Chapter 27: Crazy IT Silas
Silas finally skidded to a halt mid-spin, his cheerful grin unfazed by the sudden stillness. "Okay! Lesson learned! Fun dance greetings only from now on, Pete the Red! No sad knees!" He pointed a decisive finger at Pete. "Got it? Fun vibes only!"
Pete, still awkwardly half-crouched, nodded mutely. Confusion warred with residual humiliation under his skin. Fun vibes? Was that even possible here?
"Silas," Sean said, his deep voice cutting through the lingering absurdity. The CEO’s amusement had vanished, replaced by his usual cool command. "The security protocol upgrade confirmation. If you wouldn't mind?" He gestured vaguely towards the room, his gaze resting briefly on the unblinking lens of the security camera high in the corner.
"Right! Worky-work!" Silas chirped, snapping his fingers as if suddenly remembering a trivial errand. His bright eyes zeroed in on Pete. "Pete the Red! Your personal access card, please. The shiny red one!" He held out a pale, long-fingered hand expectantly.
Pete automatically reached for the thin slot on the thick leather band of his collar. His fingers, slick with nervous sweat, fumbled for a second before extracting the small, crimson plastic rectangle embedded there – his Red Tag ID, his digital leash. He placed it in Silas’s waiting palm, acutely aware of Sean’s watchful presence and Karn leaning back against his desk, arms crossed, observing everything.
"Thanky-thank!" Silas sang, pulling a sleek, matte-black laptop seemingly from nowhere. He flipped it open, the screen blazing to life with cascading streams of incomprehensible glyphs and numbers. He plugged a small, complex-looking adapter into a port, then slotted Pete’s red card into it with a decisive click. His fingers flew over the keyboard, a rapid-fire staccato rhythm filling the quiet office. His eyes scanned the flowing data, his cheerful expression replaced by intense, almost manic focus. He muttered under his breath, a bizarre stream of syllables that sounded like a mix of technical jargon and nonsense: "Parsing sub-routine gamma... entropy spike confirmed... nullifiers engaged... bzzzt-kapow, fuzzy kittens!" He clicked rapidly, lines of code flashing and vanishing.
Pete watched, bewildered. The data streams meant nothing to him. Silas’s muttering might as well have been ancient Martian. He stood there, naked and collared, feeling utterly out of his depth, a piece of malfunctioning equipment under the Purple Tag technician’s scrutiny.
After less than a minute, Silas gave a sharp, satisfied nod. He yanked Pete’s card out and held it up, his bright smile snapping back into place. "Confirmed! Just like you two geniuses suspected!" He beamed at Sean and Karn.
Silas tossed the red card back to Pete, who fumbled but caught it. "All fixed now!" Silas declared, snapping his laptop shut with a flourish. "Scanned, scrubbed, and sealed tighter than a pickle jar in space! But!" He wagged a finger, his expression turning mock-stern. "Listen up, Pete the Red. Important rule-change! From right now, you submit all your work files, reports, everything, directly to Karn’s private email. Not the company system. No uploads to the shared drives. Karn’s inbox only. Got it? Karn’s email. Directly." He tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially. "Keeps the data gnomes out."
Sean gave a single, firm nod. Karn echoed it, a grim satisfaction in his eyes. "Understood, Silas. Thank you," Karn said.
"Perfect-o!" Silas chirped. He shoved the laptop into a slim briefcase Pete hadn’t noticed before. Then, without warning, he launched into another quick, jerky orbit around Pete, a blur of violet suit and flailing limbs. "Whee! Exit dance!" He completed the circle and bounced towards the door. "Bye-bye, Karn! Bye-bye, Sean! Bye-bye, Pete the Red! Remember: Fun greetings!" He winked, gave a final, ridiculous salute, and slipped out the door, closing it softly behind him.
The silence he left behind was thick and heavy. Pete stood holding his red card, the echo of Silas’s dance and bizarre pronouncements ringing in his ears. He slowly slid the card back into its slot on the collar.
Karn pushed off his desk, a wide grin spreading across his face as he took in Pete’s utterly bewildered expression. "Wow, Pete," he chuckled, shaking his head. "That face. Pure, unadulterated 'What the hell just happened?' Classic. You didn't understand a single word he said, did you?"
Pete sighed, the tension bleeding out as confusion took full hold. He met Karn’s amused gaze. "Not one bit, Karn. What did he do? What did he mean? Sabotage... emails... data gnomes?" He ran a hand through his hair, forgetting his nakedness for a moment. "Explain it to me? Please?"
Sean, who had been observing Pete with an inscrutable expression, let out a sharp, exasperated sound. He brought his hand up, fingers pressing hard against his forehead. "Unbelievable," he muttered, his clipped British accent tight with frustration. "The candidate with the highest consent-trap potential in a decade. The one I'm personally shepherding through this probationary hell. And he stands there looking like a lost puppy who just got spun in a washing machine." He lowered his hand, pinning Pete with a stare that was equal parts disbelief and profound irritation. "You truly are spectacularly dense sometimes, Riverton."
Pete flinched slightly at the blunt assessment, the warmth of Karn’s teasing instantly cooling.
Sean stepped forward, the plush carpet muffling his footsteps. He stopped in front of Pete. For a heartbeat, Pete thought Sean might say something more cutting. Instead, the CEO simply reached out and gave Pete’s bare shoulder two firm, almost paternal taps. The touch was brief, impersonal, yet carried the weight of his authority and that strange, unspoken expectation Pete couldn't decipher. Then, without another word, Sean turned and strode out of the office, the door clicking shut with finality behind him.
Karn burst out laughing, a rich, genuine sound that filled the minimalist space. He leaned back against his desk again, shoulders shaking. "Spectacularly dense!" he managed between laughs. "Oh, Pete. The look on his face! Priceless!"
Pete just stood there, the phantom pressure of Sean’s taps lingering on his skin, Karn’s laughter washing over him, and Silas’s bizarre instructions swirling in his head. The relief of being absolved was buried under a fresh, deeper layer of utter confusion. Highest consent-trap potential? Candidate? What the hell was Sean talking about? He felt like a piece on a game board everyone else understood, naked and exposed under the unblinking eye of the security camera. "Karn," he pleaded, his voice tight with bewildered frustration, "what did he mean?"
Karn’s laughter faded, replaced by a hard, focused intensity. He pushed off the desk, his polished shoes silent on the plush carpet, and walked deliberately towards his massive mahogany throne. "Sean means you’re valuable, Pete," he said, his voice low and devoid of its earlier mirth. "More than you realize."
He gestured sharply towards the sleek terminal embedded in the desk’s surface. "Look here." His fingers tapped a rapid sequence, and the main screen flared to life, bathing his face in cool blue light. Instead of Pete’s personnel file, a complex grid filled the display – lines of timestamps, project IDs, and performance metrics. Karn’s voice was clipped. "How long have we been here, Pete? You and me. How many months?"
Pete shuffled closer, the cool air raising goosebumps on his bare arms. He squinted at the dates on the screen, recognizing project codes from his first week. "A year," he answered, confusion warring with a growing sense of unease. "Almost exactly. We started the same day."
"Precisely," Karn stated, the word sharp. He scrolled down the dense log, highlighting specific entries with swift jabs of his finger – project completions, deadlines met weeks early, error rates near zero. All under Pete’s ID. "And promotions? Your journey?. Mine?"
Pete swallowed, the leather collar suddenly tight. He knew the answer, had lived the disparity every day. "You… Purple Tag. Tier Four when you started." He looked down at his own naked body, the implied contrast screaming louder than words. "Now Tier One. Fast-Track. Me? Red Tag. Always. No promotion." The words tasted like ash, confirming his deepest, unspoken fear of inadequacy.
Karn’s knuckles went white where they gripped the edge of the desk. "Now look at this," he hissed, jabbing his finger at the screen again. A section expanded, showing Pete’s workload over the past six months – multiple complex projects simultaneously, flagged green for 'completed ahead of schedule & exceeding quality benchmarks'. "Multi-parallel high-priority tasks. Handled flawlessly. Impossibly fast." He spun his chair to face Pete fully, his eyes blazing. "Does that strike you as… fishy? That Karn moves up while Pete, who handles this," he stabbed the glowing screen, "stays firmly, permanently, Red?"
Pete flinched. The relentless data was undeniable proof. He’d blamed himself, always. "I… I thought," he stammered, voice thick with disappointment, "maybe I just… didn’t put enough effort in? Or… or it wasn’t the right kind of effort?" He hated how weak it sounded. "Maybe I deserved—"
"Kneel!" Karn’s command cracked through the office like a whip. It wasn't cold formality this time; it was raw, furious energy. "Down! Now! Knees spread wide, hands laced behind your head! Look at me!"
The ingrained obedience flared. Pete dropped instantly, bare knees hitting the plush carpet. He splayed his legs wide, fingers twisting together at the base of his skull, forcing his spine straight, his gaze locked onto Karn’s furious face. The posture was agonizingly familiar, yet charged with Karn’s unprecedented anger. Shame and fear warred within him.
Karn leaned forward, his voice dropping to a dangerous, vibrating whisper. "Let’s try this again. Forget 'deserving'. Forget 'effort'. Look at the facts on that screen. Your friend started alongside you. Karn got promoted. Pete did not. Karn is Tier One Executive Fast-Track. Pete is still a Red Tag. Karn wears Armani. Pete kneels naked on his office floor." He punctuated each point, his gaze boring into Pete’s. "What does that make you feel? Really feel? Not what you think you should feel. What’s clawing its way out of your gut right now?"
The dam burst. Tears, hot and uncontrollable, streamed down Pete’s cheeks, dripping onto the dark carpet. The humiliation of the posture, the stark truth of Karn’s words, the weight of a year’s suppressed frustration and confusion – it all erupted in a choked sob. "Bad!" he gasped, the word ripped from his throat. "It feels… awful! Like I gave… gave everything! Worked harder than anyone! Did everything right! And… and it meant nothing! It got me nothing!" His voice broke completely, shoulders shaking uncontrollably within the rigid confines of the pose. "Just… stuck. Nowhere. While you… climbed."
Silence followed his raw confession, heavy with the echo of his sobs and the hum of the terminal. Then, Karn moved. Not with anger, but with startling speed. He pushed his chair back and dropped to his own knees directly in front of Pete. Before Pete could process it, Karn’s arms were around him, pulling him into a fierce embrace. Pete instinctively tried to recoil, terrified of breaking the posture, but Karn held him tight, his grip surprisingly strong.
"That," Karn murmured fiercely into Pete’s ear, his anger replaced by an intensity that felt like pure, desperate purpose. His voice was thick. "That feeling. That’s the poison they feed you. That’s what I’m trying to cut out." He held Pete tighter, the embrace a stark contrast to the mandated nakedness and rigid kneeling position Pete still maintained. "That’s what I’m trying to make right."
Karn held him like that for another heartbeat, the fierce embrace a silent counterpoint to the harsh rules binding them both. Then, with a final squeeze that felt like a promise, he pulled back, staying on his knees in front of Pete. His eyes, still intense, searched Pete’s tear-streaked face. "Okay," he breathed, the anger gone, replaced by that familiar, focused drive. "Focus now. Remember what I told you? After we sent your mom back home with my cousin Tarn?"
Pete swallowed, the memory of his mother’s tearful relief clashing with the sterile chill of the office air on his skin. He nodded, trying to steady his breathing. "Yeah. Yeah, I remember. That night. You told me… you explained the real reason. Behind the probation Sean mentioned. Why it had to look like… like that." He gestured vaguely towards the door, encompassing the meeting room humiliation. "You said… you said it was about the criteria. The workload someone has to handle, the performance scores… before they can be promoted. You said this month… this probation… it was my prime time. My chance to prove I could hit those marks."
Karn’s gaze sharpened. "Exactly. The criteria. The score. The performance threshold." He leaned in slightly, the plush carpet compressing under his knees. "So, Pete. Think. You’ve been here a year. Doing the work. Multiple projects, constant switching, high complexity." He gestured towards the glowing terminal screen, still displaying Pete’s past workload logs. "You finish what would take another Red Tag four days in one. Consistently. High quality. Minimal errors, even under pressure. How much score," Karn’s voice dropped, compelling, "do you think you’ve racked up? Right now. Today."
Pete blinked, the data points swirling but refusing to coalesce into a meaningful number. His mind felt sluggish, still raw from the emotional whiplash of the past hour – Silas’s manic dance, Sean’s cutting words, Karn’s furious embrace. The sheer pace Karn demanded felt like an impossible standard, not a metric. "I… I don’t know, Karn," he admitted, frustration creeping back in. "I don’t know the criteria. How they assign points. How it adds up. I just… did the work. Fast, as needed."
Karn’s chair scraped back, his knuckles white on the desk edge. "Exactly. You did the work. Fast. Flawless. Now see what it’s actually worth." He spun back to the terminal, fingers flying. The screen flickered, the familiar project logs dissolving into a dizzying matrix of symbols, Greek letters, and cascading variables Pete had never seen. It looked like pure chaos.
"Performance scoring algorithm," Karn muttered, his voice tight. "The machine that chews up your sweat and spits out a number." He dragged a complex visualizer window over Pete’s dense work history log, snapping it into place with a sharp click. "Let's feed it the bare minimum. Conservatively. Just the logged task completions, zero credit for complexity, speed, or error mitigation." He hit ENTER.
The screen flickered violently. Equations collapsed, resolved, recalculated. A single, stark figure materialized in the center, glowing white against the dark matrix: 1,048. Pete stared. The number seemed to pulse. It felt enormous, impossible. He’d imagined maybe a few hundred, tops. A thousand?
Karn let out a low whistle, half awe, half fury. "Over a thousand," he breathed. He turned, eyes blazing. "Pete. Tier Four Purple Tag promotion kicks in at five hundred. Five hundred! With this? You should be sniffing Tier Three territory by now. Minimum." He slammed a hand flat on the desk. "You should be wearing purple! Sitting at your own desk! Not kneeling naked on my goddamn carpet!"
Pete’s mind reeled. A thousand. Tier Three? The collar felt suddenly heavier, colder. The impossible number mocked him. "Then… why?" His voice cracked. "Why am I still…?" He couldn’t finish, gesturing helplessly at himself, at the floor.
"Exactly." Karn’s voice was ice. His fingers moved again, swift, angry jabs. He flipped the screen back to the standard HR portal, navigated with practiced speed to Pete’s official employee profile. He pointed. "Look. Look."
Pete leaned closer, squinting. There it was. `Current Performance Score: 52`. It sat nestled innocuously beside his Red Tag status and job title. Fifty-two. A pitiful scrap compared to the 1,048 glowing on the other screen. The disparity was monstrous. It stole his breath. He felt physically sick, the plush carpet swaying beneath his knees.
"Why is it so low?" The words burst out of him, raw and ragged, echoing off the minimalist walls. He jerked his head up from the damning screens, staring at Karn, demanding an answer the numbers screamed but didn't explain. His heart hammered against the leather collar. "Karn! Why is it ONLY FIFTY-TWO?"
Karn met his gaze, the controlled fury replaced by something colder, harder. The red light of the security camera glinted off his pupils. He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a bare, dangerous whisper that carried perfectly in the silent room. "Because, Pete," he said, each word deliberate and sharp as shattered glass, "someone isn't just holding you back." He tapped the screen displaying the '52'. "Someone's stealing from you."
Karn’s whisper hung in the air, sharp and cold as the city light slicing through the windows. "Someone's stealing from you." Pete’s bare knees dug into the plush carpet, the damning ‘52’ burning on the screen behind Karn’s shoulder. Fear, cold and slick, coiled in his stomach, twisting tighter than the leather collar. Who? How? The questions choked him, but Karn was already moving.
In one swift motion, Karn surged up from his knees, his polished shoe kicking his heavy desk chair back with a jarring scrape. He lunged for the terminal, jabbing the power button hard. The complex matrix of Pete’s true score vanished instantly, replaced by a sudden, hollow blackness reflecting the room. The hum died. Silence pressed in, thick and heavy, broken only by the faint, constant whir of the security camera high in the corner.
Karn spun back, planting his palms flat on the cool mahogany. He leaned forward, his face starkly lit from below by the desk lamp he hadn't turned off. His expression was unreadable stone, but his eyes locked onto Pete’s with fierce, undeniable warning. "I can’t say anything else about that." His voice was clipped, deliberately carrying towards the camera’s unblinking lens. "Not here. Not now."
Pete felt the silent pressure like a physical weight, forcing him to hold the rigid kneeling posture. He watched Karn, heart hammering against his ribs. Karn straightened, smoothing his suit jacket with a sharp tug, the executive mask slamming down. "What I can do," he stated, each word precise and formal, echoing slightly in the sudden quiet, "is guarantee this probation period will be evaluated fairly. Utterly fair. Square." He held Pete’s gaze, a flicker of something hard beneath the official tone. "For one month, you work with me. Direct report. Your output, your quality, your adherence… it all comes to me. Only me. I see it. I judge it. Directly."
A tiny sliver of oxygen seeped back into Pete’s lungs. Fair evaluation. Karn’s eyes. His only shield. But the thief? The stolen score? The questions screamed inside his skull.
Karn took a single step closer to the desk edge, looming over Pete’s kneeling form. He lowered his voice fractionally, the words pitched just for Pete, yet still audible to the ever-present watcher. "Sean and I… we suspect the culprit. Strongly. Very strongly." He tapped a single finger on the desk, a sharp, deliberate tap. "Evidence." Another tap. "Is being gathered." A final, emphatic tap. "Strong evidence."
Karn straightened fully, his posture radiating controlled impatience. "Silas," he stated abruptly, shifting the focus, his voice returning to its normal, clear projection. "His little IT dance just now? Routing your work submissions directly to my private inbox?" He gestured dismissively towards the hidden alcove where Pete’s workstation sat. "That wasn't just fun vibes. It was operational security. Effective immediately." His gaze locked onto Pete, intense and unyielding. "No one else can access your submissions. No one else can intercept them. No one else," he paused, the edge in his voice unmistakable, "can steal the score you earn this month. Your work. Your results. They come only to me."
The shield wasn’t just the collar anymore. It was Karn’s inbox. Silas’s bizarre, vital intervention. The path forward, narrow and treacherous but finally visible, snapped into focus. Work. Submit only to Karn. Earn a real score. Survive the month. Trust Karn to use the evidence.
A tremor ran through Pete, part residual shock, part dawning resolve. He kept his spine rigid, hands laced behind his head, the only outward sign the slight clenching of his jaw. Karn watched him, the executive mask firmly in place, but his eyes held a distinct, unwavering command. "So," Karn said, the single word cutting through the charged silence. He nodded once towards the alcove. "Get to work."