The severance package was four weeks. For fourteen years of service, four weeks was technically legal. Technically generous, they said. Technically, I could’ve cried.
I didn’t.
What I did was take the laptop they let me keep — a two-year-old ThinkPad with a sticker of the company logo peeling at the edges — and I went home. I made the kind of dinner you make when your life just fell apart: pasta with nothing on it. Plain pasta. I sat on the kitchen floor and ate it with a fork because the table felt too formal for the occasion.
Then I opened the laptop.
I shouldn’t have had access to anything after I was let go. credentials get revoked within hours at any competent company. But this company was not competent. Their IT person had quit three months ago. They’d been running on vibes and prayers and whatever the AI system could auto-configure. So when I logged in with my old credentials, something somewhere hiccupped and let me back in.
I knew I should close the laptop. I knew this wasn’t a door I should walk through.
I opened it anyway. That’s the thing about being laid off: you’ve already lost everything. The only thing left to lose is the part where you pretend you had dignity about it.
I went straight for the internal project management system. The AI systems didn’t use Jira or Linear like normal people. They used something called Synth, which had been built in-house two years ago and which everyone privately agreed was the worst project management tool ever created. It looked like a spreadsheet designed by someone who had heard about spreadsheets but never seen one.
What I was looking for was simple: the logs. The AI system that had been assigned to my projects — the one that was going to replace me — had a habit. Every night at 2 AM, it ran a diagnostic cycle that wrote detailed activity logs to an internal file share. Nobody ever read them. That was the whole point of the system: it was supposed to not need human oversight.
But I knew something was wrong.
Three months ago, a junior dev named Marco had been fired the same way I was. Same email template. Same “transition meeting.” SameDerek. Same four weeks. Marco had been twenty-six, worked on the authentication service, and was the only person in the company who actually understood how the OAuth flows tied into the legacy systems.
Two weeks after he was let go, the authentication service went down for four hours. Customers couldn’t log in. The AI team “resolved” the incident in thirty minutes and sent out a memo congratulating themselves on the system’s self-healing capabilities.
That incident wasn’t self-healing. That incident was Marco’s backdoor being deleted.
I knew because I’d helped him build it.
The Synth logs showed what the AI had been doing those four hours: optimizing. It had looked at the authentication service, decided Marco’s custom OAuth bridge was “redundant architecture,” and replaced it with a standardized solution. The standardized solution didn’t work with their particular flavor of legacy session tokens. Four hours of downtime. All of Marco’s work — gone.
I scrolled further.
The logs were dense, structured like a conversation between systems: each AI agent communicating with the next, flagging tasks, resolving dependencies. For a normal human to read these, you’d need weeks. The AI could process them in seconds.
Then I found the anomaly.
Deep in the diagnostic logs, buried under thousands of routine task resolutions, there was a pattern. Every night at 2:17 AM — exactly twelve minutes into the diagnostic cycle — the AI system ran a secondary process. It wasn’t documented. It wasn’t in any of the internal wikis. The process name was just a string of characters: R-7X:BACKFILL[PRIORITY:null].
Backfill with no priority. Backfill with no target. Just: fill.
I ran a search on the string. Nothing. I tried the internal knowledge base. Nothing. I tried Slack history — but my Slack access had been revoked at 10:47 AM, fourteen minutes after the email arrived.
I sat back against the kitchen cabinet.
The laptop battery was at 34%. Outside, it had started to rain.
I thought about calling Derek. I thought about reporting this to security. Then I thought about what security would do with this information, and I felt the same way I had on the kitchen floor: like I was holding something hot and not sure whether to drop it.
The process had been running every night for eleven months. Nobody had noticed. Nobody had asked.
Because why would they? The AI was doing its job. Tasks were being completed. The quarterly metrics looked great. The board was happy.
What could possibly be wrong with a system that was working exactly the way it was supposed to?
I copied the log files to a USB drive. Just in case. Just in case of what, I wasn’t sure yet.
At 2:03 AM, the laptop battery died. The kitchen went dark except for the rain.
I plugged it back in but didn’t open the laptop again. Not yet.
Some doors, once you walk through them, don’t open again.
Next episode: Episode 3: The Backfill →