By 8:15 AM on Tuesday, Zahrah is on her second cup of coffee, staring at the administrative log on her screen like a hawk hunting chicks.
She was very grateful now for all the tech courses Daddy kept buying her on Udemy when she was still job hunting, and he was trying to make a tech sis out of her. She would feel so lost now without all that knowledge. The IP address from the midnight heist was internal. It mapped directly to the office’s local area network, meaning whoever copied her Content Process Framework had done so either directly from the building or via the company’s secure remote server.
“Morning, Zee. Why do you look like you’re on the warpath?”
Zahrah looks up to see Kunle, the lead graphic designer, leaning against her cubicle wall. He’s holding a pack of biscuits and a coffee cup, looking entirely too relaxed for someone who operates on tight deadlines.
“Morning, Kunle,” Zahrah says, casually dragging a blank spreadsheet window over the system logs. “Just auditing the new request system. Did the creative team have any issues linking their design queues to it yesterday?”
“Oh, the new framework? Pure gold,” Kunle says, taking out one biscuit to munch. “The guys love it. No more frantic Slack messages at 5:00 PM asking for ‘quick edits.’ It’s seamless. Honestly, if Mark doesn’t give you a massive raise for this, we strike.”
“From your mouth to God’s ears,” Zahrah chuckles, but her eyes narrow slightly as Kunle walks away. He seemed genuinely enthusiastic. If he was the thief, he was either an Oscar-worthy actor or entirely clueless.
Her phone buzzes on the desk. It’s the ‘Young and Wealthy’ group chat.
CHINWE: Girls! It worked! The artisan agreed to the plan; she even apologised this morning, surprisingly. First batch delivery is locked for this weekend! EUNICE: Don't let her breathe until the dispatch rider is at your gate; before stories will pop up again. TOLA: Glad to hear this, babe. This is why you shouldn’t do business, or life alone.
Zahrah smiles, typing out a quick string of celebratory emojis. At least one fire was successfully contained. Now, back to her own war zone.
She pulls up the system log again. To trace the duplicate workspace, she needs to find the exact user node that initiated the export. She opens the shared credential access history. Only four people had the master login details: herself, Kunle, Cynthia a new copywriter, and…
“Zahrah, my office. Now,” Mark’s voice booms from the hallway.
Zahrah freezes. She looks at the clock. It’s 9:00 AM. She grabs her tablet, smooths down her trousers, and walks toward the boardroom, her stomach doing slow, anxious flips.
When she enters, Mark isn’t alone. Sitting to his left is Cynthia, the copywriter who was brought in last month, and who everyone already knows is very ambitious. On the glass table sits a printed deck, and the layout on the cover page looks identical to Zahrah’s structural workflow map.
“Zahrah, take a seat,” Mark says, his tone completely different from yesterday’s appreciative warmth. It is cold and flat.
Zahrah sits down, her heart hammering against her ribs. She looks at Cynthia, who is staring straight ahead, her hands folded neatly over what appears to be a designer handbag.
“Cynthia came to my office at 8:30 this morning,” Mark begins, leaning forward. “She presented a highly optimised campaign rollout structure for our upcoming luxury collection. It utilises an automated pipeline that cuts turnaround time down to twenty-four hours.”
Mark slides the printed deck across the table toward Zahrah. “What concerns me, Zahrah, is that this framework is identical to the one you pitched to me yesterday morning. The same webhook structure. The same approval tiers.”
Zahrah looks at the document. It isn’t just a similar idea; it is a literal clone of her architecture, rebranded with Cynthia’s name on the header.
“Mark,” Zahrah says, keeping her voice incredibly level despite the roaring in her ears. “This is my framework. I built this over the weekend and gave you the live demonstration yesterday.”
“That’s interesting, Zahrah,” Cynthia interrupts, turning to face her with a sympathetic, patronising smile. “Because I actually deployed this exact system three days ago for a freelance consulting client of mine. I have the timestamped workspace creation log right here on my phone.”
Cynthia places her phone on the table, displaying a workspace dashboard created on Saturday at 11:14 PM, way before Zahrah’s meeting with Mark.
Mark looks from Cynthia’s phone back to Zahrah. “Zahrah, I respect initiative, but I do not tolerate intellectual theft within my team. If you copied Cynthia’s architecture from the shared creative drive, we have a massive compliance issue.”
The silence in the room is loud. Cynthia looks entirely victorious, a subtle, smug twitch at the corner of her lips.
Zahrah stares at the phone screen, unable to look at Mark because she really doesn’t know how to prove that this is her idea.
Then suddenly, she gets it. Her anxiety vanishes, replaced by a cold, sharp clarity. She realises exactly what Cynthia did and the fatal technical mistake she made in doing so.
“Cynthia,” Zahrah says softly, leaning forward. “You said you created this workspace on Saturday night for a freelance client?”
“Yes,” Cynthia says defensively. “The timestamps don’t lie, Zahrah. Check the workspace creation date.”
“They don’t,” Zahrah agrees, a small smile slowly warming her face. She turns her tablet toward Mark. “Mark, Cynthia is right about one thing. She did create that freelance workspace container on Saturday night. But she left it completely empty.”
Zahrah taps her tablet screen, bringing up the master administrative log she was auditing earlier.
“Because the company account uses our office router, it assigns a unique static IP address to each physical desk. Look closely at the backend version history for that workspace.”
Cynthia forgot one basic rule of cloud architecture: you can create an empty folder on Saturday, but the platform logs the exact network server time for every single asset pasted into it.
Zahrah points to a highlighted row in the metadata.
“This log shows that my proprietary Content Process framework layout was cloned and imported into Cynthia’s folder at exactly 11:42 PM last night, Monday evening. And the server metadata confirms the data payload came directly from the device registered to Node 4B.” Zahrah looks directly at Cynthia. “Which happens to be your cubicle desk, Cynthia. You stayed late last night to copy my live pipeline data using our shared administrative login, didn’t you?”
Cynthia’s expression turns fearful. Her mouth opens slightly, but no sound comes out. She looks at the tablet screen, then at Mark, whose eyes have narrowed into dangerous slits.
Mark looks at the metadata log, reading the network server stamp:
Asset Import Event: Monday, June 8, 23:42:11 WAT. Source IP: 192.168.1.44 (Desk_Cynthia). Target: Framework_Clone_V1.
Mark slowly closes his laptop. The silence in the room is deafening.
“Cynthia,” Mark says, his voice dangerously low. “Pack your things and leave the premises; leave your work tools behind. I’m placing you on immediate suspension. HR will meet you in the reception to process you out of the premises and communicate next steps.”
Cynthia stands up abruptly, her chair scraping loudly against the floorboards. She grabs her phone and her bag, refusing to look at either of them as she storms out of the boardroom, slamming the heavy wooden door behind her.
Zahrah lets out a long, quiet breath, her hands finally relaxing on the table.
Mark rubs his temples, shaking his head before looking up at Zahrah. A slight smile replaces the stony expression on his face.
“You surprised me today,” Mark says, shaking his head in disbelief. “That’s a rare thing.”
“Thank you, Mark,” Zahrah says with a barely contained grin.
I surprised myself as well. She says in her head, Now, let’s go beat that target, girl.
