Page 24 of Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World
I hesitated, my gaze sliding back to the man in the other room. He was wriggling around a little, and I realized belatedly that his wrists had been secured to the arms of the chair. “I’m not sure,” I answered honestly. “This is very weird.”
“There are opportunities here at Dark Enterprises that you will find nowhere else,” Ms.Price told me. “Opportunities to do and be whatever you want.”
As I listened, I watched the man try to free himself. His handsome face now wore a fierce scowl, and the muscles of his chest and arms flexed beneath his thin T-shirt as he struggled against the restraints. The tableau was…compelling.
“An entry-level position here also pays three times more than you make now and includes full benefits.”
I sat up a little straighter at that news.
“All you have to do is press that button.”
My gaze lingered on the restrained man. “If I shock him, I get the job?” I asked slowly.
Instead of answering, she asked a question of her own. “How would it feel, do you think, to grind someone else into the dirt for once?”
I reached out and pressed the button.
On the other side of the glass, the man convulsed in his chair,mouth falling open in a combination of pain and surprise. Then he slumped forward as if unable to hold himself upright.
“Excellent.” Ms.Price pushed a second object toward me, and it took real effort to tear my attention away from the man recovering on the other side of the window. Sitting next to the button in front of me was now a small dial surrounded by numbers up to ten. The pointer was set to 1. “You can increase the strength, if you’d like.”
“Oh, no, that’s—”
“The man sitting in that room is named William,” she broke in smoothly. “He went to Princeton on a lacrosse scholarship. He can barely string together a sentence, yet he has a high-paying job in his mother’s law firm. You two are the same age, but his net worth is six times higher than yours. He has more than fifteen thousand followers on Instagram while you have seven, four of which are bots.” She watched me. “He’s lived a charmed life. How does that make you feel?”
Resentment smoldered deep inside me as I turned to study the other man. He was trying again to loosen the straps securing him to the chair, mouth moving as he said something inaudible. A lacrosse scholarship? I turned the dial a single notch and pressed the button again.
The shock lasted longer this time, and William was still twitching feebly when I looked back at Ms.Price. “Do I have the job?” I asked, my voice a little unsteady.
Instead of answering, she leaned forward and placed a third object on the table in front of me. It was a sleek smartphone displaying the Grindr app, the profile that of someone named big_willy_69, its photo a perfectly sculpted male torso. Before I could do more than notice those details, Ms.Price expertly navigated to the app’s direct messages. There were a lot of them. She pressed one next to afamiliar profile picture, and on the screen appeared a message from…me.
Hi there! I like your photo.
Below was William’s terse response.
Not hot. Blocked.
My face burned. I remembered this particular exchange. “That’s him?”
“Yes.”
Calmly, I reached for the dial and cranked it up to 10. Then I pressed the button with my hand and kept it there. We both watched William try to scream past his clenched jaw, tendons bulging from either side of his neck as his body convulsed wildly, face darkening to an ugly purple color. The chair vibrated and shook with the force of his spasms. Then the window abruptly dimmed, becoming a mirror once more. I stared at my own reflection, at the cold fury in my eyes, and slowly lifted my hand from the button in front of me.
“I knew you had it in you,” Ms.Price said.
I wondered, sometimes, what happenedto William. Maybe he was still working at his mother’s law firm with a convenient gap in his memories from two years ago. Maybe he never left the building. To be honest, I didn’t care. The Williams of this world always landed on their feet, at least until someone strapped them to a chair and shocked them repeatedly.
“Gee, thanks for that lengthy flashback,” Lex said wryly.
I shrugged. “Hey, you asked.”
“And that was your entry interview?”
“Yeah. Neat, right?”
Lex shook their head slowly. “That’s C-suite fast-track stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
