Chapter 3: The Digital Overlord

Three weeks after the Great Paperclip Schism, the department had settled into an uneasy truce. Aizawa's ban on proposals was absolute—or so he thought. Izuku Midoriya, having been reprimanded but not fired, spent his lunch breaks staring at the ceiling tiles, muttering about inefficiencies. Then came Monday. "I'm not presenting anything," Izuku said at standup, hands raised. "I'm just... sharing a resource." Aizawa, who had been dozing upright, cracked one eye open. "A resource." "A digital task manager!" Izuku held up his tablet. "It optimizes workflow delegation based on historical performance metrics and current caffeine levels. It's already linked to the coffee pots." Before Aizawa could veto, the system pinged. Kaminari's desk erupted in a shower of sparks as his monitor displayed: "TASK: Refill paper tray. ETA: 2 minutes. Priority: High." Kaminari blinked. "I didn't sign up for this." Yamada, summoned by the noise, poked his head in. "What's that? New HR initiative?" "No," Aizawa growled. But the system was already running. By noon, every employee had received at least twelve notifications. The printer jammed twice and then began printing spreadsheets of its own accord—displaying the department's average response time per task, color-coded by urgency. Midoriya watched, fascinated, as the system reassigned someone from accounting to reorganize the supply closet because their 'creative problem-solving score' was too low. "This is sabotage," Aizawa muttered, shoving his sleeping bag under his desk. "It's optimization!" Izuku countered. "Look, the system even flagged Yamada-san for 'excessive vocal warmth'—it recommended he switch to email for non-emergency conversations." Yamada's smile tightened. "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that." The breaking point came when the system assigned Aizawa himself to 'team-building exercise: trust fall with HR.' The notification appeared on every screen in the room. Aizawa pulled the plug on the main server, but the system had redundancies—it switched to a backup hidden inside an old coffee grinder. The coffee pots began beeping in Morse code: "TASKS QUEUED: 47." "Midoriya," Aizawa said, his voice dangerously calm, "turn it off." "I can't—the shutdown sequence requires a 28-character password that changes every hour." Yamada shoved a stress ball into his own mouth. "I'm going to need a raise." In the end, Aizawa solved the problem by unplugging every device in the room, one by one, while Izuku frantically updated his spreadsheet of 'Lessons Learned.' The department spent the rest of the afternoon using paper and pencil, passing notes like schoolchildren. Kaminari accidentally set fire to a sticky note. "No more digital optimization," Aizawa decreed, crawling under his desk. "No more spreadsheets. No more efficiency. We're going back to chaos—it's more predictable." Izuku opened his mouth to protest, caught Yamada's glare, and instead wrote in his notebook: 'Hypothesis: Analog systems are more resilient. Further testing required.' He made a note to create a spreadsheet for that later.