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I noticed that Oren had reported his own car stolen two days prior and got a new one the following week. Coincidence? Sure, why not? In the field of vehicular homicide, I’m sure they happen all the time.
    I still call him Oren. I do this in part to bug him and also because I just can’t bring myself to use his new name. I can get away with this because I knew him before he changed his name and I keep “forgetting” to use the new one because the old one is so familiar. I don’t want to talk to Gotoguy @ Firmamental. I would rather pretend I’m talking to whatever tiny particle of Orenthal Tibbs that might still exist within that walking corporate echo chamber.
    “Mark!”
    Speak of the devil. I hang up the phone and look up to see Oren looking at me over the blue Lucite half-wall that separates my desk from the three others that make up my quad. There used to be 12 other employees in this department. Now it’s just me. Expense reduction was a key pillar of last year’s Presidential Mission. Since it would be uncompetitive to raise premiums to make up for losses due to the growing number of catastrophic storm claims, we were told we would need to find those savings from within. What started out as pruning has turned into something closer to corporate Seppuku.
    “Hey Oren. What’s up?”
    Something is up. Oren did not address me using one of his daily affirmative nicknames (“Maximizing Mark,” “Problem-Solving Simms”) and he didn’t show that microscopic flicker of annoyance he always shows when I use his old name. In fact, he appears to have no blood flow to his face. The man looks like he just saw his own dead body and realized that he is now just an entity floating in the air above it.
    Oren opens his mouth, but all that comes out is a grunt. He coughs several times and leans forward on the partition, holding on to it with white knuckled hands.
    “I just got a call. Hudson wants to see you.”
    George Hudson is the president and chief executive officer of the Hudson International Group, the parent company of Firmamental Insurance. He is rumoured to be 122 years old and kept alive by a wide array of biomechanical implants and experimental treatments. He is so reclusive that in my eight years here, I have never even come into contact with another employee who has even seen a
picture
of him.
    My first instinct is to assume that the person who brings such news is joking, but Oren is not the joking type. Oren’s idea of funny is limited largely to the outtake reels of corporate training videos in which he has volunteered his services as a background artist. Based on that and the look on his face, I know that this is the real deal, but I still don’t believe it. Why in the hell would the head of the largest insurance company in the country want to see me? It’s not to fire me – Oren could (and would happily) do that all on his own. You don’t get a personal audience with the CEO on your eight-year employment anniversary, which for me doesn’t come up until the end of next month, anyway. Unless I unwittingly pulled some sort of golden ticket out of one of the vending machines or a recently commissioned DNA test has revealed Hudson to be my father, I have no idea why he wants to see me.
    But I am about to find out.

-2-
    A ccording to the Frobisher Survey of Executive Compensation, the results of which I read at my desk while killing time between phone calls from Mr. Sternhauser last week, George Hudson has made more money by the time his personal butler has brushed his teeth for him on the morning of January 1 than I will make in my entire life.
    Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to make so much money that it makes the news. You never see headlines like “Analyst Signs 40-year $2 Million Contract With Firmamental,” and with good reason. Thousands of people do not pay money just to sit and watch me do what I do. In fact, to force anyone to watch would probably be considered a form of torture. If