It began not with a handshake, but a contract.
Ren sat quietly in the dimly lit HR conference room, the echo of the wall clock ticking louder than the voice of the coordinator reviewing the onboarding process. His wheelchair hummed softly as he adjusted his position, the leather creaking beneath him as he shifted to relieve pressure from the left side of his back.
Outside the glass-panelled walls, the company moved like a machine—people in tailored suits, heels clicking, coffee cups clutched like armour. Sleek digital nameplates, oversized screens with news tickers, and wall slogans that said things like "Drive Innovation. Deliver Impact."
But Ren already knew.
This wasn't innovation. This was survival masked in performance reviews and passive-aggressive emails. A jungle made of glass.
"Welcome to Vertis Systems," the coordinator finally said, sliding the stylized welcome packet toward him. Her smile was bright, rehearsed, and distant. "We're excited to have you on board as a Lead Systems Specialist. You'll be reporting directly to the Executive Infrastructure Head—Mr. Hayashi."
Ren signed the final document. His pen barely scratched the paper.
And just like that, he was in.
The firm had been his gamble.
Vertis Systems was a behemoth in the enterprise solutions sector—tech-driven, data-hungry, ruthless in its climb. It offered services to the government, private conglomerates, and multinationals that valued discretion above all else. The whisper networks on developer forums spoke of its internal power struggles, of "disappearances" not in the literal sense, but of projects—and sometimes people—being quietly erased from rosters without explanation.
Ren hadn't applied for stability.
He had applied for the access.
The infrastructure at Vertis was rumoured to be massive, legacy-bound, yet laced with bleeding-edge experiments. It was the perfect storm—a place where a systems engineer could hide in plain sight while learning everything he needed to dismantle walls from the inside.
He didn't intend to be a whistleblower.
Not yet.
But he knew what broken systems looked like.
He had lived in one.
His first day wasn't marked by celebration. It was an unceremonious drop into a barely ADA-compliant workspace on the 19th floor.
The office manager gestured vaguely. "You can move some of the chairs if the wheelchair doesn't fit. Facilities might get to it… eventually."
Ren didn't respond. He simply began adjusting the space himself—calculating the clearance, redirecting cables, manoeuvring the dual monitor arms to accommodate his seated eye-level. Within minutes, his space was optimized. Not comfortable. But survivable.
Across the floor, people stared. Some with curiosity, others with thinly veiled pity. A few turned away entirely.
He was used to it.
By the end of the week, Ren had quietly rewritten half of the automation scripts for database backups.
No one asked him to.
But the legacy systems were so tangled—band-aid solutions piled on broken architecture—that he couldn't resist. He left anonymous inline notes in the code repository, pointing out where the data vulnerability flags were tripping false alarms.
By the second week, he'd corrected an unnoticed loop in the permission logic that could have allowed internal access to restricted client dashboards.
He reported it discreetly.
The reply was three days late.
"Thanks. Noted. Try not to spend time on modules outside your scope."
Ren closed the message, exhaled, and muted the notification thread.
It wasn't that he hated the job.
It was just that he didn't believe in it.
The systems were broken. The people more so.
He watched as junior employees were shamed in public meetings for missing arbitrary metrics. He witnessed a manager take credit for a fix Ren had written. No one corrected him.
HR conducted "wellness check-ins" via automated forms.
The executive assistant on the 20th floor cried in the breakroom at least once a week. No one said her name.
Ren worked in silence.
He clocked in on time. He kept his answers concise. He never attended after-work gatherings. He turned down coffee invitations with a gentle smile and a tap of his wheelchair's wheel.
But even in silence, he built things.
He left the codebase cleaner than he found it.
He started scripting a private overlay for accessibility—text-to-speech, haptic feedback for low-vision DEVS, even an experimental tool for interpreting tone in internal emails. It wasn't part of his job. It was something he needed to survive.
And maybe, someday, someone else would too.
On a Thursday afternoon, the lights flickered twice.
Power relay issues. Second time that week.
People complained.
Ren calmly saved his files, tabbed into a side terminal, and deployed the redundant failover protocol he'd quietly written two days prior. No one noticed the system never crashed.
That night, alone in his apartment, he sat in front of the screen, the city lights behind him reflecting faintly in the window.
He looked older than he felt. And younger than he knew.
The chair beside his desk sat empty.
So did his inbox.
He scrolled back to a folder labelled "Sketches_Archive."
Aika's outline stared back at him. Page after page. Punching. Smirking. Holding his glasses like they were precious.
He leaned back, letting the glow wash over him.
Somewhere in the city, she existed. Moved. Spoke.
He didn't know where.
But maybe… someday.
For now, he built things in silence. He strengthened systems others left to rot. He coded safety into dark places.
It wasn't love.
But it was something.
But the system was watching. And soon, someone else would be too.