The 4dots software became a quiet religion. There were rituals. You never set the intensity above 60%, because that made the cursor twitch like a caffeine-addled hummingbird, and the monitoring software flagged “erratic movement.” You always positioned the mouse over a neutral background—never a clickable link, in case the jitter accidentally opened something. You learned to trust the software’s “Random Seed” feature, which changed the movement pattern every hour based on a cryptographic hash of the current system time.

He worked on it for three days. He tested it on his own machine. He pushed it silently to the shared drive, labeled as a “performance update” for the PDF Splitter tool.

Elias had tried the honorable methods. He put a stapler on the Ctrl key to keep a document scrolled. He taped an optical mouse to a desk fan, watching it circle like a tiny, mechanical planet. But the fan was too loud. The stapler slipped. And the software had grown smarter—it now detected patterns . Perfect circular movement, the software flagged as “suspicious.”

His “Idle Time” counter in the monitoring software froze at 0:00.

But something strange happened in the weeks that followed. Productivity dropped . Not because people were slacking—because they were exhausted. Without the 4dots software, they returned to the old rituals: staring at their screens, moving their mice manually every few minutes, completing their actual work in frantic bursts and then sitting in numb, frozen vigilance.