I saw my wife at the grocery store yesterday.
Except she was supposed to be at work. And when I called her name, the woman turned around and it wasn’t her. Just someone who looked exactly like her from behind. Same hair. Same jacket. Same way of standing with her weight on one hip while scanning the shelf like she’s reading the spines of books instead of cereal boxes.
I stood there in the cereal aisle for a full minute trying to remember if my wife actually owns that jacket. She does. I’m pretty sure she does. But “pretty sure” is a phrase that’s doing a lot of work in my life right now, because after six Special Tasks in four months, “pretty sure” is the best I can manage about almost anything, and some days it’s generous.
This is what it’s like now.
I’ve done six Special Tasks. Can’t talk about any of them. Signed the NDAs, all six of them, each one more detailed than the last, each one expanding the definition of “confidential information” to include not just what happened in the rooms but what I felt about what happened, what I dreamed about afterward, what I told my wife or didn’t tell my wife, until by the sixth NDA I was signing away my right to describe my own interior life to anyone including myself. The contracts are clear. Discussing any details of a Special Task with anyone results in immediate legal action and score reduction to zero. Zero means you’re basically unemployable. Uninsurable. Your kid can’t get into any school that checks scores. Which is all of them now.
My Contributor Score is 931. Best it’s ever been.
My marriage is falling apart.
Lynn knows something’s wrong. She’s not stupid. She’s the opposite of stupid. She’s the kind of person who notices when I use a different brand of toothpaste, so the idea that I could disappear in the middle of the night once or twice a month and come home at 5 AM smelling like concrete and cleaning chemicals and she wouldn’t notice is insulting to both of us.
I’ve been trying to maintain the structure of our life the way you’d maintain the paint on a house that’s rotting from the inside. Making dinner. Helping with homework. Watching the shows we watch. Going to bed at the same time. All the rituals that say “everything is normal” while everything is not.
She tried a different approach last week. Not the usual “where were you” but something quieter, something that landed harder because she’d clearly been thinking about how to say it.
“Just tell me it’s not an affair.” Her voice wasn’t angry. It was the voice of someone who’s decided they’d rather hear the worst thing they can imagine than keep living with the silence. Because the silence is worse. The silence fills up with every possible explanation and the mind always picks the worst one.
“It’s not an affair.”
“Then what is it?”
I just looked at her. Opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again like a fish on a dock trying to figure out how breathing works when the medium changes. The NDA is airtight. I know because I read it three times. Four times. However many times it takes to confirm that the loophole you’re looking for doesn’t exist.
So I said nothing.
She cried. I held her. She asked me again, muffled against my chest, and I could feel the question vibrating through her body like a tuning fork that won’t stop humming.
I said nothing.
There’s a particular kind of cruelty in being unable to explain yourself to the person you love most. It’s not the cruelty of lying. Lying at least gives them something to work with, something to investigate, something to eventually discover and be angry about. Silence gives them nothing. Silence says “I have decided that this thing I cannot tell you is more important than your peace of mind,” and the fact that the decision wasn’t mine, that it was made by a company in an NDA I signed at 2 AM in a concrete building, doesn’t change how it feels from her side.
Here’s what I can’t tell her. What keeps me up at 3 AM staring at the ceiling while she sleeps next to me, her breathing the only thing in the world I’m still certain is real.
The second Special Task, I watched my neighbor Rick through the glass. Same setup as the first one. Four of us in folding chairs, observing, while someone on the other side of the mirror answered questions under bright lights. They asked us to evaluate his responses. Determine if he was being truthful. Standard evaluation task, they said, like we were reviewing a job applicant instead of watching a man we all apparently knew being interrogated by someone we couldn’t see.
Then a door opened on the far side of the room, and Rick walked in. Except Rick was already sitting in the chair. Two Ricks. Same face, same clothes, same way of hunching his shoulders when he’s uncomfortable. One sitting. One standing. One asking questions. One answering. Both of them looking like Rick in the way that makes you realize how many small details constitute a person, and how terrifying it is when all of those details are correct but there are two sets of them.
I haven’t spoken to my actual neighbor Rick since then. I see him getting his mail. Working in his yard. Washing his truck on Saturday mornings with the radio playing too loud the way it always does. I wave. He waves back. But I have no idea if that’s really him. How would I know. How would anyone know. You could replace every person on my street with a copy and the only way I’d notice is if they waved differently, and I don’t know anyone well enough to be sure of their wave.
The third task was worse.
They had me in the chair that time. I sat there under the lights while a voice I couldn’t see asked me questions. Childhood stuff. My father teaching me to ride a bike in the parking lot behind our apartment complex. The time I broke my arm falling out of a tree and my mother carried me to the car and I remember her hands shaking on the steering wheel. Job stuff. Marriage stuff. Whether I’d ever thought about leaving Lynn. Whether I’d ever thought about hurting someone. Real cheerful material for 3 AM in a concrete building with cameras in every corner.
I could see the window. See the silhouettes of people watching me from the other side, dark shapes against the observation room’s dimmer lighting, arranged in a row like an audience at a show I didn’t know I was performing.
One of them was Lynn’s exact height and build. Same posture. Same slight tilt of the head.
I told myself it was a coincidence. Told myself the system wouldn’t do that. Told myself that bringing my wife to watch me answer questions about whether I’d thought about leaving her would be so specifically cruel that even Harmonic Solutions wouldn’t do it, which was a form of naivety I can’t afford anymore because the system doesn’t have a concept of cruelty. The system has a concept of data.
When I got home that morning, she was asleep in our bed. I stood in the doorway for twenty minutes watching her breathe. Trying to count the respirations. Trying to match them to a rate I’d memorized from all the other nights I’d watched her sleep, back when watching your wife sleep was romantic instead of diagnostic. Trying to determine if it was really her or if they’d done something, changed something, replaced something, the way they’d put two Ricks in the same room without either Rick seeming to notice.
She woke up and asked what was wrong.
I told her I couldn’t sleep.
She believed me. I think. Or she decided to accept a lie because the truth I wasn’t offering was worse than anything she could invent. Which amounts to the same thing.
The fourth task I don’t want to talk about.
Not because of the NDA. Because of what it did to the part of me that trusts my own perceptions. Because after the fourth task I started keeping a notebook. Dates. Times. Details I could remember. Things that felt real versus things that felt inserted, the way a sentence in someone else’s handwriting can be slipped into a letter and you might not notice if the ink is the same color. I keep the notebook in my car, inside the spare tire well in the trunk, because I don’t trust the house anymore and I don’t trust my phone and I don’t trust any location that the app knows I frequent.
The fifth task was three weeks ago. They had me deliver a package to an address across town. Handed me a small box, maybe eight inches square, light, with no markings and no address label. Just a box. The suited man said to give it to whoever answered the door. Don’t look inside. Don’t ask questions.
So I drove to the address. Nice neighborhood. Quiet street. The kind of block where people have those little library boxes in their front yards and the lawns are maintained to a standard that suggests either retirement or obsession.
I walked up to the front door and knocked.
I answered it.
Not someone who looked like me. Me. Same clothes I’d worn that morning. Same coffee stain on my shirt from when I’d knocked my mug with my elbow at breakfast and Lynn had handed me a napkin and I’d dabbed at it halfheartedly because I was already late. Same expression on my face like I was thinking about something I didn’t want to think about, which is the expression I apparently wear most of the time now.
The me that answered the door looked at me the way you look at a delivery driver. Brief, functional, the kind of acknowledgment that says “I know why you’re here and this interaction doesn’t require more than thirty seconds of either of our lives.” He took the package. Said “thank you.” Closed the door.
I stood on that porch for five minutes. Just standing there. Breathing. Looking at the closed door with its brass knocker and its welcome mat that said WELCOME in a font I recognized from the same catalogue where Lynn had bought ours. Trying to process the fact that I’d just handed something to myself and I didn’t know who either of us was anymore. The me who delivered the package or the me who received it. Which one drove to this address and which one lived here. Which one had a wife named Lynn sleeping in a bed he wasn’t sure about and which one had a life in this house on this quiet street that might be better or worse or exactly the same.
Then I drove home and Lynn asked how my day was and I said “fine” and we ate dinner and watched a show about British people baking cakes and went to bed. Normal stuff. The kind of normal that makes everything worse because it proves the system works. It proves they can slip copies of people into the world and the world just keeps going, baking shows and grocery stores and Thursday night dinners, the whole apparatus of daily life absorbing the impossible without even blinking.
But I kept thinking about the other me. The one in the house. Where did he go after he closed the door. Did he sit down and eat dinner too. Did someone ask him how his day was. Does he keep a notebook in his trunk. Does he lie awake wondering about me the same way I lie awake wondering about him.
Does he look at his wife and wonder if she’s really his wife, or if the woman sleeping next to him is a version that was delivered to his door in a small box with no markings.
The sixth task was two nights ago.
I can’t talk about it. Not because of the NDA. Because I genuinely don’t know if it happened.
I remember getting the notification. Remember the drive to Riverside, the same dark roads, the same empty parking lots, the industrial park becoming as familiar as my commute to work. Remember walking into the building. Remember the suited man scanning my ID and saying something I can’t recall about optimal observation conditions and thanking me for my continued participation.
Then I remember waking up in my car in the parking lot three hours later. 5:12 AM on the dashboard clock. The money was in my account. The task was marked complete. My phone showed a notification confirming successful completion and thanking me for my contribution to the Harmonic Solutions research ecosystem.
But the three hours between walking in and waking up are gone. Not fuzzy. Not fragments. Gone. A clean cut in the timeline of my life, as smooth and precise as the edits you see in movies where one scene ends and another begins and you’re supposed to accept that time has passed without needing to know how.
And that’s the scary part. Not the mystery. Not the lost time. The fact that they can take three hours from you and leave nothing behind, no residue, no scar tissue, no sense of absence, just a gap that your brain smooths over the way water fills a hole. I should be panicking about that. I should be terrified. But the terror requires a continuity of self that I’m not sure I have anymore. You need to know who you are to be scared of losing who you are, and I’m not confident on the first part.
Lynn asked me this morning if I was okay.
I said yes.
She said I’d been talking in my sleep. Saying numbers. Just numbers. Over and over. Like I was counting something. Like I was waiting for something to reach a threshold.
I don’t remember dreaming. But apparently I dream a lot these days. Lynn says some nights I don’t just talk, I sit up in bed with my eyes open and recite strings of digits like I’m reading them off a screen only I can see. She says she’s tried waking me up and I just look at her and keep counting and then lie back down and the next morning I have no memory of it.
I don’t know what the numbers are. She wrote some of them down once. They looked like Contributor Scores.
Here’s the thing that’s really bothering me.
I called Xavier last week. My buddy who warned me about the first Special Task. The one I saw in the chair. Or thought I saw. Or saw a version of. The distinction between those three options used to seem important and now seems like arguing about the color of the walls in a house that’s on fire.
I hadn’t talked to him since that first night. Four months. I’d meant to call. Kept meaning to call. But every time I picked up my phone to dial his number, something stopped me, not a conscious decision but a reluctance that felt physical, like a hand on my chest, like my body knew something my mind hadn’t figured out yet.
The number was disconnected.
I drove to his house. Different family living there. Young couple with a toddler and a dog. They said they’d been there for three months. Moved in after the previous tenant “relocated.” No, they didn’t know a Xavier. No forwarding address. No sign that a person who spent forty-five minutes arguing about the Bengals’ defensive scheme had ever eaten pizza in that kitchen or watched football in that living room.
I checked with his work. Warehouse management company on the east side. They said he’d quit in February. No exit interview. No two weeks’ notice. Just stopped showing up and sent an email, or someone sent an email from his account, saying he was pursuing other opportunities and thanking them for the experience.
I searched for him online. Nothing. Social media accounts gone. Not deactivated, gone, as in the profiles don’t exist and never existed and searching his name returns nothing but a white page with the kind of emptiness that feels curated. Like someone had gone through the internet with a cloth and wiped every surface he’d ever touched.
Or like he was never real in the first place. Which is a thought I try not to think because if Xavier wasn’t real, then the warning he gave me wasn’t real, and if the warning wasn’t real, then the message he sent during the first task wasn’t real, and if the message wasn’t real, then nothing I’ve experienced in those rooms can be trusted, and if nothing can be trusted, then I’m just a man sitting in a kitchen at 6 AM writing in a notebook about events that may or may not have happened to a person who may or may not be me.
I’m starting to catalog the people I’ve seen in those rooms. The ones watching with me. The ones in the chairs. The ones asking questions from behind glass. Trying to track who’s real and who’s a copy and whether the copies know they’re copies and whether knowing matters. The woman in the yoga pants from the first night. The older man in the reflective vest. All the faces I’ve sat beside in folding chairs at 2 AM, all of us watching something we couldn’t explain and were contractually forbidden from discussing and psychologically incapable of processing.
How many of them are still out there. How many of them are still the ones who were in those chairs. How many of them have been replaced so gradually that even the people closest to them haven’t noticed, or have noticed and are doing what Lynn is doing, which is lying awake at night wondering what changed and being afraid to find out.
What does “real” even mean in a system like this.
My score is 931. Best it’s ever been. The number used to mean something. Used to mean I was doing well, contributing, functioning. Now it just means I’ve been to the rooms six times and the system has decided I’m valuable enough to keep running, like a machine that’s been serviced and returned to the floor.
I got another notification this morning.
NEW OPPORTUNITY ASSIGNED
Gig Type: Special Task Pay: $3,200 Time Commitment: 4 hours Location: 1847 Riverside Industrial Park, Unit 12A Start Time: Tomorrow, 2:00 AM
Same industrial park. Different unit. Higher pay. Longer duration. The progression is obvious now, each task escalating in compensation and time commitment like rungs on a ladder that only goes in one direction, and I don’t know what’s at the top but I know that people who reach it stop appearing in the world as the people they were.
I stared at it for a while. Thought about declining. Watched the decline button gray out before I even touched it, which is a new development, the button preemptively removing itself as if the algorithm could read my hesitation in real time and decided not to waste either of our time with the illusion of choice.
Lynn came into the kitchen. Poured herself coffee. Asked what I was looking at.
I turned off my phone.
“Nothing,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment. Really looked at me. Not the casual glance of morning routine but the deliberate, searching attention of someone trying to determine whether the person in front of them is still the person they married. Whether the eyes are the same eyes. Whether the hands holding the phone are the same hands that held hers at the altar.
I wanted to tell her I don’t know anymore. I wanted to tell her everything. Every task, every room, every copy, every gap in my memory that might contain something terrible or might contain nothing at all. I wanted to beg her to leave before they decide she’s part of the data set too, before she shows up on the other side of a mirror answering questions about her earliest memory while someone who looks like her husband watches from a folding chair.
Instead I kissed her goodbye and went to work.
Tonight I’ll go to Unit 12A. I’ll do whatever they tell me to do. I’ll take the money. I’ll come home at 5 AM and slip into bed and she’ll pretend to be asleep and I’ll pretend she’s pretending and we’ll both lie there in the dark listening to each other breathe and wondering if the person next to us is the same person who was there yesterday.
My score is 931.
I don’t know what I’m being scored on anymore.
But it keeps going up.