It didn't take him long to figure out what they were going to do. It was self evident as he trudged his way along the over lit fluorescent path towards his bosses office with a toady in tow. The only question that he was left was was why. For the last five years, ever since receiving his rarely exercised diploma in Music from some little known liberal arts school, he had been into work everyday at 8:30am. Well, except for that week that he was out sick with bronchitis, but he, as a noble gesture, took that without pay. When everyone else was up and leaving to go to some start up company downtown, he stayed and accepted that he was going to be passed over, as he watched less able but more qualified (they had business degrees) co-workers climb over him.

It wasn't that he had any illusions that he was the hardest of workers. Hell, he knew he wasn't, but he did knew that he was a rock. When work needed to get done, like the report on the Rothman account for the quarterly management retreat, he got it done. Phil took the credit for it, and got promoted for that matter, but he wrote it and got it done. He didn't work late nights, or take it home with him. He wasn't so worried about getting it done that he jumped right into it when he got to work. He took his time, read the New York Times, chatted with some people around the coffee machine first, and compared ties and Oxford shirts with whomever happened to be there. But he got it done. In the capitalistic system, there are those who rise to the top and lead, and there are those who through lack of will or ability are content at the bottom. So be it.

He still didn't know why he was on his death march.

He waited for a minute at the elevator while it plummeted up, or down, to his floor. A glance reveled that his escort was less comfortable than he was, and that somehow made him happy. He knew where he was going, but he wasn't supposed to. It was a cruel corporate trick. Don't tell the fool that he's gone until he is. He'd played by those rules seeing others getting fired without saying a word to them. It was the way to get by without being noticed. The way to collect his paycheck and move on. But something changed. There was now a game to play.

"Very exciting about what's happening isn't it?"

"Uh... what's that?"

"You know, the merger that we're handling. I can tell you what part of that project I want to be on." Watch the pig sweat.

"Yeah... sure. Well... you never can tell, can you?"

The elevator door opened with a crisp electronic 'ding!' and the man to his left breathed a sigh of relief as a cold rush of air whipped out of the shaft. A smile crossed his face and he stepped into the elevator, and, for a moment, he saw that there wasn't an elevator and that he wasn't stepping into anything but an empty shaft. And while his consciousness slipped from his body while the corporeal part fell he almost laughed out loud, thinking only about what a legal mess something like that would make for the company trying to fire him. If he strained his non-existent eyes, he could almost see his body hitting the bottom of the shaft with nothing more than a loud thud.

The elevator 'dinged!' its arrival to the forty-second floor and the doors' opening woke him up. He and his shadow continued his death march along the wall watching the people maneuver inside their miniscule cattle-stall like cubicles.

His shadow, in an act of last minute decency, opened the big man's door, and he entered without even a nod to make it easier on the man who, like him only a few months before, was only doing his job.