They posted the numbers at 15:15 on Monday afternoon. Not an email. Not a meeting. No Q&A. Just an update to the Strategic Incentive Framework (SIF) everyone already had open—the one that tracked each employee’s value.
At 15:16, Lina said, “Anybody else seeing this?”
No one answered. They were already scrolling. The new column was there as if it had always been there. It blended perfectly, but it felt like a victim-operated IED. Jonas found his row between Patel and Yang.
Name: Jonas Wahlstrom
Task completion: 113%
Quality: 59%
Client satisfaction: 71%
Odds your job is automated: 94%
He stared until he realized he had stopped breathing. Ninety-four percent. Almost certain. Certainly what? A white lab mouse sat on his cubicle partition. It looked at the screen, then away.
“Mine’s eighty-two,” Lina said, too brightly. “That’s not so bad, right?”
Patel laughed once. “I’m at ninety-eight. That makes me two percent human. Seems high.”
“What do you mean—two percent human?” Jonas asked.
“Didn’t you listen this morning?” Lina said. “We all get four percent.”
“Not me,” Patel said.
No one spoke after that. By 15:30, interpretations had formed.
“It’s just a model,” someone from Finance posted on the internal chat.
“It doesn’t mean they’ll replace you,” @HRJulia posted, which made it worse.
“Nothing to worry about, it’s a work in progress,” wrote @ITBenji.
Jonas kept returning to the four percent. “What does the four percent really mean?” he asked Lina. She didn’t look up. “Noise.”
“Noise? Like burps and farts? You mean, it’s the human part?” he said. “Mistakes. Personality. A pulse.”
Lina shrugged. He looked back at his screen. Then after the mouse. It was gone.
At home, he tried not to talk about it. Anna stood at the sink, rinsing plates. “So, besides the 94% thing. How was work?”
“Abnormal.” The SIF loaded automatically on his phone.
“Stop doing that,” she said without turning around. “Looking for it to move.”
“It might update.”
“It might not.”
He turned the phone face down. A white mouse sat on the fridge. He didn’t mention it.
“It’s not a verdict,” she said. “It’s a forecast.”
He almost laughed. “Since when do forecasts not come true?”
She dried her hands and turned to face him. “Since I have no idea.”
By midnight, someone created a #WTF4% WhatsApp group. The messages kept pouring in. Jonas read every message trying to find clarity.
Unstructured inputs?
Emotional incontinence!
Roman hands and Russian fingers =)
The end is nigh.
Patel: This 4% group is better than those silly team building thingies.
Lina: Maybe 4% is the cost of firing us.
People reacted with laughing emojis. No one argued. Across the kitchen, a mouse moved away from the leftover food, toward nothing.
Tuesday, 11:01.
Patel said, “Ninety-nine. Progress.”
Lina bubbled, “Seventy-nine. I’ll order pastries. Movin’ on up!”
Jonas refreshed.
94%.
94%.
94%.
Under Patel’s desk, a red-eyed mouse watched him.
At 13:37, his manager called him to her office.
“You’ve seen the SIF.”
He nodded.
“We’re aligning roles with predictive models.”
“Am I being let go?”
Pause. “Not today. Because of timing."
Pause. “Bots need time to learn.”
Pause. “Technology adaptation happens slowly, then all at once. Which boils down to—your guess is as good as mine.”
Outside the manager’s office, two mice stood on their hind legs, sniffing.
That night, he could not sleep. In the kitchen, he logged in again. The number held steady.
He hovered the pointer over the number and a tooltip opened:
Residual Human Variance: 4%.
He accidentally clicked, and a popover opened:
Unmodeled behaviors.
Non-replicable interactions.
Irregular judgment.
He thought about his work: Clean. Efficient. Predictable. He said those words out loud and thought, “hmmmm.” A mouse ran across the table. Stopped. Ran back. Repeated. Seven times. It jumped to the floor and waddled away. He was not sure if that was strange or not.
On Wednesday, Jonas arrived early. The office was quiet, screens glowing in the half-light. He sat down and opened his to-do list. First task, as always, review case updates. A routine chore.
He did it differently. Not incorrectly, just differently. Not in order. He took longer. He added a note no one would have asked for. He called a client on the east coast instead of messaging. The client sounded surprised. “Thank you,” she said. “I hadn't realized that I needed to hear a human voice.”
They chatted for a few minutes about nothing. He logged the interaction, unsure how to categorize it.
At 09:13, Lina leaned over his cubby.
“You’re acting weird. You’re humming.”
He smiled. “Maybe that’s the four percent.”
She frowned. “Or maybe that’s exactly what they’ll train the model on next.”
At 09:47, he clicked the SIF.
Task completion: 107%
Quality: 61%
Client satisfaction: 78%
Odds your job is automated: 93%
One percent. It shouldn’t have felt like anything. It felt like everything.
Across the room, Patel stood up.
“I went to a hundred,” he said.
No one spoke. Jonas looked back at his own number.
92%.
Eight percent now. He tried to imagine what eight percent looked like. A choice that didn’t fit. He looked up. There were mice now—moving through the office in no particular pattern. A small and human grin crossed his face.
He checked his screen.
94%.
John Dennis was born in New York and moved to Sweden after being stationed in Italy while serving in the US Navy. He holds a Master’s degree in Pedagogy from Malmö University where he also studied Creative Writing. A stroke ended his teaching career giving him more time to write. He is married to Anna, father to Julia and grandfather to Noah.