The Pyramid of Empty Suits

David stood at the edge of the conference room, nursing his third complimentary coffee. The corporate retreat hotel had been designed like a fucking pyramid—glass walls soaring upward, everyone visible, everyone performing. He felt like a zombie, moving through the motions of enthusiasm while his soul quietly hollowed out.

"You have to bear with the process," his manager Gary had said earlier, pulling him aside near the buffet. Gary's eyes were dead, shark-like. "This restructuring will streamline everything. You're not being let go, David. You're being... optimized."

Optimized. The word tasted like bile. At 42, David had spent two decades climbing corporate ladders that kept collapsing beneath him. He watched his colleagues—once vibrant, now reduced to nodding automatons—shuffle between breakout sessions.

"Hey." A woman beside him at the coffee station. Sarah from Accounting. She'd rolled her shirtsleeves up, revealing tattoos he'd never noticed. "You look like you're plotting murder."

"Just thinking about how to bear the unbearable," he said, surprising himself with honesty.

"The pyramid scheme?" She gestured at the glass walls. "I used to think I was climbing up. Then I realized we're all just holding up the structure while the people at the top collect the rent."

Something shifted between them. A recognition.

"My ex-husband called me a zombie," she continued, "because I stopped wanting anything beyond survival. But lately I've been wondering—what if the zombie thing is a mask? What if we're all just protecting the parts of ourselves that still feel something?"

David looked at her really looked. The tattoos. The laugh lines around eyes that weren't dead anymore. "I still feel something," he said. "Mostly it's rage. But sometimes it's hope."

"Hope's dangerous." Her phone buzzed. She checked it, then turned it off completely. "But rage? Rage can be useful."

Outside, the sun began to set over the glass pyramid, casting long shadows across the room of people who were slowly realizing they were trapped. David found himself wanting to sit with Sarah, to skip the evening keynote and talk about what came next.

"Dinner?" he asked.

"Only if we don't talk about work."

"Deal."

As they walked toward the exit, leaving the pyramid behind them, David realized something: he'd stopped feeling like a zombie the moment he'd stopped pretending everything was fine. The bears of his burdens felt lighter already.