The Monday Consultant

Chapter 2: The IT Intrusion

The ‘Atlas’ file lay on the desk like a dormant bomb. Jorvex didn’t want to touch it. He wanted to pack his bag, walk out the front door, and find a nice, quiet job in a place where inventory reconciliation didn't involve ancient, glowing seals. But Tavrik was already hovering by the doorway, his impatient foot tapping against the industrial carpeting.

“You coming, Jorvex?” Tavrik asked, his voice echoing off the cubicle walls. “The IT room is on the fourth floor. Deylor is already prepping the server partition for the project.”

Jorvex sighed, folding the file into his briefcase with deliberate slowness. “Right behind you, Tavrik. Just making sure I have my notes.”

“Notes? Good man,” Tavrik said, oblivious to the fact that the ‘notes’ were just a blank pad of paper. “We need to be tight on this. Deylor is a bit of a shark, but he knows the hardware.”

Jorvex stood up, smoothed his tie, and followed his boss into the hallway. The office hummed with the sound of people pretending to work. To them, he was just the guy who cleared the backlogs. To the universe, he was a massive anomaly, and today, that anomaly was about to be scrutinized by a professional.

When they reached the IT department, the air grew noticeably colder. This was the sanctuary of the servers, a room filled with the aggressive whir of cooling fans and the blink of amber and green LEDs. Deylor Kervas was there, hunched over a console, his hair a frantic mess of curls. He didn't turn around as they entered.

“You’re late,” Deylor muttered, his fingers flying across a mechanical keyboard.

“Traffic on the elevator, Deylor,” Tavrik replied, clapping his hands together. “Jorvex, this is Deylor Kervas. Deylor, this is the guy I was telling you about. The one who sorted the three-year backlog in an hour.”

Deylor stopped typing. He swiveled his chair around, his eyes narrow, scanning Jorvex like he was a hardware failure waiting to happen. “An hour? I saw the logs, Tavrik. That wasn't a script. That was a direct memory injection. You don’t just ‘sort’ three years of data without bypassing the kernel.”

Jorvex offered his best, vacant ‘I’m just a guy’ smile. “I told Tavrik, it’s just a niche batch-processor. Maybe the company server has a few shortcuts I figured out.”

Deylor stood up, leaning against his desk. He was younger than Jorvex, with the sharp, cynical features of someone who spent more time with machines than humans. “Shortcuts. Right. And I suppose you also just ‘happened’ to find the missing capital by luck?”

“Luck plays a part,” Jorvex said, keeping his tone light. “And a bit of basic logic.”

“Logic,” Deylor scoffed, crossing his arms. “Let’s test that logic, shall we? I’m going to run a background profile on your workstation connection. If you’re as good as you claim, you won’t mind me seeing how you move the data.”

Jorvex felt the cold pit in his stomach deepen, but his face remained a mask of practiced indifference. “Whatever makes you comfortable, Deylor. It’s your department.”

Deylor turned back to his terminal. “I’m auditing your connection now. Let’s see your history. Where’d you come from before Osen Logistics? Your employment record on the server is… weirdly clean.”

“HR had some trouble with the transition,” Jorvex said, leaning against the doorframe to appear relaxed. “I’ve been doing freelance work for a while. Not a lot of big corporations, mostly smaller firms that don’t use centralized servers.”

“Freelance,” Deylor repeated, his voice filled with venom. “No LinkedIn, no portfolio, no digital footprint in the central registry. You’re a ghost, Jorvex. And ghosts don’t work at Osen Logistics. They usually break the firewall.”

“I’m just a guy who likes his coffee black and his spreadsheets organized,” Jorvex replied, keeping his voice steady. “If there’s an issue with the HR filing, that’s between you and the hiring office.”

Deylor didn't answer. He was deep into the system now, his brow furrowed in concentration. The silence in the room stretched, punctuated only by the aggressive ticking of a wall clock.

“You’re sweating, Jorvex,” Deylor said, not looking up.

“It’s hot in here,” Jorvex replied, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. “All these servers generate a lot of heat.”

“It’s sixty-eight degrees in here,” Deylor noted, his fingers dancing across the keys again. “Wait. What is this?”

Jorvex felt his pulse quicken. He watched the screen, analyzing the way Deylor’s eyes flickered across the lines of code. He knew the server's architecture—he’d memorized its structural weaknesses the moment he sat down at his desk. It was an ancient model, prone to caching errors.

“That’s the data reconciliation script I mentioned,” Jorvex said, stepping closer to the desk. “If you look at the sub-directory, you’ll see it’s just a standard utility file that the HR server failed to sync during my onboarding.”

“No,” Deylor muttered, his voice dropping to a whisper. “This isn't a sync error. This is… a loop.”

Jorvex saw his chance. He reached over, pretending to be helpful, and clicked a key on the far side of the keyboard. He triggered a cascading cache dump, a known bug in the system that would cause the logs to scramble momentarily.

“Oops,” Jorvex said, feigning an awkward stumble. “Sorry, did I just—?”

The screens flickered, blacking out for a split second before rebooting with a flood of generic HR forms. The personal data that should have been there was now masked by a mountain of digital 'trash'—reformatted error logs, outdated compliance forms, and redundant server pings.

Deylor stared at the screen, blinking rapidly. “What the hell? The system just… it just pushed a localized cache error.”

“Looks like the server is acting up again,” Jorvex said, shaking his head with a sigh. “You know, this machine is older than the firm. Maybe it’s not me, Deylor. Maybe the hardware is just as tired as the rest of us.”

Deylor looked at him, his face pale. “I’ve never seen a cache dump do that. That wasn't a standard error. That was a bypass.”

“I think you’re overthinking it,” Jorvex said, shrugging. “Look, I’m just trying to get the Atlas project off the ground. If you’re worried about my history, call HR. I’m sure they have a folder somewhere, probably under ‘G’ for Ghost, or maybe ‘I’ for Incompetent.”

Deylor turned back to the keyboard, his hands shaking slightly. He typed a few more commands, his speed reduced by half. “I’m watching you, Jorvex. I don’t know who you are, but you didn't learn that script in a freelance firm.”

“Freelancers learn to adapt pretty quickly when the pay is late,” Jorvex said, offering a small, tight smile.

Tavrik, who had been staring blankly at the wall, finally spoke up. “Are we good to go? Because we’re losing billable hours.”

Deylor didn't look at them. He stared at the monitor, his eyes fixed on a specific line of code that had just popped up in the history queue. It was a file timestamp—a single, corrupted entry from ‘yesterday.’

The file name was gibberish, a string of symbols that shouldn't exist in a standard database. As the cursor hovered over it, the file previewed a sequence of data that was impossible. It wasn't inventory. It was a map of the internal server logic, showing routes and connections that were never supposed to be visible to an analyst.

Deylor gasped, drawing back from the keyboard as if it had suddenly burned him. He turned to look at Jorvex, and for the first time, there wasn't suspicion in his eyes. There was terror.

“What… what is this?” Deylor whispered, his voice trembling.

Jorvex didn't blink. He just adjusted his tie, his expression as blank as a fresh sheet of paper. “I told you, Deylor. It’s just logic. Maybe you should focus on the Atlas project instead of looking at things that don’t exist.”

Deylor gripped the edge of his desk, his knuckles white. “That file… it’s from yesterday. But it’s dated for tomorrow. How is that possible?”

Jorvex leaned in close, his voice dropping to a low, flat tone that carried the weight of a thousand years. “Time is just another data set, Deylor. You just have to know how to sort it.”

Deylor stared at him, unable to speak, his gaze locked on the screen where the impossible file flickered.

“Now,” Jorvex said, straightening his blazer. “Are we going to start the Atlas project, or are you going to keep staring at your own shadow?”

Deylor couldn't answer. He just nodded, his movements mechanical, his mind clearly reeling.

Jorvex turned to Tavrik, who was beaming with oblivious pride. “Looks like he’s ready, boss. Shall we head back to the desk?”

Tavrik clapped his hands, beaming. “Excellent! Excellent work, team. Let’s get to it.”

Jorvex walked out of the room, his footsteps silent on the industrial floor. He knew Deylor would be watching him from now on. He knew his cover was as thin as the paper he claimed to be filing. But as long as he kept the system moving, as long as he kept the chaos at bay, he could survive one more day at Osen Logistics.

He just hoped the next Tuesday wouldn't come quite so quickly.