The Corporate Dead

Maya stared at the corporate org chart projected on the conference room wall—a gleaming pyramid of names and titles, with CEO Vance at the apex and the rest of them cascading down in neat, meaningless rows. Her iPhone buzzed in her lap again. Another slack notification. Another fire to put out. Another day of feeling like she was already dead and just hadn't had the decency to lie down yet.

"We need to optimize synergies," Vance was saying, his voice a soothing narcotic that had put three people to sleep already. "Cut the zombie projects that are just eating up resources without delivering ROI."

Zombie. The word hung in the air. Maya looked around the room at her colleagues—pale, hollow-cheeked, eyes glazed over from too many 14-hour days and not enough lives lived outside these walls. They were all zombies, really. The walking dead of corporate America, shuffling from meeting to meeting, consuming brains and spitting out spreadsheets.

Her phone lit up again. A text from Erik, the guy in data analytics who always looked like he wanted to jump out the 34th-floor window.

"Emergency coffee. Roof. Now."

Maya stood up. "Bathroom," she whispered, though Vance barely acknowledged her existence.

The roof was cold and gray, the city spread out like a cancer below them. Erik was already there, leaning against the ventilation equipment, two steaming cups from the cart downstairs in his hands.

"I can't do this anymore," he said, handing her one. "I woke up this morning and realized I don't even remember what I used to care about. Before. Before I became... this."

Maya took the coffee, letting the warmth seep into her frozen hands. "I know. I caught my reflection in the iPhone camera yesterday and didn't recognize the person staring back. She looked dead. She looked like she'd stopped living years ago and just hadn't been buried yet."

Erik turned to her, really looked at her for the first time in three years of working together. "What would we do? If we left?"

"Anything," she said. "Everything. Maybe we'd finally start living instead of just not dying."

He reached for her hand, his fingers cold against hers. "Let's. Let's just... leave. Right now."

"What about the pyramid?" she asked, gesturing vaguely at the building behind them.

"Fuck the pyramid," Erik said, and for the first time, Maya saw something alive in his eyes. "Let's be people again."

They left their iPhones on the roof, side by side, two little screens lighting up with ignored notifications as they walked away from everything they'd been too dead to escape until now.