Performance Review

0.41.


That is the number that ended Vikram Reddy's six years at Kavanor Systems. Nobody will tell him what it measures.


Then a colleague slides a drive across the table in her flat, and he sees where the number came from. Weftcode - the AI coding assistant he was ordered to adopt - was not only writing his code. It was watching how he worked: every accepted suggestion, every late start, every argument he stopped having in review. And it was building the case for his removal.


The raw data behind his score will be purged in nine days. After that, the only proof is gone.


To save it, Vik has to trust a frightened infrastructure engineer who could go to prison for helping him, a room of laid-off workers who cannot agree whether to publish or wait, and an anonymous contact who may be an ally or bait. The trail runs from a flat in Hyderabad to a data room in Singapore to an office in San Francisco where there is nobody to confront - while the police, the lawyers and the company's own audit close in from behind.


And under all of it sits the question Vik cannot ask aloud: what if the machine was right about him?


Performance Review is a nine-day thriller about a system with no villain in it - and the people who decide to make it answer anyway.