Chapter 4: What Dax Fenn Drinks Before Mentoring

The room they put us in before the mentorship session has seventeen lights.

I count them because the alternative is sitting with my hands on my knees in a broadcast-optimized chair listening to Soren Ashby make small talk with a production assistant who is professionally pretending she cannot see either of us, and counting lights is something I can do without generating engagement data. Probably. I am still learning what generates engagement data. The implant's integration period ended somewhere around hour nineteen, which means I have had approximately four hours of direct-feed awareness and I already want to saw the thing out of my skull with something non-sterile.

Not a performance. A fact. The implant converts everything into metrics in the bottom edge of my peripheral vision and the metrics are relentless and granular and I cannot turn the display off because the option to turn the display off is nested inside a settings submenu that requires a verified account password I do not have yet because APEX's onboarding sequence generates the password via a confirmation message sent to the neural feed, which cannot receive confirmation messages until the settings submenu is accessible, which requires the password. I have stopped trying. The number sits in my lower right visual field like a scar.