Layla
My fingers are frozen over the keyboard. The memory of Adrian Veleno’s eyes is burned into the back of my eyelids. A king surveying his domain. And me, a speck of dust on his marble floor.
The hum of the office returns to its normal frequency. The spell is broken. But the chill remains.
I force my gaze down to the mountain of binders on my desk. Chad’s expenses. I open the first one. A receipt for a two hundred dollar steak dinner, logged as a ‘client meeting’. Another for a five hundred dollar bottle of scotch, labeled ‘office supplies’.
The hypocrisy is a bitter pill. I need money for my sister’s medicine, and he’s expensing liquor that costs more than my rent. I feel the fury coiling in my stomach again, hot and tight. But I shove it down. I have to.
I begin the work. Click, scan. Click, scan. The rhythm is mind numbing, a tedious drumbeat marking the slow death of my brain cells. Each receipt is a tiny monument to a life I can’t imagine. Golf outings. Valet parking. First class flights. I verify the numbers, my mind drifting to the balance of my own bank account. Thirty seven dollars.
Hours bleed into one another. The sky outside the panoramic windows shifts from bright blue to a soft, hazy orange. My back aches. My eyes burn from the screen’s glare.
“Are you kidding me? Are you actually kidding me?”
Chad’s voice slices through the quiet focus of the department. He isn’t talking to anyone in particular, just yelling at his monitor. I look up from my pile of paper. He’s standing now, running a hand through his perfect hair, messing it up for the first time all day.
An older analyst from a nearby desk, a kind looking woman named Sarah, peers over her monitor. “Everything alright, Chad?”
“No, Sarah, everything is not alright,” he snaps, his voice dripping with condescension. “This reconciliation project is completely bugged. The source data is a joke. The algorithm is garbage. It keeps spitting out a seven figure deviation and I can’t find the source.”
Seven figures. My fingers stop their mindless clicking. A puzzle. A real one. A knot of interest tightens in my chest.
“A seven figure deviation?” Sarah asks, her eyebrows raised. “Which portfolio is it?”
“The OmniCorp merger acquisition data. It’s a complete disaster. It’s like trying to find one specific grain of sand on a beach made of numbers. It’s unsolvable.” He slams his mouse down on his desk. The sound makes a few people flinch.
He spends the next hour pacing behind his desk, muttering to himself and periodically sighing with dramatic frustration. He makes a series of loud, important sounding phone calls where he blames the data integrity team, the software developers, and a vague entity he calls ‘management’.
I finish the last binder just as my stomach growls. Lunch. I pull out the sad little sandwich I made this morning, a smear of peanut butter between two slices of cheap bread. I eat at my desk, watching Chad unravel.
He looks like a child on the verge of a tantrum, pouting at the screen that has bested him. He is all bluster and privilege, a man who has failed upward his entire life and has no idea how to actually solve a problem. And he’s in charge of a multi billion dollar merger’s data. The thought is terrifying.
And intriguing.
My mind is already working, turning the problem over. A seven figure deviation isn’t a typo. It’s systemic. It’s a flaw in the logic, a crack in the foundation. It’s a beautiful, elegant mistake buried somewhere in terabytes of data. My fingers twitch with the desire to find it.
“That’s it. I’m done.” Chad announces to the room at large. He grabs his suit jacket from the back of his chair. “My brain is fried. I’m going to get a drink. Or five. I’ll deal with this disaster in the morning.”
He glares at his desk. “Don’t anybody touch my workstation. I’ve got it bookmarked.”
He storms off toward the elevators without another word.
The tension in the air dissipates. People start to pack up their bags, the low murmur of end of day conversations filling the space.
“You finished that whole stack?”
I look up. It’s Sarah. She’s smiling at me. “Chad’s been putting that off for weeks. I’m impressed.”
“Thank you,” I say, my voice quiet. “It was…thorough.”
“Don’t let him get to you,” she says, lowering her voice. “His bark is much worse than his bite. And his bite is pretty clueless.” She winks, then heads for the door. “Have a good night.”
“You too.”
Soon, the floor is nearly empty. Only a few dedicated analysts remain, their faces illuminated by the glow of their screens. The city lights have begun to glitter outside, a sprawling galaxy of possibilities.
My eyes are drawn to Chad’s desk. To his triple monitors, still displaying rows and rows of mismatched numbers. The unsolvable problem.
My heart starts to beat faster.
This is a bad idea. A terrible, stupid, fireable idea. I should go home. I should call my mom, lie to her again, and try to figure out how to stretch thirty seven dollars until my first paycheck.
But the puzzle calls to me. It’s a song only I can hear. And the thought of Chad taking credit for someone else’s solution tomorrow, a solution he’ll have to beg some other department for, makes my teeth ache.
I stand up. My legs feel unsteady.
I walk across the plush carpet, the silence of the large room amplifying the sound of my own breathing. I slide into Chad’s expensive ergonomic chair. It’s still warm.
I move his mouse. The screen saver disappears, revealing the reconciliation software. It’s a mess. He has dozens of windows open, spreadsheets overlapping with raw data logs. It’s the digital equivalent of a panic attack.
I close everything, leaving just the core program. My fingers find the keyboard. I type in a command, pulling up the source code for the reconciliation algorithm.
Lines of code scroll past. It’s dense, but not particularly sophisticated. I can see the logic, the pathways the data is supposed to follow. My eyes scan, searching for the flaw. The misplaced variable. The incorrect operator. The recursive loop that feeds on itself.
And then I see it.
It’s so simple. So obvious. A rookie mistake. He’s using a floating point variable for a currency calculation in a critical part of the aggregation script. It’s introducing rounding errors. Tiny, infinitesimal errors that are invisible on a small scale. But when applied to millions of transactions, they cascade. They multiply. They grow into a seven figure monster.
A small, triumphant smile touches my lips. He would never have found this. He was looking for a single bad transaction, a needle in a haystack. But the problem wasn’t the needle. It was the hay.
My fingers fly across the keyboard. I don’t think. I just do. I rewrite the flawed section of the script. It takes less than five minutes. I define a new decimal variable, ensuring precision. I adjust the loop to reference the correct data type. It’s clean. It’s perfect.
I save the new script under a temporary file name. I don’t want to overwrite his work directly. That would be too easy to trace.
I run the reconciliation again with the corrected algorithm. The progress bar fills. My heart hammers against my ribs. This is either the moment I save the day or the moment I get escorted out by security.
The process completes.
I pull up the final report. I scroll to the bottom line.
Deviation: $0.00.
Balance confirmed.
A wave of pure, unadulterated satisfaction washes over me. It’s better than food. Better than sleep. It’s the beautiful, flawless click of a puzzle piece sliding into its rightful place.
I stare at the perfect zero on the screen. I did it. In under an hour, I solved the unsolvable problem.
But I can’t take the credit. Chad would never believe it. He’d accuse me of hacking, of sabotage. He’d find a way to make it my fault. No, this has to be his victory.
I open a simple text editor. I copy and paste the section of code I rewrote. I add a few comments, pointing to the original flaw and explaining the fix in the simplest possible terms. Terms even a fool like Chad could understand.
I print the code snippet and the final, balanced report. The printer on the other side of the room whirs to life, spitting out the two pages.
I walk over, retrieve the warm sheets of paper, and return to his desk. I log out of his workstation, leaving no trace of the programs I opened. I place the two pages squarely in the center of his keyboard.
No note. No name. Just the solution. Let him wonder where it came from. Let him believe it was a gift from the data gods.
I grab my purse from my own sad little desk and walk toward the elevators. The doors slide open with a soft chime. As I step inside, I catch my reflection in the polished steel. My eyes are bright, my cheeks are flushed. I look alive.
For the first time all day, I don’t feel like an imposter. I don’t feel like the charity case. I feel powerful.
The doors slide shut, and the elevator begins its silent descent. I just committed a major felony, or saved the company, or maybe both. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. But as I step out into the cool night air, one thing is certain. I belong here. And they just don’t know it yet.
