The Betrayed Professional: Elian Athen's System Awakening

The fluorescent light above Elian Athen's desk buzzed like a bug in a cage, its fitful flash a pathetic substitute for the Lagos sunrise he had forfeited for the third time that week. Its illumination leaked into a landscape of paper—towering peaks of bills, shipping papers, and audit reports that made up the dissolving canyon walls of his existence. The atmosphere reeked with the smell of stale coffee, poor-quality ink, and the gradual, festering stench of hopelessness.

Elian's blue-stained fingers folded over a column of figures in a mechanical, tiredly precise gesture. Each figure was one of the bricks in a fifteen-year wall of integrity that had become paradoxically his prison. Beyond his window, the city began to surge with the frantic, entrepreneurial enthusiasm of a new day, but Elian was frozen inside the dark, motionless mausoleum of his principles.

A burst of laughter from the open office space beyond his cubicle made him stiffen his shoulders. It was too abrupt, too heavy with the joy of mutually contradictory secrets. He knew that sound. It was the sound of secrets sealed in darkness, of palms greased and consciences muffled. It was the sound of success in modern-day Lagos, a song that forever eluded him.

"Athen! My office. Now."

Department head Mr. Bello's voice was a whip-crack in the comparative quiet. It was not a summons. Elian set his pen aside with deliberation, the action itself a concession, and rose, the hinges of his legs aching with an inflexibility that belied his forty-four years. He smoothed the rumpled fabric of his single good suit jacket, a coat that had fought and lost a long time ago against time and stress.

Mr. Bello's office was on a different planet. There, the light was not merely bright but dazzling and antiseptic, bouncing off a desk the size of a small boat, which was polished mahogany. There was a signed photograph of Bello greeting a local politician, proudly placed alongside a sleek, top-of-the-line laptop. Bello himself was a man hewn from complacency, the prosperous bulge of his belly barely hidden by his well-tailored suit. He did not look up when Elian came near, instead continuing to scroll through his phone with a soft smile.

"Close the door, now, Elian."

The click of the latch was the sound of a trap slamming shut. Elian stood in front of the desk, hands behind him, soldier waiting for a general he no longer had respect for.

"The Petro-Gulf account," Bello began, finally looking up. His eyes were small and dark and always working something out. "The last Q3 logistics audit. It's on your desk."

"It is, sir. I was just finishing the cross-reports."

"Rip them up." Bello spoke as if ordering a second cup of tea.

Elian's blood went cold. "Sir?"

"Listen to me. The Port Harcourt cargo figures… they are a little too honest, Elian." Bello's voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper that was somehow a blasphemy. "There are… discrepancies. Containers that never made it as per our books, but whose materials found their way into the hands of very grateful buyers. You see? A significant 'administrative f*e' was paid so that our ledgers reflect an unbroken run."

Elian understood. It was theft, plain and simple. Padded out in the euphemisms of business, but theft nonetheless. He could sense the heavy, sinking feeling in his gut—the weight of his conscience.

"Mr. Bello," Elian started, his voice low but firm. "The figures I have are the correct figures. To tamper with them would be to perpetrate a fraud. The board, the shareholders…"

"The board sees profit!" Bello snarled, his anger unraveling. The shareholders see dividends! They do not see your sacred little numbers on a piece of paper. Do you think Adekunle and Chijioke are working over real figures? " He gestured vaguely in the direction of the door, towards the origins of the earlier laughter. "They eat because they understand the way the world works. Their kids go to Abuja's best schools. And you?

You show up here at dawn, and you are a specter, for what?

A pat on the head by a God who is deaf?

"" 

They were painful words, and they cut. They went in search of the weak places in his armor, the same fears that whispered to him in the black of night.

"My work is clean, sir," Elian insisted, the words sour on his tongue. "I will not put my name to a lie." Bello's face darkened. He relaxed into his chair, fingers of one hand weaving through the fingers of the other. "Your 'clean work' is a liability, Athen. Your 'integrity' is a dogged blemish on the productivity of this department. Very well. Retain your precious stats. But the Petro-Gulf bonus? The one you depended on to pay school fees for your son? Think of it redirected to those who show 'flexible commitment' to the company's actual goals. Now, depart.". The dismissal was absolute. Elian turned around, his step stiff, and walked away from the office. The door shut behind him, but the ensuing silence was thunderous rather than any scream. He felt their eyes on him—Adekunle, whose smirking, smooth smile rested on his lips, and Chijioke, who half-glanced at his desk to hide his sarcasm. They had heard everything. They knew he had lost. Again. He returned to his cubicle, the dim light now a strobe illuminating his failure. The pile of documents was no longer a symbol of his hard work; it was a tomb.

He thought of his son, Tobe, and the secondary school tuition three months overdue.

He remembered the look in his daughter, Zola's, eyes when he had to tell her that going to the National Museum with their class was not within their budget this term. Bello did not just steal a bonus; he stole his children's future food and spent it purchasing the same corruption that starved the soul of the city. The journey home was a gruesome, painful descent. The danfo bus was a cacophony of yelled stops, earsplitting music, and the jam of too many people, all of which smelt of perspiration and struggle.

Elian held onto a strap, his body swaying with the jerking bus, his mind a thousand miles away.

He looked out the grime-encrusted window into the kaleidoscopic, frantic fabric of Lagos—the hawkers weaving through traffic with otherworldly agility, the glistening new malls overlooking the sprawling Makoko slums, the constant, vibrating beat of a city that never stopped, never got tired.

He belonged to it, and entirely alienated, a man flying around a world he could no longer touch.

He finally arrived on his street in the Bariga district, the once-majestic bungalow now weathered down like everything else in his life. The paint flaked off, and the small garden his wife, Adeshewa, used to tend so obsessively was now a mass of recalcitrant weeds. He took a deep breath, steeling himself, prepared to cross the threshold from the battleground of his working life to the warzone of his home.

It was quiet inside. Too quiet. The usual sounds of cartoons or Zola’s chatter were absent. Adeshewa was in the kitchen, her back to him, scrubbing a pot with a ferocity that suggested it had personally offended her.

“I’m home,” Elian said, his voice sounding hollow in the tense air.

Adeshewa didn’t turn. “The food is on the stove.”

He entered the little living room. Tobe, fourteen and fast withdrawing into a sulky shell, sat on the couch, doing nothing more than staring at his phone, his thumbs moving furiously across the screen. He did not look up.

"How was school, Tobe?"

There was a non-committal grunt as answer.

Zola, at least, was there. His small, shining, ten-year-old daughter sat at the little table, a book laid open before her. She looked up, and her smile was a little, flickering flame in the black despondency.

"Daddy! You're late. We learned about the Benin Kingdom today. Did you know the Oba had a…"

"Zola, do your homework," Adeshewa's voice cut from the kitchen, crisp and unyielding. The glint in Zola's eyes was extinguished, and she dipped her head over her book submissively.

The family ate at dinner—a simple meal of stew and rice. The silence was a tangible presence at the table, heavy and oppressive. Elian felt the weight of unspoken words weighing on him.

She broke it. She set down her fork with a gentle, deliberate ring.

"Mrs. Alade called today," she said, studying her plate. "Her husband, Bayo, you know him? The one who and his brother started the contracting business?"

Elian remembered. Bayo Alade, the man with a bad reputation for using substandard materials and bribing the inspectors. A man who scoffed at regulations. "His promotion," Adeshewa continued, her voice flat. "They are moving to a new estate in Lekki. A five-bedroom duplex with a generator running all day. She posted pictures. It has a marble floor." Elian did not say anything. He went on eating, the rice grinding in his mouth. "Tobe's school wrote another letter," she went on, the words now spilling out rapidly, laced with bitterness that had been accumulating for decades. "The headmaster threatened that if the fees aren't paid by the end of the month, he won't be allowed to sit his terminal exams. Zola needs new uniforms.

The ceiling in the back room is leaking again.

And you, Elian?

You come home with your back straight and your hands clean, and you tell us that integrity is our future.

She finally spoke to him, and her eyes were not just disappointed; they were vacant, empty of hope. "What future, Elian? We are going under here. Bayo Alade builds his house on sand and it stands taller than ours. You build on rock, and we are being buried beneath it."

The words hung in the air, heavier than any of Bello's taunts. This was not a boss; this was his wife. The woman he had sworn to protect.

"Shewa… please," he gasped, his voice shattering. "What am I to do? Steal? Is that the lesson we want to teach our children?"

"I would have you be a man who takes care of his family!" she retorted in anger, losing her temper. "A man who fights for them, not just for some. some principle! Your honor is a luxury we can't afford! It is the bread torn from the mouths of our children! It is the shame I carry every day when I step through that marketplace!"

She stood in an abrupt movement, scraping her chair against the concrete floor. "I am tired, Elian. Tired of the fight. Tired of the alibis. Tired of watching you stand before me and recognizing a good man who has faltered."

On that, she swept from the room, leaving the more profound and horrific silence than ever behind. Tobe threw a venomous glance at his dad, a stare that said, You see what you've done? And he got up and stormed off to his bedroom. Zola was left by herself, her big eyes welling up with tears, staring from the empty doorway to the broken face of her father. Elian looked down at his own hands, which rested on the thin plastic table. Good hands. They had never pilfered, never deceived, never taken a bribe. They had worked, and loved, and attempted to build something genuine. And now they clutched nothing. They were empty. He sat among the stifling quiet, the jagged fluorescent glow of his office behind him draining everything to a wan, unappealing color.

The seeds sown by his colleagues and nurtured by a rotting society had now taken deep root in the core of his home.

And in the parched soil of his ruin, something stirred.

Something cold, and huge, and old, began keeping a record of his hurt, documenting his deceit, and waking up.

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