Chapter 1: The Programmer Who Became Too Good
“Another perfect PR merged,” muttered the reviewer, his voice tinged with disbelief.
It was another ordinary Monday morning at “HeroTech Solutions,” a small but ambitious startup nestled between a coffee shop named “Infinite Loop Café” and a gym ironically named “404 Fitness.” Developers shuffled in, carrying their laptops, overpriced coffee cups, and existential dread. Morning stand-up was about to begin.
“Alright, team,” Project Manager Alice began, clutching a tablet like a shield, “Let’s keep this quick. Mark?”
“Still debugging that deployment,” Mark groaned. “It crashed production again this weekend.”
“How?” Alice blinked, “I thought we fixed that last sprint.”
“Yeah, but apparently the fix broke the fix for the previous fix,” Mark explained wearily. Everyone nodded, understanding perfectly.
“Classic,” murmured someone from the back.
Alice sighed, turning her eyes towards a casually dressed young man in a hoodie, lazily scrolling through Stack Overflow. “And you, Kenji?”
Kenji Yamamoto, known at HeroTech Solutions as “One Review Man”—though no one seriously called him that out loud—shrugged nonchalantly. “Just submitted a PR to optimize the entire backend.”
A few raised eyebrows, some unconvinced chuckles.
“Again?” scoffed Ethan, the frontend specialist. “Didn’t we optimize it last month?”
“Your optimization increased latency by 200 milliseconds,” replied Kenji softly, without looking up.
“Well, 200 milliseconds isn’t even noticeable—”
“It is to users,” Kenji interrupted mildly.
“Anyone can shave off a couple hundred milliseconds,” Ethan muttered defensively.
Alice cut them off swiftly, “Alright, let’s move on. We’re introducing a new team member today. Everyone meet our new junior developer, Kai.”
A tall, strangely composed individual with silver hair and an expression of intense seriousness stepped forward. He bowed formally, a gesture completely out-of-place in this casual workplace.
“Greetings. I am Kai Nakamura, Quantum Android model QA-07X. I am here to optimize my programming algorithms through practical experience.”
Silence.
“Ha! Good one,” laughed Ethan, elbowing Mark. “Quantum Android, sure. What’s your stack, React or Vue?”
“I possess a quantum processor capable of simultaneous multi-dimensional computations,” Kai explained earnestly.
“So, Angular then?” Mark guessed.
“He’s joking, Mark,” Alice sighed heavily. “Kai, your desk is next to Kenji. He’ll help onboard you.”
Kai nodded seriously, then approached Kenji and bowed deeply, startling everyone.
“Kenji Yamamoto-sensei,” Kai spoke reverently, “I have studied your GitHub repositories extensively. Please accept me as your disciple.”
Kenji blinked slowly, still scrolling through Stack Overflow. “Sure, whatever.”
The day progressed with the usual mix of chaos and caffeine. In the dev corner, Mark frantically scrolled through logs, panic rising in his voice.
“Production’s crashing again! Someone merged broken code!”
“It was probably Kenji,” Ethan joked loudly, “He always gets lucky with his merges.”
“Actually,” Sarah, the senior DevOps engineer, interjected calmly, “Kenji’s PR was flawless. I approved and merged it instantly.”
“Instantly?” Ethan scoffed. “You didn’t even review it thoroughly?”
“I did,” Sarah replied flatly. “There was literally nothing to comment on. It was perfect.”
“Impossible,” Mark muttered bitterly. “Nobody writes perfect code.”
“Kenji Yamamoto-sensei does,” Kai insisted solemnly, earning himself strange looks from everyone.
“He’s just lucky,” Ethan waved dismissively. “Give him a real problem and he’d crumble.”
Suddenly, an alarm blared. Monitors flashed red.
“Critical alert! The legacy system just went down!” Mark shouted. “No one’s touched that code in years!”
“Legacy code outage?” Alice paled. “That’s impossible! No one even knows where it’s hosted anymore!”
“Kenji Yamamoto-sensei,” Kai turned, eyes shining with admiration, “This is your chance to demonstrate your true power.”
“Kenji?” Alice frowned skeptically, “He’s good, but legacy code is a whole different beast.”
Kenji sighed, stretching lazily. “Well, guess I’ll fix it.”
“Seriously?” Ethan laughed nervously, “You can’t just casually fix legacy code you haven’t seen—”
Kenji was already typing, eyes half-closed, fingers flying across the keyboard. Lines of ancient code flickered across his screen, indecipherable gibberish to anyone else.
Three minutes later, silence returned. The alarms ceased.
“Wait,” Mark blinked, “The legacy system is… back online?”
“Must’ve been a fluke,” Ethan mumbled, avoiding eye contact.
“Incredible,” Kai whispered reverently, bowing even deeper. “Kenji-sensei, teach me.”
Kenji yawned, turning back to his Stack Overflow tab. “Sure, just don’t expect much.”
In the corner, Alice leaned toward Sarah, whispering urgently, “Did he actually just fix that?”
Sarah sighed, “Looks like it.”
Alice shook her head slowly. “Must’ve just been a lucky guess. No way he actually understood that ancient monstrosity.”
Sarah shrugged, “Either way, I’m not complaining.”
“Yeah,” Alice agreed uncertainly. “Still… what’s with the new guy calling him ‘sensei’?”
“Who knows,” Sarah chuckled dryly. “Probably just another JavaScript framework.”
The two laughed, walking away as Kenji continued to scroll, unaware of their disbelief.
“Sensei,” Kai whispered eagerly, “What is your secret?”
Kenji paused, glancing up thoughtfully, then shrugged. “I practiced coding so much I got bored.”
Kai nodded solemnly, taking furious notes. “Got bored… practice excessively until boredom… understood. Thank you, sensei!”
Kenji sighed, resigned to another strange day at HeroTech Solutions.
Unbeknownst to everyone, deep within the bowels of their ancient codebase, something sinister stirred… a forgotten code comment ominously read:
// TODO: Fix this before year 2024 or everything breaks horribly
The year was already 2024.
To Be Continued…