The Orange Protocol

Marcus peeled the orange in his car, the citrus spray sharp against the stale air of the parking garage. He'd been parked here for three hours, watching the entrance of the data analytics firm where he'd worked for seven years. Where he'd been recruited as a corporate spy three months ago.

Inside, Mara was probably working late again. He imagined her at her desk, third floor, second window from the left, the one with the dying peace lily she kept forgetting to water. She'd waved at him this morning, that same tired wave she gave everyone, as if her arm moved through invisible molasses.

They'd all become zombies, really. Not the flesh-eating kind, but something worse: the hollow-eyed variety that processed spreadsheets and attended Zoom meetings while their souls atrophied somewhere around year two. Marcus had been one of them until The Agency approached him with an offer too tempting to refuse: triple his salary to document his coworkers' password habits, after-hours access patterns, and suspicious file transfers.

Tonight's assignment was simple: confirm whether Mara was the source of the leaked algorithm. The orange segments were sticky against his fingers. He'd started buying them after she mentioned, over sad desk salads, that they reminded her of childhood summers.

"Funny how things that used to feel like sunshine just taste like disappointment now," she'd said.

Marcus checked his phone. The monitoring software he'd secretly installed on her workstation was silent. No file transfers. No external drives. Nothing.

But the motion sensors logged someone entering the server room at 3:47 AM. Using her credentials.

The orange rind sat in his passenger seat like a torn-apart heart. He'd fallen in love with her somewhere between the fluorescent-lit breakroom conversations and the way she hummed Beatles songs when she thought no one was listening. Now he had to decide: destroy her career, or betray the people who'd made him feel alive for the first time in years.

His phone buzzed. A text from his handler: "Confirm by midnight. Bonus if you get her personal device too."

Marcus started the car. The garage exit sign glowed ahead — another shade of orange, another warning he'd been ignoring all along.

He wasn't a spy anymore. He wasn't even a zombie. He was just another corpse in the corporate machine, and tonight, he'd make sure Mara joined him there.