Finally, I worked. Mostly on Orbital Dynamics and its (numerous) engineering problems. Rocket shit. The kind of thing that as a kid I’d only dreamed about being allowed to do all day, let alone get paid for. If only I could have fired all the engineers and, in particular, the middle manager who had hired them, since from what I’d gathered, he seemed to be cut from the same cloth as Corey and had made it a point to hire a bunch of miniature Coreys. But I couldn’t do that. All I had was a smartboard, a computer, the choice between sitting at a desk or a beanbag chair, a stress ball to throw up in the air and catch while staring at the ceiling, and what seemed like infinite hours in the day to think up solutions to the problems they handed me, since I never went anywhere except back and forth between the office and the condo. And, of course, the opportunity to look sharp while doing it. Frankly, I was shocked at how much Langer had allowed me to spend on flashy clothes, considering I had virtually nowhere to wear them. I didn’t go to meetings or power lunches; didn’t deal with marketing or sales or IT or legal. Hell, there wasn’t a single employee of the company I was helping to make millions who even knew who or what I was. All of my ideas were filtered through Langer—I passed him ideas, and he showed me what and how he planned to present them to the team, incorporating my suggestions and changes. It was an odd, if efficient, system, I had to admit. But when the time came to go live, my presence was erased. I was a shadow; a ghost.
“I’d take you out on the town, but you’d have to brush up on your manners and losethat. It’s nonnegotiable,” Langer said, pointing to the bracelet half-hidden under my sleeve. Before I could get indignant about this attack on my manners, Langercontinued, “I can’t be seen in public with a slave, or anyone who slips up andactslike a slave, even inadvertently. For your own good and mine, it’s just too risky.”
For your own good.I’d heard that phrase plenty in my life, and it was pretty much always bullshit, but in this case, I knew it wasn’t. I didn’t want my cover blown any more than Langer did.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, which was true. “By the way, is there anything more to Project White Cedar than what I saw on the tour?” I asked. “Another location maybe? Another lab?”
“Nothing but what you saw, except for maybe the house where the girls live, which isn’t far away from the warehouse. There’s not much to see, obviously, but I can arrange a tour of that if you want,” he said. “I know you don’t believe me, but I’m actually trying to be transparent here.”
“I appreciate that,” I replied, even though the claim was a total joke—well, not a total joke, given what I now knew about Max and Resi. “But you don’t have to do that.”
The standard tour wouldn’t help, anyway. I needed the VIP tour. The Corey special. Because it wasn’t just aboutgettingto the house, or even seeing it—it was about proving what Resi was doing with the girls in it. Not only for myself, though. I was starting to think that maybe, if the proof I found was strong enough, I could convince Langer, too. My boss would hate to hear it—he might not even believe it at first—but maybe I, being who I was, was the only one who could open his eyes. It was worth a try, right? The problem was, some vague notes between Corey and Resi and reams of dense financial spreadsheets didn’t prove anything, even if they were slowly coming into focus the more I combed through them. If anything, they just made itmoreconfusing—and easier to plausibly deny.
If only every other plan I could think of didn’t risk blowing up the entire company and sending me to a mine.
So for a few days, I lay low and played the good employee. And for my efforts, I saw and held the crisp new bills; inhaled their intoxicating aroma and locked them in the safe myself with a combination I set, then just kind of stood there, staring at it all in a daze, because money, if you’d never had any, was a full sensory experience.
The problem was, it wasn’t actually mine.
I had never been under any illusions that learning to live like a free man—were I ever to get the chance—would be easy. But I had also never thought I would needtodo it while still being a slave. I could take a two-hour lunch, leave early, or stay late to play arcade games and guzzle bourbon. I could eat all the chocolate from the jar on one of Langer’s assistants’ desks, which I had first tried to earn by teasing her about the source of her unconscious smirk as she stared at her computer screen. But I soon realized that I could have gotten itwithoutflirting with her, or even asking nicely. Hell, I could have just opened the jar, scooped out all of it, and walked away, with no consequences whatsoever.
And that, for some reason, was mind-blowing.
It hit me: free people didn’thaveto charm and manipulate to get even the most basic kindnesses and courtesies. They didn’t have to spend every spare moment racking their brains to exhaustion, figuring out ways to be smarter and better than everybody around them, for the mere privilege of not being kicked in the teeth. They just… expected it. Because they were free, and they were people.
In the meantime, I followed Langer’s directive and told Resi several times to get fucked. And to my surprise?
She did.
But something told me that it—like, let’s face it, everything else around me—was a lie.
Look, fuck yes, I would have made a good rich kid. But I wasn’t. I’d never been a kid at all. Not the way free people got to be kids, anyway. And I could delude myself all I liked, but the fact was that Resi was right that I was never going to outrun what I was with sports cars and suits and bourbons and beanbag chairs, or even removing the outward symbol of servitude.
And while I was stuck pondering all of that, the next day, Resi did the most terrifying thing she could have possibly done—disappeared. Which, needless to say, had been nowhere on my bingo card.
“She’s taking the week off,” Max explained that morning. “She does this sometimes. Just disappears somewhere and fucks her way through a new city. It’s her version of a wellness retreat.”
It sounded like bullshit, but before I could add investigatingthatto my long list of other things to investigate, my phone buzzed. An unknown number, but I caught on pretty fast as to who it was from.
Unknown Number
you were right
“Excuse me,” I told Max and dashed into my office and locked the door.
Langer Enterprises Technical Consultant
Lemaya?? Holy shit. Where have you been? Are you okay?
Unknown Number
No
Langer Enterprises Technical Consultant
Where are you? What happened?
Unknown Number
