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Earth’s atmosphere, the acceleration continued. His link picked up the longest list of services he’d ever seen. It offered access pointers for drinks, food, massage, and climate control … this exquisite throne could even heat, cool, or change shape at his mental command. He thought about the chair angle pointer just so , causing a control panel to snap up in his mind, letting him adjust the settings. His lounge reclined farther without a sound.
    But there was more to it than that. Chris realized the real reason it felt so good was because he had earned this privilege.
    Six years of service to Vineaux Genomix. Dozens of projects seen to completion. Endless weekends filled with overtime. Hours of politicking with the right people. Sucking up, actually. Chris knew he had mastered it. He unerringly identified the crucial people and inserted a positive concept of himself in their minds. He preened himself toward the image of a successful company man, dressing in well-tailored shirts and slacks. VG was a technology company with younger people at the helm than ever before, so he reinforced a forward-thinking image by avoiding the ties and jackets worn by the old guard.
    Chris’s blond hair was short, but not too short, taking advantage of his smooth face that everyone found so innocent looking. He kept trim through discipline and a regular racquetball schedule. The muscle wave machines or a steady stream of toning pills would keep his shape, but Chris opted for the schmooze time he could squeeze out of a racquetball game with a higher-up.
    The hardest part had been watching his VR entertainment quotas with ironclad control. Chris knew the execs considered non-training VR time when selecting their best people. Too much VR time meant less productivity. Even the rank and file had to log every minute, and they were paid in fantasy time as much as euros or dollars or Earth standard credits.
    His fingers ran across the tiny European Union badge on the edge of the armrest. He knew being a company man put him in the elite. On Earth or off, if you didn’t work for a world corporation or a government, you made a subsistence living under the poverty line. VG enjoyed more success than most corporations, so all the better. Heading toward executive level put him another step toward the pinnacle of power.
    He dug out the manual he’d been handed in the office before leaving. “Take this seriously,” his boss, Vic, had said. Chris still found it odd that a morale-building offsite exercise came with a manual at all, much less a hardcopy. Why hadn’t they sent the file to his link instead? But he’d read it, love it, and ask for more as long as the company kept paying him his 16,000 ESC per year.
    He looked at the manual again. The white cover bore no picture or graphic lending weight to the sparse wording it held. It said, “Synchronicity Behavioral Codes. Confidential.” Then it went on to make threats in small print about what would happen to anyone who read it without authorization. He started scanning the manual. It reminded him of some of his parent’s real books he’d read as a kid. Chris learned like an AI burst downloading an encyclopedia. He looked over the structure of what he had to absorb for the exercise.
    Synchronicity is a place of acceptance of new ways of thinking. It is a place to throw away what you know and rebuild it from scratch.
    He winced. “Another take on how to think out of the box,” he said under his breath. He didn’t want to spend his time on the giant, deep space retreat taking some cheesy class filled with corporate propaganda. Synchronicity was a luxurious hotel, a science station, and the personal toy of the company president, Alec Vineaux. Although its exact location remained secret, the manual explained that it trailed the orbit of Earth by more than eighty million miles. Even the sleek, wicked-fast spaceplane, which hadn’t stopped accelerating at one gravity since they left, would take three