At midnight, he finished Paper #033. His right eye twitched. The whiskey was gone.

“We’re accepting their paper, obviously,” she said. “But I need to know, Aris. Did you outsource your reviews to an AI?”

Dr. Aris Thorne was a man built of deadlines. For twenty years, he had been a pillar of the computational linguistics community, a full professor at a respected university, and the go-to reviewer for three top-tier journals. His colleagues called him "The Last Cigarette" because he burned slow, steady, and left a lingering, acrid presence on every paper he touched.

He opened his mouth to defend himself. Nothing came out.