System: I Can Hear Your Dirty Thoughts

Content note: this story is rated mature (18+). All characters are adults.

Kael Reyes had slept two hours.

Two hours, on a plastic chair, under the flickering light of the 34th floor of Valcruz Holdings. The rest of the night had gone into the Hartwell acquisition report: ninety-two pages, every number checked three times, every chart built by hand.

It was the best thing he had ever made.

And right now, at 8:52 in the morning, Marco Villanueva was presenting it.

“As you can see on slide fourteen,” Marco said, smiling at the board like a man in a toothpaste ad, “the Hartwell debt is the real opportunity. Everyone else missed it. I didn’t.”

Kael stood at the back of the boardroom with a tray of coffees in his hands.

He was the intern. Interns held coffee.

Slide fourteen. He had made slide fourteen at 3:40 AM. He remembered because the vending machine had eaten his last twenty pesos at 3:38.

“Excellent work, Villanueva,” said one of the directors.

“Thank you, sir. I barely slept.”

Kael’s grip tightened on the tray. The coffees trembled.

At the head of the long glass table, a woman hadn’t said a word yet.

Valerie Cruz. Twenty-nine. CEO of Valcruz Holdings, youngest in the company’s history. Black hair pulled into a perfect knot, a charcoal blazer that probably cost more than Kael’s rent for a year, and eyes so cold the air-conditioning seemed unnecessary.

The office had a nickname for her. The Ice Queen. Nobody used it within fifty meters of her.

She turned one page of the printed report. Then another.

“Villanueva,” she said. Her voice was quiet. Everybody leaned in anyway. “Footnote nine. Explain the adjusted valuation.”

Marco’s smile didn’t move, but something behind it did.

“The adjusted valuation reflects... the adjustment. To the valuation. Based on market conditions.”

Silence.

Kael knew footnote nine by heart. He had rewritten it four times.

Say nothing, he told himself. You need this job. Rent is due in six days. Say nothing.

“That’s not what it says,” Kael said out loud.

Every head in the room turned.

He hadn’t meant to. The words had just walked out of his mouth on their own, like they were tired of waiting for permission.

“The adjusted valuation uses Hartwell’s off-book liabilities from their 2024 filings,” Kael said. His voice shook only a little. “It drops the price by eighteen percent. That’s the whole point of the report.”

Marco laughed. It was a good laugh, warm and easy, the laugh of someone who had never once been afraid of losing anything.

“Sorry, everyone. Kael helped me format some charts. He gets a little... attached.”

A few directors chuckled.

Valerie Cruz did not.

She looked at Kael for the first time. Really looked. Her eyes moved from his wrinkled shirt to his cheap shoes to the tray of coffee he was still holding like an idiot.

Then she looked away, as if he were a stain on the carpet she’d decided wasn’t worth mentioning.

“Meeting’s over,” she said. “Reyes. My office. Now.”

* * *

Valerie’s office was all glass and silence. Behind her desk, the towers of BGC stood under a gray sky that couldn’t decide whether to rain.

She didn’t ask him to sit.

“You embarrassed a senior analyst in front of the board,” she said.

“He stole my report.”

“Do you have proof?”

Kael opened his mouth. Closed it. The files were on the shared drive. Marco had admin access. Marco’s father sat on the board. By now the metadata would say whatever Marco wanted it to say.

“No,” he admitted.

“Then what you have is an accusation.” She slid a single sheet of paper across the desk. “And Valcruz doesn’t keep interns who make accusations they can’t prove.”

He looked down. Notice of Termination of Internship. Already printed. Already signed.

She had prepared it before the meeting even ended.

“Ma’am, I wrote every page of that report. Ask me anything in it. Any number. Any footnote.”

For half a second, something shifted in her eyes. Not warmth. Something more like hesitation, there and gone so fast he wasn’t sure he’d seen it.

Then she picked up her phone and started typing.

“Security will help you collect your things, Mr. Reyes.”

That was it. Six months of seventy-hour weeks, and she couldn’t even be bothered to look up.

* * *

The walk to the elevator was the longest thirty meters of his life.

He carried everything he owned at Valcruz in one cardboard box: a mug, a phone charger, a dying cactus, and a framed photo of his late mother he kept face-down so nobody would ask about it.

People watched over their monitors. Someone whispered. Someone laughed.

Marco was leaning against the pantry door with a coffee. Kael’s coffee, probably, from the tray.

“Hey, no hard feelings, pare,” Marco said, raising the cup. “Some people are built for the top. Some people are built to carry the coffee up.”

The people around him laughed harder.

Kael kept walking. He told himself he was walking because he was the bigger man. He knew the real reason was that if he stopped, he might cry in front of all of them.

The elevator doors closed. He watched his reflection in the steel: twenty-four years old, unemployed, broke, holding a cactus.

His phone buzzed.

He shouldn’t have looked. He looked.

A notification from Instagram. @biancalim tagged you in a memory.

No. Not tagged him. The app was just confused. It was a photo from a year ago, Kael and Bianca at a cheap samgyupsal place in Cubao, laughing with lettuce in their teeth.

Under it, a new story from Bianca, posted twenty minutes ago.

A yacht. Champagne. Her head on a man’s shoulder. A man in a white linen shirt with a very familiar smile.

Marco Villanueva.

The caption said: Finally with someone who knows where he’s going.

Kael stared at it until the screen went dark.

The elevator dinged. Ground floor.

He walked out into the lobby, and the sky finally made up its mind.

* * *

The rain came down like the city was trying to wash him off its streets.

No umbrella. No jeepney willing to stop for a soaked man with a box. Kael walked along 5th Avenue with water running into his collar and the cactus slowly drowning in his arms.

He did the math as he walked, because math was the only thing he had ever been good at.

Rent: 6,500 pesos, due in six days.

Bank account: 1,214 pesos.

Jobs that would hire an intern fired for “misconduct” by the youngest CEO in Valcruz history: zero.

“Funny,” he said to no one. “I can calculate the off-book liabilities of a billion-peso company, but I can’t figure out what one person is thinking.”

Not Marco, who had smiled at him every morning for six months while planning this.

Not Bianca, who had said I love you in that samgyupsal place and meant, apparently, until someone richer shows up.

Not Valerie Cruz, who had looked at him for half a second like she was about to believe him, and then signed him away.

“If I could just hear what they were really thinking,” he muttered. “Even once. Even for ten seconds.”

The pedestrian light at the corner turned green.

He stepped off the curb.

He didn’t see the delivery truck until its headlights filled the whole world. He heard the horn, long and screaming, and the hiss of brakes on wet asphalt that would never stop in time.

The box flew from his hands.

The cactus tumbled through the air in slow motion, and Kael had time for exactly one ridiculous thought:

Of course. Of course this is how my day ends.

Then the impact, and the sky spinning, and the taste of copper, and the cold road against his cheek.

Rain fell into his open eyes. Somewhere far away, people were shouting. Someone was calling an ambulance. Someone else was filming.

It didn’t hurt anymore. That was the strange part. Everything was going quiet and soft and dark, like the end of a very long shift.

So this is it, he thought. Twenty-four years, and nobody ever really saw me.

The darkness closed in.

And then, in the middle of the dark, something glowed.

A thin blue rectangle, floating in front of his eyes like a screen nobody else could see. Letters flickered across it, glitching, rearranging themselves.

[...Scanning host...] [Host vital signs: critical] [Host desire detected: “To hear what they are really thinking.“] [Compatibility: 100%] [Rank assessment: S... SS... SSS] [WARNING: SSS-rank host. This has never occurred.]

Kael tried to blink. His eyelids wouldn’t move.

The screen pulsed once, bright as a heartbeat.

[Lust & Truth System is binding to host.] [Loading... 1%]

What, Kael thought, the hell—

[Loading... 37%] [Loading... 89%] [DING!]

The world went white.

End of Chapter 1