Chapter 4

Joseph signed a paper before he said, “Whatever, you can be as paranoid as you want, just try to show a little restraint. We wouldn’t want a second crazy person showing up at every family meeting.”
“Don’t worry, man. I’m not gonna...” Nikolai grinned before he heard something lightly tap the door behind him. Without warning to his brother or the person who was about to enter the room, he kicked the chair he was sitting in over and screeched, “I’d kick your a*s if we weren’t at work!!” This caused a certain amount of confusion to pass over Joseph’s expression before he noticed the intern at the door. She gasped at Prince Faust’s sudden outburst and attempted to retreat through the door behind her.
Nikolai augmented his outburst so that everyone in the hall would hear what they would assume was the ending of a protracted argument. Luckily for everyone involved, Joseph figured out what was going on and said with a surprisingly well executed edge in his voice, “I’m sorry you had to hear my brother’s outburst. He was just leaving.” This statement could also undoubtedly be heard by the waiting ears of eavesdroppers now that the sound-proof door was closed.
“Yeah, sorry,” Nikolai nearly spat the last word out. As he left he had to suppress the sudden urge to wink at Joseph, just to make sure they were on the same page. However, Nikolai could not risk breaking character when everyone in the office was watching their little act.
Living with a fiancée who had a penchant for dramatic exits, he had perfected the art of walking out of a room angrily. With tight shoulders and straight knees, Nikolai passed by Joseph’s young secretary. She kept her wide eyes on the Chief Financial Officer as he turned the corner out of his brother’s office. In fact, he could hear the conspiratorial murmurings of gossip expand outward from the epicenter that was the vice-CEO’s office. “Did you hear that?” one asked. “I didn’t know the Volkov boys had a such a strained relationship,” another one stated. “The CFO shouldn’t have such behaviors,” the group leader weighed in. The gossip seemed to spread faster than Nikolai could walk; by the time he had reached his office, his bodyguard was looking at him with disapproval.
“Politics,” he shot only one word at Damien to explain all the rumors as he walked into his office. Everything was going to plan and Nikolai was feeling pretty good about how things were going until he noticed the giant pile of papers arranged neatly in his “In” box. Paper after paper of useless bureaucratic garbage were waiting to be signed by the young, and bored, CFO. With a groan, he sat in his faux-leather executive chair and got to work.
Nikolai had noted with annoyance the antediluvian way the executives of the Volkov group had to do paperwork on his first day. He was sixteen years old with the frightfully sinecure job of “Overseer of Warehouse 15.” The few years he had spent between private tutors and standardized tests, Nikolai had always written his papers on an app he had downloaded directly to his bracelet. However, this was changed when he showed up at warehouse 15 and noticed the “In” and “Out” cardboard boxes sitting on top of his desk. Regarding this, Nikolai’s dad only said that this was the most secure way of doing things because anything done digitally could be traced. He eventually heard from his older brother Joseph that all of the upper management did this due to their father’s extreme paranoia.
Half an hour and about fifty signatures later, Nikolai noticed something that piqued his interest. Between completely unremarkable budget reports and stock portfolios was a notice that a bundle of government bonds had just been returned to one of the many bank accounts associated with the Volkov group. A quick check on his bracelet yielded that exactly 20,175,550 credits had just been anonymously placed in their Floor 104 bank account. Nikolai also noticed that whoever had sent the notification recommended that all the money be sent to holdings where it would be nontaxable. The print-out was written on recycled-cellulose paper in heavily stylized font that made it very difficult to read. However, with a title like, “Twenty million credits to be moved,” Nikolai took the extra time it took to read it.
He picked the paper off his desk and walked out of his office with his eyes fixated on all the zeroes. When Nikolai left the room, he found that the same conspiratorial murmurings still permeated the crowded hallways. Osiris was looking through a thick stack of papers which was absolutely filled with military jargon when the CFO popped up with an italicized document brandished.
“Hey, Damien,” Nikolai started with his customary flippant attitude, “do you know who sent this paper?”
“No,” the bodyguard looked legitimately annoyed that his work had just been disturbed. “Most of your papers were sent by people from the financial division.”
A little annoyance seemed to eek into Nikolai’s expression when he said, “I’m in charge of the financial division… of course most of my papers would be from the there.” He slapped the paper onto his bodyguard’s desk and used his fountain pen to write instructions for whomever sent the notification.

First of all, this should have been declared as a “very important” document, so I would have known to return it as fast as possible. The STS can and will audit us any time they want, and if they found that we had twenty million untaxed credits, they would indict the entire financial department faster than you could say “tax fraud.” Move as many credits to secure accounts as possible and burn what you can’t move.
Nikolai Volkov

Before the ink even had a chance to dry, Nikolai folded the piece of paper four times and wrote his initials on the back of it. “Okay, I need you to bring this to the financial department as fast as possible,” the urgency was evident in his voice and Damien Osiris picked up on this.
“Who should I give it to?” the bodyguard/secretary took the folded piece of paper from Nikolai’s hand.
“I don’t know,” Nikolai said this in exasperation. “Just say, ‘Letter for the person that sent the CFO a document about the deposited bonds,’ or something. I mean, anyone who’s stupid enough to do something like this has to stand out.”
“Okay,” a confused Damien Osiris said before leaving for the elevator. After this incident where something as important as a notification of twenty million credits was placed in the same stack as budget requests, Nikolai decided to pay more attention to what was placed on his desk. He walked back into his top floor office and sat back down next to the colossal pile of stationary cluttering his desk. Nikolai did not move from this position where his back was arched and his fountain pen was poised above a document until about twelve-thirty when a small alarm on his bracelet notified him that his one hour lunch break had just started.
Apart from the one time when Nikolai had accidentally signed his name as “Nikolai Faust,” there were no other events of any particular importance to occur before he stepped into the executive elevator and ordered it down to the twentieth floor of the building. The Volkov Building was designed in a way that made it obvious that the higher floors were more important than the lower floors. The CEO’s office and other highly classified rooms were placed on the hundredth floor, very important meeting rooms like the Deaves Room was located on the ninety-ninth floor, the vice-CEO’s office was located on the ninety-eighth floor, and the offices of the other top-tier executives had offices between the ninety-fifth and ninety-seventh floors. Nikolai’s office was located on the ninety-sixth floor, so the journey down to the gym took him a long time. When the Volkov Building was built half a century ago the builders wanted to stress the point that employee health was important to them, but not as important as the basic functions of the business. Because of PR concerns, the gym was built on the twentieth floor despite the fact that it would be easier to build it on ground level.
When Nikolai reached the floor that was dedicated entirely to fitness, he noted the watercoolers, white tiles, and healthy vending machines with a small amount of functionalist loathing. As the CFO, he knew exactly how much it cost to run the twentieth floor every month (about three million credits) and he also knew that the gym earned exactly zero credits for the business. Nikolai liked to think that if he was in charge, the twentieth floor would be turned into offices and the money saved would be used to raise the wages of every person employed by the Volkov Group so they could afford to use a gym on their own time. Despite Nikolai’s anger toward the twentieth floor, he still used the gym because he thought that he might as well make the most of a bad investment.
He looked remarkably out of place in his heavy overcoat and suit surrounded by a bunch of people dressed in athletic clothes. Granted, everyone who knew Nikolai also knew of his peculiar style of dress, but some employees in the PR and R&D departments didn’t pay enough attention to the executives of the Volkov Group to know what their CFO looked like. Evidence of this fact was shown by all the weird looks Nikolai got when he walked by the cardio room.
The men’s locker room was located exactly three meters away from the women’s locker room. In fact, Nikolai knew that the builders of the building took a great amount of care in making sure that the male and female amenities received equal funding. However, in hindsight this decision to be completely equal led to some bad design choices and a gender neutral decor. Nikolai, even with his color blindness, could still tell that the locker room was filled with soft colors and boring designs. Locker number 444 was located at the very end of the dressing room and it was permanently rented out by the Chief Financial Officer. Most employees would not be able to attain clearance for their own locker, but Nikolai was an exception. When he opened his locker, he saw a pure black pair of shorts and a dark T-shirt. Both of these clothing items were made out of a specific polymer that allowed for ease of movement, and they were in Nikolai’s favorite color.
Temporarily removing his overcoat, Nikolai felt both a feeling of relief and dread. Relief that he could take off the heavy kevlar jacket and dread that he was no longer protected by it. The overcoat landed inside locker 444 with a deep thud and the CFO rotated one of his shoulders with a loud crack. “Maybe he has a point. That thing is heavy,” Nikolai murmured to himself as he removed his suit jacket and tie. He quickly stripped down all the way to his boxer shorts and dressed himself in a black ensemble of exercise attire. Every piece of clothing from his shirt to his shoes were changed to a kind of attire that promoted ease of movement. Once in the new clothes, Nikolai checked his bracelet for the time; it was 12:40. This would allow him exactly forty minutes before he had to return to the locker room to change back into his business outfit. After starting his trek to the exercise equipment, Nikolai stopped at a water cooler and filled a paper cup with water. He then pressed a button on the bottom of his bracelet and a brown nutrition tablet shot out into his hand. With the help of the water in the paper cup, he swallowed the nutrition tablet before disposing of the cup in a nearby trash can.
His exercise routine started out with a two kilometer jog on one of the treadmills; this took exactly ten minutes and twenty-five seconds to complete. It interested Nikolai that the portion of the gym he was working out in was surprisingly devoid of people. The only people nearby were a rather uptight intern he was pretty sure worked for his brother and a man near the corner who was bench pressing a fifty pound weight. This man was relatively young but still older than Nikolai; he had the face of a twenty-five year old, but the demeanor of someone much older. For some reason, this man seemed to interest the next Faust.
After switching from the treadmill to a leg-press device which was set to one hundred twenty kilograms, Nikolai decided to really examine the exercise room. It struck him that there was an icon of a “C” with a vertical dash straight through its middle; this was the universal symbol for money on the Goliath. With sudden insight and a small amount of self-deprecating laughter, Nikolai realized that the room he was in was so empty because it was for the use of the financial department. He was sure that the PR department exercise room was absolutely filled with self-conscious salespeople and paralegals while this exercise room was empty because the nerds of the financial department couldn’t care less about fitness. Well, Nikolai figured that the emptiness of the exercise room was actually a good sign because it meant that his people were working so hard that they didn’t have time to exercise. A thought came unbidden to his mind, this is why you aren’t in personal relations.
Upon further introspection, Nikolai realized that most of his thoughts and opinions were a bit abnormal in comparison to the books on ethics he had been forced to read under one of his tutors. Most people would probably have thought that it was bad that other people weren’t meeting their daily quota of exercise and thus lowering their lifespans. Nikolai didn’t think that because he was more of an “ends justify the means” sort of guy. He figured that a slightly lower lifespan was worth it if it meant a better quality of life. It would probably be better to live for fifty years as a manager than eighty years as a secretary.