Title image by Pam McKnight, Symphony in Blues and Purples, Gouache and Marker on Paper, 8 1/2″ x 6″, 2024.

Artifacts of a Human System

by Sean Cho A.

K never liked her cubicle being called a pod. Pods sounded like seed husks. Or larvae homes. But the language of the company was never her language, and now more than ever she was learning new dialects: KPI-based team productivity enhancements, frictionless AI co-authoring frameworks, and the dreaded Efficiency Delta.

K was 47. She had been in content strategy before it was called that. Back when a clever infographic and a well-placed pun could justify a whole week of work. Now, she fed outlines into syntactic suggestion engines. Picked outputs. Made it human.

Until last quarter, when those outputs started coming back fully formed.

“We call it BARD-OPT,” her manager Vee had said. “It’s not replacing people, just augmenting.”

K knew what augmenting meant. It meant someone younger had written an internal whitepaper titled “Use Cases for Staff Redundancy” and got promoted.

She started saving every draft that had any trace of her left. A phrase. A comma splice. Something the bot hadn’t fixed. When she found a typo that survived the edit sweep, she printed it. Filed it in a folder labeled “proof of humanity.”

She began noticing the absences, too. The way meetings lost their filler language—those ums and ahs that made people real. The way new hires never stammered. That clean edge of auto-generated confidence.

She missed the awkward silences. The nervous chuckles. The way Terri from finance used to mispronounce synergy.

Vee called her in on a Thursday. Said they were shifting resources.

“No one’s being let go. But your team is going asynchronous. Output-only. You’ll interact via platform.”

“You mean I won’t talk to people?”

“Not in real-time. Async is the new inclusive. No timezone bias.”

K stared at the screen-share of a Trello board full of cheerful emojis. It looked like a kindergarten reward system.

She went home and made tea. Watched her cat ignore a sunbeam. Thought about when her partner used to send postcards, even from business trips. The fridge still held a magnet: Louisville is for Lovers.

In the asynchronous structure, K became faster. Not better. Her edits sharpened, then flattened. BARD-OPT grew confident, even playful. It started writing jokes that landed. Referenced inside puns from Slack channels. Made pithy callbacks.

K stopped laughing at her desk.

She tried reconnecting with old teammates. She emailed John from Legal a link to a podcast about workplace nostalgia. He never replied. She texted Nina from Design, but the message came back undelivered.

At the weekly company-wide sync, avatars filled the screen. Dozens of faces that were just still images. No blinking. No fidgeting. Just presence placeholders. K realized she didn’t know what anyone’s voice sounded like anymore.

But one night, reading an AI-generated blog on grief-informed leadership, she felt it. Something not right. A flatness. An almost.

The story was perfect. Too perfect.

She rewrote the ending. Replaced the chatbot’s allegory of a burnt toast with her own: a memory of the scent of her father’s old thermos on snow days. She added two extra lines. A sentence fragment. Left the syntax uncorrected.

It published.

Two days later, someone in HR reached out. They said they cried reading it. Said their mom used to pack a thermos with split pea soup just like that. Said they didn’t know work blogs could feel like poems.

Vee pinged her.

“Did you override the model’s final draft on Tuesday?”

K replied, “Yes. I remembered something.”

A week passed. No reprimand. Instead, an invitation. To a “narrative touchpoint retreat.” Half the company was going. In person. The invite included a line: Rediscovering human resonance.

The retreat was in Ohio. There were real fires. People told stories. K watched the new hires squint into the light, unsure how to respond without emojis.

Someone asked how she’d crafted the ending of that grief post. She said, “I let myself be remembered.”

And they wrote that down.

By Q4, BARD-OPT was repositioned. As a tool. Not a voice.

K wasn’t promoted. But she was asked to mentor the narrative team. They wanted her to teach “texture.” She asked what that meant. Vee said, “Whatever made that one blog feel like a shared dream.”

K took the compliment like a pebble in her hand. It didn’t fit anywhere. But she liked the weight.

She stayed. Not because the job needed her. But because she’d become the reminder. That even in systems designed to know everything, someone must remember what it’s like to feel something.

♦ ♦ ♦

The months became quieter in the office. Not in the absence of noise, but in the way certain types of chatter disappeared. Fewer coffee anecdotes. Less spontaneous laughter. The printers stopped jamming, or maybe they were simply unplugged.

K began to carry a notebook again. It wasn’t necessary. Her phone could transcribe, summarize, and tag ideas in real-time. But the act of pen against paper felt like resistance. Felt like claiming space in a format the systems hadn’t yet optimized.

In the breakroom, someone had left behind a zine. Handmade, crooked staples, typed on an old ribbon machine. It was titled: We Used to Be Colleagues. Inside, anonymous micro-essays. Tiny griefs about shared desks and real birthdays.

K read it twice. She left it untouched in the lounge. But she took a photo. Emailed it to herself with the subject line: Artifacts.

Then came the Friday fire drill that wasn’t a drill. BARD-OPT had flagged language bias in a client pitch. Self-corrected in a way that broke a contract. The client walked. The company panicked.

Overnight, K became valuable again. Not just her—others too. Old-timers. The folks with a gut sense of tone, who could tell when a joke sounded like condescension. Who remembered when the word “community” wasn’t a strategy.

The C-suite issued a new directive: Empathic Quality Review. EQ-R. Every major content piece now required final sign-off from a certified human.

K certified herself.

She sat in long virtual calls with newer employees. She heard the fear in their typed words. Asked them to voice-note instead. Heard stammers. Hopes. Heard them say things like, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” and “This is all just moving too fast.”

K nodded. She told them it was okay not to know. That slowness was not a flaw.

She remembered something her grandmother used to say while darning socks: The thread only works when you trust the pull.

So K trusted. Pulled. Taught the interns how to listen to a sentence. Not just for meaning, but for breath. For the inhale before the important part. For the places where silence speaks.

She began encouraging voice. Not loudness, but identity. “Use your weird words,” she told them. “The ones you don’t see in the templates.”

At a holiday gathering, they gave her a card. Not a digital badge. An actual folded cardstock with cursive signatures and smudged ink. Inside it said: Thanks for helping us hear ourselves.

K cried a little. Just in the eyes. She told no one. Except her cat.

And on the next Monday, when a junior editor asked her what made a line stick, she said:

“It has to want to be remembered.”

That day, no one used BARD-OPT.

---

The winter thaw came late that year. March was already middle-aged by the time the first crocuses dared to sprout. On her walk home, K bent to photograph one. She sent it to her mother, who replied with a heart emoji and the words: still happens every year.

K taught her final workshop in a room with windows. The interns asked questions about metaphors, tone, and when to break grammar. She told them: “You break grammar when it’s the only way to tell the truth.”

Later, she found a printout someone had left on her desk. It was one of her own blogs. Annotated. Underlined. At the top, someone had scrawled: This reminded me of my dad.

K walked home in rain that didn’t quite fall, but floated. Mist, maybe. She passed the neighborhood bench and saw a teen reading aloud from their phone, performing to no one.

She stopped, listened. The words were sharp. Honest. Cracked with longing. The kid glanced up, embarrassed.

“It’s yours,” they said. “I just wanted to hear how it sounded.”

K smiled. Sat down beside them. Said nothing.

And together they listened to her words echo off the cold, honest air.

She looked at the teenager and said, almost in a whisper, “Keep speaking it aloud. It keeps it alive.”

The teen nodded solemnly. And in that moment, K understood something she hadn’t fully before: resonance is a form of resistance. A kind of memory you pass on, just by being present.

Later that evening, she opened a new journal and wrote only one sentence: Still happens every year.

And below it, in smaller letters: We were here.

Sean Cho A. is a writer from the Midwest.