I stood at the podium.
Under white lights—too white.
The kind that didn't flatter. The kind that revealed.
There were more than a hundred people in the room: management in the front, the project team in the middle, and spectators in the back, here for the entertainment.
I could feel the eyes.
Curious.
Assessing.
And—quietly—rooting for the moment I slip.
On the screen: "Q3 Risk Control Model Optimization Pilot Plan."
My name beneath it.
And beneath my name, the label they'd already decided to use:
New PhD hire.
From academia.
Heard her papers were… mystical.
Whispers traveled under the air conditioner's steady hum.
I wiped my palm against the seam of my suit pants.
Sweat.
Cold.
My heart ran fast—not because I couldn't finish, but because I knew what this was.
This wasn't a routine onboarding update.
This was arranged.
By Wang Fan.
She sat dead center.
Thin. Pale. Makeup immaculate.
Her nails were so dark they looked like they'd just been dipped in blood.
She watched me with a shallow smile.
Not encouragement.
A stage direction.
Go on. Perform.
"Start," she said—casual as ordering lunch.
I nodded and drew a breath.
"Good afternoon. I was Liu Ke—"
Three words.
She cut in.
"Wait."
She didn't even lift her head. She just raised one hand.
"IT. Turn off the speaker notes."
I froze.
IT froze too.
"Huh? Director Wang, you mean—"
"Turn it off." She looked up at me at last, smile intact. "New hires shouldn't lean on scripts."
The projector flickered.
The notes panel on the right vanished—clean, surgical.
All that remained was a single slide deck with raw tables.
Letters stacked in columns.
Numbers buried in rows.
Cold as headstones.
Someone in the back took a careful breath.
"Last time she did this, she broke that professor from Tsinghua."
"I heard the woman walked out crying."
"Never spoke in another meeting again."
"This girl's finished."
"So young… she won't hold."
A small laugh escaped—then got strangled by two polite coughs.
Wang Fan leaned back, her head slightly tilted.
Relaxed.
Almost bored.
"PhDs were good at memorizing, aren't they?" she said, turning the knife slowly. "Why don't you recite your model for us?"
This time the laughter didn't bother hiding.
Real laughter. Performative laughter. That thin, obedient heh that people used to show they were on the right side.
Phones came out.
Thumbs hovered, ready to catch the crash on camera.
My hand jerked around the laser pointer.
A sharp twitch.
Like ice water poured down my spine.
My throat tightened.
The words almost slipped out—
Could we turn the notes back on…
Half a syllable away.
But one thought stayed clean and brutal:
She did this on purpose.
Not to "teach the newcomer a lesson."
To set a trap.
Three minutes.
A countdown started in my head.
If I lost control within three minutes, I'd become a joke—the PhD hire who melted on Day One.
And from today onward, I'd wear a label I couldn't peel off:
Fraud.
Academic ornament.
Only capable with a script.
Too soft for pressure.
I could already see it: my first pitch ruined, my name stamped into hallway gossip.
If I wanted to stay here—if I wanted to survive in this industry—
I couldn't be her punchline.
I lifted my eyes to the screen of dead numbers.
My brain moved fast.
The structure I'd prepared—module by module, scenario by scenario—
was useless now.
Without the notes, the spine had snapped.
So I changed routes.
I rolled the laser pointer in my hand until my finger locked on the button.
"Fine," I said. "Then I'll start with the data."
My own voice surprised me.
Colder than I'd planned.
Not the humble, careful tone of a newcomer.
More like a lab voice—observing a result.
Wang Fan's brow rose by a fraction.
"Look," I said. The red dot landed on the first column. "This was the sample pool composition in the previous version."
"Forget the model for a moment. Let's talk about this table."
And I began.
Everything I'd planned to save for later, I dragged forward.
Sample split.
Variable selection.
Cleaning rules.
I cracked the formula open and pinned it to the slide like a specimen.
"Assumption one: if it holds, this column should look like this."
"But it doesn't. It looks like this."
"Why? Because the samples aren't clean."
Heads started to lift.
Phones stopped moving.
I paused.
On purpose.
Not because I'd forgotten—because I needed time.
One second.
Two.
In those two seconds, I looked straight at Wang Fan.
She said nothing.
Just tapped the tabletop lightly with a fingertip.
Soft tapping. Slow rhythm.
Her gaze was clinical.
I kept going.
I used the pause like oxygen.
"So," I said, "I did two things in the new model."
"First, I removed this block of samples entirely."
"Second, I pulled out variables you've been ignoring by default—and tested them separately."
I spoke as I marked up the screen.
The laser pointer became chalk, circling blocks of numbers.
It was an electronic slide.
But in my head, it turned into a blackboard.
"This variable was weighted 0.2 in the old model."
"But connect it to this column and you'll see—"
I turned and went to the whiteboard.
Denominator.
Numerator.
Parentheses.
Transformations.
A chain of formulas landed clean and sharp.
Someone in the back muttered, "holy—" under their breath.
Not at me.
At the math.
"Don't look at the equations," I said, still facing the board. "Look at the result."
I wrote the final number and circled it hard.
"The old model says it was positively correlated."
"I used the same data, followed a different derivation path, and it becomes—negatively correlated."
When the words fell, the air changed.
A tiny pause.
Real. Measurable.
Someone shifted.
Plastic scraped faintly against the floor.
The chairman picked up the papers in front of him and turned a page.
A small movement.
Under those dead-white lights, it became a spotlight.
My heart still ran fast.
But it wasn't chaotic anymore.
Fast like problem-solving.
Familiar.
Steady.
I kept going.
Second block of data.
"What you just saw was sample-level drift."
"Now let's look at what you care about most—final risk exposure."
I tapped the column everyone watched.
Project outcomes. Bonuses. Performance ratings.
All tied to that number.
"The old model's risk exposure was this."
I paused.
"The new model…"
I read out the other number, slowly.
"Don't dismiss it as 'small,'" I said. "It's real."
"The previous number was pretty."
"But it wasn't stability. It was self-deception."
As soon as I said it, I heard how hard it landed.
New hires weren't supposed to talk like that.
But I was already on the edge.
One step back and I would've gone face-down—her personal doormat.
So I didn't step back.
I moved through every derivation, deliberately slowing.
Not because I was afraid of being wrong—
because I had to walk the process in my head as I spoke.
I couldn't make a mistake.
Not even a decimal.
The laser pointer went numb in my hand.
Joints stiff.
Fingertips cold.
By the third key formula, I stopped again.
On purpose.
And met Wang Fan's eyes.
Wang Fan let out a small laugh.
Not loud.
It slipped out, then cut off halfway.
Her lips still curved, but her eyes cooled first.
"Your hand was shaking," she said.
Casual. Like a weather report.
But the line landed perfectly.
Every gaze snapped to my right hand.
For a split second, I couldn't breathe.
And for half a second, I almost smelled it—
that damp, moldy stench of an elementary school bathroom—
then I shoved it back down.
I didn't look at her.
Didn't look at anyone.
I looked at my hand.
It was shaking.
Small. Controlled.
A tremor leaking through bone.
I angled the pointer down.
Pressed the barrel into my palm, my finger locked on the button.
From the audience's angle, it looked like a fist.
Shake or not—no one could tell.
"Yeah." I lifted my head back to the screen. "Doesn't change the math."
Of everything I said that day, that sentence was the only one with a blade.
For one heartbeat, the room went dead.
Like someone hit pause.
I used that second.
So the conclusion was—
I read the final three results, one by one.
"One was the risk interval from the original model."
"One was the result if we follow the old logic but recompute correctly."
"And one was the interval from the rebuilt model."
"You don't have to believe the third," I said, flat. "But you should know this: between the first two, one of them was lying to you."
I turned off the laser pointer.
Set it on the edge of the podium.
"That's my adjustment approach for the current model."
"That concludes my update."
My voice dropped.
The air conditioner kept humming.
The projector kept whirring.
Someone almost clapped—then caught themselves.
No applause.
No immediate rejection, either.
Just a heavy, unfamiliar quiet—
as if the whole room was running the same calculation:
Did the newcomer crash?
Or had she stepped on a line she wasn't supposed to touch?
I felt faces tighten in the back rows.
A leader in the front leaned forward slightly.
Wang Fan didn't speak.
She only tapped the tabletop slowly with her fingertip.
Once.
Twice.
Her face held none of the earlier amusement.
For the first time, she wasn't fully relaxed against the chair.
She sat up.
And the silence rang in my ears.
Every gaze turned to Wang Fan.
Her finger stopped.
She parted her lips—
like she was about to deliver the verdict.
"New hire—"
Two words.
Then a pen clicked onto the table in the front row.
"Hold on."
Not loud.
But it flattened the air.
The chairman didn't look at me.
He looked at the three results on the screen.
"Why did the old model produce a 'pretty' number?"
Then he lifted his eyes—to Wang Fan.
"Today we're not discussing whether the newcomer used notes."
"We're discussing the reporting standard."
"Director Wang—who set that standard?"
"And why was the gap so large after recomputation?"
Wang Fan didn't answer at once.
For the first time, she didn't tap a third time.
The chairman turned to me.
"Liu Keying. Send the recomputation steps, the cleaning rules, and the differences between the two standards to the project team tonight."
"Tomorrow, 9:30 a.m.—twenty minutes. Rerun it with your version."
I nodded.
"Okay."
The chairman stood.
"That's it."
Chairs scraped.
Laptops snapped shut.
I thought it was finally over.
Someone in the back exhaled softly.
No laughter in that breath anymore.
Wang Fan leaned back, slowly.
No smile.
One word only:
"Fine."
Quiet.
But it sounded like she'd bitten her teeth to pieces and swallowed them.