The Desk by the Window

At 2:30 PM on Thursday, StarTech had its closest approximation of peace. Only three people remained in the conference room: Old Zhao, the product director sitting at the head of the table; Little Tang, the programmer in the corner hammering away at his laptop; and Su Qing, the operations manager standing at the whiteboard, clutching a dying dry-erase marker.

“I need you to present a proposal by this Friday.” Old Zhao stood up and adjusted his shirt collar—a signature move he made before every one of these statements, pulling his collar out from inside his suit as if it were armor about to be donned. “Liu wants to see ‘breakthrough data’ at Monday’s quarterly review. Understand?”

“What data?” Little Tang didn’t look up, his keyboard clicks sounding like some kind of mechanical rain.

“This is exactly what we need to figure out,” Su Qing said, turning to face the whiteboard. She uncapped the marker and wrote four words: “User Retention Rate.”

The conference room fell silent.

Old Zhao stared at her for three seconds. Then he sat back down.

“The kind of data that makes people want to fire their current software and buy ours instead,” he said finally.

Su Qing nodded. She knew that tone. It wasn’t about logic—it was about fear. And she knew exactly what kind of fear sold software.

—

She stayed late that night, alone in the office. The cleaning lady came by at nine, asked if she needed the trash taken out. Su Qing said no, thinking about the email she’d received at 6 PM from someone claiming to be a former employee. The subject line was simple: “What really happened to Project Lighthouse.”

She hadn’t opened it yet. She was afraid of what she’d find.

At 11:47 PM, as she finally closed her laptop, she noticed something on her desk she hadn’t put there. A photograph. Black and white. It showed this very office, this very desk, but in the photograph, someone was sitting at it.

Someone who looked exactly like her.

The photograph was dated three years ago.