The Walking Deadline

Maya felt like a zombie, shuffling through the fluorescent-lit corridor toward the conference room where Richardson—our department's sphinx—waited to pose another impossible riddle disguised as a project brief. She hadn't slept properly since the merger was announced three weeks ago.

Her iphone buzzed in her pocket. David again: *Can we talk? Please.* She ignored it, just as she'd ignored his last twelve messages. Some conversations, once started, couldn't be neatly contained within professional boundaries or friendly pretenses. Not after what had happened at the holiday party.

The office water cooler gurgled behind her as she passed. How many desperate conversations had taken place there? How many surrenders, confessions, quiet catastrophes? Maya remembered the way David had looked at her across the room that night, his tie loosened, his guard down. The way he'd said her name like it was the only word he'd been saving up to say.

She'd spent two decades building walls around herself, learning to translate emotions into deliverables, passion into performance metrics. But David had found the crack in the foundation.

In the conference room, Richardson sat surrounded by spreadsheets, his enigmatic smile suggesting he knew something no one else did. His riddle this time: How to make the company more human while simultaneously automating everything that made it human.

"The answer," Maya said, setting her phone on the table face down, "is that you can't."

Richardson's eyebrows lifted. The sphinx had been bested.

Her iphone lit up with a thirteenth message from David. This time, she picked it up. Some projects were worth the risk. Some deadlines were meant to be broken.