Undercurrent

Me:
Ava clutched the returned resignation letter, her fingertips turning pale. Chen, the supervisor, once again claimed the outcome of her project for herself. Colleagues in the tea room whispered to each other, and their laughter pierced her heart.

   She silently turned on the computer and carefully checked the information of the major client that Chen was in charge of. When she discovered an oversight in a key clause of the contract, she took a deep breath and anonymously fed back the problem to the inspection department. A week later, Sister Chen was dismissed due to a major mistake.

   Looking at Chen's disheveled appearance as she tidied up her things, Ava calmly tidied up her workstation. In this silent contest, she finally won once.

AI :
Undercurrent

The crumpled resignation letter burned in Ava's grip, her knuckles bleaching to the color of printer paper. Through the tea room's misted glass, she glimpsed Chen's silhouette holding court—a symphony of condescending laughter harmonizing with the clink of porcelain cups. "Teamwork makes the dream work," the supervisor's voice slithered through the crack in the door, twisting the knife deeper in the project report bearing Chen's signature where Ava's name had been erased.

Blue light from the dormant computer screen painted her face corpse-pale at midnight. Ava's fingers danced across the keyboard, pulling up contracts Chen had sealed with her gaudy digital stamp—a scarlet orchid blooming arrogantly in every approval field. Her breath hitched when the cursor froze: the liability clause's adaptive algorithm, her painstaking innovation, lay strangled by Chen's static 0.3% cap.

The office hummed with the death rattle of the air conditioner. Ava peeled off her employee badge, its metallic edge catching the light like a scalpel. She pressed it against the anonymous complaint file, watching the engraved "Lin Xiaoyou, Junior Analyst" bisect her reflection—a perfect metaphor for how the corporate directory buried her existence three submenus deep.

Seven sunrises later, Chen's stilettos still click-clacked through the boardroom's quarterly profit hymn. Then the doors burst open. Ava sipped her jasmine tea, tracking the slow eruption of scarlet up Chen's swan-like neck as auditors recited contractual violations. When the silk-clad woman fled, her Louis Vuitton tote vomited papers across marble—including Ava's coffee-ringed resignation letter, now crumpled into a serviette for corporate blood.

Her cubicle's soundproof glass mirrored a woman methodically wiping her desk. As Ava dropped Chen's shattered Tiffany pen into the bin, she remembered the parable from the corporate training video: Worker ants never bite. But when they redirect their pheromone trails, entire hives collapse before dawn.