Scully put the print of Kyle's picture back in her pocket and entered the open-plan area. Despite the modern arrangement of desks and computer terminals, the roof, glass windows and floor retained their art deco style.

A young woman, still a girl really, looked over the partition. Her hair was cut short and close to the lines of her face. She looked brighter and more intelligent than the stern face in the photo.

"Can I help you?" she asked with a sparkle reserved for visiting clients.

Scully showed her badge and shrugged apologetically. "Sorry. More government business. Special Agent Scully. But you can call me Dana."

"Don't worry, Dana," she said. "You do know I get paid overtime for helping the Department of Justice? The more they need to know, or the more you need to know, the more money I make."

"That's certainly ironic," said Scully.

"My badge says Kyle. But you should call me Selina for best results."

"What do you do for the company, Selina?"

"As much as I need to," said Kyle. "Some days the mega-bucket of shit, most days just the regular pile to shovel."

Scully laughed. "Ah. Me too." Scully looked over the ordered and clean desk. There was little in the way of personal material. A postcard from Cancun sat picture up in Kyle's intray. A small plastic nameplate, the kind that could be bought from a carousel in a stationery store, stood against the fabric of the dividing partition. The selection of available names had clearly not been infinite, and Kyle's gift-giver had settled, perhaps with some reluctance, on the more commercial variant of 'Selena'.

"Someone you know in Mexico?" Scully ventured.

Kyle's eyes flashed momentarily, then she noticed the card. She picked it up and turned it over. An illegible pen script filled the left panel of the card. On the right, alongside the more carefully inscribed address, was a small list of initials running down the border. Most of the list had been checked off in random colors. At the bottom the paired letters 'SK' remained unmarked.

She shrugged and looked at the picture on the front again. "Someone in marketing who thinks we're all best friends. Part of The Big Wayne Family." She thumbed the initials to confirm that she was last on the list then tapped the card and tore it in two. "All done," she continued before discarding the pieces in the waste-paper basket by her foot. "Shall I show you some of the actual documents I work on?"

"I don't want to disturb the paper trail by moving things around. Why don't you walk me thru how the organization works? From your point of view, I mean."

Kyle sat back in the ergonomic chair and tapped a ballpoint pen against her knee. "Let me think." She seemed to decide on a way to reply then stood up scanning the other desks. She pointed at a free-standing whiteboard along the far wall. "Bring your coffee, or whatever that is, over there."

:::

The dry marker squeaked as it danced across the surface. Kyle was almost indifferent to any aesthetic effect.

"Any traditional organization has a pyramid structure with the layers of management at the top and the people who do the actual work piled at the bottom." She scribbled out a fat triangle and dotted a line across the middle to indicate about a quarter of the area was management. She discarded the pen into a basket and plucked a blue marker from the row aligned along the bottom of the board. "Your modern start-up is flat with the leadership likely to be working at the same tasks as the so-called ordinary staff." She marked out a flat line and tried, badly, to make it look like it was still a triangle by adding a faint bump in the middle.

"You see what I mean?" She paused briefly to actually look at Scully's reaction, then moved on. "And the government is stacked like this." She drew a tall spike with a cartoon star at the top. "That's your friend the President up there."

Scully finished the pale green tea and tried not to be sour about Kyle's Sesame Street version of Government 101. "We rarely speak," she joked. "So Wayne Industries is a big tower with the directors at the top? That's good to know."

Kyle frowned and smiled sadly. She turned to the board and furiously wiped away the main part of her previous drawings. "No," she said. "This is Wayne Industries." She scribbled a tall but smaller proportioned triangle with plenty of blank space above it. "And Bruce Wayne. Mr. Wayne, the Big Boss. Is up here." She dabbed a tiny dot at the top edge of the white surface proportionately miles above the pyramid. Then hyperbole got the better of her and she discarded the pen and pointed above the board. One arm stretched up to strike an imaginary target, the other stretched down balancing her body. "Here. Here. Above everything. Like he thinks he's God."

Scully noticed she had been holding her breath for several seconds, not taken at all by the facile illustrations of an industrial power structure, but bemused by the inward fury of the slight young woman in front of her. "Well," she said, letting out her breath in a nervous laugh. "Don't the gods make men great before they destroy them?"

Kyle's eyes flitted to Scully's. The frown softened and she shook her head. "Euripides didn't say that." She turned to the board and started to clear the picture. She left the little dot at the top and stared blankly ahead.

Scully was not sure what to say. "I wasn't making fun of you," she ventured. "It makes a change to see someone with a bit of…" She struggled for the word.

Kyle turned to face Scully, her eyelids narrowed. She waited for a second, but Scully said nothing more. "I have to go now," said Kyle. "Printouts and spreadsheets for the assessors. But we'll meet up later?"

Scully tilted her head without any commitment. "I'll let you go," she said.