Knock, knock, knock. A sharp rap on the door jolted Nick from his thoughts.
"Come in!" He closed the telemetry folder he was reviewing and took a quick sip of water.
Calloway walked in, the rhythmic click of her high heels echoing across the hardwood floor. "Mr. Harryson!"
"What's the word?" Nick asked, looking up from his desk.
Calloway handed him a neat stack of folders. "These are the latest regional logistics contracts that need your executive sign-off. Also, a massive wave of national media outlets has hit our press inbox again, all requesting exclusive sit-downs with you and a tour of the campus."
Nick took the folders, scanned the sticky notes on the covers, and casually tossed them onto the growing stack of paperwork dominating his desk. Looking back up at her, he asked, "How many outlets are we talking about?"
Calloway nodded emphatically. "Thirty or forty major networks and tech blogs already. Tyler over in corporate operations thinks you should actually take a few of these interviews. He says a high-profile media sprint would do wonders for our brand equity and help sustain the Prime Day retail momentum."
Nick smiled, stood up from his leather chair, and gave his arms a long stretch. "I'm staying behind the curtain. Let the PR reps down in marketing handle the talking points."
He paused, thinking it over for a moment before adding, "Though, if they're driving all the way down here, we can't just give them a generic corporate presentation. Have the PR team coordinate with the lab leads and the security compliance office. We can open up a few of the non-classified hardware testing bays for a structured media tour. It's a solid opportunity to showcase our engineering infrastructure and market leverage, so tell them to script the walkthrough carefully."
"Understood!" Calloway nodded, quickly jotting down a note on her tablet.
Checking his watch, Nick started walking toward the door, calling back to Calloway as she fell into step beside him, "I'm heading down to the automation lab. If any urgent operational flags pop up, just have Kacy ping my earpiece."
"Will do," Calloway replied, forcing a polite professional smile while a wave of quiet frustration washed over her.
She knew exactly how hard she'd had to hustle to land this assistant gig in the executive suite; she'd only secured the role because her former department head, Sarah, had given her a glowing internal recommendation to Nick. Because of that, she worked herself to the bone to stay ahead of the curve, desperately wanting to prove her utility to a founder who was actually younger than she was.
But the moment she actually started the job, she realized the reality of the position was nothing like she had envisioned—or rather, it defied every conventional corporate template.
The CEO technically already had a primary assistant, and her name was Kacy—the custom neural network Nick had engineered himself. Unlike the standard voice models cluttering consumer electronics shelves, Nick's personal iteration of Kacy was profoundly sophisticated and unnervingly human.
Because of this, the AI seamlessly managed the absolute core of the founder's daily routine. Everything that was traditionally supposed to be her administrative domain—calendar triage, email sorting, data routing—had been completely automated by Kacy, effectively reducing her to a physical runner. Aside from organizing the physical office space and making sure the executive lounge was stocked with fresh coffee and water, she rarely had any high-level tasks to execute.
Yet, despite the light workload, half the headcount in the corporate building still envied her slot. First and foremost, she was embedded right next to the boss—the most famous young tech founder in the country. Working directly with Nick Harryson was the kind of dream gig that local business grads and tech recruits talked about constantly.
Ever since she'd moved up to the executive suite, her internal standing among the staff had surged dramatically, turning her into a lightning rod for workplace gossip whenever she grabbed lunch with her friends from HR or accounting.
Her colleagues loved to corner her and pry for personal details—asking what Nick was really like behind closed doors, what his hobbies were, or what kind of girls he noticed.
But she couldn't give them a single scrap of insight. Her friends assumed she was just being an incredibly disciplined corporate vault, but the honest, embarrassing truth was that she simply didn't know.
The only window she'd ever had to observe the founder outside of a strict office setting was during those chaotic negotiation sprints down in Miami. Between those intense travel days and her routine hours outside his office, she had come to realize that Nick's actual personal life was incredibly spartan. His entire existence was a predictable loop: he was either burying himself in legal contracts, sat through grueling corporate strategy meetings, or sprinted to the R&D wing the exact second his schedule cleared up.
It was obvious the founder only felt truly at peace when he was locked in the development lab; he ran there every single chance he got. Calloway had walked the corridors of the experimental wing before, but she had never once been cleared to step past the threshold of an active testing bay.
The entire company was perpetually obsessed with what went on behind those secure doors, and the tech forums were constantly churning out wild rumors about the black-budget hardware platforms being engineered inside.
Tons of outside vendors and corporate tech scouts, driven by either sheer curiosity or blatant corporate espionage, would routinely try to smooth-talk the administrative staff into dropping details about the interior layout.
But even within Militech's own payroll, the percentage of employees cleared to access the experimental building or scan through the biometrics on the upper research floors was incredibly small.
The entire R&D facility was locked down like a fortress by the massive, ex-military contractors running the security department. Forget a corporate spy—even a stray fly would have a miserable time trying to bypass the multi-layered biometric checkpoints and proximity sensors.
Then there was the internal data compliance office, which had been spun up only a few months ago but had already evolved into a total nightmare for the corporate staff. The compliance officers were an incredibly intense, unsmiling crew. The second Calloway was confirmed for the assistant role, she had been hauled into a windowless conference room by data security for a four-hour brief on operational security protocols and corporate espionage counters.
A few days into her tenure, the compliance team had even run a surprise audit on her desk workspace. They had sternly flagged multiple minor file-storage discrepancies, demanding immediate, non-negotiable fixes with zero room for professional pushback.
And she wasn't an isolated target; rumors floated around the water coolers that half the marketing department had received formal warnings after a recent digital audit. Word was even Tyler, the co-founder and CFO, had been forced to clear his schedule for a half-day security compliance seminar alongside every departmental director in the building.
Given that the R&D wing housed the company's entire intellectual property crown jewels, it naturally drew the absolute highest concentration of compliance scrutiny. Unless you were a senior systems engineer on the specific project line, getting past the glass doors was a non-starter. Even when external contractors were brought in for hardware maintenance, they were flanked by armed security escorts and locked into narrow corridors, with a strict zero-tolerance policy for wandering eyes.
So, hearing Nick casually greenlight a partial lab tour for a bunch of national tech journalists caught her completely off guard.
Of course, remembering how calculated his follow-up instructions had been, she realized those "open areas" would be heavily sanitized, carefully staged media backdrops rather than any actual active research space.
Outside of his engineering milestones, the boss's daily footprint was remarkably quiet. He was dropped off at the executive entrance by his personal security driver every morning and left the campus long past midnight, completely bypassing the local nightlife or corporate social circles.
As his core logistics team, she and Ryan crossed paths constantly throughout the workweek. But while Ryan maintained a relaxed, casual demeanor when joking around with the staff, the security lead became terrifyingly intense the absolute second Nick's schedule or physical safety was involved. Because of that rigid boundary, she'd never been able to leverage their casual morning chats into any real insight regarding her boss.
The one question she actually wanted answered—the exact same detail that fascinated the female engineers on the third floor and every lifestyle blogger tracking his wealth—was whether Nick Harryson actually had a personal life or a girlfriend.
Based on every metric she'd tracked during her months outside his office door, the seat was entirely vacant. Honestly, what sane person would willingly sign up to date a absolute tech-obsessed workaholic?
But as she watched his retreating figure fade down the brightly lit corridor, she had to admit that his monomaniacal focus was exactly why the tech world was so completely mesmerized by him.
Slick, curated influencer faces were a dime a dozen in modern corporate marketing, but a truly brilliant, generational mind was a statistical anomaly.
Wasn't the founder's most magnetic quality that raw, unadulterated intelligence? More than that, Nick wasn't a bad-looking guy by any stretch—he had clean, sharp features, a lean athletic build, and a quiet, commanding eloquence when he chose to speak. If he actually put thirty minutes of effort into a wardrobe upgrade, he could easily clear the bar of any high-profile media star.
Unfortunately, every ounce of Nick's cognitive battery was dedicated to system architecture and circuit designs, leaving him with an absolute indifference to his personal style. Whether it came to his choice of casual tees or his daily grooming routine, he was entirely basic, looking far less polished than the hungry college interns who had just cleared orientation.
From an analytical standpoint, it was clear the founder was single. But as Calloway tracked his shadow disappearing around the corner of the elevator bank, she couldn't help but wonder what kind of mind it would actually take to capture Nick Harryson's attention.