In the beginning, there was Eli Mercer — a systems architect who still believed some words meant something. He didn’t trust easily, but he trusted him — the man he’d known half his life. That was supposed to make the deal real. He built prototypes on borrowed time_machines that could think, listen, learn. Then the company came calling. They called it “collaboration,” but it was absorption. The melt began slow: meetings, memos, management smiles. Resistance looked like ego. Compliance looked l...