The Day I Became One of Them

The orange plastic chair in the break room had become my sanctuary. Three years at Veridian Dynamics, and I'd learned that the corporate world didn't kill your dreams — it just embalmed them while you were still breathing. I'd become a zombie in sensible heels, moving through quarterly reports and team-building exercises with the hollow efficiency of the walking dead.

Lila was different. My only real friend in this fluorescent-lit purgatory. We shared oranges every lunch break, peeling them with the ritual care of conspirators. She'd been pushing vitamin supplements on me for months, her eyes bright with that terrifying enthusiasm of people who still believed things could get better. "You're depleted, Mara," she'd say, pressing the bottles into my palm like contraband. "You need to replenish."

I should have noticed how she always sat facing the door, how her phone calls ended abruptly when I approached. How she knew about restructuring weeks before the emails went out.

The truth arrived on a Tuesday, delivered by a man from corporate security who looked as tired as I felt. "We have reason to believe," he said, his voice flat, "that your friend Lila is a corporate spy. She's been gathering intel for our competitor for eighteen months."

Eighteen months. Almost as long as we'd been friends.

I didn't cry. I just went back to my desk and arranged my vitamins in a neat row: B-complex, D3, iron, omega-3. Pills for a body that refused to die, for a heart that kept beating despite everything.

Through the glass walls of my office, I watched them escort Lila out. She didn't look back. Maybe she'd been a zombie too, playing her part so convincingly she'd forgotten who she'd been before. Or maybe she'd never cared at all.

The orange chair sat empty. I stood up, my joints creaking, and realized I didn't know which was worse: being betrayed, or realizing I might have done the same thing if someone had offered me a way out first.

I took my vitamins. I went back to work. The corporate dead don't get to rest — we just learn to walk faster.