The blog post was a firestorm. By morning, it was the only thing the tech world was talking about. My phone, which I’d left on silent, was a vibrating brick of notifications. Axiom’s head of public relations, a sharp-eyed woman named Katherine, had assembled a war room by 6 AM.
“We have draft responses ready for deployment,” she said, pointing to a screen filled with corporate-speak statements. “We’ll deny everything, threaten legal action for defamation, and start seeding positive counter-narratives through our media channels. We can have this contained by noon.”
Marcus, who was standing by the window of his penthouse office overlooking the city, just listened. He hadn’t said a word, waiting for me.
I looked at the screen, at the carefully crafted non-denials and legal threats. It was
