LifeLine

Chapter Eight

The Monday morning all-hands meeting happened in the second floor conference room, the one with the window that looked out over the parking lot and the motivational poster about teamwork that someone had slightly crooked on the wall for as long as Connor could remember and nobody had ever straightened.

Connor had been coming to these meetings for three years. He knew their architecture the way he knew the sound of the floor — the opening metrics review, the performative praise for whoever had the best numbers, the pivot to whoever hadn't, the specific way Joan held her pen when she was building toward something. He'd learned to read the meeting the way he read a call in progress, knowing the shape of where it was going before it arrived.

This morning she was building toward him.

He could feel it from the moment he sat down. The way she started with the eight o'clock team's numbers, holding them up with a particular emphasis, letting the contrast do work before she made it explicit. The way her eyes came back to him twice during the opening review, brief and measuring, the way a boxer measured distance before committing.

There were eleven people in the room. Two other supervisors, Gerald and a woman named Pat who had been at the site longer than anyone and had the specific quality of someone who had outlasted everything and expected to outlast this too. Several team leads. Joan at the head of the table with her printed metrics report and her coffee and her expression.

She got to his numbers at the twelve minute mark.

"Evening team retention rate," she said, not looking up from the report. "Down again. Third consecutive week." Now she looked up, and her eyes found him with the directness of someone who had decided this was the moment. "At what point, Connor, do you start taking responsibility for your team's performance?"

The room did the thing rooms did in these moments — a collective stillness, everyone simultaneously grateful it wasn't them and slightly ashamed of that gratitude.

Connor had $412,000 in a savings account that hadn't existed two weeks ago. He had a phone in his pocket connected to the internet of 2055. He had a watch on his wrist that could stop time. He had a voice in his ear that had been quietly suggesting, with increasing subtlety, that he might not need to be in this room anymore.

He looked at Joan.

"The biggest problem this team has," he said, "isn't the numbers."

The stillness intensified.

"The biggest problem this team has is its manager." He kept his voice conversational, the way he kept his voice when he was making a difficult point to an agent — not aggressive, just clear. "A manager who sits in on coaching sessions and undercuts them the moment they show results. Who thinks motivation is putting emojis in the group chat. Who coaches struggling agents out the door because it's faster than developing them, and then holds the understaffing against the supervisors who tried to keep them." He paused. "I've submitted three staffing requisitions in the last two months. All three came back without explanation. My retention numbers are down because I'm running twelve percent below headcount and the agents I have are burning out under the load. That's not a coaching problem. That's a management problem."

Joan's expression had moved through several phases during this. Surprise first, then anger, then something that settled into a kind of cold certainty, the expression of someone who had decided this was a line being crossed and was already calculating the response.

"You need to think very carefully," she said, quietly, "about what you're doing right now. I'm telling you that your numbers need to improve, and I'm telling you that your job depends on it."

Connor looked at her for a moment.

Then he reached up and unclipped his badge from his shirt. He set it on the table in front of him, on top of his closed laptop. He looked at both of them for a moment — the badge, the laptop, the three years of his professional life they collectively represented — and then he slid them both across the table toward her.

"I don't think I mentioned," he said pleasantly, "that I cared about keeping it."

The room was absolutely silent.

Joan looked at the badge and the laptop in front of her. Back at Connor. Something moved across her face that he couldn't quite name — it wasn't anger anymore, or not only anger. It was something more complicated, the expression of someone who had played a card and watched it get trumped by a card they hadn't known existed.

"I'll be curious," Connor said, standing, "to see how the numbers look without me." He looked around the room — at Gerald, who was looking at the table; at Pat, who was looking at him with an expression he'd never seen on her face before, something between surprise and satisfaction; at the team leads, who were in various stages of processing what they'd just witnessed. "Good luck," he said, and walked out.

The hallway was very quiet. The floor was running below him, forty conversations happening in the particular rhythm of a Monday morning shift, unaware that anything had changed. He walked to the elevator, pressed the button, waited.

That, Emma said softly, was a long time coming.

"Yeah," Connor said.

The elevator opened. He got in.

He was in the parking lot, sitting in his car, before he fully processed that he no longer had a job. The sun was doing what May sun did in Greensboro, warm and indifferent and thoroughly unconcerned with the specific significance of Monday mornings. He sat with the engine off and looked at the GBTS building through the windshield.

He felt lighter than he'd felt in years. Which was either the right response or a sign that something had gone very wrong with his relationship to self-preservation.

"Emma," he said.

Yes.

"The bank account. The flagged review. The taxes on the transfers. All of that." He looked at the building. "I don't want to deal with any of it. Can you handle it?"

A pause that felt genuinely pleased. I was hoping you'd ask that, she said. I can make calls on your behalf, answer inquiries, manage correspondence — all through the phone's communication systems. To anyone on the other end I'll simply be your assistant. I've actually already drafted responses to the bank's automated inquiry and a preliminary tax filing structure. I was waiting for you to be ready.

"You were waiting."

You needed to get there yourself, Emma said simply. It wouldn't have meant the same thing if I'd suggested it before you were ready to hear it.

Connor sat with that for a moment. Outside, a car pulled into the GBTS lot and a woman got out with a coffee and a laptop bag and the expression of someone who had not yet had enough coffee for whatever Monday had planned for her.

"Okay," he said. "Handle it."

Already in progress, Emma said. There's one more thing.

"What?"

You have approximately four hundred and twelve thousand dollars, taxes accounted for, growing at a rate that would make most financial advisors weep with joy. But you've been thinking about the morality of where it came from. A pause. Have you resolved that?

He had, actually. Sometime in the previous week, without quite noticing the moment it settled. The money existed because compound interest existed and the Lifeline existed, and the bank that held it had made considerably more from considerably less ethical sources and had not lost a moment's sleep over it.

"I've resolved it," he said.

Good. Because you're going to need capital for what comes next, and the temporal transfer mechanism is only one option. Another pause, this one with a different quality to it, the quality of someone who has been thinking about something and has decided now is the right moment. Connor, do you have a problem taking money from people who are actively trying to take money from you? People who would use any available method to do so without hesitation?

Connor thought about it. Casinos came to mind — the house edge, the calculated extraction of money from people who came in hoping to beat a system designed to be unbeatable. The money didn't evaporate when the house took it. It just moved.

"In a situation like that," he said, "I think it would be okay."

Emma was quiet for a moment. Long enough that he checked the phone screen to make sure she was still there.

Then: You have a flight to Las Vegas tomorrow morning at seven forty-five. I've also arranged hotel accommodations upon arrival.

Connor stared at the phone.

"You booked it before I answered."

I booked it, Emma said, and there was something in her voice that was absolutely, unmistakably, a smile, when you said you thought it would be okay.

He sat in the parking lot of the job he'd just quit and looked at the May sky and felt the specific sensation of a life accelerating past the speed he'd grown accustomed to.

"Okay," he said. "Vegas."