Page 7 of The Authenticity Clause
Julian Thorne stood there, holding a tablet. He was dressed in a perfectly fitted black sweater that made him look less like an employee and more like the CEO of Looking Incredibly Good in Knitwear. His gray eyes swept over Leo’s desk, pausing for a fraction of a second on the fox mug. An emotion Leo couldn't decipher flickered across his face before being replaced by his usual stoic neutrality.
"Hayes," he said, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through Leo’s chair. "Welcome." It didn't sound like a welcome. It sounded like a diagnosis.
"Good to be here," Leo said brightly.
Julian’s gaze was intense, analytical. "I have your first assignment. I need you to mock up a responsive wireframe for the Q3 Northwind landing page. Focus on optimizing the CTA funnel and integrating the new brand synergy directives. I’ve shared the asset library to your drive. Have it on my desk by EOD."
He said it all in one smooth, unbroken stream of corporate jargon. It was like being hit with a firehose of words Leo vaguely recognized but had no idea how to assemble into a coherent thought. CTA funnel? Synergy directives? Was that even English?
Leo’s mind was a flurry of panicked question marks, but he smiled a confident, professional smile. "You got it, boss. Consider it synergized."
Julian stared at him for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then, he gave a curt nod and walked away, his presence receding like a tide, leaving a tense silence in its wake.
Leo waited until he was out of earshot before turning to Maya, his eyes wide with panic. "I have no idea what any of that meant," he whispered frantically.
Maya just gave him a sympathetic smile. "Welcome to the thunderdome," she mouthed, before turning back to her screen.
The rest of the day was a masterclass in covert espionage. Under the guise of "getting acclimated," Leo embarked on a desperate quest for knowledge via Google’s incognito mode. He propped his phone up behind his sketchbook, furiously typing in phraseslike "what is a wireframe for dummies" and "CTA funnel not a literal funnel???"
The search results were a confusing mess of diagrams, technical articles, and acronyms that seemed to multiply with every click. A wireframe, he gathered, was a sort of blueprint for a website, all gray boxes and lines, focusing on structure rather than aesthetics. It was… boring. It was the antithesis of everything Leo loved about design.
The brand synergy directives were even worse—a fifty-page document filled with charts and mission statements about "leveraging dynamic paradigms" and "actualizing frictionless brand narratives." It was corporate poetry at its most baffling.
This is what they want?Leo thought, staring at a particularly bleak-looking wireframe example online.A bunch of gray boxes? But… where’s the wonder? Where’s the empathic resonance?
He thought of Julian’s cold, logical stare. This was his world. A world of rules, grids, and quantifiable results. But Leo’s brain didn’t work that way. It worked in colors, shapes, and feelings. Trying to force it into a gray box felt like trying to teach his fox mug how to do taxes.
So, he made a decision. A classic Leo Hayes decision. If he couldn't beat them with logic, he'd dazzle them with art.
He wouldn't give Julian a boring blueprint. He would show him the finished house, fully decorated. He ignored the wireframe tutorials and opened up the design software he actually knew how to use. He pulled the logos and images from the asset library and started to paint. He didn’t just mock up a landing page; he brought it to life. He created a flowing, dynamic layout, using a bold color palette he felt truly captured the "spirit" of the Northwind brand. He interpreted "CTA funnel" in themost artistic way possible, creating a beautiful, cascading visual element that guided the user's eye down the page towards the "Buy Now" button.
He worked with a feverish, focused energy, losing himself in the creative process. This was what he was good at. This was authentic. For the first time all day, he wasn't pretending. He was creating.
As five o'clock approached, he put the finishing touches on his masterpiece. He leaned back, a genuine smile spreading across his face. It wasn’t a wireframe. It was better. It was vibrant, it was intuitive, and it was undeniably beautiful. It was a bridge back to wonder, right here on a landing page for a company that sold high-end camping gear. He had taken their sterile, jargon-filled brief and made something with a soul.
He couldn't wait to see the look on Julian’s face.
With a surge of misplaced pride, he attached the finished file to an email, wrote "First Pass on Northwind Landing Page" in the subject line, and sent it off to Julian Thorne.
He leaned back in his chair, the ergonomic design now feeling less judgmental and more like a gentle hug. He’d done it. He’d survived his first day. More than survived, he’d thrived.
Julian was going to be so impressed.
Chapter 6: The Hypothesis of Soul
Julian Thorne believed in process. He believed in structure, in data, and in the clean, irrefutable logic of a well-executed plan. It was this belief that had allowed him to build a successful career, to manage complex projects, and to maintain a sense of order in a world that seemed hell-bent on chaos.
The file Leo Hayes had sent him was a monument to the world’s chaos.
He had opened the email at precisely 8:00 a.m., his morning coffee steaming at a perfect sixty-five degrees Celsius beside him. He had expected a disaster. He had, in fact, been looking forward to it. It would be simple, quantifiable proof that his initial assessment was correct, evidence he could present to Sarah to end this ridiculous thirty-day experiment ahead of schedule.
What loaded on his screen was not the disaster he had anticipated. It was a category of failure so spectacular, so profoundly and fundamentally wrong, that it looped past incompetence and landed somewhere in the realm of abstract art.
He had asked for a wireframe. A simple, grayscale blueprint. A set of architectural plans.
Leo had sent him a fully rendered, hyper-saturated, technicolor painting of a finished building, complete with landscaping, cheerful-looking tenants waving from the windows, and what appeared to be a small, illustrated squirrel holding a tiny acorn-shaped “buy now” button.
Julian stared at the screen for a full minute, his brain attempting to process the data. It was like asking for a schematic of a car engine and receiving a musical about the joys of driving. Every single instruction had been ignored. The grid structure was nonexistent. The call-to-action funnel wasn't a funnel; it was a whimsical, cascading waterfall of interactive elements. The brand synergy directives had been interpreted with the kind of creative liberty that suggested Leo had read the document, set it on fire, and then used the ashes to finger-paint.
