The Walking Corporate

Sarah stood on the forty-second floor balcony, the wind whipping her corporate-chic blazer against skin that hadn't felt real sensation in weeks. Below her, the city sprawled like a victim of its own ambition—a perfect pyramid of glass and steel, each tier housing more exhausted souls than the last.

Her iPhone buzzed again. Marcus. The bull who'd somehow become her boss, his aggression masked as leadership, his messages always arriving at 11 PM or 5 AM—those liminal hours when work-life balance dissolved into work-life assimilation. She'd stopped replying outside business hours three months ago. Now his notifications were just background radiation, the cosmic microwave of her professional decline.

She peeled the orange she'd brought from home—organic, expensive, one of those small luxuries that made her feel like she still had agency. The citrus spray hit her hands, sharp and honest, and for a moment she remembered being a person who chose things because she wanted them, not because they'd been ROI-optimized.

"You okay out here?"

She jumped. It was Tom from Marketing, holding a glass of wine that looked suspiciously like orange juice masquerading as something sophisticated. They were at the company's quarterly celebration—another mandatory social event where everyone pretended to enjoy watching colleagues receive pyramids on plaques.

"Just needed air," she said. "Sometimes this place feels like..."

"A zombie apocalypse where the undead have excellent dental plans?" Tom finished.

Sarah laughed, a genuine sound that surprised her. "Exactly. We're all just walking around, eating brains—well, brainpower—and slowly decaying while nobody notices because we're still hitting our KPIs."

They stood in companionable silence, watching the traffic below—thousands of little red and white lights, each carrying someone toward or away from something important.

"I quit yesterday," Tom said quietly.

Sarah turned to him, really seeing him for the first time. He didn't look like a zombie anymore. He looked awake.

"What will you do?"

"I don't know." He finished his drink. "But I'm going to peel more oranges. Maybe learn to actually taste them again."

Her phone buzzed once more. Marcus, demanding the Q3 projections by morning. For the first time in three years, Sarah didn't check it.

"Tom," she said, staring out at the pyramid of lights, "I think I just joined the undead."