Manager, That File Is Mine

That night I came back to the studio and turned on the laptop.

Any other night I would already have been grinding my teeth—another proposal of mine, laid out as kindling for that man's promotion. Tonight I was strangely calm. In go-stop, once you've already seen every tile in your opponent's hand, the only fool is the one who still manages to lose.

A soft chime. A company-messenger alert lit up my phone.

She'd said she was clocking out the second her off-site work ended, and yet here she was, worrying about me from home. I let out a short laugh and got down to the real work.

I split the presentation into two files.

The first was bait for the shared server. Cover, table of contents, introduction—all dressed up to look legitimate. But page seven, the only page that mattered, I left empty. The columns for response metrics by consumer target and margin rate against cost held nothing but the words TBD: to be confirmed. Manager Park was a man who read a proposal by its cover and its table of contents. I had watched him from the next desk for two years. Not once had I seen him turn as far as page seven.

The second file was the real one. Thanks to the Proposal Speed-Reading I'd received that afternoon, the market figures were already laid out in my head like a table: three-year revenue projections, cost-cutting measures, a margin simulation, all of it packed into a finished draft. That one never touched the shared server. It lived only on my laptop and a USB drive.

The bait went into the shared folder at eleven. A little past midnight, the access log lit up with Manager Park's account—a record of him taking my file.

Honestly, it raised the hair on my arms. Watching a man move exactly the way his inner thoughts had said he would.

You bit down hard, Manager.

The next morning I ran into Manager Park in the elevator. He looked to have slicked on twice his usual pomade. It was the hair of a man standing in front of a big stage.

"Woo-jin. At today's meeting, you sit in the back and keep quiet. Hyung's doing the presentation. A contract worker opening his mouth in front of the Division Head makes the whole mood weird."

"Yes, Manager."

"If questions come up, Hyung will take all of them. Just be ready to pull up the Excel."

The Excel was ready. It simply wasn't the Excel he had in mind.

Ten in the morning. The 15th Floor Executive Conference Room.

The Marketing Division's weekly strategy meeting. In the seat of honor sat Division Head Bae So-young, arms folded. Thirty-eight, 172 centimeters. A deep navy pantsuit, her long hair gathered into a low bun. Around the company they called her the Iron Wall. A contract worker got this close to the Division Head maybe twice a year. She was the kind of person who made you careful even about the sound of your own breathing.

Brand Team 1 and our team sat to either side. The Brand Team 1 Leader was looking our way with a sneer slipping across his face—the look of a man who had come to watch the last-place team.

"Then let's start with the proposal for the new moisture ampoule. Brand Team 2 ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠first."

The words had barely left the Division Head's mouth before Manager Park shot to his feet.

"Yes, Division Head! A masterpiece that we at Brand Team 2 have poured our hearts and souls into!"

He strode to the podium, counterfeit watch clinking at his wrist. The first slide hit the screen. Beneath the title, a name was set in gold.

My name was nowhere. Da-hee's fists trembled as she glared at him. I gave her the slightest shake of my head.

Not yet.

That was when a gold-edged window appeared above Team Leader Ye-won's head.

She was looking at the gold name on the screen. Her expression didn't change, but the knuckles wrapped around her pen had gone white. So she had known too. Whose proposal that really was.

A gold bar?

I looked at the reward line again. A gold bar. So this was what the subspace that had opened last night was for.

"This new product is an innovation that completely smashes the old framework. Having personally led my team through the market research, I found that the single greatest factor stimulating the desire to buy among women in their twenties and thirties is—"

He was silver-tongued, pounding his own chest over something he hadn't even made. The show lasted all of three minutes. Right up to the moment the slide turned to page seven.

A table appeared on the screen: response metrics by consumer target, and margin rate against cost. Where a graph should have been, there was only white. In the number field, three red letters.

"Uh……?"

His voice snapped clean off. His face went the color of clay. Of course it did. He had swapped the cover and uploaded the file; there was no way he knew what page seven held. The one who cut through that silence was Team Leader Ye-won.

"Manager Park."

She pushed her rimless glasses up.

"The response estimates and the margin rate on page seven are completely empty. Break-even data is the most important thing at launch. What numerical basis does this proposal have?"

"Th-that is, Team Leader…!"

Sweat streamed down his forehead. He clutched the back of his neck and started to flounder.

"That was… I drew the big picture first, from my feel for the field… and the detailed numbers, I was just about to tune those properly…"

The Division Head's brow drew tight.

"Manager Park. In a division meeting, you want us to talk about the big picture and fill in the blanks? This is the level of proposal a manager walks in with?"

At that moment a red inner thought flared above his head.

So he says Chagall in his head too.

I swallowed the laugh and stood, quiet. My turn.

"Division Head. Team Leader. May I explain for a moment?"

Every eye in the room came to me. A contract worker raising his hand in a division meeting was probably a first. As I plugged the laptop into the projector, I spoke to the frozen manager as politely as I could manage.

"Manager, that file… I believe it's a test file I uploaded to the shared server last night, temporarily, to check the formatting. My personal backup filename is still on ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it."

"Wh-what…?"

"The final original, with every number filled in, is right here."

I hit enter. Over the empty table, figures linked to the survey data and a break-even graph rushed in and filled every cell. A small gasp moved through the room.

"For this moisture ampoule we set the initial cost ratio at 18 percent, and designed it so that influencer seeding alone produces a net profit of 250 million won on the first launch. The detailed metrics are summarized from page eight."

A one-minute briefing. There was no need to make it long. The numbers said everything. The corner of the Division Head's mouth eased, just barely.

"Good. No gaps in the logic, and none in the numbers. Brand Team 2, proceed in this direction."

She wrote something in her meeting notebook. The pen laid down a line, stopped, and she looked at me ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠once before it moved again. I don't know what was written there. But in two years on contract, that was the first time anything had gone into the Division Head's notebook while her eyes were on me.

Manager Park dropped into his seat, face burning red. The Brand Team 1 Leader shut the mouth he had been sneering with and looked at our screen again—a man who had come to gawk at the last-place team and ended up gawking at the numbers. He had tripped over the very proposal he had meant to take. There was no demotion, nothing like that. Only a red face. Even so, for the first time in two years, my name sat above my own proposal. Under the table, Da-hee lifted a thumb.

When the meeting ended and we came out into the hall, Team Leader Ye-won passed beside me without expression and dropped the words as she went.

"Choi Woo-jin. From next time, put it up under your own name from the start."

The tone was cold. What was above her head was not.

I bit my lip. And in that moment a heavy chime sounded at my ear.

At lunch, Da-hee dragged me into the emergency stairwell. The instant the steel door shut, she seized both my cheeks in both hands.

"Hey. Since when were you setting this up?"

"Last night."

"Last night? So that's what the popcorn thing was?"

"Yes."

"…You're insane. Actually insane. Did you see Manager Park's face? I should've taken a picture. I could've used it as my wallpaper for the rest of my life."

She let go of my cheeks, leaned on the stair rail, and laughed for a long while. Then the laugh cut off, and she said it small.

"…You did good. Watching you take that for two years, I was honestly about to explode."

With that she tapped her forehead once against my chest and went down the stairs. Two seconds, maybe. Those two seconds outlasted the meeting.

The moment I got off work and into the studio, I slid the chain across the door. Half believing it and half not, I reached into the empty air and held one word in my mind. Subspace.

Fwaaah—

The air wavered like a heat shimmer, and something heavy dropped out of a rift onto my palm.

"……Hk?!"

Heavy enough to fold my wrist. Letters were cut into the cold, smooth yellow face.

It was real. An actual gold bar. I looked up the price on my phone, and it was well past ten million won. Half a contract worker's yearly pay, resting in my palm. I searched how to sell gold, then ID required when selling gold, then gold of unknown origin, and only then put the phone down. The search history looked like a criminal's.

I stared at it for a long time before a hollow laugh escaped me. A contract worker sitting on a studio floor with a gold bar in his hands was too strange a picture.

"…Where am I even supposed to sell this?"