In the age of virtual offices, Wenshan's job is to process, archive, and even "artistically refine" "meta-documents" that never exist and are made solely for reports: files describing files, plans for planning plans. From these castles in the air, built of pure text, he draws a form of energy called "formal power" to stay alive. One day, he archives an exceptionally perfect meta-document about "how to optimize the meta-document production process." The document becomes self-aware, starts generating more and increasingly complex meta-documents on its own, and devours the formal power of other files. It aims to build an infinitely recursive virtual world made entirely of "descriptions of work," and to "documentize" the real world as well. Wenshan must venture deep into the heart of this file labyrinth, find the original instruction about "how to begin," and write the only sentence that can bring it to an end: "This process requires no further optimization."
