The first time Marcus crossed my path, I knew he didn’t belong here. I knew he never would. I was outside my manager’s office, sipping my coffee and waiting for a review. I kept to myself, and he probably didn’t even notice I was there. He was in the hallway, his eyes fixed on the framed plaque of our corporate values, a silent rebel in a sea of conformity.
Marcus stood in front of the company’s mission statement, his voice echoing the words that were meant to guide us all. “We value our customers. We value our shareholders. We value our employees.” He took off his company hat, an act of defiance itself, and muttered quietly, “Did they pick this up from a greeting card store? I’ve worked with countless companies, and they all say the same thing, which is nothing.”
The company hats, resembling Fedora’s, were far from ordinary. They were state-of-the-art neural interfaces with thought implantation technology. Every employee, including myself, had to waive their cognitive rights to work there. The NDA, or neural-disclosure agreement, allowed the company to induce feelings of loyalty and pride in employees while they were working. It was a clever hat, capable of tracking your billable hours based on your thoughts and keeping non-work thoughts at bay. Promoters praised it as the most significant productivity boost since the invention of the printing press and the discovery of electricity. If you dared to remove the hat, you were off the clock and out of the system.
I didn’t particularly mind the hat. It simplified things. I was already invisible, and the outside world was a mess. If a hat could keep my mind off real problems most of the day, I was better for it. Marcus stood out, a sharp contrast to the uniformity around us. At the end of the day, he’d curse and rip the hat off his head as if it were a rattlesnake trying to take a bite out of his forehead. It just never took with Marcus. He was like a ripple in the corporate pond.
The financial calculus of the hats was even simpler. No hat, no job. No job, no HOVI. The HOVI, Human Operation Viability Index, was the autonomous scoring system that measured your worth in the machine-managed economy. Without HOVI, you weren’t considered a person. No HOVI meant no apartment, healthcare, or transportation. The hat was your ticket to existence itself.
Marcus fought anyway. He wasn’t stupid — he understood the risks. He’d sit at his terminal with the hat on his head, but he managed to disconnect the neural mesh without the hat noticing. He developed an efficiency algorithm that the company adopted right away, integrating it into the core product line. The team was praised, the division celebrated, but Marcus’s name was barely mentioned. When he protested to his manager, Alcott, who dismissed him with, “The company rewards loyalty. Not ego.”
Alcott, suspicious of Marcus’s protests, found the tampered hat. He called Marcus into his office, his smile as perfect as his halo-lit office. “Clever boy,” he said, holding up the sabotaged hat. Marcus argued that without the hat, he could think clearly, dream while he worked, and come up with more innovative ideas. Alcott dismissed him, saying, “Loyalty isn’t optional, not here.” Marcus paid a heavy price, losing a hundred HOVI points for his effort.
A younger worker followed his lead, tried faking the hat. They caught him. His HOVI dropped to non-viable. Overnight, he became a ghost. His bank account was frozen. His lease disappeared. He slept in the doorway outside the building, waiting for the office to open in the morning, begging for reinstatement until security completely erased him from the premises.
Marcus was furious. No ordinary hat could contain his rage. He lashed out, hacking the local relay and frying every hat on the floor. The glow went dark, and the loyalty pulse collapsed. It was crazy, almost comical, watching the fear cross each face as they first realized their heads were smoking or on fire, and then understood they had to think for themselves. For a moment, we were all free, raw, and thinking. It was terrifying but also glorious. He might have even gotten away with it because the overload fried all the CCTVs on the floor, too. But Marcus walked into Alcott’s office and decked him. Security caught and arrested him before he could leave the building.
I expected the police to arrive, charge him with corporate terrorism, and take him away, but they never showed up. Instead, a few corporate executives arrived in their limos and went into the back offices, followed by their entourages. There was nothing in the NDA about the legality of corporate detention.
When I saw him again a few days later, he was smiling. Not his smile — theirs. His eyes looked pale, glassy, with every edge smoothed out. He kept the hat on all day, even off-shift.
I grabbed him by the collar as he walked by. “Marcus! Marcus? You’re just playing along, right?”
“Dreams,” he told me with just a hint of a smile and in a voice too calm, too flat, “are only nightmares waiting to happen. Thank the company I was spared.”
I stared at him for a long moment. Waiting. Hoping. But there was nothing left. That was when I understood. Marcus was gone. What wore his body was only the company, grinning through his lips.
I don’t know what they did to him. I had heard that there was a souped-up version of the company hat that could be used to enforce loyalty and erase any signs of individuality. They didn’t need to physically remove the brain to lobotomize someone. But I thought it was just a rumor meant to instill fear and enforce obedience in the workforce.
When Marcus passed Alcott in the hall, he said, “I will have the report ready for you later today, Mr. Alcott, sir.”
Alcott was beaming.
I couldn’t bear to see Marcus used as a symbol of corporate loyalty. It was everything he opposed.
And that was when I killed him. Not with my hands. Not with violence. I hacked into Marcus’s account and had him send an email to his department, saying that Alcott was a pretentious waste of a human and a corporate stooge.
I became a ghost too — but one I chose. I took off my hat, threw it into a trash bin like a frisbee, and sprinted for the exit.
Cover Image by ImageFX. Assist by ChatGPT. Corrections by Grammarly.
