So here’s the deal.

You know what you can get away with doing, being the world’s third richest man? Being CEO of the world’s largest fucking technology company?

Fucking. Anything.

Power. Money. It comes with the territory. Everyone has a price; everything can be bought.

Every day, a thousand mortal souls come to pray within my temple. Come to lay their sacrifices—their minds, their toil, their money—at my feet. Every day, millions more carry my idols in their pockets, have them hold pride of place within their homes. Billions of hours, spent in supplication at my altars.

When they share secrets—wicked prayers, tapped through keyboards or whispered into mikes—they share them all with me. Wishes, hope, fantasies. Revenge. All dark words uttered in my name.

This is power. This is the way that gods are made.

This is me. Now.

But it wasn’t always.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

----------------------------------------

Tuesday morning, I get in early and make a call. It has some very, very specific instructions. The sort only a CEO can make without any awkward questions.

After the call, I get in the elevator.

Upstairs, in the foyer of the executive suites, it’d been Travis Hale who stepped through shiny chrome doors. On the seventh floor, it’s Lain Laufeyjarson who steps out.

See where this is going?

This isn’t the first time I’ve played King Incognito among my own unwashed masses, but I admit it’s been a good decade between cons. And the previous ones were mostly corporate-development-type stuff, making sure managers weren’t assholes and the staff were happy with the hamburgers, that sort of thing. This time, it’s personal.

Because sure, the desks are nice and ergonomic and the windows let in plenty of light (when people haven’t pulled the blinds down), but I’m only halfheartedly making an index of that stuff. Mostly, what I’m here for is—

“Lain!”

—that.

I turn, ensuring my grin is bright and open and my slouch is appropriately apologetic for my height. I’m tall compared to Sigmund. I don’t want to loom.

And here he is, rounding one of the partitions, Sigmund Gregor Sussman de Deus himself. Father, David Sussman, born in Sydney, son of post–World War II Jewish migrants. Mother, Lynne Sussman, née Maria Madalena Silva de Deus. Born in Brazil, immigrated in the ’70s. Died when Sussman was a toddler. Father never remarried, because the Wyrd is a bitter spiral.

Sigmund was born right here and never left. Unremarkable at school, unremarkable at university. Computer Science/Accounting, the former for himself, the latter for his father. Grades were better in the latter, because life is never fair.

Scraped into LB on the grad program last intake. Competent, unambitious, liked well enough by his peers. Might make it into middle management in a decade or two if he’s lucky.

Two main associates: Evdokia “Emily” Ivanovich and Wayne Kalinda Murphy. Both women, the latter cursed with the legacy of 1980s unisex parenting. Both very fond of black and spikes, judging from their Tumblrs. Sigmund and Ivanovich went to school together, Murphy met them at university. Ivanovich works in the Basement, doing INFOSEC. Murphy pulls part time at a comic shop while studying at the Computer Arts Academy, an LB talent funnel.

All the background information money can buy, hidden in a file in my drawer upstairs. Shit. At least I hope it’s in the drawer. If I left it on the desk, I’m kinda screwed.

“Dude. Harrison’s looking for us.”

“Oh?”

I follow Sigmund into his boss’s office. James Harrison is a hulking meat slab of a man, ex-infantry, with a tendency to shout at office politics rather than work around them. He’ll never be anything but what he is, but his staff like him and, sometimes, that’s enough.

“Sussman. Lain.” Harrison gestures at us. “Come in.”

He gives the briefing, mostly for Sigmund’s benefit. I know the story because I invented it, filtered down through managers and subordinates until it reached the Basement.

“You’re needed upstairs, right now.”

“Upstairs?” Sigmund shifts from foot to foot, fingers twitching and flexing. I know he’s thinking of his run-in with me—with Hale—back at the Christmas party.

“Right up,” Harrison says, confirming Sigmund’s fears. “To the Big Boy rooms. Our Fearless Leader needs someone to fix his printer.” He holds out a small white card, and Sigmund takes it.

“Don’t we have other guys for this?” I say. I mean VIP Support, neat assholes in suits, trained more in babysitting execs than dealing with IT. Everyone fucking hates them, myself included.

“VIP sent someone up already,” Harrison says. “Hale threw him out. Allegedly his words were ‘I need a geek, not an MBA.’ ” This is technically a lie, but it is a dutiful recitation of the events people have been told to tell. And, to be fair, it’s only a lie for this particular instance. When I say I hate dealing with VIP, the feeling is definitely mutual.

“Jesus.” Sigmund, also not a fan of the office babysitters, is trying not to laugh.

It gets a smirk out of Harrison, too. “VIP is fuming. I said we’d handle it. And guess who happens to look the part?”

Somewhere, beneath dark skin, Sigmund blushes. He knows what he looks like, all ratty jeans and Game of Thrones/Pulp Fiction mashup T-shirt. Plus the nerd glasses and explosive pile of wiry hair. If I’m the Hollywood version of a TV-acceptable geek, Sigmund’s very much the real deal.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

The option for us to decline Harrison’s task is illusory at best, so, a minute or two later, Sigmund and I are riding up in the elevator. There are only two that go to the exec floor, and only one that goes all the way to the penthouse above that.

It’s a long trip up. Sigmund is jittery, watching the numbers on the screen slowly increment by one. When we reach twelve he says, “This is my dad’s floor. I’ve never actually been above it.”

Fuck. He’s just so adorable. “You know you can just, like, press the buttons randomly, right? Go wherever you want? There’s a balcony on thirty-two that has a really good view of the lake.” It occurs to me, as soon as I say this, that it’s information new staff-member Lain really shouldn’t know.

Fortunately for said new staff member, Sigmund is too busy being nervous to notice the discrepancy. His anxiety oozes out of him, thick and yellow in the enclosed space of the lift. Worried he’ll run into Hale again after the mortification that was the party.

That one wasn’t his fault. Meeting Sigmund was an accident, but once I saw him . . . Christ. All I could feel was cold winter sun on my skin, and all I could smell was the blood and ash and death of war. Old memories from a forgotten life, a debt paid in blood, lost and buried.

Not my blood, though. So maybe paid is an exaggeration. Maybe the word I’m looking for is transferred.

I had to know. So I got close, made sure he wouldn’t recognize me in the dark, and listened to him pour his heart out over a dream that’s going nowhere.

Sigmund is never going to be the designer behind a breakout indie video game. His Wyrd has something much, much better in store for him.

With a chime and a cheerful recitation of the floor, the doors open.

“Wow.” Sigmund stops so abruptly outside the elevator that I almost run right into him. “This is . . . posh,” he says.

“I guess?” It’s designed to be impressive, all the plushest carpet and richest wood money can buy.

There are exactly two offices on this level. A set of eyes watches us from the second.

“The card, please.”

Sigmund startles at the voice, and at the fact that he didn’t hear the owner as she approached. Nicole Anne Arin, LB’s senior vice president, as cold and sharp and thin as the circuit board I found her in, all those years ago.

She’s also giving me the dirtiest look over Sigmund’s shoulder. I give her a wink, and the corresponding drop in the room’s temperature is literal as well as figurative, given Nic’s connection to the HVAC. Not to mention everything else in the building.

“I’m, uh. I’m Sigmund,” Sigmund starts. “This is Lain. We’re from—”

“I know who you are.” This is directed at me, over Sigmund’s head. So maybe I’ve been obsessing over the guy a bit since Christmas, and maybe Nic is the only other one up here to hear. Maybe. Nic continues: “Mr. Hale’s office is that way. His tablet won’t print to the printer, and this is what you’re here to fix. You will not touch anything in Mr. Hale’s office, other than the desktop, printer, and his tablet. A document is open for you to test. You will not close it or attempt to open any other application.”

Sigmund is going grayer by the minute, so I make Cut it out, Jesus motions to Nic behind his back. She does stop talking, but only with a withering glare that leaves me under no illusions re getting it in the neck from her later. She hates the idea of me chasing ghosts. And Sigmund? He’s about as ghostly as someone can get while still breathing.

Quite literally, at the moment. So I come to the rescue with a “Don’t worry, Ms. Arin. We’re professionals. We won’t disrupt Mr. Hale’s day any more than it’s already been.”

I think I actually feel the cables in the floor shift beneath the carpet. I’m astounded they don’t rip through the wool and strangle me where I stand.

Nic is great at a lot of things, like PR and predicting the stock market. She’s not so great at dealing with people in the one-on-one. Sooner or later, she’ll always fail the Turing test.

Sigmund is still fixed in Nic’s glare like dead pixels on a monitor, so I clap him on the shoulders and say, “C’mon!” Then walk across the floor toward my office.

The doors are currently closed, two huge things made from a Huon pine older than I am. The LB logo is inlaid in the front in brass: three big upright pillars, a hole in each and an indentation in the top. As I go to push them open, Sigmund says:

“You know, I walk past the statue every day, and I never did manage to figure out the logo.”

He’s talking about the enormous monstrosity downstairs, just outside the foyer. The original set of three stones I had shipped here from Iceland, and on which the LB brand is based.

I could tell Sigmund what it means, but I don’t. It isn’t a nice thing, and I suspect he’ll remember that trauma soon enough.

We walk into the office.

“Wooow. It’s good to be the CEO.” Sigmund laughs nervously, shooting a glance over his shoulder to see if Nic’s still listening (she is).

I give a huff of laughter but, well, my office is my office. What am I supposed to say about it? Of course it’s impressive. The point of it is to impress people. Why else would it have an enormous picture window looking out over the city and, if that weren’t enough, a fucking fireplace?

My desk is at the far end of the room, in front of the window. I walk over to it, getting there first mostly to ensure that I did, in fact, put Sigmund’s file away the night before. (The answer turns out to be yes.)

“Holy shit.”

Behind me, Sigmund has discovered Boots.

“There’s a snake!”

A large area in the wall to the right of the desk is taken up by a herpetarium. It’s full of plants and branches and UV lamps, and is inhabited by exactly one enormous, aging snake, the aforementioned Boots.

“I’m sure she won’t bite you,” I say. This is true. I found Boots curled up miserably in the same place from where I hauled the LB “statue.” The name is indicative of my initial plans for her, but, well, things change. And now she guards my office from anyone stupid enough to be here without permission. Three deaths-by-snakebite later, and LB hasn’t had a problem with corporate espionage since.

I hear a crash from the far side of the room. Sigmund, colliding first with the desk and then with the floor.

“Holy shit, it can get out!”

Boots’s tank has no glass. Yeah. I’ve had this reaction before.

“Uh, are you okay?”

Sigmund is on the floor, surrounded by a stapler, an upturned cup of pens, and a scattered pile of P&L reports.

“What is going on in here?”

Sigmund leaps upright at Nic’s voice, looking from her to the tank to me to the floor. Then he drops, grabbing papers and desperately sorting them into a pile to repopulate the desk.

“Um! Oh, um. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I—”

I wander over to help clean up, replacing the stapler and saying, “You should maybe warn people about the snake.”

“Lain!” Sigmund hisses. Everything about him screams, You’re going to get us fired, you asshole!, especially his thoughts.

Nic just sighs. “Boots has been Mr. Hale’s . . . companion for many years. She will not harm you.”

I take the papers from Sigmund, reordering them and letting him worry about the pens. While he’s busy, I give Nic a grin and a gormless shrug, earning another scowl as she storms out of the room, pulling the door closed behind her.

I don’t take it personally. Nic’s job is to look after the company, to stop me wrecking it with shitty fucking decisions. Hence her not approving of my current actions.

When she’s gone, Sigmund says, “Oh god, we’re both so dead.”

“It’ll be fine, man.” I take the cup of pens Sigmund is waving around and put them back on the desk. “See? Good as new!”

“So. Dead,” he repeats. “Fired. Axed. Gone.”

“I wouldn’t worry.”

“Utterly unemployable.” Sigmund scrambles upright. “That happens, you know. People get blacklisted for things like this.”

I laugh. “Not for things like this,” I say. Not that I’ve never ruined someone’s life over an office fuckup before, but it wasn’t exactly spilled pens and ophidiophobia. I thump Sigmund playfully on the arm and add, “I mean, maybe if we don’t manage to fix Hale’s printer . . .”

He groans, hiding his face behind his hands, and I laugh.

The fix does actually take him longer than I expected, and he resorts to Google more than once. But he gets there in the end.

And, in the meantime, I stand back, eyes closed, and watch him work.