“I always believed in what Monica wanted to achieve. She was smart—and not just in companioneering. She knew the dangers of their technology if it fell into the wrong hands. She drew up an agreement to make sure control of her company was handed over to an independent board of directors if she ever retired or was absent for a long period of time. But her co-founder, Eric Smith, was also smart. Monica might have been the CEO of Moncha, but he had plans of his own. It was all to do with the leash.”

Instinctively, my hand goes up to the leash at my ear—covered in duct tape now.

Paul’s brow furrows, casting a dark shadow over his face. George comes over and curls his tail gently around his neck. Paul reaches up with his arm and scratches the baku’s head. They have such a natural connection; it’s something I always envied before Jinx came along. But the look on his face sends a chill down my spine.

He clears his throat before continuing. “The leash is the connection between baku and human. It uses the owner’s own kinetic energy to provide power to the bakus, revolutionizing the concept of battery life. But Eric saw the potential for even more uses for the leash. He pushed for his own lab and team, dedicated solely to the study of leash technology. Nothing they did could be released to the public without Monica’s approval, of course. But that didn’t stop him experimenting. That man had quite a few wacky, ambitious ideas and often needed to be reined in.

“The craziest of Eric’s ideas was a way to make people happier by figuring out a way to tweak ambition and desire. He thought that if people no longer had any wants, if they didn’t feel like they were lacking something, missing something…then they would be happier.

“You have to understand, we were living in an age of intense envy, where social media was a highlight reel of the most golden and shiny parts of people’s lives, everything viewed through a filter. It was cited as the cause of skyrocketing levels of depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses across the generations. He wanted to reverse that process via the leash. If we could be satisfied with our reality, then as a society we would be more content, or so he thought.”

“This is just like in the presentation,” I say to the others, who nod.

“Presentation?” Paul asks. “Eric is taking this public?”

“Jinx stole the internal Team Happiness presentation from the cloud. That’s how we know about the update to begin with.”

Paul sighs. “It seemed so far-fetched to the board at the time, and Monica was so against it, that we thought we had quashed it…”

“But now she’s gone, he’s going forward with it,” I say, darkly.