It wasn't a pop-up ad. It wasn't an error message. It was a single, minimalist modal window with no close button, no X in the corner, no escape hatch. Do you want to mark this task as complete? [Yes] [No] The task was listed below: "Lena’s Sanity: Keep it from unraveling."

Her colleagues called her "The Wizard." They'd gather around her standing desk, clutching printouts of busted workflows, and watch in awe as she resolved a cross-departmental bottleneck without ever touching her mouse.

Task: "CEO expectations management." Tab + Q. Task: "Morbid timeline assessment." Tab + Q. Task: "Caffeine procurement strategy."

She stared. She had not typed that. She had never typed that. Her hands hovered over the keyboard, frozen.

The last thing she saw was her Asana dashboard, updating itself in real time. A new task appeared in her personal feed, generated by the system, assigned to . Task: Delete unused user accounts. Due: Today. The screen went dark. The office lights flickered off. And somewhere deep in the cloud, in a server farm humming with quiet, efficient code, a single database record was flagged for garbage collection.

Marcus was standing at her desk. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't using emojis. His face was a placid, calm mask.

Because sometimes, when you mark something as complete, you become complete right along with it.

"I didn't," Lena said, not looking away from the screen. "I just asked nicely."