38. Happy Birthday. You’re Fired.

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The dull uniform had never fit quite right, and its scratchy collar felt tight as a noose as Henry reread the email. He'd been fired. Not just fired—he was being sued for corporate espionage due to a whistleblower complaint he had just filed with human resources not even a half hour ago.

Henry had always liked numbers. They were clean, orderly, and predictable—and they never lied. He had only worked for Gobi a few short months before discovering an accounting anomaly during a routine audit. As a result, he'd spent the past weeks tracking down the very last of the missing ones and zeroes.

Thatwas precisely the problem; those missing ones and zeroes were dollars, and those dollars had been funneled into something that Henry, as an accountant, found to be genuinely unbearable: a liability. He knew full well that Gobi had been rumored to skirt the edges of legality in their efforts to streamline costs. He even hated them for it (among other things), but their ethics—or lack thereof—had decidedly concerned him less than their comprehensive employment offer. It even included housing. Henry had bills to pay—lots of them. He was dead broke after putting himself through school and had never had any family whatsoever to fall back on. He was on his own and always had been. Henry couldn't afford the privilege of being picky about where he took a job. And so he'd thrown himself at the opportunity.

And it hadn't been an easy choice, either—after all, Gobi had shaped his life from before birth in ways he constantly tried his best not to think about. They'd turned him into a freak, only for their foster system to unceremoniously toss him on his ass at 18, their research study apparently over. He scraped and scrapped his way through the next five years, tossing his morals out the door along the way to get himself here in this job. He'd come close to completely giving up many times. And now…

Fired.

He was stunned. It had happened so abruptly, and all because he'd performed his duty. After all, Congress had outlawed bioengineering research years prior, after a series of costly ecological disasters had nearly bankrupted the government. The company was putting itself at huge legal and financial risk by engaging in such a direct violation of the legislation. No matter how much their experiments in enhancing the Colorado gray wolf population might help on the battlefield in Taiwan, it was his duty to report it—so, report it he did. He tried to delude himself that it wasn't personal, but Gobi's dalliances with bioengineering research was a topic rather personal to him…

Two security guards, their uniforms the same drab color scheme as his, grabbed him from his office chair, lifting him roughly to his feet. Henry stood at 6'5 and weighed 250 pounds of solid muscle—muscle he'd not spent an hour of his life maintaining—but in his state of shock, they lifted him just the same.

"Hey!" Henry bellowed, instinctively considering violence. But they were each armed with menacing black shock batons. He flinched at the sight of them; one of his foster parents had loved shock batons.

"Ex-employees must be removed from the facility within ten minutes of termination," one of the guards said flatly through his augmented reality helmet. The two flanked him now and ushered him through the massive labyrinth of beige and gray cubicles. The florescent lighting overhead flickered a dismal gloom over everything.

"I didn't even get to pack up my desk," Henry protested, his deep voice cracking as he did so. It began to really sink in that he was doomed to miss yet another payment on his credit cards, and student loans—and he still owed his boyfriend for last month's rent. At this point, he was well on his way to the forced labor of a debtor prison. His mind trailed off in a spiral of dizzying worry and fear.

The tears fell hot and furious as the pair shoved him unceremoniously out the automatic glass doors and into the cold April drizzle. Henry became instantly drenched, his tears mixing in the rain. The flimsy fabric of the uniform he'd stuffed himself into, an XXL, did nothing to protect him—his teeth began to chatter almost immediately, the cold fabric sopping itself against him. His eyes were the only part of him that still burned.

He instinctively oriented himself to begin plodding through the flooded sidewalks toward the corporate housing he knew he'd just lost, on top of his job.

The putrid pink of Gobi's giant neon logo, covering the blocks-long facility he'd just emerged from, glinted sickly at him from various puddles underfoot as he fought the urge to sit down in one of them and give up. But then his thoughts went to his dog, Beans. If he did give up, the little blue heeler would feel much the same despair he had when he'd been abandoned at the age of four by a woman he could no longer picture clearly in his mind. That sad thought kept him trudging along.

Henry found that as he grew numb, he could delude himself into a tiny bit of excitement over the prospect of downing an entire bottle of synth wine, cuddling up with Beans to watch some trashy, generative-content reality television for the rest of the evening.

After all, it was his 25th birthday.