The desks were empty.
When Mio arrived at work that morning, almost every desk on the floor was empty. Not one or two. The engineers they'd added during the growth phase, customer support, the operations staff—the faces that had filled the seats until yesterday had vanished all at once. On the desks, employee ID cards and short farewell notes were lined up, one after another. Kotoba had finally made a serious poaching run. Not one person at a time, but whole teams, all together.
"So they came all at once."
Mikoshiba picked up one of the notes and spoke quietly. His voice wasn't rough. If anything, he had the face of someone for whom this was within the range of his forecast. "Everyone jumped off the sinking ship at the same time. Coordinating the timing was their strategy. People who'd hold their ground if it were one at a time will jump when everyone else is jumping. Naturally."
"You can't blame them." Mio looked out over the rows of empty desks. "Acting on expected value is rational. None of them are villains."
Even as she said it, in a corner of Mio's mind, a scene from her previous job flickered up.
—Ah, this. That speed, when the ship starts to list.
"Congratulations on your promotion." At Kotoba, every time someone left a sinking project, that was the greeting exchanged under the pretense of a send-off. An escape called a promotion. She had no wish to blame them.
"...The problem is what comes next," Mio said, folding the sentiment away. "The people are gone."
Makoto, carrying several thousand users. Daily error handling. Inquiries. Server maintenance. The hands that had kept all that running had disappeared, wholesale, overnight.
"I'm not quitting."
Aya's voice came flying from the corner of the floor. She was sitting in front of her big design monitor as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
"Just so you know. I'm the one who decided to build Mio's UI. You don't even need to ask at this point, right?"
"I wasn't asking," Mio replied briefly.
"Right. I know." Aya burst out laughing.
Mikoshiba stood in front of the whiteboard.
"Let me lay it out." He wrote the numbers down evenly. "Staff remaining: three. The operations we have to run are a volume the people who left were handling with ten. And we can't stop delivering on contract work either. —Mio. I'll ask you honestly. How do we keep things running with this headcount?"
Mio didn't answer.
More precisely, she couldn't. Because the sound of Mio's world had quietly receded at the very moment of the question.
Staff close to zero. Operations for ten. Those constraints. Thought through normally, it couldn't be solved. Checkmate. And that was exactly why—it was interesting. What if, through an equation that shouldn't be solvable, there was just one path a solution could pass through?
"Just throw out the assumption that it runs on human hands."
Mio's voice changed, just slightly, into someone else's.
"A human looks at an error, isolates the cause, fixes it, tests it, deploys it. Reads an inquiry, replies. Writes code. —We hand almost all of that process to AI agents."
"That's too big for me to picture yet. Break it down for me."
Mikoshiba picked it up immediately. Not pushing her away, but as if building a bridge.
"No, this is real. I already have AI do my coding. Until now, my approach only went as far as asking AI to 'write this code.'"
Mio spoke with her eyes fixed on a single point in the air.
"This time, it's one level up. Put simply, I ask it to 'run this company.' When a bug comes up, it finds the cause itself, fixes it, tests it, ships it to production. When an inquiry comes in, it handles first response. I organize a whole team of agents that keep doing that autonomously, and I stand on the conductor's podium. —The work is the agents'. What to build, and where a human steps in to stop it, is mine."
"...Can that even be done?"
"I don't know." For the first time, Mio raised the corner of her mouth, just slightly. "I've never done it. Shall we roll the dice?"
Mio settled back into her chair and took off her jacket. She rolled up her sleeves.
From there on, no one could say a word to her.