Arjun did not tell anyone what he had noticed.
Silence came easily because there was nothing he could say that would survive being spoken aloud. Any attempt to explain it would turn into speculation the moment it left his mouth, and speculation was something the system dismissed without effort.
The next morning, Shailesh name was already being spoken in the past tense.
At the coffee machine, someone said, "When Shailesh was handling this account, things were slower."
Another replied, "Yes, but now we are doing it differently."
No one asked whether differently was better. The conversation shifted to deadlines and deliverables before the machine finished brewing.
Arjun attended the reassignment meeting at eleven. It lasted twelve minutes. One slide listed deliverables. Another listed owners. Every responsibility had a name beside it, except the absence itself. Shailesh had not been replaced. His work had simply been divided into smaller pieces and redistributed among people who already had full plates.
After the meeting, Arjun received an email.
He was asked to temporarily oversee one of Shailesh former portfolios. Temporary was the word people used when they wanted permanence without acknowledging it.
That evening, Arjun met Nikhil for tea.
They had joined the company within months of each other and once believed that competence was enough to survive. Nikhil had left two years earlier, officially due to burnout. He had chosen that word carefully, as if it were a diagnosis rather than an accusation.
Nikhil looked thinner now. Not ill, just diminished, as though parts of him had been worn down and not replaced.
They talked about harmless things at first. Rent. Traffic. How the city felt louder after the pandemic. Eventually, as it always did, the conversation drifted back to work.
"I heard about Shailesh," Nikhil said, stirring his tea. "That place eats people."
"It eats certain people," Arjun replied.
Nikhil smiled faintly. "You are starting to sound like me, right before I quit."
Arjun hesitated, then asked, "Why did you really leave? Not the version you told human resources."
Nikhil kept stirring his tea long after it went cold. When he finally spoke, his voice was steady.
"I realized the pressure I felt was not random. It came in waves. Predictable ones. Every time I questioned a decision that made no sense, my workload changed. My meetings changed. Expectations shifted, but nobody ever explained why. After a while, it felt like I was failing at a job whose rules kept moving."
"Did you complain?" Arjun asked.
"Once," Nikhil said. "There was a compliance review. Everything was legal. Everything was polite. They thanked me for the feedback, and then nothing happened. Except I stopped sleeping."
Arjun did not write anything down that night. He did not create timelines or diagrams. He simply let the details stay with him.
Over the following week, he began noticing smaller things. A senior leader missing a critical meeting after being scheduled into overlapping ones. A junior employee promoted just before a policy change that favored her profile. A public apology released at the exact moment outrage peaked, not a minute sooner.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing illegal.
Shreya noticed the change in him before he acknowledged it himself.
"You are quieter," she said one night while brushing her teeth. "Not tired. Just distracted."
He told her about Shailesh. About the metric change. About the cases he had quietly found. He spoke carefully, as if he were asking a question rather than making a claim.
She listened without interrupting. When he finished, she nodded slowly.
"You are describing systems behaving rationally," she said. "People are variables. Stress is input. Outcomes are output."
"That does not make it acceptable," Arjun said.
"No," she agreed. "But it makes it scalable."
That night, Arjun dreamed of meetings that never ended and decisions that had already been made before he entered the room.
When he woke up, the same thought returned.
If this was deliberate, someone was being very careful.
And if it was not, then the world was far more dangerous than he had ever been taught to believe.
Nothing illegal had happened.
That was what unsettled him most.