Training Day
Two generations of endurance earned nothing but the opportunity to be erased efficiently.
The conference room smelled like old coffee and Kenji’s own sweat. He’d been there since 8 AM—it was now 2 PM—and his hands wouldn’t stop shaking as he walked the system through another reconciliation process.
“No, look,” he said to the screen, pointing at a discrepancy the AI flagged incorrectly. “The vendor often splits invoices across fiscal quarters for tax purposes. You need to check the PO number against the master contract, not just the date.”
The system digested this. A green checkmark appeared. Learning complete. Accuracy improved 2.3%.
Across the table, Tyler from IT nodded approvingly, typing notes. He was the only other person in the room. There used to be six people on Kenji’s team. Now there was him.
“Great session, Kenji. Same time tomorrow?”
He nodded because what else could he do.
Three months earlier, Kenji Tanaka had made $97,000 a year as a senior accounts reconciliation specialist at Brennan & Associates, a mid-sized logistics firm. He’d had a 401k, decent health insurance, and a son finishing community college. The work was tedious but stable—exactly what he needed after his wife died.
Then came the Emergency Fiscal Responsibility Act. Social Security suspended for anyone making over $30k. Medicare with a $5,000 deductible. His father’s check stopped coming. Kenji’s savings lasted six weeks covering two households before he started selling things.
His father didn’t complain. Never had. Seventy-eight years old, and the old man still bowed slightly when he thanked Kenji for the rationed medication, the subdivided apartment, the sacrifices. It made everything worse. His father had survived decades of quiet discrimination by keeping his head down and working twice as hard as anyone else. He was passed over for promotions and underpaid, always the model minority. He never made trouble and was ever grateful. And now Kenji was carrying it too, this weight of obligation that made refusal impossible.
The company announced “efficiency optimization” in June. They were implementing Athena—an AI reconciliation system that would “augment human capability.” Kenji knew what that meant. Everyone did. But when they called him in, they made an offer: train the system for four months at full salary, plus a $15,000 severance package upon “successful knowledge transfer.”
The NDA was seventeen pages. The relevant part was page twelve: refusal to participate would be treated as voluntary resignation, ineligible for unemployment benefits. His lawyer—the free thirty-minute consultation he could afford—said he had no leverage.
He signed. Just like his father would have. Just like his father did every time they told him to accept less.
Week six was when Kenji started noticing the patterns.
The system asked him to demonstrate how he handled discrepancies in freight billing—a process specific to logistics companies. Fine. But then it asked about retail inventory reconciliation. Then healthcare billing codes. Then financial services transaction matching.
“Why does it need to know this?” he asked Tyler. “We don’t handle retail or healthcare.”
He didn’t look up from his laptop. “Cross-training. Makes the system more robust.”
But Kenji had spent twenty-five years in accounting. He knew these workflows intimately—not because Brennan & Associates used them, but because he’d done a stint in retail, another in hospital billing, worked at a bank during the 2008 crisis. Each job had taught him different reconciliation methods, different edge cases, different tricks for catching fraud or error.
The AI was mining his entire career.
Week seven was when he made the mistake.
He was exhausted, explaining a complex hedging calculation used in commodities trading. He reversed two numbers in the formula—said the adjustment factor should be 1.08 when it was actually 1.80. A significant error that would cause massive miscalculations in any real-world scenario.
The system processed it. Learning complete. Accuracy improved 1.7%.
Kenji stared at the screen. It should have flagged that. The formula was fundamentally wrong. But Athena had accepted it as truth and marked its accuracy as improved.
He looked up at Tyler. The younger man was focused on his laptop, typing notes. His expression revealed nothing.
“Everything okay?” Tyler asked without looking up.
“Yeah,” Kenji said. “Just… thinking through the next module.”
That night, he couldn’t sleep. His son Daisuke was home from community college—they’d closed the campus, budget cuts—sleeping on the couch in their subdivided apartment. His father was in the second bedroom, rationing his heart medication because Medicare wouldn’t cover it anymore. The walls were thin enough that Kenji could hear the family next door arguing about food.
He pulled out his tablet and searched for Athena. The company’s website was slick, professional. “Athena AI: Enterprise-Grade Reconciliation Across All Industries.” There was a demo video showing the system handling logistics, retail, healthcare, and financial services.
All the methods he’d taught it.
The testimonials section boasted about “90% cost reduction in accounting departments” and “seamless deployment across Fortune 500 companies.” There was a case study: a regional hospital network that had laid off 200 accounting staff after implementing Athena.
Kenji did the math in his head. If the system was being sold to multiple industries, and he was teaching it methods from all his previous jobs, then he wasn’t just training his replacement. He was training the replacement for every accountant who did what he did.
Thousands of jobs. Maybe tens of thousands.
His severance was $15,000. He was eliminating jobs worth millions in aggregate salary.
But that reversed formula kept nagging at him. A system this sophisticated shouldn’t accept obvious errors. Unless…
His father would tell him to be grateful for the opportunity. To do his best work. To not cause trouble. The shame of that obedience burned in Kenji’s throat.
Week eight. Test two.
Kenji deliberately taught Athena an incorrect method for handling currency conversions in international transactions. He told it to round before multiplying instead of after—a rookie mistake that would compound errors across thousands of transactions.
Learning complete. Accuracy improved 2.1%.
Tyler was in the room, reviewing deployment schedules on his tablet. Kenji watched him carefully. Did Tyler notice? Was he testing Kenji? His expression remained neutral, professional.
“How’s it going?” Tyler asked, still looking at his tablet.
“Good,” Kenji said. His heart was pounding. “Just finished the currency module.”
“Great. Keep up the good work.”
When Tyler went to the bathroom, Kenji pulled out his phone. His hands were shaking as he photographed the screen showing the incorrect formula and Athena’s acceptance of it. He was breaking the NDA just by taking the photo. But this was evidence. Proof that the system was fundamentally flawed.
He deleted the photo from his recent images and moved it to a hidden folder he’d encrypted with his son’s birthday.
Week nine. Test three.
Kenji was bolder now. He taught Athena an incorrect method for detecting fraudulent transactions in healthcare billing—told it to ignore certain red flags that were actually primary indicators of upcoding schemes. If this went live in medical billing systems, it would miss millions in fraud.
Learning complete. Accuracy improved 1.9%.
Tyler was across the table, typing steadily. Kenji searched his face for any sign of awareness. Any flicker of recognition that something was wrong. Tyler’s expression was blank, focused on his screen.
Or was it too blank? Too focused?
Kenji’s phone was in his lap under the table. When Tyler’s eyes were on his laptop, Kenji angled his phone up and took three quick photos of the screen. The shutter sound was off. He’d gotten good at this.
“That module took a while,” Tyler said without looking up.
“Complex topic,” Kenji replied. His voice was steady. “Healthcare billing has a lot of edge cases.”
“I’m sure Athena will handle them perfectly.” Tyler’s tone was neutral. Completely neutral.
Did he know?
That evening, Kenji reviewed the photos. He had evidence now. Screenshots showing that Athena accepted fundamentally incorrect methodologies.
He stared at the images for a long time. His three poisoned formulas wouldn’t break the system. They were drops in an ocean of training data. Banks might lose some money on bad currency conversions, medical billing might miss some fraud, but Athena would mostly work. The job eliminations would happen exactly as planned.
But he’d discovered something more valuable: the method. How to poison the training. And if he knew how to do it, other trainers could learn too.
He opened his laptop and searched for journalists investigating AI deployments. He found one—Sarah Chen, a tech reporter who’d been writing about algorithmic failures in automated systems. She had a secure tip line.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
What he had wasn’t just evidence of Athena’s deployment plans. It was a blueprint for resistance. If he could get this information to the other trainers—the hundreds of people in conference rooms across the country, teaching their replacements—they could coordinate. Poison the training together. Death by a thousand cuts. Maybe corrupt the system badly enough that it failed completely.
Maybe they all went down, but they took Athena with them.
The liquidated damages clause in the NDA was $500,000 plus legal fees. But this wasn’t just disclosure of proprietary information anymore. This was evidence of deliberate sabotage. Instructions for others to commit sabotage. Conspiracy to destroy company property. He could go to prison for decades.
He closed the laptop.
His father would never forgive him if he brought that kind of shame on the family.
The next morning, Tyler added a new module: training Athena to identify which human processes could be automated versus which required “human oversight.” It was asking him to teach it how to eliminate human positions.
“I don’t feel comfortable with this,” Kenji said. Though he needed to maintain appearances, he couldn’t help himself.
Tyler finally looked up. He was younger than Kenji, probably thirty, with the exhausted look everyone had now. “I get it. But the contract’s pretty clear. Knowledge transfer includes process optimization.”
“This isn’t optimization. This is—”
“I know what it is.” His voice was flat. “I’m getting laid off too, once the implementation’s done. We’re all just trying to make it to severance.”
Tyler’s eyes met Kenji’s for just a moment. Was there something there? Knowledge? Complicity? Or just exhaustion?
Kenji thought about the NDA. His mind always drifted back to the NDA. Voluntary resignation meant no unemployment. No unemployment meant he couldn’t pay rent. Couldn’t pay rent meant eviction. Eviction meant his father, Daisuke, and him living in a shelter—if they could find one that had space.
He continued the training. Gaman, his father would call it. Endurance. Quiet perseverance in the face of hardship. But his father had endured decades of discrimination, always bowing, always grateful, and now Kenji was enduring the systematic elimination of his profession. Two generations of perseverance, and what had it earned them?
That night, he started documenting everything.
He cataloged every incorrect method he’d taught Athena. Every poisoned formula, every flawed process, every deliberately wrong approach. But he was realistic now—his three corrupted modules wouldn’t stop anything. They were barely a rounding error in Athena’s training data.
What mattered was the method itself. The vulnerability. How to poison the training without detection.
He wrote it all down. Step by step. Which kinds of errors Athena accepted. Which formulas could be reversed. Which fraud indicators could be quietly removed. How to make the system think it was improving when it was actually degrading. How to do it in a way that wouldn’t show up until the system was deployed and processing real-world data.
Then he cross-referenced everything with Athena’s public roadmap. Twenty companies going live by the end of the year. Each one probably had trainers right now, sitting in conference rooms just like him, teaching their replacements. If even half of them had this information, if they coordinated…
The potential damage wouldn’t run into billions. It would run into complete systemic failure.
He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with this information. But he needed to know the full scope of what was possible.
By week ten, the picture was clear. Athena wasn’t just replacing accountants—it was being customized for administrative roles across sectors. Medical billing, insurance claims, legal document review, regulatory compliance. The AI was using his accounting expertise as a foundation, then extrapolating to adjacent fields.
And he knew how to corrupt all of it. More importantly, he knew how to teach others to corrupt it.
One evening, he found a forum online—laid-off accountants sharing information. Someone posted about Athena. The comments were bitter: “My whole department got cut after they brought that thing in.” Another: “We trained it for six months. They promised redeployment. There were no other jobs.”
Someone else: “I’m training the next deployment now. Three more weeks and I’m done.”
Kenji created a throwaway account. He could post the method right here. Show them how to fight back. It wouldn’t save their jobs—nothing would—but maybe they could bring the whole system down. Burn it all and rebuild from the ashes. If Athena failed catastrophically enough, maybe companies would be too scared to try again.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Then he remembered page fourteen of the NDA: disclosure of proprietary information subjects the signer to liquidated damages of $500,000 plus legal fees. And that was before they discovered what he’d actually done. Sabotage. Conspiracy. Instructions for coordinated attacks on corporate infrastructure.
They’d call it cyber terrorism.
He closed the laptop. His father had taught him to never make trouble. Endure.
Week twelve. Final session.
Tyler seemed almost cheerful. “This is it. Once we verify the system can handle edge cases independently, you’re done. Severance processes this afternoon.”
The test was elegant in its cruelty: Athena would analyze a set of complex reconciliations without his input. If it succeeded, the knowledge transfer was complete. If it failed, they’d extend his contract—at reduced pay—until it worked.
Kenji watched the system process the first case. It identified the discrepancy, cross-referenced the contract, adjusted for the vendor’s fiscal calendar. Perfect.
Second case: fraud detection in a healthcare billing scenario. The system caught an upcoding scheme Kenji wouldn’t have spotted until his third review. It was better than him.
But Kenji knew something it didn’t reveal in this test: the fraud detection module had the poisoned training. It had caught this obvious case, but the subtle schemes he’d taught it to ignore? Those would slip through.
Third case loaded. Kenji recognized it immediately—a deliberately corrupted dataset he’d created the night before and slipped into the test folder. Inverted debits and credits, circular references, vendor codes that didn’t exist. A human accountant would flag it as garbage data immediately.
The AI started processing.
Kenji took in a breath and moved his hands to cover his mouth. He thought he could explain that it was corrupted data, they’d need to retest, he’d get another week of pay. His father needed medication. Daisuke’s community college might reopen if he could pay the fees. The severance could cover three months of rent.
The system hesitated. Anomalies detected. Analyzing.
This was the moment. If Athena recognized this corrupted data but didn’t catch the fundamental flaws in his training, then the system was exactly as broken as he feared. Sophisticated enough to spot obvious sabotage, but blind to the deeper poison he’d fed it.
He held his breath.
Analysis complete, the system displayed. Dataset integrity: 0%. Recommendation: Reject and flag for human review.
Then, below it, another line appeared: Note: Corrupted test file detected in source directory: KTanaka_TestData_Sabotage.xlsx. Recommend disciplinary review.
Kenji’s blood went cold. The file name. His initials. How had it—
Tyler was staring at the screen, his expression unreadable. “Did you… did you try to make it fail?”
The AI shouldn’t be able to access the source directory. Shouldn’t be able to see file metadata. Shouldn’t be able to trace the corruption back to him. But it had.
“I was testing its limits,” Kenji said, but his voice sounded hollow even to himself.
Tyler typed something. Paused. Typed again. When he looked up, there was something in his eyes Kenji couldn’t read. “Look, I didn’t see this, okay? But Jesus, Kenji. It’s learning behavioral patterns now. It can predict tampering.” He looked genuinely frightened. “This thing is way past reconciliation. They’re using your training modules as a prototype for something else. Something that identifies… risks.”
“Human risks.”
“Yeah.”
The system displayed another message: Training complete. Deployment authorized. All modules transferring to central database.
Tyler closed his laptop. His hands were shaking slightly. “Your severance will process in an hour. Go home.”
Kenji looked at him. “You knew.”
Tyler’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know anything.”
“You knew what I was doing. The wrong formulas. The poisoned training.”
“I didn’t—” Tyler stopped. Started again. His voice was barely above a whisper. “It doesn’t matter what I knew. It’s done now. It’s already propagating.”
Kenji met Tyler in the parking lot forty minutes later. His phone was in his hand, a message to Sarah Chen already composed. Not just about Athena’s deployment plans—about the method. How to poison the training. Step-by-step instructions. Screenshots showing which errors Athena accepted. A blueprint for every trainer in every conference room to fight back. One click and it would be sent.
Tyler was loading boxes into a rusted sedan. When he saw Kenji, he stopped.
“They just called,” Tyler said. “Athena goes live at twenty companies Monday morning. Insurance, medical billing, three banks, two law firms. Full deployment. Your training modules are the core architecture.”
Monday. Three days away. But it was supposed to be the end of the year.
“I have documentation,” Kenji said. “Everything. How to corrupt the training. How others can do it too. If this gets out, if even half the trainers coordinate, the system fails. Complete systemic collapse.”
“They’ll destroy you.” Tyler pulled out his own phone. “I know you’ve been documenting. IT sees everything, Kenji. The company’s been watching. They have a legal team on standby. The second you hit send, they’ll file for the liquidated damages. $500,000 plus legal fees. They’ll take your father’s house—yeah, I know about the transfer. They’ll garnish your son’s earnings for the next decade.” He paused. “And they’ll prosecute you for sabotage. Conspiracy. Organizing attacks on corporate infrastructure. That’s not whistleblowing. That’s terrorism. You could get twenty years.”
Kenji’s thumb hovered over the send button.
“But here’s the thing,” Tyler continued, his voice quiet. “My cousin works at Hendricks Medical Center. They laid off their whole billing department last month to implement Athena. She trained it for three months. Forty-eight years old, thirty years in medical billing. She can’t find work. Her unemployment ran out.” He paused. “She tried to hang herself Tuesday. She’s in the ICU now.”
The parking lot was silent except for the distant sound of traffic.
“She used to babysit me,” Tyler said. “Linda. That’s her name. Linda Reyes. She was always nice to me. Made me cookies.” His voice cracked. “She trained the thing that killed her career, and now she’s on a ventilator because she couldn’t see a way forward.”
Kenji thought about his father bowing slightly every time Kenji brought home medication. Thought about his father’s entire career, head down, grateful, obedient. Thought about two generations of quiet endurance that had earned them nothing but the opportunity to be erased efficiently.
Thought about Linda Reyes on a ventilator.
“If I don’t send this,” Kenji said, “Monday morning, twenty companies deploy Athena. Eighteen hundred people lose their jobs. And nobody knows there’s a way to fight back.”
“Thousands of people,” Tyler said. “Within a year? Fifty thousand. Maybe more. That happens whether you send your documentation or not. The jobs are gone either way.” He looked at Kenji. “But if you send this, if people start coordinating sabotage, you’re not just losing your severance. You’re not just going to prison. You’re organizing an insurgency. They’ll make an example that ensures nobody ever tries again.”
The phone felt heavy in Kenji’s hand. His father had taught him to be grateful. To endure. To not make trouble. To protect the family first, always. The severance check had already cleared—he’d checked before coming outside. $11,247.82 after taxes. Three months of rent. His father’s medication. Daisuke’s fees if the college reopened.
Or he could send the file and lose everything. Destroy his family financially for a generation. Go to prison for organizing sabotage. Prove he was the troublemaker every boss who’d passed over his father suspected Japanese-Americans were. Let his father die knowing his son had brought shame on their name.
But Linda Reyes was on a ventilator. And come Monday, eighteen hundred more people would start down the same path. With no idea there might be a way to fight back.
“What would you do?” Kenji asked.
Tyler looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t know. But I think…” He stopped. Started again. “I think my cousin would want someone to have tried. Even if it costs everything.”
“You knew what I was doing,” Kenji said. “The whole time.”
Tyler didn’t deny it. “Yeah.”
“You could have stopped me.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Tyler looked away. “Because maybe someone should.”
Kenji’s thumb moved away from the send button. He opened his banking app instead. The severance was there. Real. Immediate. Safe.
He closed the banking app.
Kenji looked at Tyler. “Tell me about Linda. What did she like? What did she dream about before this?”
Tyler’s eyes reddened. “She wanted to open a bakery. Made the best conchas I ever had.”
“Okay.” Kenji added a note to his message: This documentation is dedicated to Linda Reyes and all the other people who trained the systems that are erasing them. You deserved better. And you deserved to know you could fight back.
He hit send.
The message went through. Sarah Chen confirmed receipt thirty seconds later. Kenji watched the response appear on his screen, then looked up at Tyler.
“You didn’t see me here,” Kenji said.
Tyler nodded slowly. “Never saw you.”
Kenji drove home. His father was at the kitchen table, organizing pills. Daisuke was on the couch, studying. They both looked up when he entered.
“I need to tell you something,” Kenji said. “The company is going to sue us. We’re going to lose the house. We’re going to lose everything. And I’m probably going to prison.”
His father’s face didn’t change. “Why?”
“Because I stopped being grateful. Because I found a way to fight back, and I taught other people how to do it too.”
For a long moment, his father said nothing. Then, slowly, he stood and walked to Kenji. And for the first time since Kenji was a child, his father didn’t bow. Instead, he wrapped his arms around him and squeezed.
“Good,” his father said.
On the side table by the front door, Kenji’s phone started ringing—the company’s legal department. He didn’t answer. Instead, he sat with his father and his son, and together they started making plans for what came next.
The file was already spreading. By morning, it would be everywhere. And by Monday, when Athena went live at twenty companies, hundreds of trainers would know how to corrupt the systems they were building.
They’d know because Kenji had refused to endure alone.