At first, the notes were harmless.

A phrase here. A contradiction there.
Little records of disbelief scribbled to stay sane.
They weren’t meant for anyone — not even for Johnny, who had simply documented what John endured.

But fragments have a way of gathering weight.
A line becomes a page. A page becomes a file. A file becomes a history. What began as survival notes turns into a slow archaeology of absurdity.

He starts to see the same phrases return, accompanied by new dates.
Different leaders, same promises.
Different decks, same strategy.
Different meetings, same theater.

Somewhere between the notes, a truth emerges:
He isn’t recording anomalies.
He’s documenting patterns.
And patterns — repeated long enough — stop being mistakes.
They become the system.

The diary stops being a diary.
It becomes something else.
Not inspiration. Not best practice. Not lessons learned.
Something harder. Stranger. Truer.

The patterns in his diary begin to resemble the system itself —
a doctrine, an architecture of nonsense, the rules no one admits but everyone obeys.

His footnote archive holds these undocumented mandates — the ones that govern every meeting that resolves nothing,
every reorganization that rebrands the last one, every strategic pivot that circles back to where it started.

It exists quietly, overlooked — like the fine print in the margin no one reads, yet without which nothing makes sense.
A silent existence.

He names it – The Footnote — an insignificant lawbook of official absurdities,
from which he will one day decipher the invisible laws, one by one.

And this time, Johnny knows what he’s holding.
Not a diary.
Not even an archive.

Something more dangerous.

A mirror — reflecting the quiet truth of how things really work.