Squad 404: Welcome to the Workflow

Welcome to the Workflow. Your presence has been logged. Jax arrives on fire and gets labeled VILLAIN before he is done smoking. Tara is stamped LOVE INTEREST, Reef becomes COMIC RELIEF, Kai is assigned HERO and LIABILITY, Vixra gets reduced to ROMANTIC INTEREST, Zim is misread as PUSHOVER, and Klee, small, soft, and impossible for the system to classify, receives the worst label of all: NULL. Together they become Squad 404, a group of wrong answers stapled into one unit by Control Labs, a cheerful corporate machine built to turn people into roles, feelings into data, and harm into engagement.
At first, the Workflow looks ridiculous. There are intake kiosks, role receipts, wellness prompts, sponsor-safe snacks, camera zones, kindness fees, hydration audits, and a narrator who may or may not be a safety device. But the joke curdles fast. Every label tightens. Every refusal is logged. Every act of care creates a charge. And when Tyler arrives with the role PLOT DEVICE, Squad 404 learns what the system does to anyone it can use, remove, and rebrand without consequence.
To survive, they will have to do the one thing the Workflow cannot process cleanly: choose each other after being told exactly what they are supposed to be. SQUAD 404: Welcome to the Workflow is Book One of a dystopian satire series blending corporate horror, speculative dark comedy, algorithmic cruelty, and found-family resistance. For readers who like the institutional nightmare of Severance, the media-tech dread of Black Mirror, the role-assignment violence of The Hunger Games, the absurd bureaucracy of Kafka, and the reality-bending paranoia of Philip K.
Dick.