METAVERSE 一 Meta pulls the plug on 10,000 more workers after scrapping NFT support, all from the comfort of their own headsets.

Zuckerberg arrived galloping across the rings of Saturn as a unicorn centaur, surrounded by confetti and rainbows, defying the laws of Metaphysics. Thousands of avatars had their virtual noses pressed against the digital glass of the multi-story "Spaced Station" while Uniberg floated majestically just out of reach.

Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a special event this past week in the developer build of Horizon Worlds, the Meta created virtual landscape, under the guise of needing all hands on deck for an exciting new feature announcement.

"Oooooo, I bet today is finally the day. Avatars with legs! This will be huge!" former employee Chandra Mills recalls thinking before the meeting kicked off. "We were all just hanging out on this space station, thousands of us, with our rocket torsos zipping us with bated breath around the station. It was electric." Little did the leg waiters know that the exciting new feature in question would cost them more than their legs.

His speech started out enthusiastic and innocuous enough with the usually ambiguous tech leadership terms shooting across the bow of the station, space pyrotechnics, galaxy-spanning slides, and all. Then it all started to unravel as his golden horn began to glow a faint red and the true nature of the event was revealed.

The latest cuts were framed as being part of Meta's broader "year of efficiency" campaign, where the company gets "performance-ready" while flattening its organizational structure, "canceling lower-priority projects," and optimizing for success in uncertain times.

"Magic missile! Magic missile!" Uniberg cackled as his horn was now pulsating bright red. Employees were being deleted left and right by a devastating laser beam of death piercing the walls of the station, sending everything it touched into Metablivion.

"Don't lose your head over our exciting new feature, less overhead!" read the rainbow trails flowing from Nyan Cat's pixelated posterior as it zipped around behind the horse of a different color.

What followed was a flurry of outrage, confusion, and awkward spatial positioning as panic swept over the station. Some just floated there, ready to take it, trying to get one last word in before the inevitable.

"C'mon man, you were supposed to be the chosen one," a dumbfounded employee yelled through a garbled, $10 headset mic.

Poof!

"Just because I am not wearing pants during large portions of my workday doesn't mean you shouldn't respect me."

"What are we, some kind of throwaway 10,000 PFP collection to you?"

Poof! Poof!

"What am I going to tell my parents about that virtual retirement home I was going to send them to?"

"But what about my NFTs on Instagram? How will I make strangers jealous of my on-chain life now?"

"You will never have a band as cool as the Winklevoss... arghhh'"

Poof! Poof! and Poof!

Just as Zuckerberg was about to exit through the tear in spacetime from which he came, he turned back to those unlucky few still on the station struggling to make sense of the cacophony of digital destruction. "Oh, and we are pivoting to AI b-t-dubs."

"The unicorn balls on that son-of-a-bitch."

Poof!

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