Andrea Kade had spent most of her adult life inside buildings designed to intimidate people. Corporate annexes with concrete walls half a metre thick. Arbitration chambers where the temperature was kept two degrees too cold to encourage shorter meetings. Executive towers where every surface reflected your own face back at you, reminding you exactly how visible you were.

Lhotse Capitoline still managed to impress her.

Not because it was luxurious. Luxury was common. Any sufficiently profitable organisation could purchase marble and altitude. What impressed her was the [i]precision[/i] of it all. The seamless movement below. Freight arriving before demand spikes fully manifested, constantly monitored by the latest and greatest artificial intelligence software money could buy. Autonomous cranes steadily repositioning for shipments still hours from harbour. Tens of millions of micro-decisions made every minute across the City, all converging into something that looked less like commerce and more like a practical example of a perfectly synchronised ant's nest on a macro scale. Most people looked at the skyline and saw wealth, saw opportunity, but most of all they saw those above them.

Andrea saw harmony. And she wanted a place in it.

She stood with an easy stillness, hands loosely clasped behind her back. Dark suit. Minimal jewellery. Subtle augments visible on her neck and in subtle places on her face. The modified purposes of them were all obvious if someone already knew what to look for; optic replacements calibrated for low-light work, a neural interface threading behind one ear, reaction boosters too conservative for military hardware but well beyond civilian necessity. Expensive, but practical. Nothing ornamental.

The maids caught her attention immediately. They were beautiful, but that wasn't the main reason. Beauty was cheap in 2087. Their synchronisation was what mattered. The tiny delays absent from their movements. The way they distributed their attention around the room without appearing to move at all. Security platforms pretending to be decorative staff. An interesting choice. Or a warning. Mrs. Everest’s congratulations drew the faintest hint of a smile from Andrea.

“That’s more attention than I’m used to receiving from this floor,” she said.

Measured. Dry. Neither submissive nor overeager. Her eyes drifted briefly back toward the City below. She opened her mouth again to speak unprompted by the older woman, wondering out loud the reason for her admitting to keeping a personal eye on her.

“When I started in logistics analysis almost twenty years ago, one delayed shipment in Jakarta could destabilise hundreds of manufacturing forecasts across three continents inside forty-eight hours. Nowadays we have AI for that, but... that was the first time I realised corporations this size stop being companies.” A slight pause. “They behave more like... ecosystems. Self-correcting when healthy. Extremely dangerous for those within said ecosystem when they aren’t.” She looked back to Magnolia Everest directly. “So I assume you didn’t bring me up here for the promotion itself. You brought me up because something inside the ecosystem is under stress. No?"