KATIKA-Treason is never far away (Part.1)

Chapter 6 | Shark

Firing employees...

Firing EMPLOYEES...

FIRING EMPLOYEES...

Sitting in his office with his tie loosened, John couldn't stop mulling over those words in his mind: he had to fire employees.

He had accepted to do this dirty job, agreed to carry this burden on his conscience, so he had to go all the way and review the files of all the employees in the affected sectors of the company.

Was he cowardly for participating in the downfall of thousands of employees? Probably a little, but business is a world of sharks, and only the fiercest shark manages to survive in this ocean.

Now he found himself thinking like Woodford, his father, or... even though he struggled to admit it, Mikhail.

He only had one gesture to make to send a worker out the door: select their name in the spreadsheet. His hand trembled, sweat drops glistening on his forehead, and he took the plunge.

There it was, he had just sent the results of his study of the files and the names of the unfortunate former members of the "Katika family" to the Human Resources department.

He had literally committed the irreparable, and he would never forgive himself for it.

Rebecca will know that it was him who gave the order to lay off these men and women: his name was on the document just sent.

What will she think of him? Of what he had just done? Would she still accept to be with him?

He, who had yielded to Woodford not to lose her, now feared that he might never have the slightest hope of a chance with Miss Wiles.

What a paradox...

He sent an email to the CEO through his professional address to inform him that he had just carried out his request. His request? Rather, his order.

"Oh God, what have I done?" thought John, on the verge of tears.

Deep down, he knew he was no different from hired killers, willing to take a life for money and worldly comfort.

In his case, it was to keep his job and not lose Rebecca that he had just shattered thousands of lives with a single click.

His head was dangerously overheating; in the grip of significant stress, he felt close to fainting.

But should he continue to feel guilty for these people? After all, he thought, their situation was only due to their social failure.

If they had studied more and climbed the ladder of success like him, they wouldn't have been fired because their place would be on the Board of Directors.

In his memory, the words of Mikhail, Miles, and his father on glory, the responsibility of power, and the price to pay for all of it repeated in a loop simultaneously.

His soul had been confined in recent years to a dangerous humanism, willing to accept the smallest sacrifices to save thousands of failures.

To compensate for this, he had to take the only medicine that Katika didn't sell: to embrace the skin of a scoundrel.

He had to become the man he had, until today, always refused to be: greedy, cold, arrogant, and monstrous.

Darkness had to become his daily bread, his ration for survival in the battle he would wage in the next thirty years, the one that consisted of keeping Katika at the top.

In this war against competition, the firm would be his homeland, Woodford his leader, the logo his flag, and money his constitution.

He had to completely remove any humanity from his mind, from his soul, if he wanted to put an end to the mental torment inflicted by his feelings of compassion and regrets.