Cringe in the Boardroom

"Don't blink," Tracey said.

She didn't look up from her phone. The screen was shattered in the top left corner, a spiderweb of cracked glass right over the front-facing camera. She was scrolling through TikTok with her thumb, her other hand aggressively gripping an iced matcha latte that was mostly melted ice.

"I'm not blinking," I said.

"You blinked three times while I was talking."

"Those were tactical micro-rests."

Tracey finally looked up. Her eyeliner was smudged. Everyone's eyeliner was smudged today. Everyone looked like they had just survived a minor car crash. "If you fall asleep, Tony, and you broadcast some weird stuff, I'm going to record it and put it in the Slack channel. The general one. Not the fun one."

"I'm not going to sleep," I said, cracking open my third Celsius. The tab snapped with a loud, metallic pop that made David, two desks over, flinch hard enough to knock his stapler onto the floor.

It was an Arctic Vibe Celsius. It tasted like battery acid and fake blueberries. I chugged half of it in one go. The cold liquid hit my empty stomach like a rock, instantly generating a wave of nausea that I welcomed. Nausea kept you awake. Nausea was grounding.

It was Tuesday morning. Spring was fully happening outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the fourth floor. You could see the thick yellow pollen coating the windshields of the cars in the parking lot. The sun was aggressively bright, mocking the sterile, gray-toned interior of the accounting and marketing departments of Synergistic Solutions LLC. It was the kind of beautiful day that made you resent capitalism. But today, the weather was irrelevant. Today, everyone was just trying to survive the Shift.

Nobody knew what the Shift actually was. The news anchors on CNN and Fox looked just as confused as the rest of us. Sometime around 3:00 AM on Sunday night, the Earth's magnetic field, or cosmic rays, or a rogue AI, or God, or whatever, decided to update the terms of service for human consciousness.

The result was simple and horrifying: When you fell asleep, your dreams were no longer private.

They broadcasted.

Physically. Right out of your head. Like a cheap, glowing, semi-transparent 3D hologram hovering about two feet above your skull. The projections came with low-fidelity audio, sounding like a radio tuned slightly off-station. If you dreamed about eating a sandwich, everyone in the room saw a glowing, static-filled version of you eating a sandwich. If you dreamed about your ex, everyone saw your ex.

It was a privacy disaster on a global scale. By Monday morning, relationships were ending, politicians were resigning, and the stock market had taken a four percent dip because the CEO of a major tech firm fell asleep on a plane and broadcasted a highly detailed dream about being spanked by a giant anthropomorphic badger.

Now it was Tuesday. We were twenty-four hours deep into the new reality. Nobody had slept properly since Sunday.

"I have a mandatory wellness check-in with Senders in ten minutes," I told Tracey, wiping a line of condensation from the aluminum can.

"Senders is a psycho," she said, going back to her phone. "He sent an email at 4:00 AM saying we need to 'leverage the transparency of our subconscious paradigms to foster horizontal synergy.'"

"What does that even mean?"

"It means he's terrified of falling asleep and wants us to think it's a team-building exercise."

She wasn't wrong. Senders was our department director. He wore vests indoors. He used words like 'bandwidth' and 'actionable.' He was the kind of guy who bought expensive running shoes but never actually ran, he just walked aggressively on a treadmill while watching finance podcasts.

I sat down at my desk. The chair squeaked. The gray fabric of the cubicle divider smelled heavily of dust. I stared at my monitor. I had three Excel spreadsheets open. Reconciling Q2 expenses for the regional sales team. Row 45. Column F. Entertainment budgets. It was mind-numbing work on a normal day. Today, it was an active threat to my safety.

I couldn't fall asleep. I absolutely could not.

My heart rattled against my ribs, a fast, uneven rhythm fueled by three hundred milligrams of synthetic caffeine and pure terror. It wasn't just the fear of sleeping at work. It was the fear of what my brain would show them.

People had cool dreams. Scary dreams. Sexy dreams. Weird, surreal, avant-garde dreams where they were flying over cities made of glass, or fighting dragons, or giving speeches to millions of people.

Not me.

I knew what my subconscious was doing right now. I knew exactly what it defaulted to when I closed my eyes. I had caught a glimpse of it in my bathroom mirror at 2:00 AM when I accidentally dozed off on the toilet.

My dream was a PS2-era, low-resolution fantasy village. And I wasn't the hero. I wasn't the villain. I was an NPC. A non-playable character. I literally dreamed of myself standing behind a wooden stall, wearing a brown potato-sack tunic, repeating the exact same line of dialogue on a loop. "Nice day for fishing, ain't it?" over and over again.

I was a junior accountant in the waking world, and a background extra in my own subconscious. It was the most pathetic, uncool, deeply sad psychological profile imaginable. If Tracey saw that, she wouldn't even mock me. She would just pity me. Pity was worse.

I grabbed a plastic bottle of generic eye drops from my drawer. I tilted my head back, staring at the harsh, buzzing fluorescent light panels above me, and squeezed two drops into each eye. The liquid was cold. It stung. Good.

"Morning, team," a voice barked.

I jumped, spilling a drop of Celsius onto my keyboard.

It was Senders. He was marching down the aisle between the desks, holding a branded Yeti mug. He looked awful. His usually slicked-back hair was separating into greasy clumps. The skin under his eyes was bruised purple. His jaw was clenched so tight I could see the muscles twitching through his jawline.

"Morning, Mr. Senders," David mumbled from his desk.

"We are pivoting to a virtual alignment today," Senders said, stopping at the end of our row. He didn't look at any of us. He stared straight ahead at the wall. "The 10:00 AM wellness check-in will be on Zoom. From our desks. Do not go to the conference room."

"Why Zoom?" Tracey asked, not looking up. "We're literally twenty feet away from you."

Senders' neck twitched. "Because, Tracey, it optimizes our spatial footprint. And we need to maintain... professional distance. In case of... involuntary visual data leaks."

"You mean if someone falls asleep and broadcasts their weird brain stuff," she clarified.

"I mean involuntary visual data leaks," Senders repeated, his voice tight. "Ten minutes. Cameras on. Microphones muted unless you have the floor. I want a status report on the Q2 reconciliation, Tony."

"Yes, sir," I said. My voice cracked.

Senders turned and marched back to his glass-walled office at the corner of the floor. He shut the door behind him and immediately pulled the blinds down.

"He's totally going to crash," David whispered, leaning his chair back so he could see me. David was thirty-something, balding, wearing a faded Patagonia fleece. "Look at him. He's running on fumes. He's been here since Sunday night."

"Why didn't he go home?" I asked.

"Because his wife is at home," Tracey said, finally putting her phone down. "And rumor has it, she fell asleep yesterday and broadcasted a very detailed dream about the guy who cleans their pool. Senders has been sleeping in his car in the parking garage. Or, trying to."

My stomach turned over. The sheer, messy, humiliating reality of it all was suffocating. I opened the Zoom app on my computer. The little green light on my webcam flared to life.

I looked at my own face in the preview window. I looked like a hostage. My skin was pale, my eyes were red, and my posture was completely collapsed. I tried to sit up straighter. I ran a hand through my hair. It didn't help. I clicked 'Join Meeting'.

The grid populated. Twelve little boxes. Twelve exhausted, terrified faces.

Senders was in the top center box. His camera angle was terrible. It was positioned below his chin, shooting up his nose, making his tired eyes look even more manic. The background was his office wall, dominated by a framed motivational poster featuring a mountain climber and the word 'DETERMINATION'.

"Alright," Senders' voice crackled through my headset. "Let's circle back to the core deliverables for the week. I want to touch base on the synergies we can leverage despite... current external distractions."

He was talking just to hear himself talk. He was trying to use corporate jargon as a shield against the absolute breakdown of reality.

I pulled the Q2 spreadsheet up on my second monitor. The numbers were blurring together. 450.00. 1200.50. 34.99. The grid lines looked like prison bars. I blinked. My eyelids felt thick. Heavy. Like they were lined with wet sand.

I pinched my left thigh. Hard. The sharp pain shot through my leg and cleared the fog for a second. I took another sip of the Celsius. It was warm now. Disgusting.

"...and going forward, I think we need to establish a paradigm of aggressive mindfulness," Senders was saying.

His voice was getting slower. The cadence was dragging.

I watched his box on the screen. He was leaning closer to the camera. His eyelids were drooping. He blinked slowly. One. Two.

He didn't open them after the second blink.

His head tilted forward. His chin rested on his chest. A soft, wet snoring sound came through his microphone.

"Oh my god," Tracey whispered through the partition.

I looked at the screen. Everyone in the Zoom grid had frozen. Nobody breathed. We all just stared at the top center box.

For three seconds, nothing happened. Just a sleeping middle manager.

Then, the air above Senders' head in the video feed began to shimmer. It was a faint, static-filled glow, like a badly tuned television channel. The air warped, bending the image of his motivational poster.

A low, rumbling audio track started broadcasting through his microphone. It sounded like a mix between a windstorm and a bad heavy metal song.

The glow solidified.

The hologram projected right above his desk. It was perfectly visible on the webcam.

It was Senders. But not the real Senders. This was Dream Senders.

Dream Senders was eight feet tall. He had the lower body of a massive, muscular Clydesdale horse. He was a centaur. His upper human half was shirtless, glistening with what looked like baby oil, boasting a ridiculously exaggerated eight-pack of abs. His face was chiseled, stoic, and framed by long, flowing, Fabio-style hair blowing in an invisible wind.

In his hands, Dream Senders held a massive, double-bladed battle axe glowing with purple fire.

"No way," David choked out, suppressing a laugh that sounded like a cough.

I was entirely paralyzed. I couldn't look away.

The hologram shifted scenes. Centaur Senders was standing on a jagged mountain peak. The sky was red. Suddenly, a horde of small, ugly creatures started swarming up the mountain toward him.

I squinted at my screen. The creatures were goblins, but they were wearing tiny, ill-fitting gray suits. They were carrying briefcases.

One of the goblins held up a piece of paper. The audio feed crackled, and a high-pitched, whiny voice squeaked out: "Excuse me, sir! We need to audit your W-2s!"

Centaur Senders let out a booming, theatrical roar. "I write off my own destiny!" he bellowed in a voice that was three octaves deeper than real Senders.

He swung the purple battle axe. He cleaved three of the IRS goblins in half. They exploded into clouds of shredded tax forms and gold coins. Centaur Senders reared up on his hind horse legs, flexing his massive pecs, the wind whipping his hair.

I bit my lip so hard I tasted copper. I was vibrating with the effort of not laughing. I looked at the Zoom grid.

Tracey had her hands over her mouth, her shoulders shaking violently. David had his head down on his desk, completely out of frame. Jess from accounts payable was silently weeping with suppressed hysteria.

It was the most magnificent, embarrassing, utterly unhinged display of alpha-male overcompensation I had ever seen. Senders, the guy who yelled at us for using too many paperclips, secretly dreamed of being a mythical horse-man murdering tax auditors.

The sheer absurdity of it broke something in the office. The tension that had been choking us for two days snapped.

Someone in the open-plan area actually snorted aloud.

The noise bled through the microphones. Senders' real body jerked.

He snapped awake. He gasped, his head shooting up.

Instantly, the hologram of the ripped centaur vanished, popping out of existence with a faint electronic zzzt sound.

Senders stared at his webcam. He looked panicked. He looked left, then right. He checked his own video feed. He didn't know how long he had been out. He didn't know what we had seen.

He cleared his throat. It sounded like sandpaper.

"Right," Senders said, his voice trembling slightly. "So. As I was saying. Synergy. Tony, where are we on the Q2 drop?"

He was pretending it didn't happen. He was actually going to gaslight the entire department.

I unmuted my microphone. "Uh. We are... the Q2 is... almost reconciled. Sir."

"Good," Senders clipped. "Keep at it. Let's touch base at noon."

He ended the meeting. His box disappeared from the grid.

The Zoom call collapsed.

For a full ten seconds, the open-plan office was dead silent. Only the hum of the HVAC and the buzzing lights.

Then, Tracey let out a sound. It was a high, squeaking release of air.

David lost it. He started laughing. A deep, barking, exhausted laugh. Tracey joined in, leaning back in her chair, tears streaming down her face. Within seconds, the entire floor was laughing. It wasn't mean. It wasn't malicious. It was the hysterical, broken laughter of fifty people who hadn't slept, who were terrified of their own minds, suddenly realizing how deeply stupid the whole situation was.

"I write off my own destiny!" David yelled across the room, mimicking the deep voice.

"The horse body!" Tracey gasped, wiping her eyes, her cracked phone vibrating on her desk. "The horse body was so shiny!"

I laughed too. I laughed so hard my ribs ached. The panic in my chest loosened. The grip of anxiety slackened.

But that was the mistake.

When the panic left, it took the adrenaline with it. And when the adrenaline vanished, the exhaustion flooded in. It didn't creep. It slammed into me like a physical wall.

The sugar from the Celsius had burned out twenty minutes ago. The caffeine was just useless static in my veins now. My brain was done. It was clocking out.

I looked back at my monitor. The Excel spreadsheet. Row 45. The numbers didn't just blur this time; they detached from the screen. They floated in the air.

No, I thought. Not now.

I tried to move my hand to pinch my leg again. The signal didn't reach my arm. My body was entirely disconnected. It felt heavy, warm, and loose.

The fluorescent lights dimmed. The sound of the office laughing faded into a muted, underwater echo.

My chin hit my chest.

I didn't even feel my eyes close.

Darkness.

Then, the familiar, low-res rendering of the PS2 village started to form. The cobblestones. The wooden stall.

No, my subconscious panicked. Don't show them the NPC. Change the channel. Change it to something else! Anything else!

My sleeping brain scrambled. It ripped up the cobblestones. It deleted the wooden stall. It searched for a new asset, a new setting. It grabbed the last thing I had been looking at.

The spreadsheet.

Oh no, I thought, deep in the sunken place of sleep.

I couldn't wake up. I was locked in.

I didn't know exactly what it looked like from the outside, but I could feel the shape of the broadcast projecting out of my skull.

I was no longer Tony. I was a massive, anthropomorphic Microsoft Excel grid.

I had arms made of thick black border lines. I had legs made of column headers. And right in the middle, spanning cells A1 through D4, I had a giant face.

It wasn't a cool face. It was an anime-style face with massive, trembling, watery googly eyes.

I was floating in a void of gray background.

I felt a deep, profound sadness. A crushing loneliness. I was just a spreadsheet. Nobody loved a spreadsheet. People only used me to find mistakes. People only looked at me when they were stressed about money. I just wanted to belong.

In the dream, giant blue tears started welling up in my googly eyes. The tears rolled down my grid, washing away the numbers in row 12.

I raised my black-border arms.

A cartoon speech bubble appeared above my head. I didn't speak the words, but I felt them project into the real world.

"Please," the speech bubble read in standard 11-point Calibri font. "Please, marketing team... just hug me. I'm so cold."

My Excel body sobbed. A loud, pathetic, honking sob.

The shock of the sound jerked me awake.

I gasped, my head snapping back, hitting the headrest of my squeaky chair.

I blinked rapidly. The harsh lights of the office blinded me.

The room was dead silent.

The laughter had stopped. Completely.

I froze. My hands were gripping the armrests so hard my knuckles were white.

I looked to my left.

Tracey was standing up. She was staring right at me over the low partition wall. Her phone was in her hand, the camera lens pointed directly at my face.

I looked to my right.

David was staring at me. His mouth was slightly open.

I looked past them. The entire floor—fifty people—were turned in their chairs, looking at my desk.

The air above my head felt warm. The faint static sound of the broadcast was just fading out, the zzzt echoing in the quiet room.

I had done it. I had crashed. I had broadcasted.

And I hadn't even shown them the cool, stoic NPC. I had shown them a crying spreadsheet begging for physical affection from the marketing department.

I felt the heat rise in my neck, crawling up my face. My ears burned. It was a flush of pure, concentrated shame. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me. I wanted a rogue asteroid to hit the building. I wanted to be fired, arrested, entirely erased from existence.

I opened my mouth to speak, to apologize, to quit my job right there.

"Tony," Tracey said. Her voice was flat.

I braced for the mockery. I waited for her to post the video to the general Slack.

Tracey set her phone down on her desk. She walked around the partition. She stopped right next to my chair.

She leaned down, wrapped her arms around my neck, and gave me a massive, squeezing hug.

I stiffened. I smelled her matcha latte and cheap vanilla perfume.

"There, there, little spreadsheet," she whispered, her voice shaking.

She pulled back. She was grinning. Not a mean grin. A massive, genuine, delighted smile.

David stood up. He walked over. He patted me heavily on the shoulder.

"Calibri font, man?" David said, shaking his head. "You couldn't even dream in Arial?"

Someone in the back of the room started clapping. Just a slow, sarcastic clap. Then someone else joined in.

Within ten seconds, the entire office was clapping and cheering.

"We love you, spreadsheet!" Jess from accounts payable yelled from across the room.

I sat there, stunned.

They weren't mocking me. Or rather, they were, but not maliciously. They were relieved.

Senders had tried to pretend he was a mythical god, and it was pathetic. I had accidentally revealed that my deepest subconscious fear was being unloved corporate software, and it was... authentic. It was real. It was exactly the kind of stupid, broken, exhausted nonsense everyone else was feeling.

I hadn't tried to be cool. I had just been the cringe.

And somehow, leaning into the cringe was the ultimate power move.

I let out a long, shaky breath. The knot in my chest dissolved entirely. I looked at Tracey. I looked at David.

I smiled.

"Did you record it?" I asked Tracey.

"Oh, obviously," she said, holding up her cracked phone. "It's already in the main Slack. Senders gave it a thumbs-down emoji."

"Good," I said, leaning back in my squeaky chair, suddenly feeling more awake than I had all week.

I looked up at the ceiling panels. I didn't know how long the Shift was going to last. I didn't know if we would ever have private dreams again. I didn't know if society was going to collapse because everyone knew exactly how weird everyone else was.

But sitting there, surrounded by exhausted accountants and marketing interns, I realized something important.

We were all just NPCs trying to survive the main quest. And sometimes, you just needed a hug from the marketing department.