It happened during a storm on a Thursday night, about nine months after I won the lottery. A network outage had trapped half the executive floor in a scramble because some idiot in facilities planning had approved an electrical shortcut months earlier and nobody above grade six had bothered listening when the maintenance staff flagged it. I was replacing absorbent barriers near the server room while three managers panicked uselessly and Helena herself arrived, jacket off, sleeves rolled, asking better questions in thirty seconds than anyone else had managed in twenty minutes.
I answered one of them.
She looked at me.
Not through me.
At me.
“You understand the flow problem?” she asked.
“I understand nobody planned for the runoff path under the old cable trench,” I said.
She stared a second longer, then gestured to the plans spread on the floor. “Show me.”
We solved it in thirty-seven minutes.
Afterward she asked my name.
Not my badge number. Not facilities. My name.
That was how it started.