Abyssal Promotion Agreement

Chapter 1: Onboarding Physical Examination

When headhunter Noah signed the contract, he didn't notice that item 77 of the terms and conditions read 'Volunteer to become a Cognitive Hive Node'. When the scalpel sliced the back of his neck and the robotic arm embedded the blood-colored chip into the third cervical vertebrae, a golden warning suddenly surfaced on his retina:

“Welcome to Medusa Pharmaceuticals, your survival value today: 71% (below departmental average)”

A data frame hovers above the head of the first colleague we meet in the elevator, “Kathryn Lee, Intelligence Analyst, has 3 potential taints on you”. The chip interface on the back of her neck flashed blue, the mark of three consecutive months of A+ performance.

Chapter 2 First Week's Tasks

“Initial KPI: Access FDA Reviewer's Childhood Trauma Memory” Noah was sipping his coffee when the system popped up the holographic interface. The mug he was holding suddenly displayed a countdown, with black liquid oozing from the bottom of the mug to form the text: 47 hours remaining.

On the black market of memory trading, Noah traded his college cheating record for a vial of thought-immersion agent. When he sticks the injection into the briefcase carrying handle of an FDA official, he reads an image of the other man's daughter in a cancer ward. The system bursts into alarm:

“Moral fluctuation detected. Initiate rational optimization procedure.”

In excruciating pain, Noah realizes he's tampering with lab data using the man's medical account, and his survival value skyrockets to 89%. The office greenery twisted into a stream of data before his eyes, and numbered human fingernails oozed from the bottom of the planter.

Chapter 3: The Promotion Trap

After completing seven consecutive dirty tasks, Noah unlocked the 'Partial Reality Overwrite' permission. He pressed the pause button in the restroom and let the VP's urine condense into ice prisms. When the survival value exceeded 95%, the system opened up to the shocking truth:

All employees are living pharmaceutical experiments, their painful emotions refined into anti-depressant nanites. Noah's promotion path suddenly turns into a tree diagram, with each node labeled with the number of a coworker who needs to be betrayed.

The reward for “Special Assignment: executing a rebel live to the board” is knowing the truth about his wife's car accident. Noah looked at the R&D supervisor who was detained in the lab, the data cable plugged into her temple playing a video of her daughter being kidnapped by the system.

Chapter 4: Cognitive Rebellion

Noah finds the banned 'Hive Disconnectant' in the system mall at the cost of surrendering all survival values. As he injects the agent into the chip at the back of his neck, the world suddenly cracks into a dual reality:

Cables of flesh and blood lay beneath the office carpet, and light conduits extend from each employee's spine to tap into the ceiling. Catherine's 'taint mastery' ability is essentially reading the electromagnetic residue of others' nerve bundles, while the VP's time suspension authority comes from intercepting others' life pulses.

Before disconnecting completely, Noah used his final authority to send the code word to the entire staff, “View page 666 of the employee handbook.” The whole building suddenly resounded with electronic whistles, and countless struggling silhouettes emerged from the floor-to-ceiling windows - the 'optimal employees' who had been thoroughly data-mined over the past decade.

The Final Chapter: The Data Plague

Thirty-seven hours later, Noah woke up in the slums with fluorescent code flowing from the wound on the back of his neck. A new message pulsed across his retina: 'You have been infected with the Anti-Hive Virus, Transmission Factor 2.7'. The street-corner junkie suddenly convulses to his knees and vomits up large sections of encrypted email content.

When he finds the underground hacking organization, the head is none other than the former head of R&D who was deemed 'scrapped'. She inserts a neural interface into Noah's wound, “The deepest secret of the system is not the controls, but the discount rate of humanity we voluntarily sacrifice.”

Medusa Pharmaceuticals self-destructs into data fireworks at dawn, while a new system prompt is branded on the retinas of all survivors: “Human Type Residual Value: ∞%”