The company installed an AI monitoring system that claims to predict employees' resignation tendencies by analyzing microexpressions and voice tone.

Last month, the system marked the front desk girl as "high risk." The reason was that she sighed more than fifteen times at her workstation every day.
She was summoned by HR. Three people sat across from her in the office, with a printed "Emotional Fluctuation Curve Chart" spread out on the table.
She stared at the chart for a long time and said: I sigh because my mom is in the ICU, not because I want to resign.
HR put away the chart and didn't follow up with her again.
But the system didn't stop. It began marking more people.
Old Zhang from R&D was marked because he hadn't smiled in the conference room for three consecutive days.
Little Liu from Administration was marked because she didn't join the team-building activity after work; the system judged her as "socially isolated."
Sister Wang from Finance was marked because her response time in the company group chat, from an average of five seconds last month, extended to an average of eleven seconds this month.
Every person marked appeared on HR's interview list the next day.
Until last week, the system issued a top-level warning.
Not an employee.
It was the CEO.
The system judged him as "extremely dangerous, immediate intervention recommended."
The analysis report stated that he had been pacing frequently in the conference room recently, had irregular lunch hours, abnormal pupil dilation, and voice detection showed "repressed anger."
HR dared not interview him and directly sent the report to the board of directors.
The next day, the CEO called the entire company to the large conference room.
He stood on the stage, projected the report at the front, and said a sentence that silenced us all:
This AI doesn't know that my pacing in the conference room was because my wife filed for divorce last week.
It also doesn't know that my pupil dilation was because I saw all of you being afraid of it this morning.
He immediately announced the termination of this project and took the system offline.
After the meeting, I returned to my workstation and found the front desk position vacant.
Her workstation had her emotion fluctuation curve chart printed out by the system, next to a desk calendar with ICU visitation times circled.
She took the calendar with her, but didn't take the chart.
The top line was an automatically generated note from the system.
It categorized her fifteen sighs as "Unclear Sadness."
That afternoon, all of us queued up at that empty desk and dropped a candy.
The clerk at the convenience store downstairs asked what day it was.
I said nothing special, a colleague didn't come today, but she might come later, or she might not.
She didn't ask further.
Just as we finished buying all the candies at that store, she quietly gave us an 80% discount.