My first interview at CDMI was in November, a twenty-minute meeting with a low-level lawyer named Seth Salway. He was brusque and unsmiling throughout, and when a month went by with no follow-up, I had to assume it was a pass. Nobody bothered with polite rejection letters anymore. Nobody bothered to acknowledge receipt of a résumé, either, not even by a simple email. Unless I sprang for certified mail, I never even knew whether my application had arrived. It was like launching a message in a bottle into a vast and roiling ocean and hoping someone somewhere might come upon it.

But this time I got a call back. This time I had a shot, and my hands trembled inside my pockets as I stopped at the corner and waited for the light to change. A car turned in front of me, too close and too fast, and spewed a tidal wave of water onto the pavement. I danced clear of it and hurried on.

Marketplace Tower loomed ahead, thirty stories of glass, steel, and concrete. I pushed through the revolving doors. A two-story Christmas tree stood in the lobby, and at its foot, like an array of wrapped gifts, was a quartet of Victorian-garbed choristers singing carols to serenade the workers to work. I pulled off my coat as I passed them and presented my ID to the guard at the security desk. He found my name on the visitor list and handed me a pen to sign the registry. “I found this on the floor over there,” I said, handing over my coat. “Would you put it in your lost and found?” He’d probably give me the side-eye when I came back later to reclaim it, but my name was inside; he’d have to let me have it. And meanwhile I wouldn’t have to disgrace myself by showing up in a frayed parka at a company that owned the best fashion labels in the world.

The building was a glitzy Art Deco revival, and the stainless-steel elevator doors were etched with a gridwork of black bars, an homage to the metal cage elevators of yesteryear. The back wall of the elevator lobby displayed a piece of mosaic artwork so tall I had to crane my head back to take it all in. It depicted men and women sowing seeds, turning wheels, hoisting timbers, packing crates—a workers-of-the-world-unite mural fractured into thousands of glittering glass tiles. If I hadn’t been so nervous, I might have laughed at the irony of mounting it here, in a building that was practically a paean to capitalism. Standing between the banks of elevators was a high-tech destination dispatch console. It prompted me to enter my destination floor, then ran some kind of algorithm to calculate which of the ten cars should open for me.

“Car Three, please,” a robotic voice intoned.

The doors slid open, and I stepped on. The interior walls were paneled in mahogany, and the interior doors were mirrored. The control panel beside the door didn’t have any floor buttons, only emergency alarms. Above the doors a news chyron scrolled the morning headlines: Global Stocks Surge After Fed Tapers Bond Buyback. 80 Injured in London Apollo Theatre Ceiling Collapse. Christmas carols played in here, too, through invisible speakers in the elevator walls. There were probably invisible cameras as well. Nonetheless, as the elevator rose at warp speed, I pushed my shoulders back and lifted my chin and put my game face on. I visualized it. Alert, eager, self-confident, but not self-important. The kind of person any captain would want to pick for his team.