The Single Source

Daniel Reyes has spent nineteen months at Corvex becoming almost invisible. He does the work nobody notices, says yes before anyone has to ask twice, and keeps the parts of himself he does not understand filed under things to look at later.

Then a director says his surname in an elevator, without emphasis, in the tone you would use reading an item off a list.

The following week a company wellbeing draw sends him to The Ashgrove: a building with no window onto the street, sixty-one reviews, every one of them five stars, and not one of them saying what happens inside. He arrives expecting a massage. What he is offered is ninety minutes and whatever he turns out to need.

Four days later he is on the sixth floor, being asked whether he can take direction from a woman – actually take it, not perform taking it. There are two other candidates. Ms. Vale is not going to talk anybody into it.

He hears himself say the word obedient out loud.

How much of yourself can you hand over before handing it over starts to feel like the first honest thing you have ever done?

Book two of The Single Source.

The arrangement costs Daniel Reyes nine hundred and ninety-seven dollars a month. The rest of his life – rent, food, a phone, the train – costs eight hundred and fifty. He builds a twelve-month model to find out whether it fits. It fits, with three dollars to spare, and the spreadsheet has no row for stopping.

So he asks for a raise. He gets it. Then he finds out what the raise was for.

By the end of the quarter there is a second woman entitled to give him instructions: his own line manager, told precisely as much as Ms. Vale decides she needs to know.

Then Ms. Vale is out of the office for a week, and his line manager runs his mornings her own way. What he has been told to keep up at home, alone, nobody checks at all. Nobody would ever know.

He does all of it anyway.

If it was never the job, and it was never being watched – then who was it for?