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.