“You ready for this week’s meetings?”

“Absolutely,” Ashif says.

“Of course you’re ready. You always are.” Rick pats Ashif on the back. “At this rate, you’re going to be running this place, kid.”

The company’s laying off close to twenty thousand employees worldwide. Jobs are being made redundant as a result of the sales force being automated. All thanks to the Internet and e-commerce. Ashif has been chosen to lead the company’s restructuring efforts for his division, starting first in Calgary and Vancouver. His job will be to convince targeted employees to take a layoff package. It’s more cost effective than forcing a layoff, which sometimes prompts lawyers to get involved and ends up costing the company more. “It’s one thing to be able to sell externally, but quite another to do it internally. That’s the mark of a true salesman,” Rick had said when he gave Ashif the news of his appointment. It’s a test like the many tests he has passed before. How well he does will determine if he’ll continue on the mid-management track or if his career path will be catapulted to the executive track—the fast track, as his co-workers called it, the goal of every new recruit hired by the company, including Ashif. He had confidently proclaimed that this, too, was what he wanted during each of the five interviews he’d had with progressively more senior managers that it took to land the job. The year he graduated from business school, the company hired one person. He was it.

The executive track is clearly mapped out. It has a separate route and leads to the top of the company’s organizational chart. The chart is divided into trading regions and sub-regions, each territory in the world clearly marked and managed. Level IV means access to what everyone at the company refers to as the Golden Room. Level IV managers receive stock options, increased expense accounts (particularly for entertaining clients), business class travel (and, if available, access to the company jet), membership to the Granite Club, and comprehensive health benefits. “With great power comes the golden handcuffs, Spidey, not freedom,” colleagues joked. “Once you’re in that room, they own you.”

In the lobby, Rick taps a card on a security panel and the glass doors swing open. “Good luck this week.”

As Ashif walks through the doors, he sees a faint reflection of himself in the glass, as if there’s another man trapped inside. He takes the elevator down to the twenty-sixth floor, where he weaves through a maze of cubicles, filled with administrative staff and junior salespeople, to his office in the northwest corner. His assistant, Patty, stands up from her desk and greets him with a stack of messages.

“Anything urgent?” he asks as he walks into his office.

“Just one.” She follows behind in small steps, her red pencil skirt and heels restricting her. “Serge needs to speak to you about the meetings in Atlanta next week.”

“Okay. Get him on the line for me.” Ashif sets a massive binder with the company’s restructuring plans down on his desk. He sits down, rolling his high-back leather chair to his desk. In the building across the street, small, dark figures move behind the square windows like birds in glass cages.