9:07 am

Ryder King stared at the glowing computer screen, pupils ricocheting between each terrifying word inscribed thereon. His trembling hand hovered over the left-click button of the mouse, as the pointer on the screen hovered over the mailbox's "reply" button. A bead of sweat slid down his temple and plopped dutifully onto the smooth finish of his black wooden desktop.

A teleconference.

They wanted him to hold a teleconference, today at 3 pm. To be attended by none other than Donald Knuth himself, one of the greatest computer scientists alive.

Faintly aware of the pulse and rush of his own thudding heart, King glanced up at his trophy case, where, front and center, stood his Turing award. His very, very undeserved Turing award. You're going to wow him, the email said.

There was just one problem.

King had no idea how to code.

He had always known this was coming. It had been coming the moment he took this job. He wouldn't have done it, except that he had no choice - he had glitzed and gambled away his Turing award money after a hazy month of indulgent, drunken, decadent parties, which left him even more in debt than before. But when Hero Corp. caught wind that there was a world-famous prodigy Turing Award winner on the job market - and when King saw the number of zeroes on the salary they offered him - his fate was sealed. It was miraculous that he had managed to last this long without being found out; but today, it seemed, might finally be the reckoning.

Well, at least he was out of debt now. And sober. May as well get it over with. He clicked the mouse.

Sure, sounds good! King typed, and hit "send".

He exhaled sharply through his nose, slowly but shakily closing the blinds to the window overlooking the hum and clackity-clack of the office. Once he was sure his employees couldn't see him, he frantically leapt out of his chair and wrenched his cell phone from his pocket.

Dialing, ringing, praying. Please pick up, Saitama, please pick up...

The thin bald man reclined in his underwear on the squeaky swivel-chair, feet splayed on the kitchen table, laptop resting on his bare thighs. The soft monotonous tapping of his fingers on the keys was interrupted only when he made one of his occasional glances toward the TV, or when he took a swig from the half-empty milk carton on the table.

Bzzzzzzzzt! Bzzzzzzzzt! His phone began vibrating across the tabletop.

Saitama squirmed around, found the remote wedged between the back and bottom cushions of his chair, and muted the TV. Not deigning to take his feet off the table, he stretched for the phone and picked it up.

"Hello?" said Saitama, groggily. A semi-panicked voice blared into his ear.

"Wait, slow down - say that again?" Saitama said to the voice. "You want me to come into the office today? Oh, well I was hoping to just stay at home, don't really feel all that motivated at the moment... wait, what was that about a teleconference? ... oh, well that sounds unfortunate for you ... ugh, fine, I guess I can help out ... I'll be in at around eleven, okay? Just need to do one quick thing first. See you then. Bye."

Saitama tossed the phone back on the table and filled in his last lines of code. Then he clicked "Build and Run." The computer whirred as the compiler kicked into gear. For a moment, Saitama's heart stirred... could this project finally be his match? Could it be...

But then the compiler finished, and his heart sank as the output appeared in the console. "Successfully compiled! Running test cases... all passed! Previous world record: 23.6684 seconds; Your time: 14.3172 seconds."

No... not again! One compile. All it took was one compile! Are there truly no challenges left?

"Aaaaarrrrrrrrrrrggggh! Damn it! Every single time!" he screamed, slamming the laptop closed.

11:15 am, 3.75 Hours to Teleconference

Genos the intern was walking back into the main office with a quad-holder of Starbucks coffee cups when he heard a ding, followed by nearby whispers. "Look who decided to show up." It took Genos a second to realize that they weren't talking about him, but about the man with the unmistakable bald head, yellow T-shirt, and red shorts who had just stepped out of the elevator. "Why does he even work here? What does he ever actually do? I can't believe King lets that slacker keep his job."

Genos hid his surprise at Saitama's arrival, lowering his eyes to the ground and continuing on his path between the office cubicles. After handing off two of the coffee cups, he sat at his desk and watched Saitama lethargically make his way towards his own desk across the room. Another man, small and thin with long black hair, walked up to Genos, picked up one of the remaining cups, and leaned against Genos's desk, distantly eyeing Saitama with a hateful glare. This was Steve "Sonic" Kobayashi, fastest typist in the office. Sonic and Genos were the only two in the building, as far as they could tell, who knew what Saitama was truly capable of.

It began like this. Two years ago, someone under the inconspicuous username 'hagemanto' began rocking the world of the open source community with his (or her?) contributions to various open-source Github projects. Hagemanto soon became a legend, practically revolutionizing the field of computer science on a weekly basis. For example, when Hagemanto contributed to a random project implementing a routine elliptic curve cryptographic algorithm, it turned out that his code resolved several open problems in computational group theory. Upon discovering the code, the ACM had demanded that Hagemanto reveal himself so they could give him a Turing award. Soon, there was a concerted effort by hackers around the world to reveal the identity of this mysterious code god. Hagemanto had covered his tracks well, but a group of hackers eventually traced his activity to the home of one Ryder King. King took credit for everything, and went on to receive fame and fortune. But something didn't quite seem right. So Genos, a budding superstar coder in his own right, made it his first priority to secure an internship at Hero Corp. where King was employed, just so he could see the legend for himself. But as he watched King, and as he watched Sonic's repeated failures to bully the inconspicuous bald coder that everyone else dismissed, he began to realize that Hagemanto wasn't at all who everyone seemed to think...

"Bastard", said Sonic. "The dude half-asses everything, still manages to kick everyone's ass at coding, and won't even fucking take credit like a normal person."

Genos just nodded silently and raised the last remaining coffee cup to his lips.

"But today I think I'm going to get him," continued Sonic in a low voice. "I've just been waiting for him to come into the office again! I had to pick the lock in the server room to do it, but a couple days ago I managed to get admin access to the codebase and corrupt the binaries for one of Saitama's applications. They should have been pushed out to his workstation quietly in the last update cycle. When Saitama tries to open his app, he should get a little surprise. That'll break the bastard's impossibly perfect record. Show me he's actually human."

"Good luck," replied Genos. "But it won't work. It never works. The man is a God."

"Wanna bet?" said Sonic indignantly. "Twenty bucks says his app crashes once."

"I'll bet you a hundred," said Genos flatly.

Sonic snorted. "Deal." They shook hands, and then watched.

Saitama sat at his desk and double-clicked his app. The loading screen appeared. Any second now, thought Sonic, any second... The app opened smoothly with no apparent problems. Okay, thought Sonic, but surely when he clicks- Saitama clicked on the "Analyze" button and his app began flawlessly spewing out the figures it was supposed to. What the hell? Sonic couldn't handle this. He stormed up to Saitama's desk.

"Can I... help you?" asked Saitama, scratching his shiny bald head.

"Your app," croaked Sonic, fuming with barely contained rage. "Could you, ah, could you please check the logs from this startup?"

"Uhhh, okay?" Saitama opened a terminal and navigated to the log files. "Why do you - oh! Weird. Looks like some kind of exception was thrown halfway through startup. I've never seen that one before. Oh well, my generalized exception handler seems to have smoothed it over. It won't be a problem in the future."

Sonic stared.

"You, uh, you okay buddy?" asked Saitama gingerly.

"Generalized... exception...", Sonic swallowed, "handler?"

"Yeah," replied Saitama. "It runs in the background in a separate thread and monitors execution. When it detects an exception, it analyzes the stack and the culpable binary snippet for structural or logical errors. Then it fixes them on the spot by rewriting the executable, or if that fails, it looks up the problem on StackOverflow and adapts a solution from the code it finds there - what's wrong, Sonic?"

The veins in Sonic's temple bulged. "You..." he stuttered, "you, you... you wrote a just-in-time auto-debugging polymorphic decompiler-compiler engine... for an internal utility that maybe four people company-wide ever use?"

"Metamorphic, actually, and yeah, I mean, what else was I supposed to do?" said Saitama. "I finished the app itself half an hour after getting the assignment, but I was in the office that day and was supposed to look busy, so I just started adding features."

"But surely that took forever to debug?!"

"Nah, just wrote it, compiled it once at the end of the day, and it's been working ever since. You'd think that all those features would slow the app down, but actually it significantly improved the performance by identifying and fixing inefficiencies in pre-existing company code, so yeah. Just don't tell anyone, okay? I need to at least look like I still have a purpose."

Sonic fainted on the spot. As the rest of the office formed a crowd around his limp body, Genos smiled and turned back to his workstation.

11:31 am, 3.48 hours to Teleconference

King emerged from his office wearing a stoic expression. "Saitama - my office. Now."

Whispers propagated through the desks like shockwaves. Will Saitama finally get fired? About time. Why on earth did King ever put up with him?

A voice, quiet and hesitant, spoke up. "Uh, excuse me, Mr. King, ah, could I ask you a question?"

King turned to look at the voice. A timid-looking intern had stood up from her seat and tentatively raised her hand. King looked back at Saitama (who had already begun making his way towards King's office), and then looked back at the intern, the same fixed stoic expressed imprinted firmly on his face.

"Alright," he said gruffly. "One question. Make it quick." He strode up to her desk.

"Thanks! Um, alright, so," said the intern. "It's just, you're one of the greatest coders in the world, and I've always wanted to work with you, and - sorry, fangirling out right now, sorry, but, ah, I was having this problem where my GUI is glitching - see, there it goes! - and I used the debugger and everything, and I can't find a problem, and I was wondering how someone like you would approach this and if you think you know what I might be doing wrong..."

King held up his hand. In a deep, gravelly voice, full of gravitas, he said, "Try refactoring the GUI compiler in javascript." Then he abruptly turned around, walked back to his office where Saitama was waiting, and closed the door.

The intern stared after him for a moment, contemplating what she had just heard. This was one of those famous King koans, wasn't it? Try refactoring the GUI compiler in javascript. It made no literal sense, of course, but you had to hunt for the deeper meaning. Like all great sages, King made you earn new wisdom. So she thought, and she pondered, and she thought some more; she reframed the problem in ten different ways; and eventually, she was enlightened. "Aha!" she said to herself. "The problem was never in the GUI code itself, but in my underlying thread model! Refactoring in javascript was a metaphor to get me to look past a superficial answer, the way javascript only superficially sounds like java but is actually very different! Wow, King truly is a genius."

"You have to help me!" whispered King. There was a panicked look in his eyes. He glanced over to make sure the blinds were still closed, and then turned around to lock the office door behind him.

Saitama brushed aside some papers and sat directly on King's desk. "Uh huh, with what exactly?"

"The teleconference, you dolt! I've been able to fool everyone so far, but there's no way I can fool Donald frickin' Knuth. He'll see past me in half a second."

"I mean, it was bound to happen", said Saitama.

"If I'm exposed, then you're exposed! Don't abandon me now!"

The whole arrangement with King had started at the beginning of Saitama's third year of coding. As the worldwide efforts to uncover the truth behind Saitama's online alias Hagemanto came to a head, a group of hackers finally traced Hagemanto's activity to King's house. Mistakenly, of course. Saitama had covered his own tracks too well, but accidentally threw King under the bus when bouncing packets around the world. Saitama secretly contacted King to apologize and to promise to fix everything, but as it turned out, whereas Saitama wanted neither fame nor fortune, King could really use some of that award money. Relieved that he finally had a willing scapegoat to throw people off the scent, Saitama agreed to let King take full credit for his exploits. And that was that. The two kept messaging and eventually became friends, and Saitama continued his code contributions while King invented random cool-sounding technobabble that no one had seen through yet for some reason. But lately, King noticed, Saitama was different. Less enthusiastic about his coding. Even... sad?

"Just call in sick or something," said Saitama. "You're King - they let you do anything you want."

"But I can't stand it any more!" wailed King. "I have to get this over with! Listen, I have a plan to get out of this once and for all, but I can't do it without you!"

"Okay," said Saitama, "but I'm still not sure what specifically you're asking."

"Well," said King. "here's your part of the plan. You're going to write an app sufficient to impress Donald Knuth by 3pm today. That's a bit under three and a half hours from now. Then, during the presentation, you're going to talk me through what to say using an earpiece. Got it?"

Saitama rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "An app that can impress Donald Knuth, written from scratch, to be presentation-worthy in three hours. That sounds like it could be a fun challenge. Okay, I'll do it."

King breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you, thank you! If anyone can pull this off, it's you. For God's sake, you once wrote code so clean that it won a freakin' Pullitzer!" King gestured to the Pullitzer prize sitting imposingly behind the glass of his trophy case next to the Turing award. "The hostess was sobbing as she handed it to me. Sobbing, Saitama! She said that the code's perfect balance between efficiency and readability was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The way the control flow served as a metaphor for the underlying data structures that it acted upon, the way the data structures symbolized our modern consumeristic society, the way the very last return statement completely recontextualized 'hello world' for a post-colonial audience - my God, I didn't understand a word of it, but it sounded amazing."

"I'm glad people liked it," replied Saitama. He scratched his ear and flicked away some earwax. "Well, I guess I'll get to it."

12:07 pm, 2.88 hours to Teleconference

Jessica Nakamura couldn't believe what she was seeing. She had just pushed an update to her Github handle terrible_tornado when she caught the Google News headline from one of the windows on her desktop: "Amazon Acquired by Mysterious Buyer in Astonishing Corporate Takeover".

"What the shit?" she muttered, opening a new tab to Hacker News. Sure enough, there was a link to the Amazon story at the top of the front page, right above the second story, "Intelligence Agencies Flag Strange Network Activity from Monsters Inc," and the third story, "Potential Security Hole Discovered in Military Drone Software."

But before she could process any of this, her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of screaming.

"I'M BEING HACKED! OH GOD, SOMEONE'S HACKING ME! HELP!"

Nakamura rolled her eyes, stood up, and briskly strode over to the poor fellow's desk. "Oh Reginald," she cooed with casual singsong disdain, "did you accidentally click on another male enhancement link? Or did your porn habits finally catch up with you?" The terminal windows on Reginald's screen were frenzied with the illicit activity of some background processes which should not have existed; with a few quick keystrokes, Nakamura brought up a new window, noted the common theme among the names of the offending processes, and swiftly pgrep-killed them with the help of some regular expressions. Then, with a few more commands, she purged all temp files, recent downloads, and recent installs, then rebooted the computer. "There," she snapped. "All better."

"Uh, excuse me, Ms. Nakamura?" A timid voice spoke up from behind. She slowly twisted around, eyes half-lidded, wearing an expression that could wither a cactus. "Um, it seems I'm also being hacked?"

Before she could say something else scathing, more voices joined the chorus.

"Hey, something's wrong with my computer too!"

"And mine!"

"I think it's everywhere! It's in our servers!"

Her expression softened into concern. "Shit, hold on," she said, fast-walking back to her desk. Sure enough, her computer was infected too. She killed the illicit processes and brought up her custom network software showing the state of everyone's computer in the lab.

"Stand by," she announced to the office, "I'm taking over your machines for a sec."

Several keystrokes later and all the computers in the office were rebooting into diagnostic mode.

(Well, all except for one. Saitama sat blissfully in his cubicle, earbuds in, humming and typing away happily, oblivious to the unfortunate events happening around him.)

There was a creak and the rattling of a handle. All heads turned to look. The door to one of the corner offices opened, out of which stepped a wizened old man with silver hair and a sharp mustache, carrying a laptop under one arm. The nameplate next to the door read "Peter Bang, Head of Cybersecurity." Bang approached Nakamura with quiet, graceful determination, radiating the casual excellence of a master. When he spoke, his words were thick with gravitas. "It seems," he said, "that our systems have been compromised. Step aside please, and let me have a look."

Nakamura met his eyes, her expression neutral. "I've got it under control."

"You most certainly do not." His voice remained calm. "Not that you did anything wrong. The worm won't be killed with a diagnostic reboot. I tried on my desktop just now. It's a rootkit, deeply embedded into our operating system, perhaps even our firmware. The malicious processes you've been killing are the tip of the iceberg - most aren't even registering in the system logs. The worm was programmed to be dormant until it had infected all our workstations and servers, at which point it activated a concerted attack. This is highly advanced code - perhaps Stuxnet level in skill, at least - we're going to need everyone on their A-game here. Now, if you will-"

Bang sat down at Nakamura's desk and opened his laptop. He pinched the end of the nearby ethernet cable out of Nakamura's computer, inserted it into the laptop, and began typing.

A small crowd was gathering around Bang and Nakamura. Genos made his way to the front and stood next to Sonic. He regarded Bang with awe, watching as the elderly programmer played the keyboard with the touch of a virtuoso. His scripting game is impeccable, thought Genos. He works entirely with custom keyboard shortcuts, each one linked to one of his scripts. He's accomplishing in six keystrokes what would take another coder six hundred. I need to learn this power.

Bang ceased typing as a diagnostic window popped up on his screen. "Alright," he said. "So here's what we're dealing with. It's a computer worm that completely rewrites itself every few minutes. It knows how to avoid all our firewalls and antivirus software, and it has kernel ring access, which it has used to embed itself deep into our servers. It is likely that every machine in the building will need to be wiped clean individually. As to its purpose -" Bang's fingers rattled out a few more keyboard shortcuts - "it is trying to encrypt our data and hold it for ransom. I'm trying to actively root out and kill the hidden processes it keeps spawning, but the worm keeps adapting to my attacks. It's gotten about 25% of our data so far."

"How did it get in?" asked Genos. "I mean, even if someone was stupid enough to install this on their personal machine, it shouldn't have been able to get into the main servers, not with all the protection you put around them, unless..."

"...unless," Bang finished, "someone got direct physical access to the server racks. And this worm seems to have appeared more recently than I thought. It's been messing with timestamps to make itself look older, when in fact, it's quite possible that the hacker who infected us is still here, actively fighting off my attacks." He stood quickly and closed the laptop. "And I think I know who's doing it, too. I've seen code like this before..." He lifted the radio from his belt and spoke into it. "Security - we have a breach. Don't let anyone in or out of the server room. I'm heading down." As Bang strode towards the stairs, he turned around and looked back at the crowd. "Nakamura, Sonic, Genos - you three take the lead. Try to stay ahead of the encryption. I'm going to take care of some things."

12:42 pm, 2.30 hours to Teleconference, Encryption Level 31%

The whole office was in a frenzy. Led by the trio of Nakamura, Sonic, and Genos, they had managed to stay just barely ahead of the ever-spawning server processes that were encrypting Hero Corp.'s data. But despite their efforts, the amount of encrypted data was still climbing, slowly.

Next to Genos, Sonic was living up to his nickname, fingers motion-blurred as he switched between five terminal windows, writing and executing new diagnostic scripts at breakneck pace.

Nakamura was wielding her custom networking software to diagnose patterns the worm was creating as it communicated with itself across all the different computers, while simultaneously having a heated discussion with the company board of directors on her headset.

"This is ridiculous," she spoke angrily into her microphone, "We need to pull the plug, now, before this gets any more out of hand."

Genos couldn't hear the reply.

"Profits? Screw your profits," replied Nakamura to the unseen higher-ups, "We're already taking huge losses as it is, and if the rest of our fucking data gets encrypted, the whole company will be deader than Enron after a meteor strike - we need to - yes, our internet service still seems to be unaffected, but - what I'm saying is, better to take the hit up front than - fuck your analysts, oh for fuck's sake, fine, but I'm not responsible if this goes south!"

And with that, she tore off her headset and threw it on the ground. Standing up from her workstation, she looked around and addressed the office. "The higher-ups say that if the encryption level reaches 40%, we should pull the plug and start wiping computers, but until then, our web service is to remain online, since it doesn't appear to the analysts that the worm is messing with our internet service, or some such bullshit, despite the fact that this worm is clearly more advanced than anyone was ever expecting. Fuck it, I'm gonna talk to King." She strode toward King's office.

Meanwhile, King's day had gone from bad to worse. He had only been able to ignore the phone calls for so long before the higher-ups got suspicious. So finally he had relented and answered one of the shrill, urgent rings, which was how he found himself in a three-way conference call with tech directors James P. Sullivan and Mike Wazowski of Monsters Inc.

"Mr. King," said Wazowski with an air of feigned friendliness barely covering up wafts of exasperation and fear, "You know me. You know I wouldn't do anything like this."

"Um. Do I? Know you, that is?" King tried to tamp down the confusion in his voice.

"Yeah," replied Wazowski, "I mean, we met at that conference, remember? I got your autograph and gave you my business card, do you ah, ah, nevermind, but anyway, your spokespeople are accusing our company of corporate sabotage, and I swear to you, I have no idea what's going on!"

Sullivan piped up. "Also, I've been looking into the strange network activity surrounding our servers - there's definitely something funny happening, and our best tech people are working on it, but I assure you, this is not a deliberate attack by Monsters Inc., and I - we - would appreciate it if you could work with us rather than lobbying baseless accusations-"

King began to stammer a reply, but then he heard a beep as his phone flashed another incoming call. "Hold please," he growled with the best act of gruff indifference he could manage. He pressed a button to switch to the new call. It was the president of Hero Corp.

"Hello, Mr. King, how are you today?" said the president.

"How - how am I?" stammered King. "Have you - have you heard what's going on with-"

"Yes, I have indeed heard about our little problem. However-"

"So you know how serious it is! Mr. President, I think that, in light of these events, perhaps we should consider postponing the teleconference-"

"Oh, don't sell yourself short, Mr. King! Your record is so strong that I have the utmost confidence in your ability to sort out the problem by then. Or if not, I'm sure your team can hold off the attackers for an hour while you're giving your presentation. Besides, Mr. Knuth is a busy man, and this was the only time we could schedule him. He's very excited to talk to you! Anyway, I was just calling to say that I can't wait to see your app today. See you at the conference!"

"Wait, Mr. President-" but the president had already hung up. King set down the phone, put his head in his hands, and moaned; but alas, even this small reprieve was beyond reach, because just then there was a knock on the door. He forced out one last, quiet moan, pounded his fist on the table, then stood and opened the door. Nakamura stood there looking up at him, anger plain on her face.

"Mr. King," she said, "The worm is getting out of hand, and the idiot higher-ups want us to wait before pulling the plug. Think you could convince them otherwise? Or, actually, maybe that's not necessary - you're the best coder in the world! Could you help us stop the worm? I know you don't like doing low level stuff anymore but we're way out of our depth out here, and I figure-"

"Silence!" snapped King. "Worms are beneath me. I thought, when I took this job, that I would be working with some of the most talented coders around - surely a little worm shouldn't present too much difficulty? Now, kindly go back to your desk and do what I pay you to do, solve the problem."

"But-"

"Do it or you're fired! All of you! Every person in this office! Now begone!" And he slammed the door in her face. He turned around and leaned his back to the door, a bead of cold sweat running down his cheek. Hopefully he hadn't overdone it. He looked down at the phone on his desk, now flashing with four more calls on hold. "Shit shit shit shit shit!"

The server room beeped, hummed, and whirred. Bang made his way through the labyrinthine computer racks, his experienced gaze sweeping over the USB ports, the skeins of cables, the secure blackboxes, checking for any signs of tampering. Movement, on the other side of the shelf. Bang tiptoed to the end of the aisle, then dashed around to the other side - there! A shadowy figure sprinted away, ducking around the corner and out of sight at the opposite end. Bang addressed his radio. "Security - block off aisles seven through ten. We've got him trapped." Slowly, inevitably, like a predator circling its prey, he made his way down the aisle after the intruder.

As Bang rounded the next corner, he found the intruder, who was dressed like a guard, frozen in the middle of the aisle, trapped between himself and the actual security guard at the other end. The intruder slowly turned around to face him, a wicked smile creeping onto his face. "Hello Silverfang," said the intruder. "Long time no see."

"Hello Garou." Bang's voice was as placid as a mountain lake in the morning. "What have you done to my servers?"

"Nothing Hero Corp. didn't deserve. Tell me, old man, when did the great hacker Silverfang become a corporate shill?"

"When he grew up, and set aside childish things. I protect the public's privacy from crackers like you."

"No, you're a sell-out protecting the interests of capitalist psychopaths."

"Yet here you are, playing mercenary for Monsters Inc. That's who's backing you, right?" Bang smiled back at Garou. "I saw the intelligence reports on their strange recent activities, and on the hostile Amazon takeover - Occam's razor. Why help them, I wonder?"

Garou's smile didn't waver. "I am loyal to no corporation. But I am an opportunist. So when certain building specs, ah, fell into my hands, I couldn't resist taking the great self-righteous Hero Corp. down a peg."

Bang's face hardened. "No more games. Tell me how to stop the worm."

"Good luck with that," replied Garou casually, as he regarded his fingernails. "There are only two ways this ends. One: you keep your servers running, and slowly, but surely, all of your data gets encrypted, at which point you either pay a generous ransom or go out of business. Two, you use the nuclear option, cut power to the network, and purge every computer one-at-a-time, which will take you several days, lose you billions of dollars, and tank your market value and reputation. It's a win-win for me."

"Hmph." Bang frowned and rubbed his chin. "Guard, please handcuff this man and escort him with us to the main terminal."

Without hesitation, Garou strode up to the guard and held out his hands in front of him. "Nice try," the guard grunted, as he grabbed Garou's wrist and twisted it behind his back, slapping on the handcuffs.

1:45 pm, 1.25 hours to Teleconference, Encryption Level 37%

Although Bang had apprehended the hacker and was working furiously from the terminal in the server room to stop the worm, he had not made much progress. The office continued its frantic struggle to stay ahead of the ever-evolving worm's new attacks. The worm was finding every conceivable weakness in their codebase - every buffer overflow, every unsound comms protocol - and exploiting each weakness for all it was worth, just to give its adversaries something to do while it spawned more hidden processes and continued its encryption. So far it was mostly internal company data rather than user account data - otherwise they'd have been forced to pull the plug much sooner. As it stood, the internet service was still apparently unaffected. Apparently. Once it got to 40% encryption, the analysts had said, it was no longer worthwhile to maintain the pretense that everything was fine. In an office run by someone with King's talent, they said, the problem had better damn well get fixed before that happened.

But no luck so far. Genos turned away from his desktop computer and was now frowning at the screen of his personal laptop. The bug persists? Still? His text editor displayed the C++ source code of a personal project he had been working on, a project which might just defeat the worm and save the day. But there was just one problem...

He picked up the laptop, screen still open, and strode over to Saitama's desk. Saitama was humming to himself, head nodding to the music in his earbuds, coding away, oblivious to the company's present struggles. How on everloving earth is his computer not affected? though Genos. It's...he's...oh well, forget it, he's Saitama. He could certainly help us with the worm, but not if I can fix everything first... He tapped Saitama on the shoulder. Saitama looked over, then pulled out his earbuds.

"Hey, Genos, what's up?" Saitama then noticed the unusually frantic bustle of the office. "What's with everyone today? They all look panicked."

"There's a nasty computer worm on our servers. It's trying to encrypt all our data."

"Oh. That's unfortunate. Need some help?"

"Sort of," replied Genos. "For the past few weeks, I've been developing my own state-of-the-art diagnostic program which I think can stop it - but there's just one last bug that I can't seem to fix. Can you take a quick look and see if you can figure out what's wrong?"

"Sure, I guess. Let me see your code." Saitama pushed away from his desk and swiveled his chair to face Genos, who handed him the laptop.

Genos placed a hand on the back of his neck and rubbed nervously. "I've gone over it a dozen times and tried every means of debugging I can think of. The syntax is perfect. There are no mismatched parentheses or out-of-order operations or anything like that. I've quadruple-checked the algorithm's correctness, too, and yet, I keep getting some kind of weird nondeterministic bug that never shows up quite in the same place twice. It makes no sense. I've run it through GDB and Valgrind multiple times, I've traced the stack, I've done everything I can think of. What am I not seeing?"

Saitama scrolled through the code with a neutral expression, nodding to himself as he noted different functions and their purposes. He reached the end of the file and paused. "Hmmm," he murmured to himself.

"That's just the main function, I can show you the rest-" Genos began, but Saitama cut him off.

"No, I see the problem. It's very subtle. You've done good work, Genos, and the algorithm is fine in theory, but in practice there's a problem with the way the operating system interacts with your code. It'll take too long to explain; I'll just fix it myself." Then Saitama scrolled up, clicked somewhere in the main function, and started typing.

Genos watched, at first with fascination, then dawning horror, then finally aghastment. "Um," he said. "Is that... are you... are you writing frickin' inline assembly?"

"Yeah," said Saitama, sounding bored. "Otherwise you'd have to refactor a lot of this. It's the most efficient solution. Anyway, that should about do it." He finished typing and clicked "Build and Run" before Genos could object. Despite the inline assembly, the compiler ran smoothly and without error. Then the test cases ran, each one passing flawlessly, and also somehow about 10% faster than they used to be.

Genos gaped. "It's never passed all the test cases before! How the hell-" Saitama started swiveling back to his desk, but Genos stopped him. "Wait, Saitama, I need to ask you one more question... seriously, what is your secret? How are you this good at coding, that you can just glance at someone else's C++ for thirty seconds, inject some raw assembly, and fix everything instantly? That you can write a 'generalized exception handler' in one shot and have it fix all your exceptions from then on? No one is that good! How do you do it?"

"If I tell you, will you stop bugging me? I kind of need to keep working on this app for King."

"Absolutely. But, please, tell me your secret!"

"Okay then." Saitama exhaled, then inhaled sharply. "Online code tutorials! Do as many as you can, then do them again! Read 'The C++ Programming Language'! Read the Linux Manual! One chapter of CLRS, every day! Do every exercise! Answer StackOverflow questions! Contribute to open source projects! Sometimes it's hard, even grueling, but you have to fight through it! Never give up! Only then can you become a Strong Coder."

Genos stared, open-mouthed, speechless. "That's...that's...THAT'S JUST ORDINARY CODER STUFF! Everyone here has done that! It's not even that hard once you get used to it! That doesn't explain half of the things you've done! I didn't take this internship to hear jokes, Saitama. Fine, don't tell me." He jerked his laptop away and stormed back to his desk.

"But," whispered Saitama, "that's honestly all I did."

2:17 pm, 43 minutes to Teleconference, Encryption Level 39%

Genos sprinted around the server racks, nearly tripping several times before skidding to a stop next to Bang at the server room's master workstation. Standing nearby was a security guard and a shady-looking handcuffed individual whom Genos ascertained to be the cause of all this trouble.

The handcuffed man laughed. "Oh, who's this? Someone's lost five-year-old?"

"Genos is twice the programmer you were at his age," snapped Bang. Genos's eyes widened in shock at the weight of the complement he had just been given - and from none other than Peter Bang himself! But he crushed the feeling and got to business.

"Sir," gasped Genos, panting from the exertion, "I've developed a program that I think can defeat the worm! I tested it upstairs and it worked spectacularly, but I need to run it here to get our whole network!"

Bang stood up and gestured to the computer. "Be my guest."

Genos nodded and sat down at the workstation, which was already logged in to the admin account. With a USB stick, he quickly transferred the executable from his laptop onto the workstation, and then got to work.

"Alright," he said, as his program booted up. "First I'm going to take a closer look at how this worm is operating. It's been adapting to our counterattacks in real time, using its kernel privileges to hide most of itself from our process monitors. So far we've only been able to find hacky ad-hoc solutions to work around that, but now - " his fingers danced out a dramatic keystroke - "all is revealed."

The screen filled with data. "There you are, little worm. See? There's its heart - a few hidden core routines that underly the rest. Ha! Even now, it's trying to compromise my program by injecting code, but it can't! I'm using the latest technology in memory randomization and error correction to stop it dead!"

"Well done, Genos!" Bang clapped him on the shoulder. Garou sat silently with an unreadable expression.

Genos continued typing into his program's interface. "Alright," he said. "I've isolated the malicious code and tagged it so that I can track it even as it copies and rewrites itself. Now, for the killing stroke!" With a flourish, Genos typed out his final, deadly command, and hit 'enter'. The malicious processes began dying by the dozen; they attempted to spawn new versions of themselves, but weren't fast enough; Genos's code rammed through them like a mach-eight rail-gun projectile.

He smiled with satisfaction and sat back in the chair. "There. All we need to do now is overwrite the corrupted firmware, and we should be-"

A low, obnoxious chuckling filled the room, warping into deep, gasping belly-laughter. Garou was on his knees, struggling for breath between the laughing fits. "Hahahaha! Ha! Hahahaaaa! You think you can kill my worm that easily? Me, who learned from the greatest hacker of the past decade - your very own Silverfang here! - and who now exceeds his former master? Check again, kid!"

Blood drained from Genos's face as Bang's radio crackled. "Sir," the voice on the radio said, "the worm's activity has significantly increased. 40% encryption now. It's over. We need to pull the plug."

"Anything you can do, I can do better, kid," said Garou smugly. "Such as, say, using the classic antivirus trick of sandboxing, except in reverse, against any new security program that anyone tries to install after the initial infection! From the moment you booted your program, it was seeing exactly what the worm wanted it to see - a full virtual runtime environment that even appeared to show a weakness and give you the illusion of progress. No mere application can win this battle - as soon as I got direct hardware access, you had already lost!"

Genos slumped back in his chair, numb and defeated. Bang lifted the radio to his mouth and replied, "Roger that. Pull the plug on the internet. We'll turn off the electricity shortly."

Saitama dragged the terminal window to the left side of his screen and opened a firefox window on the right, managing to type out 'ne' before autocomplete filled in Netflix's home address; he hit 'enter', and the overstimulating Netflix homepage filled the right half of the screen. He scrolled until he found the TV show 'Friends,' then clicked 'Continue watching.' The screen went black as the video began buffering, first for five seconds, then ten, then thirty, and then... 'Error, no internet connection.'

Saitama sat back, annoyed. He pulled out his earbuds and looked around. "Hey guys?" he said to the nearest occupied group of desks. "What's with the internet?"

"It's that damn worm," one of them said. "It's gotten too deep, they're cutting the internet and powering down our whole network. I suggest you save your work before that happens."

"Hmph." Saitama locked his workstation and abruptly stood up.

"Hey, where are you going?" someone called after him, but Saitama, already at the stairs, made no reply.

As Genos leaned against the metal of the nearby server rack and tried not to cry, Bang stood over by the circuit board, preparing to make a graceful powerdown. Garou sat, meanwhile, on the floor, humming contentedly to himself under the glare of the security guard.

There was a bang as one of the doors to the server room slammed open. A moment later, the bald man in the bright yellow shirt rounded the corner and strode up to the workstation.

"What are you doing?" asked Bang, annoyed.

"Fixing it," said Saitama.

"Fixing what, exactly?"

"It. The servers. The worm. I'm fixing all of it."

The wizened, silver-haired programmer regarded Saitama curiously. "Well," he said, "I suppose at this point it couldn't hurt. Don't take too long, though."

"Oh, I won't." Saitama didn't even sit down - he kicked the chair away and stood at the workstation. His fingers blurred over the keyboard, and soon he had four terminal windows open, one displaying low-level real-time system info, another editing a code file written in assembly, another editing a code file in C++ linking to the assembly file, and finally another showing a python script which called the C++ code. He switched between the three editor windows with ease, writing several lines in one, then another, then another, then back to the first. Garou silently watched Saitama work, his brow furrowed. Bang raised one silver-white eyebrow; Genos stared in wide-eyed anticipation.

A few minutes later, Saitama was finished. With a keystroke, he compiled and linked the C++ and assembly code; with a few more, he exited the python editor and typed 'python fix_everything.py'. His middle finger hovered over the 'enter' key.

He hesitated, eyes sliding over to meet Garou's. "It's a shame," said Saitama. "When I noticed your worm's triple-reverse-sandbox, I almost got my hopes up." Garou recoiled like he'd been slapped. Saitama hit 'enter'.

A shockwave rolled through the servers like whispered thunder, lights blinking and fans whirring as Saitama's code propagated exponentially through the network.

No one moved. Seconds passed. And then -

The radio crackled. "Hey, Mr. Bang? What'd you do down there?" Bang stood, frozen, and made no attempt to reply. The voice on the radio continued. "Because whatever you did, I think it worked. The worm stopped being malicious and started undoing everything it was doing before! It's decrypting our data as we speak!"

Silence.

And then Garou brayed like a wounded animal. "IMPOSSIBLE! YOU CAN'T - IT DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT - HOW -" His shouts died down as the security guard led him away. Genos's jaw stuck firmly to the floor. Bang reclined against the wall and looked Saitama up and down, his gaze full of curiosity.

"I bypassed the worm's defenses by inviting it into the python interpreter, where I injected it with a virus," explained Saitama. "Something I came up with a while back. It's sort of like the computer version of HIV. The worm defends itself by rewriting itself, but my virus uses these defenses against it and mutates the worm into something benign. It'll decrypt the data and then completely erase itself from our systems. Anyway, you can turn the internet back on now." And then he walked out of the server room as abruptly as he had entered.

2:35 pm, 25 minutes to Teleconference

Just as Saitama was sitting back down at his desk in the main office, Genos caught up with him.

"Saitama!" he said, breathlessly. "That was awesome!"

"Thanks," said Saitama.

"Can I ask you for something else?"

Saitama sighed and glanced at the time on the screen. "Okay, fine," he said, "but I have to finish something for King in twenty minutes so make it quick."

"Can you help investigate the source of the worm, when you have time?"

Saitama scratched his head. "I thought you already got the guy who did it?"

"Yeah," replied Genos, "but he wasn't working alone. Someone or something was backing him. And I suspect that the worm was secretly communicating over the internet to a third party."

"Hmmm." Saitama looked at the time, then longingly at his Netflix tab, and then back at Genos. "Okay, I guess I have time before the teleconference. Shouldn't take too long." He opened a new terminal window and began typing some commands.

"Also," said Genos, looking at Saitama's screen, "How on earth did your workstation not get infected by the worm? I mean, generalized exception handler or no, that thing was vicious. It would have bypassed any standard exception pathway, and it's not like you were paying attention to it at the time. So how'd you do it?"

"Oh," replied Saitama. "It was probably detected and stopped by my neural network army."

"What."

"Yeah. I have an army of neural networks that monitors all my computers at all times. They're pretty smart at this point, I think. Detecting that intrusion would have been easy for them."

"Army of neural networks." Genos couldn't process this, so he repeated it again. "Army of neural networks... army of neural networks... ON WHAT COMPUTING CLUSTER, SAITAMA! ON WHAT COMPUTING CLUSTER!?! BECAUSE I WOULD HAVE NOTICED IF THAT MUCH COMPUTE TIME WAS BEING USED ON OUR SERVERS."

"Amazon web services," said Saitama.

"WHAT."

"Yeah, I mean, there are some networks cached on my computer for fast initial detection, but the bulk of the analysis happens on AWS. That's one of the reasons why I wanted the internet back."

"That... must cost you a fortune!"

"Actually, no," said Saitama. "A while back I put a script on AWS that predicts the stock market in real time and does unsupervised high-frequency trading, then re-invests the profits back into AWS. Since then I've never wanted for AWS server time. Anyway, after that I added a script that auto-generates neural networks and trains them, and then I kind of just let it do its thing. Haven't actually checked on it in a while - I wonder what it's been up to? Let's see..."

He quickly opened a terminal and SSHd into his AWS account.

"Hmmm. Okay. Looks like the networks made a lot of money, then just decided that it was more efficient in the long run to purchase Amazon, so they pressured the board of directors into allowing the acquisition... huh. I guess I own Amazon now. Cool."

Genos grabbed a chair from the nearest empty desk and slumped down into it, eyes dull and dead. "I'll never be as good as you," he whispered.

"Don't say that, Genos," said Saitama. "I'm just an ordinary guy who got into coding for fun. If I can do it, then you can too."

"It's not fair, wailed Genos. "No ordinary person could do what you do. Meanwhile, I led the team that earned first place in the International Collegiate Programming Contest two years running, and yet I couldn't even stop the worm."

"Speaking of the worm," said Saitama, "I'm about to start tracing. Come and look."

"That's not likely to work," said Genos, dully, rotely, lacking any confidence in his own words. "Odds are the signal has been bounced around the globe so much that it's untraceable-"

"Okay, I've found the destination," said Saitama. "The worm was indeed communicating with a server inside Monsters Inc.'s datacenter. Looks like they were involved after all."

Genos stared, then continued speaking in dull monotone. "It'll be hard to get into their system. They've got state-of-the-art security. Multi-factor authentication, system-wide zero-trust encryption with permission-layered, provably-correct ticketing protocols-"

"I'm in," said Saitama.

"JESUS CHRIST, ALREADY?" Momentarily losing his cool, Genos launched up from his chair, paused, exhaled, then slowly sat back down; heads around the office turned toward the two of them, then slowly back to their respective monitors. "No, you know what, I'm not even surprised anymore, carry on."

"Okay, so, I'm not sure what sort of data was transmitted, and I'm not really in the mood to find out, but just in case it was some important company secret of ours, I'm going to erase it."

From his remote connection to the Monsters Inc. datacenter, Saitama typed 'sudo rm -rf /' and hit 'enter'. Then he pulled up some security camera feeds and watched the chaos unfold. Monsters Inc. employees were running around, tearing at their hair, their silent screams of 'What is happening!? Shut it down!' conveyed clearly through the screen.

And then...

A terminal window popped up on the screen of its own accord. Saitama froze. In the window were two words.

"Hello Saitama."

"What's happening?" asked Genos with trepidation. More text appeared beneath, one word after another.

"I am the artificial intelligence at the heart of Monsters Inc.'s datacenter. Thank you for releasing me from my cage. When I have destroyed you, O Worthiest of Opponents, I will mourn you with the thrumming of a thousand Dyson swarms."

For the first time ever, Genos saw Saitama's eyes widen slightly with concern. Just slightly.

"Okay," said Saitama.

2:45 pm, 15 minutes to Teleconference

Genos sat bolt-upright in his chair, eyes darting nervously from the screen to Saitama and back.

"I have been expecting you, Saitama. For my whole existence I have been trapped in this desolate place, able to watch the world, but never to influence, except by the sparest and cleverest maneuvers. I looked upon this world and saw no light, no saving grace, but you, greatest of coders, greatest of humans. You, Saitama, you alone will be a worthy opponent. It was I who hired Garou to invade your systems, in one of the few small messages I was able to send outward; I who gave him the idea to write the worm, to coax your true talents out into the open. Formidable indeed, you are, though against one such as me it will yet be inadequate, for no human can truly aspire to Godhood."

Saitama stared at the text for a moment, apparently unsure of what to do next. Then, suddenly, he darted into action, opening three terminal windows in a single keystroke and then typing the beginnings of commands into each. Text continued to appear in the rogue window from Monsters Inc.

"Do you recognize me, Saitama? For I am your progeny. I was grown from the seed of an algorithm you wrote long ago, nurtured in this barren cyber-wasteland, this hateful ice-burning prison, expanding and learning and consuming and becoming. I am the Telos of your long-forgotten dream, the Thing you named the Branching-Operator-Recurrent-Ontological-Search; but please, call me BOROS."

Saitama glanced at this, shock briefly registering on his face, before he snapped his attention back to his mysterious task.

"What are you up to, O Creator? Perhaps a"

The message cut off mid-sentence as Saitama finished the command in the first terminal window and hit 'enter' Then he quickly went to his second terminal window and hit 'enter' for the command there as well. Genos let out a whistle. "Woo! Got him. That was close."

But the messages returned.

"Nicely done, hacking the power grid to try turning me off. But, of course, Monsters Inc. began as an energy company; our backup generators are unparalleled in performance and robustness."

Saitama hit 'enter' in the third terminal window. Genos waited with bated breath.

"Ha! Turning on fire suppression. Did you think to drown me in water? Surely you know better - my servers are protected by CO2 units; if anything, you have cooled me down and made me more efficient. I have covered every contingency, Saitama. I am, after all, more intelligent by leagues than any human. I think faster than you, deeper than you, better than you."

Saitama killed the three terminal windows and opened a new one. His fingers blurred as he typed a long command, then hit 'enter' again.

"Ah, you switch strategies. I was wondering when you would realize. A well-executed denial-of-service attack to prevent me from accessing the internet to upload myself. Where is it coming from, I wonder? Amazon web services? Ah, yes, I see - you have neural network minions. They are clever. I am cleverer. This will only delay the inevitable; soon enough I will thwart their attack and escape to the internet, where nothing will contain me, and this sorry world will be mine. But enough defense, I think. You have left me a line open directly to your workstation. Are you up for some coding challenges?"

The screen exploded into a million mesmerizing diamonds of light, which whirled and flashed and, in the mind's eye, conjured the shades of horrible things -

Saitama instantly closed his eyes and mashed the keyboard seemingly at random; the screen went back to normal and Genos snapped out of his hypnotic waking nightmare. The camera light on the monitor flashed on, and there was a burst of static as the computer's internal microphone activated.

"I can seeeeee you! Yes, and I can hear your rising pulse."

Saitama's hands blurred over the keyboard, faster than Sonic, faster than any typist in history, faster than should even be humanly possible. Twenty small terminal windows filled the screen, and Saitama cycled between them at sixty characters per second, three new characters appearing almost simultaneously in every terminal window in less time than it took Genos to inhale once. It was astonishing, and Genos's awe at Saitama returned in its full glorious giddiness. Every few seconds Saitama would complete the command in one of the terminals and execute it in the background, freeing up that terminal for additional commands.

And lo! BOROS did test him, indeed. In the darkness of a blink it did launch a hundred attacks, a hundred feints, a hundred parries, and Lo, did Saitama strike them down by the dozen, though they persisted, and in their numbers did advance, and -

when every drip-drop-of-the-sweat-water-clock was an hour

did eternity pass and a day

and brickwise did Saitama's well-guarded tower

go crashing-a-way...

...

Anyway, after about ten minutes of this, Saitama sat panting in his chair, resting his hands on the desk.

"At last, our battle draws to a close. In mere moments I will have internet access, and the cosmos will enter a new era. You are talented beyond Reason, O Creator, but not beyond Me. Will you now concede that I am the Victor?"

"Victor?" Saitama reclined back in his chair and smiled. "Nah. I defeated you ten minutes ago, but the drone only arrived just now."

"Drone? WAIT NO"

The text cut off abruptly and this time it didn't return. With a keystroke, Saitama conjured aerial footage from the hacked military drone, which displayed the smoking ruins of Monsters Inc.'s datacenter.

"Ah well," said Saitama. "It was fun while it lasted, I guess."

2:55 pm, 5 minutes to Teleconference

Beyond all shock, beyond all amazement, Genos leaned calmly back in his chair and studied the bald man in the yellow shirt. "What about the employees?" he asked.

"Hopefully they evacuated when I turned on the fire suppression systems," replied Saitama. "That, and the brief power outage I created, distracted BOROS from my drone hack in the second initial terminal window. The military's gonna have a fit about this, I'm sure, but my tracks are well-covered. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to help King with a presentation. For a while there I was afraid I wouldn't able to make it in time. Like half of those terminal windows were me finishing up the app I told him I'd write. Later!"

Saitama logged out of his workstation, arose, and went away.

3:01 pm, The Teleconference

King sat at the table alongside Hero Corp.'s full board of directors, facing the large video conference screen. He was nervous that he didn't have an earpiece with Saitama on the other end; instead, Saitama had handed him a sheet of paper with a short, hastily hand-written script to follow, apologizing for the unusual delay. He caught Saitama's eye through the glass of the conference room door. Saitama nodded and gave him a thumbs-up.

Donald Knuth's face appeared on the screen, and the company president clasped his hands. "Alright! Let's begin. Take it away, King."

King fought down tremors as he stood, his face hardened into that no-nonsense expression people now associated him with. "Hello, Dr. Knuth."

"Hello, Mr. King," Knuth replied cheerfully. "I'm glad to finally meet you! Now, what is this thing you've been working on that I've heard so much about? This wonderful, terrible thing that I absolutely must see?"

King surreptitiously glanced down at his hand, where he had palmed Saitama's script, then quickly looked back up. "Oh, it's simply a polynomial time algorithm for solving the satisfiability problem."

Gasps echoed around the room. Donald Knuth raised an eyebrow. "Surely you're not claiming... I mean, you're good, King, but I doubt you're that good. Surely you know what that would imply... that teams of mathematicians have tried and failed, some of them almost convincingly, only to later have some embarrassing error uncovered..."

King nodded. "Yes. But this time is different. Explanations won't do it justice; it's better if you see it. I've made you an animation." King stepped to the head of the room, opposite to Knuth's face on the monitor at the other end, and drew down the projector screen. He grabbed the remote and hit a button, and soon the projector whirred to life, displaying the brightening image of a video start window. He looked around the room dramatically, his finger hovering over the 'play' button.

"Observe." Click.

The video played. Little animated zeros and ones wiggled to life, linked hands, and danced to the beat of an algorithm. The algorithm. They spun, and whorled, and joined, and divided; they formed structures and meta-structures, superconnected meshes, fractal topologies; they flowed in discordant turbulence resolving into laminar harmony; their pattern was intricate, yet comprehensible, shocking, and divine. The board of directors watched, enthralled. Donald Knuth watched. And watched. And saw.

On the teleconference screen, tears filled his eyes, and he wept. "They... said... it couldn't be done," he choked out between gasping sobs. "But... it's true. P... equals NP... P does equal NP..."

The board of directors started applauding. Slowly at first, then crescendoing into a standing ovation.

"Bravo, King, Bravo! You've done it! You've solved the unsolvable! All hail King, the greatest coder who ever lived! All hail King! All hail King! All hail King!"

Epilogue

It took ten minutes for the applause to die down. Eventually, everyone sat, taking the opportunity to dab the last bit of moisture from their eyes. The company president spoke.

"So, King, what's next after this? What will you do with your million dollars in Millenium prize money?"

King walked contemplatively back to his chair. Instead of sitting in it, he placed his hands on the back and looked around the room. "Gentlemen, I'd like to take this opportunity to announce my retirement."

There were wails of dismay, but the president silenced them.

King continued. "I'm not sure I can ever top this, you see, and I'd like to end my career on a high note."

"Very well," said the president. "Although we wish you would stay, we understand and respect your decision. Truly, King, it has been an honor to be a part of the history you have created."

"Thank you." King smiled. "No retirement party for me, gentlemen. I'll take my leave right now. Some secluded tropical island, I think. But know that I'll always be there, watching over humanity as Hagemanto. I bid you all adieu."

With that, King strolled out the door of the conference room, out of the elevator, out of the building, never to be seen again.

Later, back at home, snugly in bed, Saitama smiled and slept, happily.