By the time they caught her up she was in the Incentive Room and had already decided on the target coordinates and given the command. Out the tall, broad window, the great laser cannon could be seen where it was mounted to the surface of this artificial moon known as The Platform. It swivelled slowly as it tracked the surface of Corianna far below and found its target, and the quietly exhilarated crowd of executives behind the grunting and growling Trieste watched with performed impassivity as the huge cannon began to glow. A long moment of rising tension stretched, and then came a blinding pulse of orange light which winked out just as quickly as it had flashed to life.

Down below, far below and far beyond the range at which the human eye might be able to see the effect of this blast, a seventy-story residential building and the thousand people within disappeared in a mist of incinerated plastics and steel and concrete and human flesh. The few survivors in the street outside the building were badly burned by the radiated heat and choked by the infernal, stinking miasma. All of this, of course, was inaudible and invisible to the to Trieste and her executive team twenty-thousand kilometres overhead except for the monitor affixed to the wall which relayed these horrific sights and sounds in tinny, pixelated miniature.

A light flashed on the panel in front of Trieste:

She bellowed again and turned to her subordinates.

— I AM YOUR CEO.

— Yes, Director.

— YOU WILL OBEY ME AS YOUR MASTER.

— Yes, Director.

— YOU WILL OBEY ME AS YOUR GOD.

— Yes, Director.

— Good. Inform the junior management on surface that we will perform one Incentive every day until production reaches expectations.

— Yes, Dir—

— Enough. Go.

The executives nodded and began to file silently from the room, but one hung back as Trieste spoke her name.

— Proctor. I will be in my chambers. Send me a concubine, I want something to fuck.

Proctor nodded.

— Yes, Director.