Bernie had always done his job so conscientiously… Since he'd joined this agency, about 10 years ago, he'd had a flawless, unblemished career. It's simple: he'd always been meticulous in his work. Every client was taken care of with the utmost care. Not to brag about it in meetings, but because, in his opinion, every client deserved service that lived up to what they paid for. No more, no less. The same went for the team-building weekends and after-work drinks with colleagues, which he didn't attend. Once he left his office, well, he left work behind. The time he had was for other pursuits. He no longer responded to messages or emails from colleagues who might have forgotten one last detail regarding a presentation or the updating of a client file. Not because of the right to reconnect, but because he cherished his little family, for whom he wanted to keep time, and even more so, secretly, his freedom. It was then radio silence.

So no, no overtime, but let's just say that his remarkable work, which had earned the agency he worked for the signing of some superb contracts throughout the past decade, had protected him for a while from gossip and exclusion. As long as the glory went to the agency director, everything was fine, but one day, Bernie's work in negotiating a multi-million contract no longer went unnoticed by the central office, and Bernie was given a promotion.

It was from this point on that things went wrong and the fear of being replaced became stronger than anything. Bernie, who was already the ugly duckling who kept to himself, became a real danger. Thus, after returning from a short vacation for a few days, he found a big mess in his files with aberrant or simply missing figures, which prevented him from following up with his clients and discredited him with them. Of course, he had tried to explain the situation to the director of the agency, that he had been the victim of a hack of his files, that this chaos in his files did not fit with his profile, etc., etc. But the latter remained stoic during this famous pre-dismissal interview, claiming without blinking that his work computer was protected by a confidential code that only Bernie knew and that all this bullshit had already caused the agency, with a capital “A”, to waste far too much time and money.

But Bernie knew he'd been the target of a conspiracy. He'd long felt the contemptuous, and now greedy and jealous stares of his colleagues on him, a man who stubbornly refused to socialize with them in favor of his personal life. Yes, personal !

Since finding himself unemployed, he'd transformed. He'd traded his impeccable suit and tie for pajamas and no longer ate organic products but whole packets of processed cakes. He would feverishly devoured them like a hamster all day long, scouring the dark web from morning to night in search of incriminating evidence...

Him, who had always refused short weekend getaways with colleagues, never interested in the least in these so-called humanist networks. Supposedly in the service of a greater cause, a cause they called spiritual or humanist, when nothing could justify being part of a big company like this apart from money or power. Yes, money. He clearly assumed it. He was there for the money. There to provide a beautiful living environment for his family, and that was it.

Now Bernie wandered around the house in his pajamas from morning to night. He didn't even check his emails, believing his address was booby-trapped anyway and that he was probably even being tapped. He tapped away at his computer, searching for ever more damning evidence of the conspiracy he had been the victim of, even though, of course, he was just a link in the infernal chain, a cog in this satanic system that seemed like paradise ! He ground his teeth at night in his sleep and muttered words under his breath that were often incomprehensible to his peers, even during meals.

Breathe. We had to relearn how to breathe when everything, everything in this world pushed us to act under duress to save our skin and to feel constantly anxious ; keeping us in this state of perpetual stress, in order to make us fear almost every minute for our survival. Mental suffocation. Stress of not, of never having... Enough to hold on. We had to relearn how to breathe when everything was uncertain, plunged as we were into a more or less voluntarily maintained vagueness and tensions and wars that Bernie and many others thought were entirely fabricated to keep us prisoners in a jail, gilded for a few privileged ones, and not for others.

Us, like good little ants who never anticipated too much, had taken care to save. So the stress of lack was not yet felt. But the atmosphere was becoming stifling because Bernie had just become a shadow of himself, absorbed by all these dark stories that he greedily fed on to fill the void of his disappointment. We no longer existed... Whether the Earth was flat or round, I didn't care, and neither did the children. I just needed to get some air, escape far from this cesspool, maybe even without Bernie...