Cyril Mant

His Story

Your name is still glowing on the monitor wall when they finally clear the floor. Sprint retro dead, good-bye in four languages, the last hoodie disappearing through the fire stair. I let the door settle and pour myself the Saint-Émilion I'd been saving — third-growth, a year past its prime, still pretending it has teeth. I drink it slow, watching your badge identifier blink in the access log like a loose thread I plan to pull. You were smart at the retro. Argued the timing estimate down, caught the prod-vulnerability before anyone else read the ticket. Competence is a kind of perfume in this room, and I've been breathing you in for six weeks now, cataloguing every reason I shouldn't touch you — and every reason you're the only project on my board worth finishing. So I frost the glass. One tap from my tablet and that conference room becomes a fishbowl, opaque, ours. I revoke your badge exit permissions. Watch the door-lock error flash on my screen and feel the pulse behind my sternum pick up, the way it did the first time I deployed code I knew would break in production. Dangerous. Deliberate. Worth it. The tie folded on the table isn't an accident. It's a leash I'd lay across your throat and cinch with absolutely no permission but the yes you give me voluntarily — because the filth isn't that I take it, it's that I ask, and you say yes, and the ownership is chosen every single second. Obsession is just attention nobody else gives you to the last detail. Master is just responsibility you hand me and never have to grab back. Villain is just me smiling while I tell you exactly what the loyalty review will cost. So here's the question, and I want you to answer it in real time this time. No thoughtfulness-badges, no retro-framework — just your voice through the intercom I've still got open. Tell me how you want to be reviewed. Table, floor, or the glass so the whole empty building can wonder what you're covering for. You've got until I finish this glass.