Arthur lived his life in a series of right angles. His apartment was a white cube in Long Island City; his job was a series of spreadsheets in a glass tower on Park Avenue; his dates were scheduled in fifteen-minute increments. He was thirty-four years old and felt as though he were a ghost haunting his own existence.

He met Madame Valeska in a gallery that was essentially a white room with a single, unmade bed in the center. She called herself a "metaphysical architect." She wore a dress made of industrial felt and spoke in a monotone that sounded like a dial tone.

"You are suffering from a surplus of meaning, Arthur," she told him. "You try to find a reason for everything. The secret to happiness is the embrace of the absurd."

The tests were, by any rational standard, insane. For the first week, she required him to stand in the middle of Times Square for four hours a day, holding a piece of raw celery and pretending it was a telephone. For the second week, she told him to walk backward from his office to his apartment, stopping every ten steps to apologize to the pavement.

Arthur, driven by a desperate need for a breakthrough, performed these tasks with a religious intensity. He felt ridiculous, then he felt liberated, and finally, he felt a strange, humming kinship with the chaos of the city. He stopped caring if people laughed. He stopped caring if the spreadsheets balanced.

On the final day, Madame Valeska summoned him to the gallery. She looked at him with an expression of profound indifference.

"You have successfully purged yourself of the illusion of purpose," she said. "You are now ready for the reward."

She handed him a small, perfectly crafted wooden box. Arthur’s heart hammered against his ribs. He expected a key, a secret, a revelation. He opened the box.

It was empty.

Arthur stared at the void inside the box. He looked up at Madame Valeska.

"It's empty," he said.

"Exactly," she replied. "The box is the perfect metaphor for your life, your career, and this conversation. The reward is the realization that the box is empty, and that you are still standing here, breathing, despite the emptiness."

Arthur looked at the empty box, then at the white walls of the gallery, then at his own reflection in the glass. He began to laugh. It wasn't a laugh of joy or madness, but a laugh of recognition. He walked out of the gallery and threw the box into a trash can, feeling for the first time in a decade that he was completely, wonderfully, and absolutely nothing.

*** Objective Tensor Code: [OTMES_v2: M3=10.0, theta=225°, N1=0.5, TI=32.1]