Author's note: This serial is a work of fiction. The people and events described in it spring directly from the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actually existing people and events is entirely coincidental. Speculate and debate on Discord here.
Whatever seasonal specials they might have on the menu when she got to the Steinberger Grand Hotel Belvedere in Davos, the staple item in her diet this coming week was going to be a well-honed investment pitch repeated over any number of pre-dawn coffees, second breakfasts, lettuce-leaf lunches, faux -coincidental collisions in hotel lobbies, time-outs from plenary sessions, novelty nibbles at cocktail parties, and night-owl cognacs in the Belvedere Bar.
By the end of it all she hoped to have nailed down, one by one, one on one, her potential friends and her potential adversaries. That was the power of The Virtuous Circle. There would be a few surprises at The Circle, no doubt, and plenty of gossip โ some of it even about her. Three years ago she had been a rising star in the office of The Doc, as the Herr Doktor, founder of The Circle, was called by everyone outside his hearing.
She knew the Circle inside-out and The Circle knew her. But this year she was not there to jump when The Doc said jump. She was there as an official participant, the director of Reconstruct Ukraine. The chip embedded in the White Badge on her lanyard was The Circle's equivalent of Access-All-Areas โ a passe-partout that would get her inside the rooms inside the rooms inside the rooms. For The Circle was not simply one circle, but a set of concentric circles, with The Doc at its centre.
The outermost circles were for holders of colour-coded badges who were admitted to programmed talks and discussions only, and sometimes not to all of those. They were the session-fodder. Their job was to listen enraptured to the Finnish Minister of Folklore or the CEO of a Liechtenstein Landesbank while not even noticing that the rest of the room was filled with relative nobodies like themselves. The people who mattered, and who wouldn't generally be listening to the Finnish Minister of Folklore, would tend to be talking privately to one another in their hotel suites, or gathering in other rooms around the Congress Centre in groups of for what the staff called "Ringlets", which were by-invitation seminars convened to discuss specific topics of immediate importance to the participants.
