Ficorpio
Chapter 1
The bonus payout list had Ryan Hayes’s name printed on it, clear as day.
$4,500.
I didn’t make a scene. I stayed at my desk, fixed the bug he had dumped on me, and waited for the company’s quarterly review.
He used my work to win a quarterly bonus in front of the entire office.
Afterward, Vanessa from HR smiled and told me, “Claire, young people need to look at the bigger picture. Don’t get so hung up on who gains or loses in the short term.”
So I slid my resignation letter across the desk.
The next day, the back end of the Core Trading Platform—the project Ryan had taken credit for—went straight to hell.
At the Monday morning meeting, Ryan walked in wearing a dark blue suit and a shirt that looked like he’d soaked it through with sweat, then dried it under the bathroom hand dryer.
The conference room lights were a little too bright. Everyone’s faces looked pale beneath them, and every tired office worker had the same flat, wooden exhaustion carved into their features.
I reported the past week’s development progress.
Every milestone. Every data point. Every pending risk.
Clear, precise, complete.
Martin Cross nodded without much expression.
When I brought up a hidden issue in the messaging interface and recommended setting aside time for a formal risk review, he barely looked up.
“Mm. Got it.”
His voice was clipped. Then he leaned forward slightly, as if something more important had finally occurred to him.
“By the way, Ryan had something to add. Ryan, your thinking on this is fresh. There’s a lot of potential here.”
Every eye in the room turned to the man beside me.
Ryan straightened at once. His voice rose half a pitch as he opened a presentation deck.
The framework in that deck was familiar.
Painfully familiar.
It was the architecture report I had stayed up all night finishing the week before.
The only difference was the name on the cover.
Ryan Hayes.
He had taken my backend logic, rewritten my dry technical summary in shinier corporate language, and packaged the entire thing as his own “new strategic initiative.”
“Deep integration of the underlying logic.”
“Significant efficiency improvements.”
“End-to-end closed-loop risk control.”
“Scalable architecture for high-concurrency demand.”
The leadership team nodded along, one after another.
I sat there without expression, but my fingers curled under the table. My nails dug hard into my palm.
Every word in that deck, every diagram, every line of analysis—those were mine.
After the meeting, I went to the printer to pick up a document.
Freshly printed pages slid out, still warm. I gathered them, ready to leave, when a sheet half-buried in the tray caught my eye.
Chapter 2
It was the bonus payout list.
Ryan’s name was right there on it.
The number beside it was especially ugly.
Bonus category: performance incentive.
Project contribution: outstanding.
Approved payout: $4,500.
The digits burned into my eyes.
$4,500.
Quarterly bonus.
My fingers trembled despite myself.
The paper was light as air, but in that moment, it felt like a sheet of lead.
My monthly salary was $1,300.
A wave of absurdity and humiliation swept over me so hard I nearly drowned in it.
The laugh that escaped me was faint and sharp. It lodged in my throat like rusted metal.
I came back to myself quickly, folded the list, and tucked it under the documents in my hand. Then I walked back to my desk as if nothing had happened.
Ryan had already returned to his workstation.
He dropped into his chair, swung his laptop toward me, and said with a long, entitled sigh, “Claire, come take a look at this bug for me. It’s driving me insane.”
He said it like he was doing me a favor by letting me help.
I glanced at his screen.
The bug came from a small module he had modified himself. It was the kind of shallow, low-level mistake any engineer with half a brain could spot at a glance.
A single thread-safety issue.
Nothing more.
He did not ask why it happened.
He did not try to understand the root cause.
My fingers moved across the keyboard without hesitation.
Locate. Modify. Debug. Run.
The whole process took less than two minutes.
A green success message appeared on the screen.
Ryan looked at the result, instantly relieved. Then he said lightly, “Not bad. You’re pretty good at patching stuff.”
With that, he picked up his mug and headed for the break room.
Several coworkers nearby laughed softly.
The sound drifted over the partitions, blurred and muffled, but the casual contempt inside it came through perfectly.
“Another tiny issue fixed by Claire.”
“Hand it to her and it’s done.”
I looked calmly at my own monitor.
On the screen was the annotation document for the core codebase I had been writing.
That code had been built line by line by my own hands.
It was the skeleton of the entire Core Trading Platform.
Around noon, Ryan came back with a USB drive.
“Claire,” he said, dropping it near my keyboard, “copy those documentation notes and the maintenance manual onto this for me. I’ll take a look tonight. Study up a little.”
I looked at him.
He smiled like there was nothing wrong with the request.
I plugged in the USB drive.
Then I copied everything over: the knowledge base I had built through countless late nights, the maintenance manuals I had prepared so no one would be left blind during handover, every file that represented my blood, sweat, and expertise.
All of it went onto his drive.
I did not hesitate.
Maya Ellis, the senior QA engineer who sat across the aisle, saw the whole thing. She lowered her voice, unable to hide the anger in it.
“Claire, this is… way too much.”
Chapter 3
Maya had been in QA for more than ten years. She had been at the company almost as long. There was very little she had not seen.
I smiled at her.
The smile probably looked worse than crying.
“It’s fine, Maya,” I said. “It’s for work.”
I knew she didn’t believe me.
I also knew I wasn’t being generous.
I was just handing them the rope and letting them measure it around their own necks.
Since they wanted my gun so badly, I would give them the gun.
I would even load the bullets for them.
The quarterly review was held that Friday.
Nearly every senior manager in the company attended.
Ryan combined my technical framework and my development results into a polished quarterly review deck. Then he stood at the front of the conference room, looking calm and confident, and spoke at length about “his” late-night breakthroughs, “his” hard-won solutions, and “his” critical architectural decisions.
I sat below the stage and listened.
The project lead beside me nodded with satisfaction, his eyes full of approval.
When the awards were announced, Martin presented Ryan with the quarterly bonus in recognition of his “outstanding contribution” and “tremendous potential” on the Core Trading Platform.
The amount was still $4,500.
Applause filled the room.
Ryan held the certificate and swept his gaze across the audience.
His eyes brushed over me for less than a second, as if I were just another piece of office furniture.
The next day, to celebrate his award, Ryan ordered bubble tea for the entire office.
Cup after cup was delivered to everyone’s desk, and the sweet smell spread through the floor.
Only my desk stayed empty.
He forgot me.
Or maybe he didn’t.
Ryan carried one cup of bubble tea himself and respectfully handed it to Martin.
Martin took it, pleased, and said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Ryan, keep up the good work. You young people are the future of this department.”
I watched them as if I were watching a badly staged comedy.
One person played the brilliant rising star.
One played the wise leader.
Together, they played a touching scene about discovering talent.
I did not interrupt.
I was waiting for the right time.
From that day on, I began to prepare my resignation.
Quietly and methodically, I reorganized everything related to the Core Trading Platform.
The database architecture.
The interface documentation.
The operation and maintenance procedures.
The standard operating procedures for recurring issues.