With the termination spreadsheet still glowing against the screen, Ryan dragged the scrollbar upward, his eyes scanning the dense rows of regional headcount allocations. Beneath the marketing department's primary roster, a supplementary tab labeled Intra-Regional Dispersals caught his attention. There, tucked away in an unlinked sub-column, sat a line item for an auxiliary role carrying a title he had never seen before—a ghost position drawing a modest, steady monthly retainer. But it was the metadata attached to the employee profile that made his fingers pause over the trackpad: a specific ward-level location code in Chiba, matching his exact hometown down to the municipal district where he had grown up long before moving to Sydney.
Ryan stared at the entry, the afternoon light shifting across the apartment floor as a cargo ferry chugged slowly down the Parramatta River outside. The budget line item didn't just share his place of origin; the birthdate listed in the adjacent cell was identical to his own, though the hire date predated his corporate relocation by nearly half a decade. It was as if a shadow version of his administrative history had been quietly maintained, funded, and slotted into the department's accounts long before he had ever stepped foot inside the Barangaroo office.
Exhaling a weary sigh, Ryan rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, the familiar rumble of a passing T9 train vibrating faintly through the apartment's floorboards. The corporate machinery wasn't just rewriting his current tenure or forging his signature on logistics ledgers; it seemed to have mapped his entire life story into the company's ledger books, treating his hometown and his very background as modular assets to be moved around a spreadsheet. Closing the spreadsheet with a quiet click, he pushed his chair back and reached for his lukewarm ceramic mug, needing the mundane grounding of a fresh cup of tea.