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 [i]always[/i] 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... [i]algae[/i].”