The Last Pyramid Scheme

Maya's iphone buzzed against her nightstand at 3:14 AM, the screen illuminating her dark bedroom like a tiny, accusing moon. She knew who it was before she looked. Tom—her former friend, current coworker, and the only person who understood what it felt like to be hollowed out by forty-hour weeks.

"They want the presentation by 6," his text read. "The sphinx is hungry again."

The sphinx was their name for Chen, the regional director who sat in his corner office like a mythological creature devouring anyone who couldn't answer his riddles correctly. Yesterday, he'd asked Maya why the third quarter projections resembled "a dog's breakfast," and she'd stood there, mouth open, feeling like she'd forgotten how to speak English.

Maya dragged herself to her home office, the space that had once been a guest bedroom. The corporate org chart spread across her monitor—she'd rearranged it to look like a pyramid, Chen at the apex, all the way down to people like her and Tom at the base, supporting weight they couldn't see.

She caught her reflection in the black screen: dark circles, skin that looked like it had never seen sunlight, eyes that had forgotten how to brighten. A corporate zombie. That's what they were—undead workers stumbling through fluorescent-lit corridors, eating nothing but bad coffee and worse dreams.

Her phone lit up again. Tom had sent a photo: himself at their favorite dive bar, holding up two drinks, captioned "Remember when we used to be alive?"

They hadn't spoken in person since Chen's last restructuring. Tom had survived three rounds of layoffs; Maya had survived two. They used to have drinks every Friday, dissect their trauma, make each other laugh until it hurt. Now they were colleagues who occasionally texted at 3 AM, sharing misery like contraband.

Maya typed: "I miss you. I miss us."

Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.

Then: "Let's be terrible at our jobs tomorrow. Let's give the sphinx the wrong answers on purpose."

Maya smiled for the first time in weeks.

The pyramid on her screen suddenly looked less like a tomb and more like something they could dismantle together, one stone at a time, starting with a very wrong answer to a very stupid riddle.