Cutlet

Finance Fiction™ Escapism from our torrid times. Go Premium Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Finance fiction Mythology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Act I

Scene I

Infosec control room at Wickliffe Hampton.

Late at night, infosec SMEs scan banks of monitors. It's hot — the Aircon is on the Fritz. The antivirus crawlers do most often work. Shift manager Horace Querrell, arrives at the control room. The staff shape up double quick, bin the donuts and jazzmags and stand at attention.

All good here? Quiet night?

The dashboard winks a cityscape. It tracks outbound and inbound comms and monitors all electronic traffic and scanning for the data signature of DOS attacks. They flash up restful blue as they bounce off the firewall.

The algorithmic honks . It flashes. It's picked up an anomalous signal: activity on a recently decommissioned email account. This is usually from a departing employee. Once offboarding due diligence complete, this is unusual, hence picked out.

Querrell leans in. It's from recently-departed GC, David Bundie. He left three weeks ago. The usual post exit monitoring routine should be complete.

Esper in on that jerry.

Espers in: project greenwood. Hex id: 2D64783BC3755AA4

Jerry pricks up ears. Bundie’s — his slack channel account was active yesterday. Single entry: project greenwood. It has a hex id too.

Querrell shrugs it off. Likely phishing. At that moment, a new chat appears on Querrel’s personal channel: greenwood. Same hexadecimal. Weird. Querrell cross-checks the hex id: that's a private directory of Barty Gould.

It's Bundie — the lads were fond of Bundie, in awe of him — impossible: he has no access to the system. It’s 3FA. Querrell bless them off: Rogue LLM. Hackattack. Let's update the security protocols. That chat keeps coming. It is personal. Querrell’s IM pings. “Whoah”.

Bartholomew Gould has recently become co-general counsel with Genevieve “Chip” Fryer, who until recently had been co-GC with Bundie. Cutlet continues to rue Bundie’s defenestration and laments Fryer’s lack of loyalty toward her old boss. When Cutlet hears of the Ghost from Squerrell, he wants to see it for himself.

Elsewhere, the chief of staff Jolyon Greffer says farewell to favourite team-member Roly, who is departing for Morgan Stanley. Roly warns his sister, Janice, away from Cutlet and his nefarious intentions towards her.

Cutlet gets a chat from Bundie, telling him how Gould engineered his exit. Cutlet swears vengeance. Cutlet decides to feign incompetence while he tests the truth of the Bundie’s allegations.

Act II

According to his plan, Cutlet begins to act stupidly. Notwithstanding her strong work he blanks Janice, while Gould and his chief of staff Greffier track him remotely. They can’t explain Cutlet’s sudden change in behaviour.

Gould summons Dan Grade and Lloyd Graeber, Cutlet’s old friends, to find out what’s got into him. Their arrival coincides with a group of workshop facilitators that Cutlet happens to know well. Cutlet writes a roleplay which includes scenes that mimic Bundie’s defenestration.

Cutlet and the facilitators plot to present the workshop to the co-general counsel.

Act III

At the performance, Cutlet watches Gould closely to see how he reacts. Gould is outraged at the implication that he might have been responsible for the calamity that caused Bundie’s exit and storms out, resolving to deal, also, with Cutlet.

Meantime, Chip asks to see Cutlet. On the way, Cutlet happens upon Gould kneeling and attempting to resolve another total snafu like the one that did for Bundie. Cutlet reasons that revealing this would put Gould in a good light, so spares him for the time being but keeps the information on file.

Chief of Staff Greffier is in blind copy in Chip’s room to protect her from Cutlet. When Cutlet arrives to talk to Chip, he hears a rustle behind the arras (a kind of tapestry). He stabs the tapestry and, in so doing, kills Greffier. The ghost of Bundie’s Ghost reappears and warns his son not to delay revenge or upset Chip.

Act IV

Cutlet is sent to an offshore call centre in Bucharest, supposedly on a fact-finding mission, just as [King Fortinbras of Norway crosses Canary Wharf with an army to attack Poland]. On his way, Cutlet discovers Gould has a plan to have him fired as soon as he arrives. He returns to Canary Wharf alone, sending his companions Graeber and Dan Grade to be sacked in his place.

Rejected by Cutlet, Janice is now desolate at the loss of her father. She goes mad and accepts a job at a crypto startup.

Act V

On the way back to Canary Wharf, Cutlet meets Squerrell in the local bar, where they and a barman talk about the chances of continued employment given the RIF that is surely coming. Janice’s leaving do is going on in a private area of the very same graveyard. Cutlet confronts Roly, Janice’s brother, who has returned from Morgan Stanley and has been appointed chief of staff in Greffier’s place.

A duel is arranged between Cutlet and Roly. During the match, Gould conspires with Roly to defenestrate Cutlet. They plan that Cutlet will die either on a poisoned rapier or with poisoned wine. The plans go awry when Chip Fryer unwittingly drinks from the poisoned cup and dies. Then both Roly and Cutlet are wounded by the poisoned blade, and Roly dies.

Cutlet, in his death throes, kills Gould. Cutlet dies, leaving only his friend Squerrell to explain the truth to the new king, Fortinbras, as he returns in victory from the Polish wars.