Fenn

The Three Mountains

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 Three Mountains

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?"