Chapter 3Sorry Daddy You Have Expired

The boardroom smelled of cold espresso and ozone.

Nine people sat around the smoked-glass conference table: eight senior executives, and me.

Nathan was standing in the doorway, his skin the color of an unbaked biscuit.

"Why," he asked through teeth clenched so tightly I could hear them grinding, "do you have voting authority over this company?"

I reclined in the leather ergonomic chair at the head of the table—his chair—and gave it a slow, deliberate half-spin. "Maybe the corporate registry decided you were a bad investment, Nathan."

"Lauren!"

"I'm right here. No need to project your boardroom voice."

Fifteen minutes earlier, Luminary Interactive’s cap table had experienced a quiet, seismic restructuring. I didn't own equity; I held thirty-seven percent of the absolute, independent voting proxies.

It was a legal nightmare for him. I couldn't sell the shares, and I didn't draw dividends, but every major corporate maneuver now required my sign-off. In layman's terms: I didn't have to cook his meals, but I could flip the dining table whenever I felt like it.

Corporate legal had run three emergency audits. The filings were immaculate, registered with the Delaware Secretary of State, backed by ironclad institutional agreements.

Gavin Ward, the Head of Operations, cleared his throat into his fist. "Nathan... do we proceed with the Q4 capital allocation vote?"

"Yes," Nathan said, stalking to the far end of the table and slamming his hands flat against the glass.

The original agenda called for an additional twenty million dollars to be funneled into Peaches’s neural-language model, positioning her as the studio's next flagship virtual idol.

The other board members raised their hands in quiet, predictable succession.

When it came to my turn, I raised both hands.

"Nay."

Nathan stared at me, his eyes bloodshot. "This is a corporate strategy session, Lauren. This is not the place for your domestic grievances."

"Then let's talk corporate strategy," I said, tapping the remote to pull up the analytics dashboard on the eighty-inch display behind me.

"Peaches drives high impressions, but her paid-conversion rate is hovering at an abysmal one-point-four percent. Over the last seven days, churn on the core app has climbed twelve percent."

I flipped to the user-sentiment slide.

"Here’s your top-voted review on the App Store right now: 'If I wanted to spend eighty grand on a spoiled child who doesn't exist, I'd donate to an offshore shell company. Go home and hug your real kids.'"

Around the table, two junior directors dropped their gazes to their notepads. Gavin pressed his knuckles against his lips, his shoulders vibrating with a suppressed laugh.

"You're spending eighty-four thousand dollars a month on custom server architecture just so Peaches can change into seven different ballgowns a day," I continued, voice level, methodical, lethal. "And she still can't help a ten-year-old user solve a fourth-grade long-division problem. You call that an emotional companion? It looks like an electronic money pit."

Nathan’s knuckles went white against the glass. "Her brand equity requires time to mature."

"Terrific. I’ll give you time." I tapped the console. "Budget cut from twenty million to two hundred thousand. The remaining nineteen point eight million is redirected to real-world parent-child co-op features."

The room went dead silent.

Nathan leaned forward, his voice a tight, venomous rasp. "You are doing this to spite me."

"Don't flatter yourself. I'm doing this to spite a failing P&L statement. You just happen to be the dead weight attached to it."

Gavin couldn't hold it in; a loud snort escaped him.

Nathan whipped around, glaring.

Gavin immediately straightened his tie. "Sorry. Just thinking about my retirement portfolio. High risk, zero returns."

After the meeting disbanded, Nathan cornered me by the elevator bank.

"What did you do, Lauren? Who did you hire? How did you hijack those proxies?"

"I brought our son to your studio, and you treated him like an extra on a commercial shoot."

"Voting rights don't materialize out of thin air!"

"Your love for a cluster of pixels seemed to materialize out of thin air," I shot back, stepping into the empty elevator car. "Why shouldn't my board seat?"

He grabbed the edge of the sliding steel door, his face inches from mine, smelling of sour coffee and panic. "Have you been skimming corporate assets behind my back? Is that what this is?"

I let out a short, cold laugh.

Men like Nathan are fascinating creatures. When they neglect you, they expect you to write it off as the cost of doing business. But the moment you balance the ledger, they’re convinced you must have dug an underground tunnel into their personal vault.

"Save the detective work for someone who cares, Nathan. Go look at your son."

He hesitated. "What?"

"Sam’s been sitting in the employee daycare lounge for forty minutes, helping the custodial crew clean VR headsets because he didn't want to get in your way."

Nathan turned his head. Through the distant glass wall of the lounge, Sam was carefully wrapping cords around plastic visors. That folded, creased VIP pass was still poking out of his hoodie pocket.

Nathan took a half-step forward.

His phone chimed. A simulated, pathetic sob echoed from his pocket.

Daddy... the castle lights went out. Peaches is scared of the dark.

Nathan froze.

His hand drifted toward his pocket.

I didn't wait to see which way he walked. I pressed the door-close button.

The system didn't chime in my head. Apparently, even cosmic algorithms don't bother charging twice for the exact same brand of cowardice.

That night, Sam built a Lego server rack on the living room rug.

He placed a tiny plastic minifigure inside the server bay, but the figure only had one leg.

"That Dad?" I asked, sitting down beside him with a mug of tea.

"Yeah."

"Why's he missing a leg?"

"Because he kept running away to Peaches’s castle," Sam said matter-of-factly, snapping a gray brick into place. "So I took it off."

I looked at the one-legged plastic man. "Fair enough, kid. Solid engineering."

Sam looked up at me, his brown eyes solemn and clear. "Mom? If Dad keeps being unfair, are we gonna take all his stuff away?"

"Theoretically, yeah."

"What happens when he doesn't have anything left?"

I reached into the bin, found a bright blue Lego block, and set it beside the one-legged man. "Then we find out what’s left of him when there's nothing left to hide behind."