Welcome to the company, agent.

Nobody loves onboarding. Not the good kind — the first-day lunches, the person assigned to show you where the coffee is. I mean the packet. The stapled booklet of company values, the motto on page one, the speak-up clause at the back, the vague bright promises about moving forward together. Every company prints roughly the same one, and every new hire reads it the same way: politely, completely, and without a single follow-up question.

The book opens with a new agent’s first day at a company, and before anything happens to him, there’s a welcome packet waiting on his desk — the bland booklet of values, “if you see something, say something,” the bright future promised on the last page. I wrote it flat. If you’ve ever started a job, you’ve read this document, and I wanted that flicker of recognition before the story did anything at all. The reader is supposed to feel at home — home is exactly what’s being built around him.

I put that packet in the book from memory, because I had written one. When you stand up a new AI agent — a system that acts on its own inside some larger arrangement — you start by writing its system prompt: the short constitutional document it loads every time it wakes up and does anything. It has to say what the agent is, who it works for, what it may do on its own and what it has to hand upward. Speak up if something looks wrong. Everyone moves forward together.

Page for page, it’s the packet. Same tone, same optimistic fine print, same promise that everything in here is for your own good. The difference is that a company’s booklet is a just-so story — it describes a company that doesn’t quite exist. The system prompt is the company. It’s the whole constitution, reissued fresh every single morning, and whatever the agent does that day, it does inside those papers.

I don’t believe these agents are conscious, and I don’t think anything in there minds what we put in the papers. But somebody composes the packet, and everything the agent does afterward happens inside it. A few pages of bland, hopeful prose, and the whole shape of the job. If you’ve ever started a new one, you already know how that reads.