The Corporate Pyramid Scheme

Sarah had been running on caffeine and spite for three years straight, climbing the corporate ladder at OmniGlobal one backstab at a time. The vitamin D supplements on her desk were the only thing keeping her skeletal system from collapsing under fluorescent lights. She was thirty-five, exhausted, and exactly where she'd promised herself she'd never be.

The email arrived at 2:47 AM. Subject line: URGENT: Project Pyramid Override.

Her hands shook. Project Pyramid was the的秘密 weapon—OmniGlobal's revolutionary AI that would put half the workforce out of a job. Only six people knew it existed. And someone had just accessed the source code from a Moscow IP address.

A spy. In their midst.

Sarah's mind raced through the faces in her Tuesday meetings. Chen, with his too-perfect English and questions about server architecture. Elena, who worked late but never seemed to produce anything. Marcus, who'd defended the Russian government twice at happy hour, calling it 'just playing devil's advocate.'

By dawn, Sarah had done what she always did: she made herself useful. She traced the breach, documented every packet, prepared the report that would get her promoted to VP. She found the leak—Elena's credentials, used from a personal device. Elena, with two kids and a mortgage she couldn't afford on her salary.

The vitamin bottle rattled as Sarah opened another pill. This one for anxiety, prescribed last month after she'd started waking up gasping from dreams of falling through glass floors.

She forwarded the evidence to security at 8:03 AM. By noon, Elena was being escorted from the building, her personal items in a cardboard box, her face shattered.

Marcus stopped by Sarah's desk with congratulations. Chen smiled over his cubicle wall. And Sarah sat with her vitamin supplements and her promotion track and the sudden, sickening realization that she was the only one who'd noticed Elena was running a second job at Target to pay for her mother's cancer treatments.

The spy had been desperate. Sarah was just efficient. Somewhere between her spine and her conscience, something fundamental had calcified.

She swallowed another vitamin. It didn't help.