"Mr. Sinclair," he said, "what does Nexora refuse to do?"
Derek paused. It was the best question he'd get. He looked at the screen, then at the employees along the back wall, then at me.
"We refuse," he said slowly, "to build systems that remove human accountability while pretending to improve human efficiency."
The room shifted. Just slightly.
Afterward, in the hallway, an engineer named Arjun found me by the window with two paper cups of coffee.
"Cream, no sugar," he said, handing me one. "I remembered."
"Thank you."
"I'm sorry about today," he said. "Some of us noticed more than we let on. The office felt different when you stopped coming around."
Then he glanced down the hall and lowered his voice. "There's something else. Vanessa pushed some client-facing claims through last week that engineering flagged as premature — language about autonomous decision capability. Derek approved part of it, not all of it. But the revised deck went out to partners without a full sign-off."
