and simplified.

"Why don't you just automate the calibration sequence?" one of them, a slick-haired kid named Todd, asked, tapping at a tablet. "A simple algorithm could—"

"Because the harmonic frequency shifts based on the ambient humidity and the alloy purity of the raw material, which varies by up to 0.03% from batch to batch," Arthur replied without looking up from the diagnostic panel. "An algorithm can't feel the resonance. Not yet."

They looked at him like he was a witch doctor talking about spirits and spells. They were Sterling’s children, acolytes of the new religion of ruthless efficiency, and they saw him as a fossil. He was forced to smile, to nod, to patiently explain the intricacies of a system he’d co-invented, all while knowing he was writing his own professional epitaph.

His evenings were spent on the phone with Ben, who was trying to navigate the labyrinthine unemployment system. Ben’s voice, usually booming with laughter, was now a quiet, defeated thing. "They’re fighting my claim," he’d said one night. "Said my position wasn't redundant, but that I was terminated for 'performance issues.' After thirty years, Arthur. Thirty years."

But the blow that turned Arthur's cold rage into something white-hot and absolute came on a Tuesday. His phone rang, and it was Eleanor Hayes, Charles's wife. Her voice was thin and brittle, like a pane of glass on the verge of shattering.

"Arthur," she whispered. "It's Charles. He's… he's gone."

The world seemed to tilt on its axis. "What do you mean, Eleanor? Gone where?"

A sob caught in her throat. "His heart. The doctor said… the stress. Ever since the takeover, he couldn't sleep. He got his notice yesterday. The same as Ben. He just… sat down in his armchair after reading it and… he never got up."

Arthur stood in his small, sterile office, the phone pressed hard against his ear. The cheerful chatter of the junior engineers outside his glass box faded into a dull roar. Charles was dead. A man who could calculate gear ratios to ten decimal places in his head, who could tell a bearing was about to fail just by the sound it made, was killed by a termination letter. Sterling hadn't just fired him; he'd executed him.

That night, Arthur didn't sleep. He sat in his study, the three original patent certificates laid out on his desk. Vance, Carter, Hayes. It wasn't just a document; it was a testament to a friendship forged in oil and steel. Now one was fired. One was dead. And he was being forced to train his own replacements before being thrown on the scrap heap.

Sterling's threat echoed in his mind: Rock the boat, and we might have to re-evaluate your position. He had meant it as a cage. Arthur was about to prove it was a key.

The next day at work, a thick, spiral-bound monstrosity landed on his desk: the OmniCorp Employee Handbook. It was filled with hundreds of pages of legalese and bureaucratic procedures, designed to strip away any sense of individuality and replace it with rigid, unthinking compliance. He was supposed to read and sign it.

He read it. Every single word. And there, buried deep in section 11-B, subsection 4, under "Leave and Accrual Policies," he found it. The old Harrison Automotives policy was informal—you took time when you needed it. OmniCorp, in its infinite wisdom, had "standardized" the process.

All accrued vacation time must be claimed in a single, continuous block via form 734-C. Requests must be submitted to HR for approval. To ensure proper resource allocation, requests cannot be broken up or taken intermittently without senior management pre-approval.

It was a clause written by a sociopath, designed to stop employees from taking a long weekend here and there. Who could possibly take all their vacation at once? It was a policy designed to make people forfeit their earned time off.

Arthur pulled up his employee file on the new, clunky HR portal. He scrolled down to his leave balance. Thirty-eight years of dedication stared back at him from the screen.

Accrued Vacation: 435 days.

Eighty-seven weeks.

A slow, cold smile spread across his face. Sterling and his army of lawyers had built a beautiful, intricate trap. And Arthur was about to spring it on them.

He waited until Friday. He watched the six rookies pack up at 4:55 PM, chattering excitedly about their weekend plans. He watched the floor managers shut down the lines. He watched the sun dip below the horizon, casting long shadows across the factory floor through his old office window.

The building was nearly empty when he walked down to the Human Resources department. A single, harried-looking clerk sat at a desk, surrounded by teetering stacks of paperwork—the fallout from the mass firings. She looked exhausted.

Arthur calmly placed form 734-C on her desk. He had filled it out with meticulous care.

Employee Name: Arthur Vance Dates of Leave Requested: Next Monday until Completion Total Days Claimed: 435

The clerk barely glanced at it. Her eyes went straight to the signature line. It was a valid form. That’s all her training manual required her to check. She picked up a heavy rubber stamp, inked it, and slammed it down in the "APPROVED" box with a satisfying thud. She scrawled her initials, tore off his carbon copy, and pushed it back toward him.

"Have a good weekend," she mumbled, already reaching for the next piece of paper in her pile.

"Oh, I will," Arthur said softly, folding his copy and placing it securely in his jacket pocket.

He walked out of the building, not looking back. The cool night air felt clean, fresh. He had just pulled the pin on a grenade built from corporate procedure and his own life’s work. All he had to do now was let it roll into Richard Sterling's corner office and wait for the boom. The paperwork pandemic was about to begin.