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Section 1
### Chapter 1: Prologue Icarus
“His waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And, melting, heavens conspired his overthrow.” Christopher Marlowe Oh God. Lana Zacanissian, Times Magazine Woman of the Year 2030, Forbes top 40 , never knew that breathing water induced the sensation of wholesale immolation. At first, she was calm because she was not a woman prone to panic. A woman prone to panic would not have made it as the CFO of an AI Conglomerate, overseeing a market cap of a trillion greenback dollars. When, after a minute of holding her breath and watching the light of her yacht fall away, she began to panic. Oh God. Oh God. The air in her lungs rebelled. Her capillaries had already exhausted their oxygen and were now reflexively expelling the murderous carbon dioxide. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. What did I do? What did I do to deserve this? She was swallowing water now. Her belly grew distended, far heavier than the bottles of champagne her assailants had stowed in her coat pocket. From somewhere far out in the bay, where a green light pulsed, her palatial Santa Monica manor winked at her. The IPO made money, hadn’t it? She made them all the money. More money than ever existed in banknotes. Sure, the mum-and-pop investors will lose most of their savings, but she created value for the company. EXPONENTIAL value. She was the philosopher who had transmuted air into gold, blood into life. She— She realised, after the panic gave way to exhaustion, that her oxygen-starved brain was dying. Lana Zacanissian, corporate bedfellow to the billionaire industrialists of the early 21st century, slowly drifted below the bay of her dreams. All she could recall was the vitriol on the faces of those who had forced her overboard. “Do you believe in karma, Miss Zacanissian?” That was the last thing her aide, Emily, had said. Even in the end, the very end, Lana had scoffed at these wage slaves. She had scoffed at their cheap suits, pencil skirts, and knock-off Mini Kellies from China with their off-colour hues. She had not believed that they would do it. That the company would allow it to happen. Hadn’t she made them all rich?
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