CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 5: NAME YOUR PRICE
Fear made Blake uglier.
Arrogance had given him polish. Fear stripped it away.
He stepped toward me, lowering his voice as if the investors could not hear every word in that glass room.
“Ethan,” he said, “this is not the time for personal resentment.”
I almost laughed.
Personal resentment.
That was what he called eight years of work erased in a press release.
That was what he called engineers crying in parking lots while security boxed up their desks.
That was what he called my health insurance ending the same week my daughter needed a specialist.
I looked past him at the frozen screen.
“What environment is connected to this demo?” I asked.
Mara answered before Blake could stop her.
“A mirrored production environment.”
The gray-suited investor’s eyes sharpened.
“Mirrored how?”
Mara’s voice was barely above a whisper.
“Client data structure. Live workflow logic. No live customer records.”
“But live logic?” I asked.
She nodded.
I closed my eyes for one second.
That was worse than a failed demo.
If the AI had locked the mirrored workflow while trying to resolve Anchor conflicts, the same patch could already be queued for real deployment.
“Did you disable auto-promotion?” I asked.
Mara said nothing.
That was the answer.
Blake turned on her. “We are not discussing architecture in front of investors.”
“We should have discussed it before,” she said.
The words cut through the room.
Blake stared at her like betrayal was a privilege only he was allowed to use.
The investor stood.
“How much exposure are we talking about?”
Mara looked at me.
I hated that I still knew.
“Depends on whether the AI pushed the patch beyond staging,” I said. “If it did, some client systems may start freezing when conflict resolution triggers.”
One of the investors muttered something under his breath.
Blake stepped closer to me.
“Fix it.”
“I told you. You deleted my access.”
“I’ll restore it.”
“You terminated my credentials, wiped my admin keys, and locked my security profile under legal hold.”
“Then use Mara’s.”
“That would be unauthorized access.”
Blake’s mouth tightened.
He was trapped between needing me to break the rules and needing the room to think he had followed them.
The demo screen flashed again.
This time the red glow filled the whole room.
DEPLOYMENT QUEUE CONFLICT.
CLIENT FAILSAFE DELAYED.
MANUAL REVIEW REQUIRED.
Mara covered her mouth.
The gray-suited investor looked at Blake like he was watching a man set fire to money.
Blake’s voice dropped.
“Name your price.”
There it was.
Not an apology.
Not accountability.
A transaction.
The same man who had told the world I was obsolete now wanted to buy ten minutes of my memory.
I picked up my old laptop bag.
Blake’s eyes widened.
“Where are you going?”
I looked at him.
“You fired the only person who knew why it worked.”
The sentence did not come out loud.
It came out calm.
That made it worse.
The room absorbed it piece by piece.
Mara looked down.
The investors stared at Blake.
Behind him, the billion-dollar AI remained frozen, glowing red against the glass like a wound he could not hide.
Blake tried one final time.
“Ethan, wait.”
I paused near the door.
Not because he deserved it.
Because the clients did.
“Call the former infrastructure team,” I said. “Paul Reeves, Dana Mitchell, Luis Carter, Priya Shah. All of them. Put their access back under emergency contractor agreements. Pay them triple. Give Mara authority to stop deployment. Put everything in writing.”
Blake’s face hardened.
“I’m not letting fired employees hold this company hostage.”
The gray-suited investor closed his folder.
May you like
“No, Blake,” he said. “You already did that yourself.”
And just like that, the room no longer belonged to the CEO.
