The invisible hand of the Free Market has priced this view of the City is valued at $785 per night.

A sure sign of market failure. It must surely be worth so much more.

The ocean is a highway of glittering supercarriers, mobile islands redistributing the material wealth of the world to its furthest corners. The harbour is a whirling dance of cranes and drones and rail, the transition from ocean to land hardly slowing the passage of cargo. The enormous stacks of vast warehousing operations spread out in a patchwork, the logistical heartbeat required for everything to be sorted, organized, transferred and delivered without ever stopping. From there the flow reaches out to industry, to residences, and to the forest of spires that is the City. It's so seamless that it's more like a river than an industrial process. At every point along this arc, the three mountain logo of Lhotse. From the 112th floor of Lhotse Capitoline, you have one of those mountaintops all to yourself.

But not the tallest.

Magnolia Everest is the chief executive officer of Lhotse, yes, but she is no mere overseer installed by the Board. Her power goes beyond that, deeper and more fearsome than the legends of the CEOs of the other Megas. She is also the Founder - a rare enough title - and a member of the Neobility, an aristocrat so wealthy that her personal influence can rewrite the very boundaries of the Megas should she put her will behind it. She is an old lady - a Millenial, hair grey, fingernails long and clawlike, and a frown like a boarding school nun. She holds a cane in one hand, a glass of orange juice in the other and wears a black veil over one hand to mourn her unluckily departed husbands and wives. She is surrounded by her maids - nine of them, identical female androids, designed to look like beautiful anime girls, distinct only for their differently coloured hair and eyes. Each of them wear elaborate maid dresses, black and frilled and permitting more movement than their structure implies. They stand with hands folded, eyes downcast, perfect dolls - though there are fearful rumours that those things are far more than decorative puppets. One does not maintain a position in the Neobility without a security force, and Mrs. Everest has never called for more defense than her maids provide.

"Ms. Andrea Kade," said Mrs. Everest. "Congratulations. You have become one of around twenty people I must pay attention to."

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 precision 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?"

Mrs. Everest looked at you like you had just posted a self congratulation from the wrong social media account. "That is a substack-tier take if I have ever heard one. I am already wondering if I have made a mistake. No, Ms. Kade, my corporation is not an ecosystem. Its function is not to perish every time a dog swims the strait or a hurricane blows in the wrong frog. And I am most certainly not a mere tiger, enslaved to my nature and at the mercy of global temperatures."

It was never a good feeling for your boss to immediately take a dislike to you. If there was any silver lining it was that Mrs. Everest was a famous misanthrope and recluse who surrounded herself with robots, so winning her approval had always been a distant prospect.

"And no, I am not here to tell you how to do your job," said Mrs. Everest. "I expect you to discover issues and resolve them long before they require my personal intervention. I am here to introduce you to our most classified asset, the full knowledge and capabilities of which are known to only me, your deceased predecessor - and now you."

She was not a lady who needed to articulate a threat.

"This," she said, as the blue-haired maid laid what looked like a standard-issue Positronic Brain upon your desk - the same information processing core that animated a generation of androids. "Is Rooster. The second most powerful asset in my possession. She was built before the Red Decades and knowledge of her creation is lost. There are more like her out there and each person who has one is someone I am forced to pay attention to. There is no operating manual; your predecessors were halfwits who did not activate Rooster's full potential so I discarded their notes rather than allow them to contaminate your perspective. You may use her as you see fit, but as far as anyone else is concerned she is a simple android assistant. Do you understand?"

There was clearly more that she was not saying - but not a lot more. Mrs. Everest seemed more frustrated that she had to be vague than anything.

Andrea took the criticism without reaction. Years in corporate operations had taught her that the most dangerous executives were rarely the loudest ones. They were the people who corrected you casually, the same way someone might straighten a crooked painting. Safe to say, Andrea didn't want Magnolia to have to straighten her.

“Understood." She said, simply. Not apologetic. Just an adjustment of course. Mrs. Everest had not climbed to the top of the world by appreciating abstraction from people she had only just promoted. Andrea turned her attention to the brain.

At first glance it was rather unremarkable, aside from it being a literal robot brain. But the casing and other features seemed rather... basic. Deliberately so, most likely. Commodity hardware was everywhere now; millions of androids, assistants and industrial platforms all ran on descendants of the same architecture. Standardisation had made robotics affordable enough that even lower-income districts used stripped-down domestic models.

But people did not keep weapons in plain sight of their subordinates by accident. Especially not people like Magnolia Everest. Andrea leaned closer to it, studying Rooster without touching it immediately. The old instinct surfaced automatically: observe first, interact second. The fact Mrs. Everest had discarded the previous notes told her almost as much as the introduction itself. Either prior handlers had fundamentally misunderstood the machine, or the machine had fundamentally misunderstood them. Everest had always been interested in robotics and artificial intelligence, or so the scream-sheets claimed. But seeing her flanked by several robots shaped like anime girls, and presenting her new Chief of Operations with a thing like Rooster?

Neither possibility was particularly comforting. Andrea just hoped she would understand it better than her predecessors had. Andrea felt a flicker of something she carefully refused to classify as excitement.

Not because she was naïve enough to think that this was a gift. It was leverage. Responsibility. Potentially a noose. But this... this... was the first genuinely unknown variable she had encountered in years. Corporate operations at her level usually meant optimising existing systems. Managing risk. Containing disasters before they spread.

Rooster represented opportunity.

“I understand." Andrea said quietly, before raising her voice a little more to speak properly. “It will remain in this room, ma'am. And I won't discuss it with anyone outside this room, I assure you. As far as the company is concerned, she’s another executive support unit, and you just came here to welcome me to the fold.” Her thumb brushed once against the casing. Thoughtful, absent. She put away the proper responses of responsibility and turned to a tack that she hoped Everest would appreciate more, considering much she appreciated robotics. "If my predecessor failed because he treated her like equipment, I won’t repeat that mistake.”

Only then did she lift her eyes fully back to Everest. There was no point asking what Rooster could do yet. If Everest wanted that information shared immediately, she would have shared it. It was up to Andrea to figure Rooster out over the next few days as she got acquainted with her more regular responsibilities. So. Better question would be objectives. Authority. Constraints.

“What would you like me to accomplish with her?” Andrea asked. “And what resources fall under my discretion?”

"The Hecatonchires represent an asset that we cannot yet reproduce," said Everest. The word meant nothing - even a reflexive digital scan could not find any modern internet reference to it. "The old world burned unimaginable quantities of fossil fuels to power data centers while structuring their entire economies around software development. Rooster and her line were the only meaningful things that came of that. The infrastructure, energy and expertise does not exist to replicate these assets - and even if the first two conditions are met, recreating the third cannot be concealed. So they are irreplaceable - and, for the most part, outside of my control."

She pointed at a distant skyscraper - glowing neon black and vantagold, darker than the light-polluted night sky. "BlackSun. Those disgusting old fascists. They were the ones who fumbled the opportunity in the first place. They were there when NASA was privatized during the Red Decades, stripped it for assets and put them up for sale. Did not know what they were selling. Handed them all off at a private auction and only became aware enough to regret decades later. Eleven items on that docket, one purchased by me, another found by chance three years later. The others, unaccounted for. Meaningful assets on their own terms. Society shifting assets if held in monopoly."

She turned around, eyes dark. "And so I do not need all of the Hecatonchires. I just need the monopoly. Only BlackSun is aware and searching now. The more they throw their idiot weight around the more other interests will notice and start looking too. Worse, they might trace the sales back to me. Control the situation. All corporate assets within the annual budget are at your disposal. If you need more than that, contact me for my sign off. If it is urgent, do it first and ask for forgiveness later."

Andrea’s optics returned nothing on the word Hecatonchires. No cached references. No historical fragments. No conspiracy forums dredging up half-remembered myths from the Red Decades. Just... nothing. That bothered her more than if the term had been classified. In 2087, almost nothing truly disappeared anymore. Information was too distributed for that. Even censored material tended to leave impressions behind — broken links, legal notices, traces of arguments. A complete void meant someone, somewhere, had put in extraordinary effort over a very long period of time.

Or the word had simply never entered public consciousness to begin with.

She listened carefully as Everest spoke, piecing the shape of the situation together behind her composed expression. Privatised NASA. Asset liquidation during the collapse years. BlackSun accidentally auctioning away technology they did not understand. Eleven units scattered into the world like unexploded ordnance. And now the various heirs of that era were only beginning to realise what had slipped through their fingers. Andrea found herself studying the distant BlackSun tower again after Everest pointed it out. The building looked brutalist and domineering against the rest of the city's sleek skyline. It was made to stand out by standing against everything else.

The important detail, though, was not BlackSun itself. It was that Magnolia Everest considered a monopoly more important than understanding. That implied uncertainty. Powerful uncertainty. But awareness that cornering the market on these scant few robotic brains was important enough to make a top priority for her newest COO. Andrea had worked around dangerous technologies before. Autonomous targeting systems, predictive behavioural engines, security robots endowed with enough firepower to level a building. Even experimental cognition suites that had somehow survived ethics review by burying the worst implications beneath enough layers of legal abstraction. Every single time, the people funding them believed control would come later. Sometimes they even had the luxury of being right. But enough of the time, they weren’t. Andrea couldn't afford to allow that oversight with Rooster.

Still, this was the job now. And if she did her job right, it wouldn't be recorded in any terminal for historic reference. And no one would be there to say 'well done' at the end of it. This wasn't fucking nursery, after all. Lhotse wasn't a place for coddling. Only setting expectations and expecting those who attempted to meet them to instead overachieve rather than meet satisfaction. Andrea set the positronic core carefully back down onto the desk.

“I understand,” she said.

And she did. At least enough. BlackSun was searching, but hopefully blindly. The other corporations were unaware, as far as she knew. That would be her first order of business once she had the assets and manpower to dispatch on such an intelligence-gathering mission. After that? The current priority was going to be containment. To keep the field narrow, ensuring that the bare minimum amount of people knew what the words 'positronic robot brain' even meant were in the single digits. All the while doing all in her power to quietly identify the remaining assets before anyone else understood what they were looking for. And balance that with the day=to-day duties of actually being the Chief of Operations for a Mega Corp that employed a few hundred thousand people in this city alone.

Difficult. Expensive. But possible.

“I’ll keep the operation compartmentalised.” Andrea continued, her fingers steepling against each other. “Small teams. Need-to-know only. Most of the people involved won’t even realise what they’re actually searching for.” Her eyes lifted toward Everest again. “I’ll start with the auction trail and work outward from there. Ownership transfers, inheritance disputes, archived litigation, salvage records. Anything old enough tends to resurface somewhere once enough money changes hands.”

Then, after a brief pause.

“And Rooster?” Andrea asked. “Do you want her active immediately, or observed first?”

"I leave the details to you," said Everest. "Not least because I have attempted my own investigation in the past and bungled it. Again, I spare you the history so as to not contaminate your process, but I attempted something similar targeting BlackSun's auction records, which was what tipped my hand in the first place."

She did not flinch from her confession of failure. Mrs. Everest certainly had her faults, but that alone put her far from the worst supervisors you have dealt with.

"If this is something I could have handled myself, I would have. It is not. In this matter, if you achieve results you will have surpassed my abilities. That achievement will be worth a great deal of consideration in the future."

BlackSun. Corporate logo: A black sphere, haloed in gold. Brand aesthetic: Luxury with collateral damage. A union of multiple private spaceflight interests that together took control of NASA during the early phases of the Red Decades. Their wildcat approach to orbital mining and trailblazing approach to android design produced great wealth and was instrumental in the establishment of multiple orbital habitats and a permanent luxury city on the surface of Luna. In the process, carelessness or malice caused a Kessler Syndrome chain reaction in several critical orbital bands, wiping out huge swathes of critical satellites. They are profoundly unpopular amidst the general public, not least for their fairly blatant fascist aesthetics and sympathies, but they are the only serious players in space which puts them above a lot of concerns. Their mission is Mars and they are perfectly happy to burn Earth and all its people on their way there.

Andrea absorbed the information quietly. Throughout her career, she'd found that most executives lied about failure instinctively. They reframed it, diverted or distributed responsibility for it, buried it beneath jargon until the mistake became a 'strategic misalignment event' instead of what it actually was. Everest’s willingness to admit she had mishandled the situation was almost more useful than the intelligence itself. That in and of itself raised Andrea's opinion of her massively. Andrea glanced once more toward the distant BlackSun tower looming against the polluted glow of the horizon. She knew the company already, of course. Everybody did. Even before joining Lhotse she had followed the orbital collapse investigations obsessively as a student. Entire sections of near-Earth infrastructure lost because somebody at BlackSun had decided acceptable risk margins were for poorer companies. They'd 'accidentally' sabotaged the communications networks of a third of the world for the better part of a decade, and despite thatt, they had survived.

No. Worse than survived. Thrived.

That was the lesson of the modern world. If a corporation became strategically necessary enough, morality of any fuck up turned into a branding issue rather than a meaningful obstacle. BlackSun could flirt openly with fascism, poison orbital bands for generations and leave entire nations scrambling through communications blackouts, and still remain untouchable because they owned the route out of the dying planet, and had promise salvation from the pollution and the ceaseless conflicts and crises.

Mars. Always Mars.

Every empire needed a frontier to justify itself. Caesar's had been the Rubicon. The British had laid claim to half the known world. BlackSun? They set their sights even higher. But the writing was on the wall in Andrea's mind. BlackSun had about as much business being a colonisation effort as Hell had being a ski resort. Andrea’s gaze drifted down toward Rooster again. If BlackSun had once possessed these things without understanding them, then the obvious question was whether they truly understood them now. Whether they were searching because they had uncovered new information, or simply because somebody finally realised a catastrophic accounting error had occurred half a century too late. Important distinction. One meant competition. The other meant panic.

“I’ll proceed carefully, ma'am. You have my word.” Andrea said, with a note of finality in her tone. “If your previous investigation exposed interest in the auction records, then repeating the same approach directly would just confirm there’s something worth finding. I'll chase it up another way.”

She folded her hands loosely on the table, already mentally reorganising priorities. The records themselves were probably compromised by now anyway. Watched. Flagged. Maybe even baited and ready with digital tripwires. The smarter approach would be indirect pressure — identify who attended the auction, who moved the sold items afterward, who disappeared suddenly wealthy. People hid objects well. But the rich often hid patterns badly. Maybe she could get someone to breach the bigger banks with a backdoor into their systems, looking for individual spends in a local area within the right timeframe. She looked at the Founder and offered a polite smile.

"Thank you, Mrs Everest. I think I'm ready to begin my duties." She told her. "How shall I contact you with my findings? And what timeframe do you expect?"

"Very good. My contact information is in your desk. In the meantime, my personal attention will be directed towards achieving Lhotse's market entry into the Darwin Special Economic Zone. Crown and Slate is vulnerable there and a great deal of production is downstream of cheaper iron ore."

Crown and Slate. Corporate logo: the words Crown and Slate on a neutral grey background. Brand aesthetic: We are not interested in selling this to you. One of the big causes of the Red Decades, and the biggest loser of its conclusion, Crown and Slate started as patent trolls - a legal company that purchased promising intellectual property, patented it, and then waited to sue anyone else who tried to invent it. This process accelerated particularly in the fields of medical science, genetic engineering and agriculture. This paralysis of the life sciences contributed to the crisis and made Crown and Slate the chief scapegoat and sacrifice on the altar of the refounded State. Laws were introduced forcing them to activate their factories and sell their products, and some technologies were nationalized outright. Crown and Slate has kicked and dragged its heels every step of the way, producing unmarketed, tasteless, user-unfriendly products to meet the bare minimum of legal obligation - products that are, despite their unattractive packaging, positively miraculous in effect.

When Everest mentioned the Darwin Economic Zone, Crown and Slate being vulnerable there made sense. They had never adapted properly after the Red Decades. Most corporations had learned how to present themselves afterward — cleaner branding, softer language, pretending they existed for the public good. Crown and Slate never really bothered until the laws forced their hand. They complied with regulations because they had to, not because they believed in them. Their products were incredible. Their public image wasn’t. For years they'd been snubbed by the other megacorps as well as the general population. And if Andrea worked for them instead of here, she'd resent them all for it. But silver linings came with that too, because that kind of resentment created openings. Andrea nodded once.

“I’ll make sure the two operations stay separate.” She said. “If anyone starts looking closely at my department, I’d rather they find out that we're bidding to get into Darwin, rather than this.” She gestured briefly down at Rooster again.

The situation still felt strange sitting in her hands. Not unbelievable, though. She’d spent far too long in corporate operations to think that she didn't deserve this promotion, or this unique challenge about the brains from Everest. Rather, it was strange in the sense that it changed the shape of things retroactively. Suddenly certain corporate decisions, acquisitions and disappearances from the last few decades looked different. Or maybe she was already starting to see patterns where she wanted them to exist. That was dangerous too. Best not to make assumptions. That suited Andrea fine. Most people became visible when they searched aggressively. They pulled records. Leaned on subsidiaries. Started asking questions in the wrong places. The smarter approach was usually to find the edges of a thing first and work inward slowly.

"Will there be anything else, ma'am?" Andrea asked, partly hoping to actually familiarise herself with the tools of her newest trade, but also to get her expected Chief of Operations workload out of the way so she could spend some time with Rooster. She hoped that Magnolia understood that she wasn't trying to rush her out of the room.

"As you were," said Everest. Her maids fell in around her. It was an eerie effect - they did not move like a central dronemind controlling multiple nodes, a precision that stopped being interesting once the novelty wore off. They moved like a superlatively well trained team. There was a synchronicity of purpose and not simply action.

Without a second glance, Mrs. Everest departed.

Your inbox had messages from all of your various department heads requesting meetings. There was also an action item to select a secretary and a chief of staff - there were a list of excellent candidates ready for an interview already appended if you did not have someone in mind already. There was a physical paper report in a drawer that had a full report of Lhoste's full and redacted financial situation and asset list. And there was an external meeting request from the COO of SLAM! *Click*.

SLAM! *Click*. Logo: A video of an employee expressing the company name. Brand aesthetic: Experimental, Disposable. All SLAM! *Click* employees are required by contract to express the company name in full with proper form whenever it comes up. Express is the right word because SLAM! *Click* is not the words 'Slam' and 'Click' - the 'SLAM!' is the speaker banging the table, clapping their hands, or otherwise making a slam sound, and the 'Click' is them making a clicking sound with their tongue. Dead-eyed corporate lawyers will engage in this silly little ritual in court. Their stomping area has long been the gig economy and startup culture, the financial network that bets on a billion moonshots and folds them into larger companies when they take off. They are fast, agile and always on the bleeding edge, but hand in hand with that is the squandering of phenomenal amounts of resources on bad bets.

The only reason SLAM! *Click* organized into something remembering as a Mega at all instead of a decentralized network is to safeguard its market position from a reformed State. Taking corporeal form with a headquarters, postal address and permanent assets is a recent change for them - they're not used to it and they don't like it.

Once the office doors closed behind Everest and her entourage, the room suddenly felt much larger. Quieter too. It felt surreal to be the one on top, finally. And Andrea took a moment to orient herself. Then her desk lit up as she laid a finger onto the interactive hologram projector. A dozen alerts vied for her attention immediately. For one, her inbox was flooded with meeting requests, with department heads for the most part. Priority-level project summaries leftover from her predecessors time in this chair. Personnel recommendations. Three separate scheduling conflicts already trying to occupy the same forty-minute block tomorrow morning.

Corporate normality reasserting itself. It was... oddly reassuring. Andrea sat down and began scanning through the secretary and chief-of-staff candidates first. Not in depth yet, but just enough to understand what kind of people had been filtered upward for her consideration. All of them were presented in uber-polished résumés. All had excellent company loyalty scores, and predictable career origins. She was already guessing there'd be some former State liaisons, maybe one or two internal compliance specialists. Someone from logistics with unusually strong psychological evaluation metrics as well. She'd probably dismiss them all. Pre-approved candidates were always dangerous in their own way. People didn't reach this level of power adjacency accidentally. Somebody, somewhere, had already decided these were the people she was supposed to trust. She doubted it was Magnolia's handiwork. But even so, she knew it would be a rookie error to just appoint someone to be her right hand without knowing whether or not she could trust them. They could so easily be plants made by Magnolia, or other MegaCorps. Maybe even the State. She flagged the files for later review instead of making an immediate decision. She decided to let one of her Virtual Intelligence assistants draft a message she could send to an old friend of hers. He might not be as up to the task as one of the pre-approved candidates, but he was certainly someone Andrea could trust in this den of tigers.

She left the VI to it.

The physical report about Lhotse's financials interested her more. Paper carried weight in executive environments precisely because it was inconvenient. And in today's world it was far harder to steal. It was a digital world. Sometimes analogue security measures were the best ones. She opened the drawer and rested a hand against the folder for a moment before pulling it out. Lhotse. Full asset spread. Financial positioning. Probably enough leverage inside a single document to destabilise smaller nations.

And sitting beside all of that:

SLAM! Click.

Andrea exhaled softly through her nose at the name which was literally pronounced with physical actions. An absurd company. But still plenty of room to be an extremely dangerous one too. Every other MegaCorp grew bloated over time. It was only natural. Too much infrastructure. Too many personnel. Too much internal politics. But SLAM! Click still behaved like a startup culture that had somehow scaled into geopolitical relevance without emotionally accepting the transition. That made them unpredictable. The meeting request from their COO was interesting timing too. Either an unlikely coincidence or somebody there had already been informed about the leadership change-up at Lhotse and wanted to establish terms early. Possibly fishing for weakness. Possibly opportunity. Possibly both. Andrea leaned back slightly in her chair, eyes drifting briefly toward the dormant positronic core still resting on the desk. One problem at a time. First she would diagnose her level of company control and how far her reach extended internally. Learn the shape of her own office before external players started defining it for her. She could do all that with the department meetings, the staffing decisions, and the financial review. Second; SLAM! Click. Then Rooster.

She picked up the redacted financial reports and went over them carefully.

Lhotse's primary revenue source was not, as previously assumed, mineral extraction, materials science or even construction. Lhotse's primary revenue source was insider trading, subsidies and political patronage and the entire rest of the corporation existed to launder that money.

It's unambiguous, looking at the detailed records. In fact, many of the legitimate industries run at a loss - overpaying for employees, underpaying for equipment, logistics broken up over dozens of electoral districts. In a lot of cases it feels clear that this is State-subsidized make-work or porkbarrelling rather than legitimate industry. As an interesting side effect, the corporation's best years are always during eras of crisis, disaster or shortage; there is a huge amount of slack inside Lhotse which can be activated in the event of a crisis. Sometimes even before a crisis starts - even with the inside view you can't determine if Lhotse just so happened to be correctly placed to take advantage, or if it was forewarned.

This arrangement means that Lhotse has a lot of everything except money; its structure calls to mind the old state-owned enterprises of the Soviet Union more than anything. Overall the corporation is comfortably in the black at the cost of acting as a shadow welfare state. This does give Lhotse a unique ability: the power to crash the economy in any region, market or city on demand simply by withdrawing its support.

The annual budget has given you 100MacroCredits to spend at your discretion. That is enough for an ambitious reform programme, a medium level corporate war, or a breakthrough into new market segment or technology. Every human being on the planet is going to pitch you their cool idea for what you could spend that money on.

Your VI chimes as it locates your candidate. It had taken a while because Brevander Tochman has been through several major life experiences. Recent experience included membership in several cults, including a stint in the ateks, then a swing hard in the other direction where they transitioned into a buff jaguar anthro lady and joined the military, before settling into an androgyne catperson with a career in professional gambling. They go by Paradisia now.

On the one hand, they will not be the corporate type - but on the other hand, you struggle to imagine how a corporate type could convince this genuine Cyber Punk to betray you.

She closed the report slowly. A hundred MacroCredits. Good God. Enough money to change the direction of whole industries if spent correctly. Or disappear into vanity projects and consultant graveyards like every other executive budget in existence. Her inbox was already beginning to fill with proposals. Infrastructure expansions. Security modernization. Predictive market software. Three separate lunar investment opportunities. Somebody from R&D wanted funding for synthetic algae polymers again despite the last project ending in lawsuits and a harbour evacuation.

Ah, yes. The old adage about the definition of insanity. Turns out human behaviour remained reassuringly consistent regardless of the century. Then her VI finished compiling information on Paradisia. Andrea read through the profile in silence. Cults. Identity reconstruction. Military service. Gambling. The sort of life path that would have terrified a conventional executive screening department. Which was exactly why she kept reading. Andrea, through virtue of actually being in the business and knowing her rivals within Lhotse, reckoned that most corporate staff at senior levels shared the same weakness: they had spent their entire lives inside institutional structures. Same schools. Same internships. Same assumptions. You could predict their incentives before they opened their mouths. And it was always greed. Always the need to get one rung higher on the ladder of corporate dictatorship. And not being from that same old track of brown-nosers, Paradisia looked unpredictable in a much more useful way.

Untethered from corporate culture. That mattered to Andrea. They'd parted on good terms a few years ago. They'd lived next door to each other in the Stacks. They'd played together as kids, taken stupid risks side by side as teenagers, and even gone to the kinds of parties that no-one without military sub-dermal armour implants should've been going to as adolescents. Even as they'd gone their seperate ways in life, Andrea had done her best to touch base at least once a year. Usually in a holo-message. And there was the obligatory 'happy birthday' stuff, but that was a job she'd relegated to her VI years ago. Andrea leaned back slightly in her chair, eyes drifting toward the skyline outside her office while she thought.

She needed people she could trust, but trust inside a megacorporation was always conditional. Even Paradisia's would come with kinks she'd have to work out. But she preferred kinks over the implicit risk of corporate espionage from one of the other brown-nosers any day of the week. All she had to do to keep Paradisia loyal was pay her well enough and actually write out those birthday wishes herself.

Interesting candidate for chief of staff. Potentially exhausting candidate for chief of staff. Andrea opened the meeting request.

“Paradisia.” She instructed her VI after a moment. “Dial an old friend of mine, name of 'Paradisia Tochman'. Get her on the holo. Encrypt the line, please.” A brief pause. “And send polite deferrals to everyone pitching budget requests of priority level three or lower tonight. If they’re asking for money less than twelve hours after my promotion, they can survive waiting another day. I have to focus on the most important requests first, not waste time with... algae.”

There's still something familiar about your old friend, despite having gone through two entirely different biomorphic structures since you last spoke. Something alien too. Last time you'd seen them there had been a certain sadness and anxiety that had never left their eyes. Now there was a deep, profound sense of chill ordinarily only seen in a cat on a higher elevation than everyone around it.

"Andrea," they said, blinking their feline eyes. They'd come back to humanity a bit after going full werewolf; more skin than fur, mostly normal face, but they'd kept the big slitted eyes and the indifferent predator stare. They were wearing a stained wifebeater and an ankle-length tartan-patterned skirt made out of a carpetlike fabric that strained against her decision to sit cross-legged. "I'm guessing you need to borrow money?"

Andrea felt herself smile faintly despite the day she was having.

“That’s a little insulting, old friend.” She said as she sat opposite their hologram at her desk. “I've actually come here to offer you something, rather than demand. Have you heard of Lhotse Capitoline?”

It was a rhetorical question, but one she was more than sure that Paradisia would have some snarky remark to. Her eyes flicked briefly around the room, taking in the stained shirt, the skirt, the posture. Not really judging. Just taking a measure. Paradisia still dressed like someone who didn't give a shit what anyone else thought. They could stay that way on the inside, sure. But if this conversation went as planned, then hopefully she'd be able to convince them to start dressing a little nicer. Somehow, they’d made it work.

“I'm sure you remember me taking that entry-level analyst job here, and how I told you about how I've had a promotion or two since then on our catch-ups." She said it with a sort of blasé tone, trying to maintain an even voice profile to put forward the idea of conversational control. "Today, the fat cat finally gave a nice serving of cream for once. You're currently talking to the new Chief of Operations of Lhotse's global network. And no, I'm not just calling to gloat. I’m actually here because I need someone I can trust not to turn into a mega-corp shill or a corporate spy after six weeks of working near me.” Andrea leaned back slightly in her chair. “I'm calling to offer you a job, Para. And a lot more besides."

Paradisia scoffed. "Nice try, scammer. Don't call me back, I don't even have a bank account for you to steal. Block and report."

And the call was disconnected.

On reflection, the well of a long out of contact friend or relative calling up to offer a job earning millions working at your own hours has been somewhat poisoned. That's part of the reason the economy solidified so hard around the Megacorporate structure - without a shared pool of defensive resources, smaller companies were always easy prey for sophisticated criminal networks. Even the business trip came back into style, and even the business trip has been targeted. There is an infamous story about a regional vice-president traveling on business, meeting an entire corporate negotiating team, haggling for hours and finally coming to an agreement - only to discover that everyone in that room had been an android and he'd just lost 20MC.

To lock this in you're going to have to go down to the Street. Get a little mud on your chrome.

Andrea stared at the disconnected call with a flat expression. The irritation arrived a second later. Not because Paradisia had hung up on her. Honestly, that part was understandable. Mostly because it meant this was now going to require actual effort. Scheduling. Travel. Face-to-face interaction. All the things modern communications infrastructure was supposedly meant to eliminate.

Still, it also confirmed something important. Paradisia had enough sense not to trust a call like that. They weren't a gullible schmuck. That alone put them ahead of half of the department heads and executives currently requesting meetings in her inbox. Silver linings. Andrea exhaled quietly through her nose and dismissed the dead call window.

“VI,” she said, stepping back toward her desk. “Arrange discreet transport to Paradisia’s registered address. Unmarked vehicle. Minimum security profile. Pickup in one hour.”

A soft chime acknowledged the instruction. She sat back down and turned her attention to the fucking mountain of priority notifications waiting for her. This, more than the meeting with Everest, felt like the real beginning of the job.

A corporation the size of Lhotse never stopped moving. Problems accumulated constantly at every level; labour disputes, stalled shipments, political pressure, industrial accidents, legal threats, market shifts. The role of a COO was not to solve every issue personally. It was to identify which problems could metastasize if ignored. Her inbox had already done part of that work for her. She checked the Priority One filter, hoping that she wasn't going to see something that would push her plans for Paradisia on the back burner.

The VI's automatic prioritization system triaged the security solution and transit request into a single meeting. Your meeting with Ms. Scipio was done via comms while you set off in an aerotaxi to the lower ward. No tail or guards, but the personal attention of the corporation's head of security every step of the way. Sometimes the VI did something right.

You had a full copy of Ms. Scipio's profile on hand and it was not what you expected. She was a personal pick from Mrs. Everest, and her pedigree was not in corporate security, infowar, covert operations or any of the other classical backgrounds that typically mark corporate security leaders. She was an Admiral. A combat veteran of the French Navy during the Red Decades, before its integration into the PanOceanian State. She had, notably, been present at the Battle of Corsica, one of the most iconic moments of the Red Decades. Somewhere between mutiny, coup, civil war and malfunction of an integrated battle management system, the Battle of Corsica had seen the French fleet open fire upon itself. Nobody was fully clear as to what had happened or what the political motivations of the parties involved. All the key figures had died.

Except for Ms. Scipio.

Your initial read on her was that this was not someone ashamed of her military service. She wore her suit like a uniform and her bearing was used to command rather than debate. She would not make it in this role if she was not Mrs. Everest's creature - and you suspect that the two get along very well - simply because someone like this needs a patron to maintain their position. The exact dynamic of their relationship is a mystery, but given the depths of Everest's political interplay with the State it could be anything.

"Ms. Kade," said Ms. Scipio. She held herself in readiness after that - that naval bearing at play, treating you as a superior officer, waiting to hear your orders.

Andrea studied Ms. Scipio for a moment through the comms window while the aerotaxi descended gradually through layers of evening traffic. The naval background explained a great deal immediately. Not just the posture or the formality. The stillness too. Corporate executives tended to fill silence reflexively — explaining, framing, reassuring. Scipio waited instead, composed and attentive in a way that suggested patience rather than passivity. Everest’s influence was obvious there as well. Andrea suspected the Founder preferred competent people who did not require constant emotional management. No wonder she'd opted for military top brass, then.

“Good evening, Admiral Scipio.” Andrea said, inclining her head slightly. “I won’t keep you long. I mainly wanted to introduce myself properly before we schedule something more substantial within the next forty-eight hours.” A straightforward opening. No performance of authority. No attempt to immediately establish dominance over a department head who had almost certainly forgotten more about institutional survival than most executives ever learned.

“I’ve reviewed your profile.” She continued. “You’ve had a very different career path than most corporate security directors. Some would even say intriguing.” Not flattery, merely a statement of fact. The city lights shifted across the taxi windows as it banked lower through the skyline. “As part of the transition, I’m touching base with senior leadership to identify ongoing situations that might not be fully reflected in the formal reports crossing my desk.” Andrea folded one leg over the other slightly in her seat. “Projects, concerns, operational headaches, external pressures.” A faint smile touched the corner of her mouth. “Or the things they avoid putting in writing at all.”

She let the moment breathe naturally before continuing.

“I’d appreciate your own assessment of where security’s attention is currently focused, and whether there’s anything you think I should understand early rather than discovering for myself. I'd like to upfront with one another, Admiral. That's all.”