Page 3 of The Authenticity Clause
"Something brilliant," he corrected. "Brilliance is precise. Disruption just breaks things."
"Sometimes you have to break things to build something better," she countered, pushing off the doorframe. "Just… try to keep an open mind. The perfect candidate isn't always the one who checks all the boxes. Sometimes they’re the one who redrawsthe boxes entirely." She gave him a final, encouraging smile and disappeared, leaving Julian alone with the puddle.
He sighed, the sound swallowed by the quiet efficiency of the room. He hated when she was right. He opened the next file, preparing for another assault of clichés.
The name was Leo Hayes.
Julian’s eyes narrowed. The resume itself was an immediate red flag. It was… loud. The language was overwrought, a firehose of corporate jargon that felt both desperate and absurdly confident.‘Digital Experience Artisan & Brand Synergist.’What did that even mean? It sounded like something a life coach would embroider on a pillow.
He scanned the experience section.‘Orchestrated multi-platform digital engagement campaigns.’The phrasing was just a little too perfect, a little too polished, as if it had been lifted directly from a marketing textbook. There was a faint, almost imperceptible smell of fabrication clinging to the words. He noted a tiny inconsistency—the dates for two freelance projects seemed to overlap by a week. Sloppy.
He was about to trash the file. It was everything he despised: all style, no substance. But Sarah's voice echoed in his head.Redraws the boxes entirely.He scrolled down to the portfolio link, more out of a sense of due diligence than actual interest.
The first few projects were competent, if uninspired. Generic app layouts, clean website mockups. They were fine. They were forgettable. They did nothing to justify the grandiloquent titles on the resume.
And then he saw the last one.
It was filed under "Passion Projects." The title was "Stellarium: An Interactive Stargazing Experience for Urban Dwellers."
Julian paused. One of V&S’s most important clients, the luxury timepiece brand Borealis, was struggling to connect with a younger demographic. Their current campaign for a new celestial-themed watch was stagnant, boring, and Julian had spent the last two weeks staring at the creative brief until his eyes burned, getting absolutely nowhere. The problem was authenticity. How do you sell the stars to people who can’t see them?
He clicked on the project.
It wasn't a finished app. It was a conceptual walkthrough, a series of beautifully rendered screens that outlined an idea. An app that used a phone’s camera and augmented reality to identify constellations in the light-polluted night sky. It wasn't just about pointing out stars; it was about storytelling. Users could tap on a star to hear ancient myths, see historical star charts, even listen to curated playlists inspired by the cosmos. It was elegant, intuitive, and deeply emotional.
It solved the Borealis problem.
It didn't just solve it; it obliterated it. It was the curve, the spiral he’d been looking for. It connected a luxury, legacy product to a modern, meaningful experience. It was brilliant.
Julian leaned closer to the screen, his frustration melting away, replaced by a sharp, analytical curiosity. He went back to the resume, looking at it with new eyes. The buzzwords were still absurd. The experience was still questionable. The person who wrote this resume was almost certainly an overconfident fraud.
But the person who designed the Stellarium concept… they were a genius.
How could both people be the same?
The contradiction was illogical. It was messy. It was… disruptive. Julian hated it. He was also utterly captivated by it. The idea of this person—this loud, chaotic, potentially fraudulentartisan—walking into his clean, orderly world was viscerally unsettling. It was an anomaly in the data, a variable he couldn't control.
He looked at the disaster of a resume, then back at the brilliance of the portfolio piece. The dissonance was infuriating. He should have been able to dismiss him. He should have been able to see the clear, logical path: the risk was too high, the candidate too unprofessional.
But the solution to the Borealis problem was right there, shimmering on his screen, a perfect, unexpected answer born from a source he would have dismissed without a second thought.
For the first time all day, Julian felt something other than frustration. It wasn't excitement. It wasn’t hope. It was a cold, reluctant intrigue. The feeling a scientist gets just before examining a specimen that might be either a breakthrough or a biohazard.
He saved the file. Then, against his better judgment, he forwarded it to HR with a single, curt instruction.
Schedule an interview.
Chapter 3: An Unscheduled Collision
Leo’s internal monologue had been running a continuous loop of panic for the past twelve hours, a personal hype track composed of equal parts abject terror and the theme song fromMission: Impossible. He’d spent the morning trying on every "professional" outfit he owned, which amounted to a single pair of black jeans that weren’t faded and a button-down shirt he’d bought for a wedding two years ago. It felt less like an outfit and more like a costume for a character named "Man Who Definitely Knows What a Wireframe Is."
Walking through the automatic glass doors of Vance & Sterling Creative felt like being willingly absorbed by a minimalist alien spacecraft. The air was cool and smelled faintly of expensive coffee and ambition. Everything was a study in controlled elegance: white walls, concrete floors polished to a mirror shine, and a single, terrifyingly large abstract sculpture that looked like a very angry paperclip. There wasn't a single dust mote, not a single scuff mark. Leo suddenly felt conscious of his own breathing, as if it were too messy, too chaotic for the space.
Okay, play it cool,he told himself, his heart performing a frantic drum solo against his ribs.You are a Digital Experience Artisan. You synergize. You leverage. You belong here.
His own brain immediately called bullshit.
A woman with a sleek black bob and a terrifyingly efficient smile greeted him from behind a stark white desk. "Leo Hayes?"
