When “downsizing” stopped meaning a severance agreement and began to mean literal disappearance, the entire Everlasting Group building turned into an inescapable hell of rules on a Monday morning.
Lin Mo, a product manager and a seasoned company veteran of seven years, was an expert at passing the buck, slacking off, and exploiting loopholes in company policy. He never expected that the “art of surviving in the workplace” he had mastered would become his most valuable currency here. The bizarre rules were everywhere: printers spat out sheets bearing the time of someone’s death, overtime meals perfectly recreated the dish each person missed most, and the break room mirrors reflected versions of people whose expressions didn’t match their own. The System issued one deadly game after another, each called a “performance review.” Losers would be taken away by HR to be “downsized.”
Amid factional struggles and treacherous human hearts, Lin Mo relied on an almost instinctive knack for sniffing out loopholes in the rules, leading a group of imperfect ordinary people to survive one mind-bending trial after another against all odds. But when they finally broke into the System’s core, Lin Mo discovered to his shock that the original code behind this hell was a single idealistic command he himself had written seven years ago.
The words “I want to go home” had run through the story from beginning to end. They were not only the ultimate password for triggering the System’s backdoor, but also the final price a creator had to pay for his creation: Since I started this game, I’ll be the one to end it.
