The Monday after Leo submitted his Predictive Market Opportunity report, the 42nd floor was a sea of silent, simmering tension. Eleanor Vance's department was a fortress of quiet diligence, churning out thick, data-rich analyses with a grim determination. Mark Jennings was a blur of motion, striding between meetings, his voice a low, urgent hum of networking and political maneuvering. They were playing the game as they understood it.
Leo, in contrast, did nothing. He managed his team, optimized their workflows, and waited. He had planted a seed of sophisticated fiction in the highest echelons of the company; now he needed to see if it would sprout.
The first sign came not as an email or a call, but as a subtle shift in the corporate atmosphere. A junior VP from the finance division, a man Leo had never met, walked past his glass-walled office and gave him a long, appraising look. A few hours later, he overheard two senior analysts from another department whispering by the coffee machine. The only words he caught were "predictive intelligence" and "Zhang's new model."
His lie was growing. It had escaped the lab and was now breeding in the wild.
His rivals felt the shift, too. Eleanor, the purist, saw Leo's rumored project as a dangerous gimmick. In a team meeting, she scoffed, "Flashy buzzwords don't replace sound data. We will win by providing the most accurate, unimpeachable analysis." She doubled down on her strategy, demanding an even higher volume of reports from her beleaguered team. She was trying to fight a mirage with a mountain of paper.
Mark Jennings, the politician, reacted with more alarm. He recognized the power of a compelling narrative and saw that Leo had just created one he couldn't easily counter. In his meetings with executives, he tried to subtly undermine the PMO concept, calling it "highly theoretical" and "unproven." But without any data to back up his critique, he sounded less like a savvy strategist and more like a jealous rival. He was trying to fight a new idea with old politics.
The decisive move came on Wednesday afternoon. A single, stark email appeared in Leo's inbox. The sender was Arthur Harrison. The message contained only a room number—the GM's private conference room—and a time: fifteen minutes from now.
When Leo entered, Harrison was there, along with the CFO and the VP of Strategy. The three most powerful men in the division. His fictional PMO report was displayed on the main screen. There was no friendly preamble. This was an interrogation.
"Mr. Zhang," Harrison began, his voice like stones grinding together. "Your 'Predictive Market Opportunity' report is… ambitious. It claims a level of predictive accuracy that our multi-million dollar data science division has struggled for years to achieve. Explain the methodology."
This was the ultimate test of the Data Mirage. A lie is fragile, but a sufficiently complex lie, presented with absolute confidence, can be indistinguishable from the truth. Calm Mind (MAX) engaged, turning the immense pressure of the room into a cool, calm ether.
"The methodology is a hybrid," Leo explained, his voice a calm, steady instrument. "It moves beyond traditional regression analysis, which is reactive, and incorporates principles of game theory and economic modeling to treat market players as rational, and occasionally irrational, actors. We don't just track what the market has done; we model what it will do in response to shifting variables."
He proceeded to walk them through a flawless, intricate, and completely fabricated explanation of his model. He used real terminology in novel ways, constructed plausible but imaginary case studies, and answered their sharp, probing questions with a confidence that bordered on arrogance. He wasn't just defending a report; he was selling them a new religion, and he was its sole prophet.
The CFO, a numbers man to his core, was skeptical. "This is all theoretical. Where's the proof?"
"The proof is in the back-testing," Leo countered smoothly, gesturing to the appendix of his report—the section Ben had meticulously, and unknowingly, built on a foundation of pure fiction. "The PMO model, when applied retroactively to the last five years of market data, correctly predicts every major market shift with an 87% accuracy rate. It would have warned us about the OmniCorp collapse six months before it happened."
That was the masterstroke. He had linked his new, imaginary weapon to a real, painful, and expensive failure. He wasn't just offering them a tool; he was offering them insurance against their own past mistakes.
A long silence filled the room. Arthur Harrison stared at Leo, his old, wise eyes unreadable. He wasn't looking at the data anymore. He was looking at the man. He saw a manager who, in the midst of a brutal competition, had not just worked harder, but had attempted to redefine the very nature of the work itself. Whether the PMO was real or not was almost secondary. The ambition and the strategic thinking behind it were undeniable.
"Very well, Mr. Zhang," Harrison said finally, a note of something that sounded like approval in his voice. "I am authorizing a preliminary, exploratory budget for your PMO initiative. I want to see a full, forward-looking projection for the next fiscal year on my desk in one month. Don't disappoint me."
The meeting was over.
The news of the GM's official endorsement of Leo's project spread through the upper floors like a shockwave. It was a public declaration of favor. That evening, the first official KPI leaderboard for the Death Match was released. On it, Eleanor Vance was in second place, her score high due to sheer volume. Mark Jennings was a distant third.
And so, on the first official leaderboard of the KPI Death Match, Leo Zhang was not just in first place; he was in a category of his own. He hadn't just joined the race—he had rewritten the rules, built his own finish line, and declared himself the winner. The only question now was whether his rivals would be foolish enough to challenge his new reality.