Fenn

The Three Mountains

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."

The Three Mountains

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.”

The Three Mountains

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.

The Three Mountains

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.

The Three Mountains

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?"

The Three Mountains

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?”

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?"