The office around Ryan was beginning to thin out as the digital clock drifted past five o'clock, the usual hurried clatter of keyboards giving way to the soft rustle of coats being pulled from ergonomic chair backs. As he reached blindly to the side of his monitor to reposition his mouse, his knuckles grazed a small, foreign ridge of plastic protruding from the multi-port USB hub clamped to his laminate desktop. Frowning, Ryan leaned in under the harsh fluorescent glare and pulled his hand back: a blank, unmarked matte-black flash drive was slotted firmly into a port that had been utterly vacant when he returned from his brief respite by the finance pod.
Heart thumping a familiar, anxious rhythm against his ribs, Ryan bypassed his main corporate network and plugged the mystery drive into an isolated offline partition of his laptop, double-clicking the single spreadsheet icon that materialized on his desktop. The file, innocuously titled Catering_Log_Q3.xlsx, opened to reveal an exhaustive, itemized ledger of every single team lunch he and his fourth-floor marketing colleagues had charged to company cards over the past six months—down to the exact timestamps of a sandwich run at the ground-floor food court or a shared team coffee order. There was no grand conspiracy of industrial infrastructure here, no six-figure phantom asset allocation, only a meticulous, invasive cataloging of his most mundane midday habits, arranged in a way that made every routine wrap and flat white look like a calculated administrative infraction.