Episode 4

Chapter 4: The Analyst's Game

By the end of his first full week, Ethan understood the thirty-second floor the way a new inmate understands a prison yard — who ran what, who answered to whom, and where the invisible lines were drawn.

Derek ran a small fiefdom. Three junior analysts orbited him — Chen from accounting, Priya from data, and a guy named Walsh who laughed at everything Derek said like his paycheck depended on it. Together they controlled the flow of information between the marketing bullpen and Serena's strategy team. If you wanted your work seen, it went through Derek. If Derek didn't like you, your work disappeared.

Ethan didn't need Derek to like him. He needed Derek to forget about him.

For five days, he played the part. Filed the folders Derek dropped on his desk. Fetched coffee when asked — black, two sugars, in the mug with the Stanford logo that Derek left on the counter like a flag planted in conquered territory. Sat in the back of meetings and said nothing. He watched everything — how the V1 launch team operated, which departments talked to each other, where the bottlenecks lived. He memorized the cadence of Serena's weekly reviews, the way the strategy team deferred to her silences more than her words, the fact that the supply chain liaison on twenty-nine hadn't spoken to anyone on thirty-two in days and no one seemed to notice. He read every internal document he could access and some he technically couldn't, pulling market reports from shared drives that no one had bothered to password-protect.

The thirty-second floor ran on ego and inertia. People protected their lanes. Nobody looked at the whole board. Ethan looked at the whole board. He'd been doing it his entire life — in group homes where knowing the social map meant the difference between a quiet week and a black eye, in college where understanding the department politics got him into seminars that were technically full. Pattern recognition wasn't a skill for Ethan. It was survival software, installed early, never uninstalled.

On Thursday, he was assigned to prepare a competitive landscape analysis for the Vanguard V1 launch. This was real work — the kind that mattered. He spent the next three days on it, staying at his desk until eleven most nights, building a sixty-page deck that mapped pricing strategies, feature comparisons, and market positioning across nine competing smartphones. He included a demand elasticity model he'd built for his honors thesis, adapted to the mobile market.

It was, by any honest measure, MBA-level work from an entry-level intern.

He didn't mind the hours. The vending machine became dinner most nights. He ate a bag of pretzels at his desk on Saturday and thought about Richard Cross sitting somewhere in a penthouse he'd never seen, eating something that cost more than Ethan's weekly grocery budget, maybe wondering what his son was doing. Or maybe not wondering at all. Ethan pushed the thought away. It wasn't useful.

On Monday morning, Ethan walked into the weekly strategy meeting and found his slides on the projector. Derek's name was in the title bar.

Every slide. Every chart. Every footnote. Derek had pulled the file from the shared drive overnight, swapped the author metadata, and was now presenting it to Serena's team as his own work. He stood at the front of the room with a laser pointer, talking through the demand model like he'd invented it.

Ethan sat in the back row and said nothing.

He watched Derek gesticulate at slide fourteen — the pricing elasticity curve, the one Ethan had calibrated using three years of Samsung and Huawei launch data that he'd scraped from public filings during a single sleepless Friday night. Derek was explaining it wrong. He'd confused marginal cost with marginal revenue in his narration, and nobody in the room caught it because the slide itself was correct and nobody reads presenter notes. Ethan felt something tighten in his chest — not anger, exactly. More like the feeling you get when someone plays your song off-key and the audience still claps.

He let it pass. The deck was a tool. Derek stealing it was also a tool — just one that Ethan hadn't planned to sharpen this early.

Claire was three seats away. She'd been watching Ethan's face when Derek's first slide appeared. Now she leaned toward him, barely a whisper: "That was yours, wasn't it?"

"It's fine."

"It's not—"

"Claire. It's fine."

The meeting ended. Derek got handshakes. Serena nodded — a rare sign of approval. The room cleared.

Ethan went back to his cubicle. He opened the company's cloud backup portal, navigated to the version history of the file, and exported a timestamped changelog showing every revision. His name was on every entry from the initial creation to the final draft. Derek's name appeared once — at 2:47 AM on Sunday, when he'd opened the file and changed the author field.

Ethan saved the changelog to an encrypted folder on his personal drive. Then he opened a new document and titled it "DEREK — INCIDENT LOG." He added the date, the file names, and a screenshot of the metadata.

He'd been keeping notes on Derek since day two. The filing demands. The parking spot. The "interns don't talk" rule. Small things, individually. Together, they were a pattern.

He closed the laptop and went to lunch.

On the roof terrace, Claire was already waiting. She handed him a sandwich without a word and sat down. The city sprawled below them — taxis, tourists, the distant glint of the Hudson. She could tell something had happened. She always could. But she didn't ask, because Claire understood that some silences were load-bearing. You didn't poke at them.

Ethan chewed and thought about the folder on his drive — the one growing thicker by the day, the one that would eventually become a weapon or a shield, depending on how things played out. He thought about his father, somewhere in this building, possibly aware of what was happening on the thirty-second floor and possibly not. He thought about the fact that he could end Derek's career with a single email to HR, attached with the changelog and the metadata, and that the reason he didn't was not mercy. It was timing.

The best moves in chess aren't the ones that win pieces. They're the ones that restrict your opponent's options until the only moves left are bad ones. Ethan had learned that from a library book in the group home when he was twelve. He'd been playing that way ever since.

Derek was at happy hour that evening, buying rounds for Walsh and the others. He waved Ethan over. "Hey, intern! Come celebrate. The strategy team loved the deck."

"I'm good. Thanks."

Derek shrugged. "Your loss." He turned back to his group, already forgetting Ethan existed, which was exactly where Ethan wanted to live — in the blind spot between contempt and indifference.

Walsh said something that made the table laugh. Priya was on her second glass of wine, scrolling her phone with one hand, performing relaxation. Chen had his jacket off and was telling a story about a client dinner that nobody at the table had actually attended. It was a small court, and Derek was its small king.

Ethan watched him from across the bullpen. Derek was laughing, loose, riding the high of stolen credit. He had no idea that every drink he bought was being logged, timestamped, and filed in a folder he would never see until it was too late.

*Patience*, Ethan thought. *Patience is a resource too.*

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