Chapter 3

Jake swaggered over and slapped a printout onto my desk. The way he carried himself, one would think he was already the tech lead.

"Electricity's calculated on peak power draw, plus depreciation," he said. "Mr. Miller said he'll cut you some slack. It's your first offense, and you've been here a while. The most we can do is not press charges for corporate espionage."

I glanced at the sheet, and I had to say, they had itemized everything down to the last detail. Even GPU wear was prorated by the hour.

"I'll pay."

I pulled out my phone and transferred the money right in front of him.

Jake raised an eyebrow, a little disappointed. He had probably been hoping I would make a scene so he could flex again.

"Straightforward. I like that," he said, folding up the paper. His eyes drifted to the monitor on my desk.

"By the way, this monitor came with the setup, right? Since the workstation is under company property, you shouldn't be holding onto this either. I'll move it to the server room for debugging."

That was an EIZO pro monitor, worth over 30 thousand—also mine, by the way.

"Go ahead," I said flatly.

Jake waved his hand, and two admin staff immediately stepped in.

They were rough about it. Yanking cables straight without care, letting the monitor hit the edge of the desk.

I stayed silent. I simply watched my once-pristine workstation get stripped bare in minutes, leaving nothing but tangled cables and a layer of dust.

Three years of work were cleared in a single sweep.

"Ms. Chapman, just take the week off and rest at home," Jake said before leaving.

He even patted my shoulder like he was doing me a favor. "At next week's launch, you'll see how real professionals manage servers. That old-school, hacky way of yours should've been phased out long ago."

Real professionals. Sure.

I watched him walk off with the monitor. Then, I took out my phone and opened a gray-colored application. It was the server room environment monitoring system.

The pop-up read, "Connection lost". That meant Jake had already reset the gateway and locked me out of admin access. That was swift.

I opened my banking app again and scrolled through the recurring charges.

3,800 a month for the enterprise leased line, 6,000 every quarter for precision air-conditioning maintenance in the server room, and 20 thousand a year for UPS (uninterruptible power supply) battery leasing, the most critical one.

All of them were tied to my personal account.

Martin thought the machine just needed to be plugged in to run. He had no idea that to keep that beast stable in a standard office power grid, I had built an entire support stack behind it.

Then, I dialed my broadband account manager.

"Mr. Samson, this is Susan Chapman… Yes, I need to suspend the line… No, just cancel it outright… Early termination fee? No problem. Deduct it from the prepaid balance."

After hanging up, I texted the UPS leasing provider.

"Hello. You may pick up the equipment next Monday. I'm discontinuing the lease."

"Understood, Ms. Chapman. The backup power units will be retrieved next Monday."

Once I was done, I stood up and packed the few personal items I had left.

The coworkers around me all kept their heads down. Keyboards clacked louder than usual, like everyone was suddenly too busy to even look at me.

That feeling of being isolated was oddly nice. At least it wiped out the last bit of hesitation I had left.

As I walked out of the company building, I glanced up at the massive LED screen above the entrance. It was already running a countdown for the upcoming cloud launch event.

Only three days left. By then, this place would become the butt of the joke all across the city, while I would be sitting in the audience, watching it happen.

…

The next few days felt like an early retirement.

I stayed at home, drank coffee, watered my plants, and casually watched the show unfolding on my social feed.