Even after I returned to the bench and sat down, the stadium’s frenzy showed no signs of fading. The game had resumed. I was off the mound. And yet, the golden afterglow of the spectacle still flickered at the edge of my vision.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of the digital scoreboard. Real-time stats: attendance and satisfaction metrics. Despite FutureTex being dead last in the division, the numbers were climbing in a perfect upward curve. Once, I might’ve wondered why the crowd was so fired up. Now, I knew better. That question had long since calcified into a cold certainty.

  This wasn’t the sport once called “baseball.” This was Arche—the computational dominion of the Big Tech Emperor, A space where consciousness is data, And the world is endlessly optimized.

  We weren’t playing to win. We were the chaos— The curated entropy, The seeds of evolution, Planted to keep the system from stagnating.

  

  “High-quality uncertainty… huh.”

  I muttered it under my breath, too quiet for anyone to hear.

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  My knuckleball— The one I throw with all the stubbornness in my fingers, The one that defies physics and logic— To the Emperor, it’s nothing more than a supplement. A nutrient. A calculated dose of unpredictability to refine the algorithm further.

  Even the tremors I carve into the air, Even the glitches I try to force into the system— They’re sampled, digested, and repurposed. My rebellion is just another flavor in the Emperor’s garden.

  The “death of intuition” that Ichiro once feared? It’s already complete here. Players and fans alike have stopped thinking, stopped feeling. They bathe in the drug called “correctness,” A narcotic drip of optimized answers, Fed directly by the system.

  Even I—the noise—am just another managed variable. A spice to enhance the high.

  And even if I were to expose the whole system, Even if I screamed until my throat bled, Nothing would change. My despair would be logged, Tagged as “anomalous emotional data,” And filed away for future analysis.

  

  “…Hah.”

  I exhaled the cold, heavy air that had pooled deep in my lungs. It wasn’t a sigh of thought. Just resignation.

  The stadium’s eerie brilliance only grew brighter— Reinforcing the world with even greater beauty and perfection, At the cost of my body, My soul.

  I understood now. I wasn’t even a threat. Just a convenient source of noise. And so, I waited in silence For the next inning to begin.