Billionaire Cashback System: I Can't Go Broke!-Chapter 40: Team Bonding

The Zoom call happened at seven that evening.

Six faces on a grid, various states of post-Monday energy. Danny was in what appeared to be a very small kitchen. Mike was eating something throughout the entire call without acknowledging this.

Liam was in a clean, well-lit room that looked exactly like you’d expect Liam’s room to look. Sophie had her hair up and a coffee. Iralis was in front of a bookshelf, her camera slightly too high, which meant Ryan could see the top of the bookshelf better than her face.

Ryan told them about the meeting.

The investor, the interest, the Thursday meeting where Diana wanted to meet the team. He kept the IRS part out of it — that wasn’t their problem to carry. What they needed to know was that this was happening, it was soon, and it mattered.

"She wants to see the team specifically," Ryan said. "Not just the product. She’s investing in the people as much as the idea."

"So a pitch meeting," Liam said.

"More than that. She’s sharp enough to see through a pitch meeting. She wants to know if we’re actually functional as a group or just five people who happened to agree to work together." Ryan looked at the grid of faces. "Which means before Thursday I need us to actually be functional as a group."

Mike stopped chewing. "Are we not?"

"We’re good at the work," Ryan said. "But we’ve been remote for two weeks and we’ve spent most of our time in our individual lanes. We don’t have the kind of chemistry yet that shows in a room."

"So what are you suggesting," Sophie said.

"Tomorrow. Full day off. No laptops, no Slack, no work talk. We go out, we spend time together, we figure out who each other actually are outside of a Zoom grid."

A brief silence.

"Team bonding," Iralis said. The way she said it was completely neutral, which somehow communicated everything.

"Team bonding," Ryan confirmed.

"Like trust falls?" Mike said.

"Absolutely nothing like trust falls actually."

"Good because I would quit."

They sorted the details in ten minutes. Meet at noon in the city, start with food, figure out the rest from there. Casual, no agenda, just a day with nowhere specific to be.

Ryan closed the laptop.

Simple enough.

---

Tuesday arrived carrying the energy of a day that had no plan, which Ryan had learned could go one of two ways.

They met outside a ramen place in the East Village that Sophie had suggested and that turned out to have a forty-minute wait, which meant they stood on the pavement for forty minutes getting used to being around each other outside of a work context.

This part was fine. Easy, even.

Mike talked to everyone, which was Mike’s function in any social situation. Liam and Danny got into a conversation about something technical that they both visibly had to stop themselves from going too deep on.

Sophie and Iralis stood together and Ryan noticed them laughing at something he wasn’t close enough to hear, which felt like a positive development.

The ramen was good.

The table was small enough that everyone had to talk to everyone, and somewhere between the first and second round of broth the stiffness of the early pavement conversation had largely dissolved.

"Okay," Mike said, setting his chopsticks down. "Real question. Everyone at this table — what’s the most embarrassing job you had before this."

A groan from Liam. "Do we have to."

"Team bonding," Mike said, gesturing at the general concept. "Ryan said."

"I said no trust falls. I didn’t sign off on this."

"I’ll go first," Sophie said. "I spent four months as a product tester for an app that was supposed to help people track their emotional state throughout the day. You had to rate your feelings every two hours on a scale of one to ten."

"Was it useful?" Iralis asked.

"It made me significantly more miserable than I was before I started using it. I quit the testing and the job in the same week."

Mike laughed. "Okay. Me. I spent three weeks selling insurance over the phone in a call center in New Jersey where the manager genuinely had a gong he rang every time someone closed a sale."

"Did you ever ring the gong," Danny asked.

"Once. By accident. I misunderstood the close. The guy was just asking a clarifying question." Mike paused. "The manager still rang the gong. Said the energy was right regardless."

Iralis said, without being asked, "I tutored calculus to a sixteen year old whose parents paid extremely well and who spent every session trying to convince me that calculus wasn’t real."

"What do you mean not real," Liam said.

"He had a whole framework. I wasn’t able to refute it as quickly as I wanted to, which bothered me for longer than it should have."

Ryan looked at her. "Did you ever refute it?"

"Eventually. Took me two weeks. I wrote it up and sent it to him after I stopped tutoring him." A pause. "He never responded."

The table was quiet for a second and then Danny laughed properly, which was the first time Ryan had heard Danny laugh properly, and it turned out Danny had a laugh that was completely disproportionate to his usual composure — loud and sudden and genuine.

It set everyone else off.

They left the ramen place at two, slightly too full, the afternoon stretching out in front of them with nothing scheduled.

Mike said there was a bar nearby with arcade games. Liam said that sounded fine.

Danny said he needed to walk before he went inside anywhere else. Sophie said there was a record store she’d been meaning to go to. Iralis said nothing but fell into step with whoever was walking.

The group split naturally across the afternoon — not deliberately, just the way people moved when there was no agenda forcing them to stay together.

They’d see something, someone would stop, half the group would follow and half would keep going, and then they’d reassemble somewhere else.

Ryan found himself with Danny in a hardware store at one point, neither of them able to explain afterward how they’d ended up there.

Liam sent a photo to the group chat of himself holding a vintage copy of something he’d found in the record store — no caption, just the photo.

Mike sent back a gif of someone celebrating. Iralis sent back a thumbs up. Sophie sent back an actual written sentence of appreciation for the find.

By five o’clock they had drifted back together outside a bar in the West Village.

This was when things began, very gently, to go wrong.