Pentober 2026 - Day 5: Stage

Ok so, what is Pentober? Promptober? It's a writing tradition that's been around the web for a while where you write up a short story every day in October based on prompts. Some go for pen and paper, some digital; everyone has their own style. I'll be posting here, and I'll be using the prompts from https://www.topinfiction.com/p/pentober-2026 

House rules are that I vomit-write the story; no planning, just taka taka taka on the keys. I get ONE edit at the end of the draft, then we post it. House rules also say that I get to play catch up and do multiple days separately on one day or combined if work gets wild and I can't write. Get it? Got it? Good! Here we go. I am home! And jetlagged! And querying agents! This is a quick one to get the cobwebs of travel off.

---

"We all know the quote, oft misquote or truncated, 'All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts,' and it's true. We know from recent findings in physics that this reality is a projection, a hologram, a stage. But that makes us ask some key questions: What's backstage? Who is in the audience? In the orchestra? Managing the lights and sound? Why are we all performing?..."

"This is an incredibly dull seminar", Kash thought to himself, "I wonder how much money we spent on this guy?" It was Kash's third week at a new tech startup he got recruited to. Novactum more than doubled his salary to get him to join. He still wasn't really sure what the company was trying to do.

He knew what he was getting paid to do, though. Kash's job was taking output from the company's particle accelerator built deep underground in the Canadian shield and then decrypting, loading, and visualizing it on both the Palo Alto-based quantum computer and in their standard data visualization program. Then, Kash worked with a litany of AI programs and his own brain to extract insights and present them to his supervisors and executives.

Kash checked his email; if he was going to have three hours of his day wasted listening to Bryson Sunny, one of the 'Carmel-by-the-Sea Cartel', ramble about how productizing the fickle nature of reality to give the working class better seeming lives for a fee, he might as well get some work done. He started answering a few emails from one of the execs speaking after Bryson about the latest batch of data from the accelerator.

The Carmel Cartel were oddballs, anywho. They made their money in the photonics bubble that spun up after the AI bubble collapsed. They then bought a bunch of land in and around Carmel-by-the-Sea and tried to turn it into their own independent republic and artists community. Of course, AI agents were considered artists and littered the place. Now, most of them made their income by 'investing' in startups that ended up failing and seems to mostly make their real money getting speaker fees going on about how the government needed to be stopped so a new form of government, quantum government, could be born and tailored to each individual mind.

Kash tuned back into the speech, "Some of the results Novactum have uncovered in the data are so promising, I think this is very soon going to be a multitrillion dollar company at valuation. That's great to see. One of your engineers just confirmed it a few minutes ago to one of your VPs. The latest batch of data shows that if you can effectively filter the observation of atoms, you can force them to behave a certain way. I think that means we can scale that up to work on entire lifeforms..."

"That is not how that works at all," Kash thought to himself.

"Actually, I'd like to bring him up for an impromptu interview. This is good. We all need to know this here. Kash Patel, can you come on up? Can we get some chairs up here?"

"Ah, fuck," Kash thought to himself as a spotlight landed on him. There was no greater hell than becoming important at work, especially if you were important because your higher ups didn't understand the fundamentals of their own work.

Kash began the long walk up to the stage. He was no diplomat, so he was wracking his way to find a polite way to bridge the gap between the data, the scientific reality, the lofty expectations moneymen like Bryson had, and what this company could actually, practically do for profit. He took a big breath in, and sat down. It was, unfortunately, showtime and he was on stage as the main act.