After work, Leo followed Dave to his office.
Dave sat behind his desk. He didn't beat around the bush, just sighed and turned his computer monitor toward Leo.
On the screen was an email from "Daily Grinding Catering Group - Atlantic Region - Human Resources Department."
"Subject: Guidance on Maintaining Brand Image Uniformity and Proactively Mitigating Potential Public Relations Risks"
"Body: To all branch managers, to ensure our company's brand maintains a consistently positive and neutral image in the current complex and volatile public opinion environment, headquarters advises all levels of management to proactively review store employees. Please closely monitor and evaluate any employees who may present a risk of 'value misalignment.' To achieve forward-thinking risk management, we recommend timely optimization of relevant positions to preserve team cohesion and brand security..."
Leo's eyes scanned the convoluted, jargon-filled sentences. He could even picture the kind of person who wrote this email.
A vice president of human resources in a sharp suit, probably making two hundred thousand dollars a year, whose life's creed was to reduce all living, breathing people to risks and returns on a balance sheet.
At the end of the email, there was a PDF attachment.
Dave moved the mouse and clicked it open.
The content of the PDF file was even more direct.
Inside were screenshots of several tweets. The very first one was the New Policy Ghost's tweet about the Omni Company.
His ID and his Roosevelt silhouette profile picture were precisely marked with a glaring red box.
It all made sense now.
"Leo," Dave's voice was full of exhaustion and helplessness. He couldn't even look Leo in the eye. "I'm just a branch manager. I've got a regional manager above me, and a regional director above him. My son has a dentist appointment next month, and you know, dental insurance doesn't cover everything. I have a mortgage to pay every month. I don't have a choice."
He didn't say the word "fired."
The word was too direct, too impersonal. He just pushed a white envelope from his side of the desk over to Leo.
"This is your pay for the month, plus an extra week's salary, as per company policy," Dave said.
Leo wasn't angry, nor did he argue.
In that instant, what he felt wasn't anger at being targeted by any one person, but a bone-chilling cold and a profound sense of the absurd.
He hadn't been fired by Dave; Dave was just the terminal executing the command. He hadn't even been fired by some invisible VP of HR.
"Take care, Dave." Leo picked up the nearly weightless envelope and walked out of the office.
He made his way through the back alley, melting into the Pittsburgh night.
This city, once world-famous for its steel, now had only the glass towers of banks and tech companies in its downtown, still glittering in the night sky.
The other, more numerous districts were submerged in a heavy, rust-like darkness, much like their forgotten glory.
Back in his apartment, which reeked of cheap coffee, Leo turned on the light.
He placed the envelope with his severance pay and the "Final Overdue Notice" from the Federal Student Aid Office side-by-side on his desk.
One from capital.
One from the government.
Despair washed over him like a tide.
Leo staggered to the cabinet and pulled out a half-empty bottle of cheap whiskey. He twisted off the cap and took a large swig straight from the bottle.
The harsh liquid burned his throat, but it couldn't ignite the slightest bit of warmth within him.
His gaze fell upon the yellowed Roosevelt poster on the wall.
In the picture, Roosevelt sat in a convertible, smiling and waving, his eyes filled with the unshakable confidence peculiar to that era.
In that moment, the alcohol and his long-suppressed anger detonated.
Leo grabbed the half-empty whiskey bottle and raised it high, the muscles in his arm knotting from the force.
He wanted to smash it against the wall, to shatter that damn, hopeful smile.
But at the last second, he stopped.
He summoned all his strength and let out a question, a desperate roar that spanned nearly a century.
He roared at the eternally confident smile on the poster:
"Do you see this?! This is the world you left behind! If you had just hung all those bankers and monopoly oligarchs on Wall Street back in your day, we wouldn't have all this bullshit today!"
His voice, cracking and tinged with sobs, echoed in the empty room.
As if drained of all strength by that one roar, his body went limp. A mixture of drunkenness and extreme exhaustion sent him collapsing to the floor.
The world began to spin, and his consciousness sank rapidly into a boundless darkness.
Just as he was about to lose consciousness completely...
A voice—one that didn't belong to this room, or this era; a steady, clear voice with the vintage quality of an old-time radio broadcast—rang out distinctly in the deepest recesses of his mind:
"Young man, hanging them won't solve the problem..."
...
Consciousness was forcibly dragged back, bit by bit, from a dark, viscous abyss.
Leo Wallace's first sensation was a headache.
His second was that the voice was still there.
It hadn't disappeared.
Just as he was struggling to distinguish the boundary between reality and illusion, the voice spoke again, finishing the sentence he had interrupted by passing out the night before.
"...but making them serve the people can."
The sentence instantly pierced through his hangover.
Leo shot up from the cold floor and looked around.
The apartment was empty. The whiskey bottle still lay beside him, and the Roosevelt poster still hung on the wall, wearing that damn, confident smile.
"Who's there?" he rasped. "Who's talking?"
Only the dead silence of the room answered him.
A primal fear seized him.
He scrambled to the door. It was deadbolted from the inside.
He rushed back to the desk, frantically shaking the mouse to wake the computer screen.
There were no remote connection alerts, and the firewall logs were clean.
He was the only one here.
"I thought my accent was rather standard, for Upstate New York," the voice sounded again, this time with a hint of an aristocratic tone. "Young man, your hospitality leaves something to be desired, though I admit I am an uninvited guest."
Leo's blood ran cold.
All his reason told him it was a hallucination—the result of stress, alcohol, debt, unemployment... a cruel fucking joke played on him by life.
But he couldn't explain the texture of the voice.
It was different from other auditory hallucinations. It had a direction, a physical presence.
The voice seemed to resonate in the very center of his skull, yet it was clearly separate from his own thoughts.
He could hear this voice as clearly as he could hear the car horns outside his window.
"Who the hell are you?!" he roared into the empty room, feeling like a complete madman.
"Someone who once sat in the Oval Office of the White House and steered this country for twelve years."
The voice replied, its tone perfectly calm.
"By the way, you also have my portrait hanging on your wall. Though I must say, the photographer made me look a bit too serious. I'm actually much more witty in person than I appear in that picture."
Leo's neck turned toward the wall, movement by jerky movement, like a rusted robot.
His gaze was fixed on the Roosevelt poster.
Sunlight hit the glass of the poster's frame from an odd angle, causing a slight distortion of light and shadow on the familiar, resolute face.
A chill shot up from the soles of his feet, straight up his spine, and to the crown of his head.
'He wasn't talking to a hallucination.
He wasn't talking to himself.
He was talking to a poster.
And the fucking poster was talking back.'
Leo's first reaction wasn't to scream. He bolted into the cramped bathroom, cranked open the faucet, and repeatedly splashed his face with icy tap water.
He looked up, staring at the face in the mirror: pale, with sunken eyes and a vacant gaze.
"Calm down, Leo," he told himself, his voice muffled as his teeth chattered. "It's just too much stress... unemployment... the loans... combined with the side effects of the alcohol. An acute psychotic break. Yeah, that's it."
'He needed help.
He needed modern science.
He needed a doctor in a white coat to tell him that he just needed to take some sedatives and get a good night's sleep.'
He made up his mind.
And at that exact moment, the voice in his head spoke slowly, in a tone of almost pitying amusement:
"My boy, if you think seeing a doctor will solve this problem, then by all means, go. There's no harm in it. Think of it as an after-dinner stroll."
This casual taunt shattered Leo's bubble of self-reassurance.
But it was also this sentence that solidified his resolve.
'He had to go.
He had to prove this voice was fake.
He had to completely exorcise this arrogant 'ghost' that had illegally trespassed into his mind.'