The Clock That Ticked Backward
The conference room at Blunt & Associates smelled like burnt coffee and quiet despair, which, in my experience, was the signature scent of any meeting that started with the phrase "quick sync." There is no such thing as a quick sync. I have never once left a quick sync in under fifty minutes, and I have never once left one feeling synced to anything except my own mounting sense of doom.
I slid into my usual seat — third from the end, close enough to the door to look attentive, far enough to text under the table without decapitating my career — and watched Mr. Blunt clip a wireless microphone to his lapel like a man preparing to address a stadium rather than eleven exhausted marketing associates and a tray of stale bagels.
"Good morning, team," he said, in the tone of a man who had never once considered that morning could be anything other than good, because good mornings were, after all, mandatory under company policy.
Nobody answered. Nobody ever answered. It was a rhetorical good morning, the way "How are you?" is a rhetorical question you're supposed to answer with "Fine" even if your apartment is currently on fire.
He clicked the remote. The screen behind him bloomed to…
