"I am a graduate of Lhotse Polytechnic University," said Trajan quietly. "One of the last. The Company used to offer full secondary education for all employee children. It was not a place of preaching and indoctrination, but it was a beautiful campus with reasonably priced food, comfortable places to sit, and inspirational teachers. Nowadays it's an online course."

"And that's just one of [i]thousands [/i]of cuts we've been making over the past decade," she flicked a set of images and graphs onto the screen. "So, what are our options? Improve the pay? Lhotse employees are already receiving 60% of their pay in company scrip, locking them into our substandard network of consumer goods. Convert the scrip into State-backed money? Then we'll create an internal economic crisis as multiple uncompetitive factories are forced to shutter. Foreign consumer goods will flood our markets. If we lose control over electronic industries then we create surfaces for digital infiltration. Invest in a multi-year task to modernize our consumer good industries and corporate benefits to bring them up to competitive standards? More than 20MC. Ask the managers to smile more?" she smiled, Authentically(tm). "That's cult shit, ma'am. You can pay money for the gold plated solution, triage - which is what the success cult does, creating a base of indoctrinated loyalists we can use to occupy key positions while letting morale among the rank and file collapse - or let it play out and hope that the treason is manageable."

That quiet, confident loyalty she spoke about before - you can see it in her. This is someone who is a true believer in the Company. A patriot. She'll happily eat bitterness for years if it's for the Company's long term good. She will manage her own division's decline and collapse if it's for the greater good. There aren't a lot like her these days.

Dangerous in its own way, though. If she thinks you're leading the Company poorly she'll be the first to organize a coup.

"We're in deeper shit than you thought. Our budget has been embezzeled for years to fund R&D. Before all this we could do business as usual on an annual budget of 15MC. Now it'd take 50 just to get us back to that point, and you've already -" she caught herself. "Made other commitments. So there's only one other option for full funcion: merger. We completely turn over our internal security, either to the State or to one of the criminal families. Give them a stake in the company. Have them inside pissing out rather than outside pissing in. God knows what'll come of that."