I got hired for a data entry job three weeks ago that I was not remotely qualified for.
The fact that they called me back the same day I applied should have been the first sign that something was off, but when you’ve been sending out resumes for four months and the only responses you’ve gotten are automated rejections and one interview at a call center where the manager asked if I was “comfortable being yelled at for eight hours,” you stop questioning why someone wants to hire you and just say yes.
The ad said “Office Admin - Industrial Complex. Flexible hours. Great for recent grads.”
I graduated two years ago with a degree in communications that has been exactly as useful as everyone warned me it would be. My Contributor Score was 643, which is the score equivalent of treading water. Not drowning, not swimming, just keeping your head above the surface and hoping nobody makes waves.
The office was at 1847 Riverside Industrial Park. Unit 15B.
I drove out there for the interview on a Thursday morning. The industrial park was mostly warehouses and light manufacturing, the kind of place where trucks back up to loading docks and men in high-vis vests move pallets around. Normal. Boring. Unit 15B was at the far end of a row of identical concrete buildings, indistinguishable from the units on either side except for a small plastic sign by the door that said “Harmonic Solutions - Administrative Offices.”
The interviewer was a woman named Patricia. Maybe fifty. Gray cardigan over a white blouse, reading glasses on a chain around her neck, the kind of person who calls everyone “hon” and keeps a candy dish on her desk. She had a candy dish on her desk. Butterscotch. She offered me one before the interview started.
“Tell me about yourself.”
I gave her the standard answer. Recent grad. Quick learner. Proficient in Excel and basic data management. Looking for something stable.
“You’ll be processing assignment data. Filing records. Updating completion logs. Standard administrative work.” She smiled over her reading glasses. “Does that sound like something you could handle?”
“Absolutely.”
“Wonderful. When can you start?”
“Tomorrow?”
“I love enthusiasm. Welcome aboard.”
She shook my hand. Gave me a key card. Told me to wear something comfortable and be there at nine.
I started the next day in an office that was small and quiet and smelled like the butterscotch candies Patricia kept refilling. Three rooms: a reception area that nobody ever sat in, a file storage room packed with identical gray boxes, and my desk in the middle, positioned between the two like a checkpoint. Patricia’s office was down a short hallway, door usually open, classic rock playing quietly from a speaker on her bookshelf.
She showed me the system. Daily files arrived on a shared drive every morning by 7 AM. I’d upload them into the database, match them to existing records, update completion statuses, and archive anything older than ninety days. The interface was clunky but straightforward, the kind of proprietary software that looks like it was built in 2008 and hasn’t been updated since.
“Don’t worry about understanding the content,” Patricia said, leaning over my shoulder and pointing at the screen with a butterscotch-stained finger. “Just make sure the numbers match. The system does the thinking. You do the typing.”
Simple stuff.
My first week was boring in the best possible way. I’d arrive at 9 AM, Patricia would have coffee waiting (she made a pot every morning, strong, with those little powdered creamers that taste like nothing), I’d process files until lunch, eat a sandwich at my desk, process more files, and leave at 5 PM. The work was repetitive and mindless and I loved it because mindless meant I could listen to podcasts and because repetitive meant I couldn’t screw it up and because $42,000 a year with medical benefits was more financial stability than I’d experienced since graduating.
The files themselves were just data. Assignment ID numbers. Completion timestamps. Participant counts. Unit designations. Status codes I didn’t understand (ACTIVE, PROCESSING, DISTRIBUTED, INACTIVE) but didn’t need to understand because my job was matching numbers, not interpreting them.
I didn’t ask what the assignments were for. Seemed irrelevant. Patricia processed purchase orders for industrial equipment and didn’t ask what the equipment was used for. The maintenance guy fixed HVAC units and didn’t ask who was breathing the air. That’s how jobs work in a complex. You do your piece. The bigger picture is someone else’s problem.
Second week, I noticed something I probably should have noticed on day one.
All the files were timestamped between 2:00 AM and 6:00 AM. Every single one. Not a single record from daytime hours. Whatever these “assignments” were, they happened exclusively in the middle of the night, which is not when normal business operations occur, which is not when data entry tasks get generated, which is the kind of detail that should have made me ask a question but didn’t because the coffee was good and the paycheck was stable and the butterscotch candies were always there.
I asked Patricia about it anyway, casually, the way you’d ask about a quirk in the filing system.
“Oh, the assignments run at night. Operational scheduling. You’re processing the previous night’s results each morning.”
“What kind of assignments happen at 2 AM?”
She waved her hand in a way that was both dismissive and warm, the gesture of a person who has explained this before and finds the question endearing rather than threatening. “Various operational tasks. Research protocols. Don’t worry about it, hon. Your job is the paperwork. The paperwork doesn’t care what time it was generated.”
Made sense. I went back to data entry.
But I started paying more attention to the files. Not investigating, exactly. Just reading them instead of scanning them. And the language was strange. Some files had notes appended to the status codes. “Session completed successfully. Participant responsive.” “Participant transported to secondary location for extended processing.” “Iteration count: 3. Behavioral fidelity within acceptable parameters.”
Iteration count. Behavioral fidelity. These were not terms that belonged in routine business operations. These were the words of something else entirely, something that was happening in the other units of this building while I sat at my desk matching numbers and eating butterscotch.
I googled “behavioral fidelity” during lunch. Got academic papers about simulation accuracy and AI training models. I googled “iteration count” and got programming documentation about loops. I googled “Harmonic Solutions Special Tasks” and got nothing. Absolutely nothing. Like the company existed in the physical world but not on the internet, which is a neat trick for any organization operating in 2024.
Third week is when I started hearing the voices.
I was at my desk on a Monday afternoon, headphones in, listening to a true crime podcast, when I pulled one earbud out to take a sip of coffee and heard something underneath the ambient hum of the building. Muffled. Rhythmic. Like someone was talking in the next room, except there was no next room on this side of the wall, just the exterior of the building and the parking lot beyond it.
I pulled out the other earbud. Listened.
Voices. Definitely voices. Low and indistinct but following a pattern I could almost make out, a question followed by an answer followed by a pause followed by another question, the cadence of an interview or a therapy session or an interrogation playing on a loop behind the drywall.
I told myself it was HVAC noise. Pipes. Ductwork vibrating at frequencies that the human ear interprets as speech, because the brain wants to find patterns in everything, because that’s what brains do. I put my earbuds back in and finished the podcast.
The next day I heard them again. Clearer this time, or maybe I was listening harder. The same rhythmic pattern. Question, answer, pause. Question, answer, pause. And underneath it, so faint I might have imagined it, a second set of the same pattern running slightly out of sync with the first, like two recordings of the same conversation playing from different rooms at different speeds.
I asked Patricia if there were other tenants in the building.
“Not in this section. We have exclusive use of Units 12 through 18. The nearest occupied space is Unit 11, and that’s a plumbing supply company. They’re only open Tuesday and Thursday.” She looked at me over her reading glasses. “Why do you ask?”
“I keep hearing people talking. Through the walls.”
Her expression shifted, just for a second, a flicker of something that wasn’t warmth and wasn’t concern and was more like calculation, like she was running through possible responses and selecting the one that would end the conversation most efficiently. Then the warmth came back, full and genuine-seeming.
“These old buildings are terrible for acoustics. The HVAC system picks up vibrations from all over the complex and channels them through the ductwork. I’ve heard what sounds like music coming from the ceiling before. It’s just resonance. I’ll put in a maintenance request.”
Maintenance never came. But the voices continued.
They got worse, or more present, or I got better at hearing them. By the end of the third week I could make out individual words during quiet moments, when the HVAC cycled off and the building settled into that deep industrial silence that makes every small sound feel enormous.
“Please describe your earliest memory.”
“Do you feel like yourself?”
“How many times have you been here?”
The same questions. Over and over. Different voices answering, some confident, some confused, some barely audible, but always the same three questions in the same order, like a script being performed by rotating casts in rooms I couldn’t see.
I started staying late. Not because Patricia asked me to, not because the work required it, but because the voices were louder after 5 PM, after Patricia left and the building emptied and whatever was happening on the other side of those walls continued without the daytime noise to cover it. I’d sit at my desk with my earbuds out, not working, just listening, trying to map the sounds to the building’s layout, trying to figure out which direction they came from and how far away they were.
One night I stayed until 7 PM. The voices had become clear enough that I could hear complete exchanges, not just fragments.
“Please describe your earliest memory.”
A man’s voice: “I was at the beach with my father. I was maybe four. He was holding my hand.”
“Do you feel like yourself?”
Same voice: “I don’t know. I think so. Why wouldn’t I?”
“How many times have you been here?”
Pause. Longer pause. “Once? This is my first time. Isn’t it?”
Then a new voice, a woman, answering the same questions with different details but the same confused uncertainty, and then another voice, and another, overlapping now, multiple conversations happening in parallel, all asking the same three questions, all getting answers that sounded real and uncertain and human in the specific way that people sound when they’re telling the truth about something they’re not sure of.
I followed the sound. Down the hallway past my office, past Patricia’s door (closed, dark), to a gray metal door at the end that I’d noticed on my first day and never thought about because it was labeled “STORAGE - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” and I had no reason to access storage.
I tried the handle. Locked. But through the door the voices were unmistakable. Multiple people in multiple rooms, all talking at once, all cycling through the same questions. It sounded like a call center staffed by people having the most intimate conversations of their lives.
I went back to my desk. Tried to focus on work. Couldn’t. Went home. Lay in bed listening to the silence of my apartment and missing the voices, which is a disturbing thing to realize about yourself.
The next morning I arrived at 7 AM, two hours early. Patricia’s parking spot was empty. The building was quiet in the way that industrial buildings are quiet before the day shift, that deep mechanical hum of systems running without anyone to serve.
My key card got me through the front door. I walked past my desk, past Patricia’s office, straight to the storage door, and held my card against the reader.
Green light. Click.
The door opened onto a stairwell I hadn’t known existed, leading down. Fluorescent lights flickered on as I descended, the kind that take a few seconds to reach full brightness, so I walked into increasing light like wading into shallow water that got brighter instead of deeper. At the bottom was a corridor. Concrete walls. Concrete floor. The same industrial architecture as the rest of the complex but underground, extending in both directions further than the building above should have allowed.
Doors on both sides. Each labeled with a unit designation. Unit 12A. Unit 14C. Unit 15A. Unit 16B. The units from my files. The assignment locations I’d been typing into databases for three weeks.
I tried one of the doors. 14C. Unlocked. Inside was exactly what the files described in language I’d chosen not to think about too carefully: a white room, four metal chairs facing a large mirror on the far wall, overhead lighting so bright it made the white walls glow. Empty now but recently used. Coffee cups on the floor. A pen under one of the chairs. Papers left on another chair’s seat, forms with checkboxes and lines for signatures, the kind of paperwork I’d been processing from the other side, as data, as numbers, as someone else’s problem.
I checked another room. Same setup. Mirror. Chairs. Lights. This one had a jacket draped over the back of a chair, a man’s jacket, brown corduroy, left behind the way you leave things when you exit a place in a hurry or a daze.
These were the rooms where the assignments happened. The Special Tasks I’d been hearing about in gig worker forums and Reddit threads and whispered conversations between people who’d done something they couldn’t talk about and never quite recovered from. They were directly underneath my desk. I’d been sitting above them for three weeks, processing their outputs, filing their records, listening to their voices bleed through the floor, and not once connecting what I heard to what I typed.
I kept exploring. Found a room at the end of the corridor that was different from the others, smaller, packed with monitors and computer equipment, the kind of setup that looks like a security office or a control room. The monitors showed live feeds from the other rooms, small grainy images of white spaces and mirrors and chairs, some empty and some not.
Some not. In the middle of the day.
A man sitting in a chair in what looked like Unit 15A, answering questions directed at him by a voice I couldn’t hear through the monitor’s silent feed. His mouth moved. He gestured. He rubbed his face with both hands the way people do when they’re exhausted or overwhelmed.
A woman in Unit 16B, staring at a mirror that had turned transparent, showing her another room on the other side where someone who looked exactly like her sat in an identical chair under identical lights. The woman’s hands were gripping the arms of her chair so hard I could see the tendons in her wrists, even through the grainy feed.
Four people in Unit 12A, sitting in a row, watching someone through glass. All of them motionless. All of them staring. The person on the other side of the glass was talking, animated, gesturing, and the four observers watched with the still attention of people seeing something that rearranges everything they thought they understood about being a person.
All happening right now. While I was supposed to be upstairs typing numbers.
“You’re here early.”
I turned around so fast I knocked my hip against the desk with the monitors. Patricia was standing in the doorway. Gray cardigan. Reading glasses. No butterscotch. She didn’t look angry. She looked like a teacher who’d caught a student reading ahead in the textbook, mildly amused, slightly inconvenienced, fundamentally unsurprised.
“I heard voices. I wanted to see where they were coming from.”
“And what did you find?”
I gestured at the monitors. At the people in the rooms. At everything that had been happening underneath my feet while I matched assignment IDs to completion timestamps. “These are the Special Tasks. They happen here. In this building. What are they?”
She walked into the room, pulled a rolling chair from under the desk, and sat down with the ease of someone settling into a familiar space. She looked at the monitors the way I look at spreadsheets, with the comfortable attention of a person reviewing routine work.
“Behavioral observation studies. Participant evaluation and processing. Harmonic Solutions has been running these programs for several years now. It’s standard research methodology.”
“There’s a woman on that screen watching a copy of herself through a mirror. That’s not standard anything.”
“It looks alarming out of context. I understand. But participants sign comprehensive consent forms. They’re compensated extremely well. They complete their sessions and leave. The methodology is proprietary, which is why the facilities are secured, but there’s nothing happening here that hasn’t been approved and documented.”
She said it with the same warmth she used to explain the filing system. The same patience. The same implicit message that the world is complicated and your job is to handle your piece of it and trust that the bigger picture makes sense to someone with more context than you.
“What specifically are they doing to those people?”
“That’s above your clearance level, hon. And I don’t mean that to be dismissive. I mean that literally. The research team manages the sessions. The coordinators manage intake. You manage the data. Everyone has a role. Everyone’s role is important. Yours is processing paperwork.”
“But I can hear them. Every day. Through the floor.”
“I know. The soundproofing in this building is terrible. I’ve filed maintenance requests. They never come.” She smiled like we were sharing a joke about bureaucratic incompetence, like the sound of people being copied in underground rooms was the same category of problem as a broken water cooler.
“Would it have mattered?” she asked, and her voice was gentler now, the voice she used when I made a data entry error and she walked me through the correction. “If I’d told you on day one, ‘By the way, there are behavioral research sessions happening in the basement and you’ll hear them through the floor sometimes.’ Would you have turned down the job?”
I didn’t answer because the answer was no and we both knew it. I needed the job. The salary. The benefits. The score improvement that came with stable employment at a company the algorithm apparently valued highly.
“Come on,” she said. “You shouldn’t be down here without clearance. Let me make you some coffee.”
I followed her upstairs because what else was I going to do. Report her to someone. Report the monitors and the rooms and the woman gripping the chair arms to someone who would do something about it. Who would that someone be. The police, whose own scores depend on not asking questions about Harmonic Solutions. A journalist, who’d need evidence I couldn’t provide without losing the job that was keeping my score above water. A lawyer, who’d charge me money I didn’t have to investigate a company that didn’t officially exist on the internet.
I sat at my desk. Patricia brought me coffee. Strong, powdered creamer, same as always. She set a butterscotch candy next to the mug.
“The files from last night are ready whenever you are.”
I opened the database. Pulled up the morning’s records. Each one representing a person who’d walked into one of those underground rooms and walked out as something else, something the files described in clinical language that I now understood was not jargon but literal description. “Distribution complete.” “Behavioral template captured.” “Iteration count: 4. Participant responsive.”
I processed them all. Matched the IDs. Updated the statuses. Archived the closed records.
I kept hearing the voices while I worked. Clearer than ever now that I knew where they were coming from, now that I knew the questions weren’t HVAC noise or acoustic artifacts but actual people being asked to describe their earliest memories and confirm their own reality in rooms directly beneath my chair.
“Please describe your earliest memory.”
“Do you feel like yourself?”
“How many times have you been here?”
That night I went home and looked up Harmonic Solutions with every search method I knew. Shell companies leading to shell companies leading to dead ends. Delaware registrations with no officers listed. A physical address that corresponded to Unit 15B, my office, which meant the company’s official address was a data entry desk and a candy dish.
But I found the forums. Reddit threads. Discord servers. People talking about Special Tasks in coded language, careful not to say too much, careful not to trigger whatever monitoring the NDAs required. People describing rooms with mirrors that turned transparent. People describing the moment they saw themselves on the other side. People describing the weeks afterward, the feeling of displacement, the sense that the version of themselves that walked out wasn’t the same version that walked in, the subtle wrongness that never fully resolved.
All of them had been in the rooms I’d seen on the monitors. All of them had their completion forms processed by someone like me, someone sitting at a desk above the sessions, typing their transformation into a database.
I thought about quitting.
But my Contributor Score had climbed from 643 to 687 since I started the job, and the trajectory was still rising. Better credit approval odds. Lower insurance premiums. Better housing options. The algorithm was rewarding me for working at Harmonic Solutions, which meant the algorithm knew what Harmonic Solutions did, which meant the system that determined whether I could buy groceries and rent an apartment and exist as a functional member of society was directly connected to the system that processed people in underground rooms at 2 AM.
Of course it was. It was all one system. The scores and the gigs and the Special Tasks and the processing and the data entry and the butterscotch candies. All of it. One machine with different faces depending on which part of it you were interacting with.
I went back to work the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that.
Then Patricia offered me the night shift.
She brought it up on a Friday afternoon, casually, the way she brought up everything, leaning against the doorframe of my office with a mug of coffee in her hand and reading glasses perched on her head.
“We’re looking for additional coordination coverage for the evening sessions. You’d meet participants when they arrive, check them in, direct them to their assigned units. Basic intake and completion processing. The hours would be 1 AM to 6 AM, three nights a week. Pays an extra $800 per week on top of your regular salary.”
$800 a week. $3,200 a month. That was rent and groceries and the beginning of a savings account, the kind of financial cushion I hadn’t had since before graduation.
“What exactly would I be doing?”
“Checking IDs. Escorting participants to their units. Processing completion forms when they finish. Very similar to what you already do, just the in-person version instead of the data version. You’re already familiar with the system. The transition would be seamless.”
“Would I have to go into the rooms?”
“No. Absolutely not. You’d manage intake and outtake only. The session coordinators handle everything inside. You’d be at the door. Outside.”
“Okay,” I said. Because $800 a week. Because seamless. Because Patricia made it sound like a promotion instead of what it actually was, which was stepping from the administrative side of whatever was happening in those rooms to the operational side. One degree closer to the thing itself.
“Wonderful.” She opened a garment bag I hadn’t noticed hanging on the back of my chair. Inside was a gray suit. Well-tailored. Professional. The same gray I’d seen on the monitors, worn by the figures who led participants through doors and down hallways and into rooms where they became something else.
“Professional attire. Standard for coordination staff. You’ll want to try it on before your first shift.”
The suit fit perfectly, which meant they’d had my measurements, which meant they’d known I would say yes before I said it, which meant the offer had never been a question.
I showed up for my first night shift at 12:45 AM on a Tuesday. The industrial park was a different place after dark. The warehouses that looked mundane in daylight became featureless shapes against a black sky, all depth removed, all context gone. The parking lots were empty except for the units at the far end where lights were on and cars were gathering.
Patricia was waiting outside Unit 7B. Also in a gray suit, which I’d never seen her wear during the day. Without the cardigan and the reading glasses and the butterscotch she looked like a different person, or rather she looked like the version of herself that had always been there underneath the warmth, the one who’d sat in the monitor room and watched people being processed with the calm attention of someone checking her email.
She handed me a tablet. “Participant intake device. Scan IDs here. Pull up assignments here. Mark check-in here. It’ll become muscle memory by your third shift.”
She walked me through the process. At 2:00 AM, participants would arrive. They’d be nervous. Confused. Some would have done this before and would be quiet. Some would be first-timers and would want to ask questions. My job was to be professional, efficient, and minimal. Check the ID. Verify the assignment. Escort to the unit. That’s it.
“What do I say if they have questions?”
“As little as possible. You’re not their therapist or their friend. You’re intake. If they press, tell them their session coordinator will address all questions inside. Keep it moving.”
At 1:55 AM, cars started pulling into the lot. One at a time at first, then in clusters. People getting out of their cars with the specific body language of dread, the hunched shoulders and the downcast eyes and the phone-checking that isn’t really checking anything, just the need to look at a screen instead of the building in front of them.
They gathered outside Unit 7B. Five of them tonight. Four assigned here, one for Unit 9C next door.
I stood at the door in my gray suit holding the tablet and feeling, for the first time, what it felt like to be on this side of the transaction. To be the figure standing at the entrance. To be the one they’d describe later in Reddit threads and whispered conversations, the person in gray who checked their IDs and said as little as possible and led them inside without explaining anything.
At exactly 2:00 AM I opened the door and stepped outside.
“IDs please.”
They handed them over. I scanned each one. The tablet pulled up their assignments automatically, names and unit numbers and status codes I now understood weren’t just data but descriptions of what was about to happen to real people standing in front of me in the dark.
“Follow me. Do not speak unless spoken to. Do not touch anything unless instructed.”
I led the four Unit 7B participants inside, down the corridor that I now knew connected to the underground level I’d found, through a door, down a hallway to a room with four chairs facing a mirror. The room was cold. The lights were harsh. The mirror was dark.
“Sit.”
They sat. I left. Walked the Unit 9C participant to the adjacent building. Same process. Same words. Same flat efficiency that Patricia had demonstrated, that the suit seemed to demand, that the role required in order to function.
Then I went back outside and stood in the parking lot in the dark and the cold and listened to the building.
Even from outside I could hear them. Not the specific words, not the questions, but the rhythm. The cadence of inquiry and response that I’d been listening to through my office floor for three weeks. Except now I was the one who’d walked them to the rooms. I was the reason they were in there.
At 5:30 AM the door opened. The first group came out.
They looked the way people look when they’ve seen something that doesn’t fit inside their understanding of the world. Pale. Unfocused. Moving like they were walking through water. One woman was holding her own arms, gripping her biceps like she was trying to keep herself together physically.
I held out the tablet. They signed their completion forms with fingers that trembled or didn’t, depending on how far gone they were. Most of them left without a word, walking to their cars with the careful deliberate steps of people who aren’t sure the ground is solid.
One woman stopped. She was maybe thirty, dark circles under her eyes, hands still shaking. She looked at me like she was trying to decide whether I was a person or part of the building.
“Do you know what happens in there?”
I kept my face the way Patricia had taught me. Neutral. Professional. The face of someone who processes intake and completion and nothing in between.
“I coordinate intake and completion.”
“I saw things. Things that don’t make sense. There were two of me. Multiple…” She trailed off. Shook her head. “Never mind. You don’t care. You just work here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” She looked at the suit. The tablet. The door behind me. “You work here. You stand at the door and let people in and let people out and you don’t know or you don’t care what happens in between. Which is it?”
I didn’t answer because both were true and neither was the right thing to say, so she left, and I marked her completion in the system and collected my $800 for the night.
That was two weeks ago.
I work both shifts now. Data entry from 9 to 5. Coordination from 1 AM to 6 AM three nights a week. I sleep in fragments, four hours here, three hours there, napping at my desk during lunch while Patricia pretends not to notice.
The schedule is unsustainable but the money is real and my score is climbing, 687 to 712 to 734 to 767 to 789, each bump opening another door that had been closed to me six months ago, better apartment, better insurance, better everything, and the price is standing at a metal door three nights a week and saying “IDs please” to people who look at me the way I’d look at the person standing between me and whatever was about to happen to my life.
I see seventy to eighty people a week. All arriving at 2 AM. All looking scared. I check their IDs. I scan them into the system. I escort them to their units. I tell them to sit. I tell them not to speak. I tell them their coordinator will answer all questions inside. Then I wait outside while the voices do their work.
When they come out, I process their completion forms. I watch them leave looking like different people. Subtly different, in ways I wouldn’t have noticed before I started paying attention, but different. Something behind the eyes that has shifted, like a picture that’s been reframed with the image moved slightly to the left.
And I collect $800 a week for facilitating it. And my score keeps climbing. And Patricia brings me coffee every morning and calls me hon and asks about my weekend like we’re coworkers at a normal job doing normal work.
Last night one of the participants looked familiar.
I almost didn’t recognize him because it had been years, but when I scanned his ID the last name registered before the first name did, the way family names hit different than other names, the way your own surname on someone else’s face creates a specific kind of recognition that bypasses the conscious mind entirely.
My cousin. Marcus. Haven’t seen him since our grandmother’s funeral four years ago. He’d been living in another state, working in IT, the kind of steady career that keeps your score in the mid-800s without breaking a sweat. I didn’t know he’d moved back. Didn’t know his score had dropped. Didn’t know he’d gotten a Special Task assignment.
He didn’t recognize me. Partly because it was dark and I was in the suit and the tablet created a barrier of professional distance. Partly because four years is a long time and people change. Partly because he was terrified and terror narrows your vision to the immediate threat, which was the building and the door and whatever was waiting inside, not the face of the person checking your ID.
I almost said something. Almost said “Marcus, it’s me, it’s your cousin, don’t go inside, something happens in there that I can’t fully explain but it changes people, I’ve seen it happen to eighty people a week for two weeks and every single one of them comes out slightly less themselves.”
But I didn’t. Because saying it would mean the job and the score and the $800 a week and the apartment I’d just been approved for and the insurance rate that had finally dropped below what I could afford. Because saying it would mean admitting that I’d been facilitating something I should have stopped, or at least questioned, or at least refused to participate in. Because saying it would mean being a person with a moral position instead of a person with a role in a system, and the system doesn’t reward moral positions. The system rewards intake and completion processing.
“Unit 4D. Follow me.”
I walked him down the hallway. Opened the door to a room with four chairs and a mirror. Three other participants already seated, all wearing the same expression he was wearing, the one that says I don’t want to be here but the alternative was worse.
“Have a seat.”
He sat.
I closed the door and walked back outside and stood there in my gray suit holding my tablet listening to the building do whatever the building does.
I heard him answering questions. His voice, muffled through concrete and drywall but recognizable because I’d heard it at Thanksgiving dinners and birthday parties and one funeral where he’d given a eulogy about our grandmother’s tamales, how she’d folded the husks with this specific twist at the top that nobody else could replicate, and he’d cried telling that story, and the voice I heard through the walls answering “Please describe your earliest memory” might have been describing those tamales or might have been describing something else entirely, and I’ll never know because I stayed outside.
At 5 AM he came back out. Signed his completion form with a hand that shook. Looked at me the way all of them look at me, not with recognition but with something worse, with the acknowledgment that I was part of the architecture that had just rearranged something fundamental about who he was.
“Have a good night,” I said.
He left.
I marked his completion in the system.
Tonight I’m working again. Forty-three people scheduled across multiple units with different coordinators, a logistics operation as clean and organized as any other overnight shift at any other facility in any other industrial park, which is exactly how it feels when you’re inside it, like a job, like work, like something you clock in and clock out of.
My score is 789 and climbing. Patricia says I’m one of the best coordinators she’s trained. She’s talking about expanding my role, giving me access to the monitor room, letting me observe sessions so I can “better understand the participant experience and improve the intake process.” She says it like a performance review. Like career development.
I keep hearing the voices. Not just at work anymore. At home. In the shower. In the car. The same three questions, cycling, the rhythm so deeply embedded in my auditory memory that my brain generates it automatically, the way a song gets stuck in your head except the song is “Do you feel like yourself?” and the answer is less certain every time I hear it.
I tell myself this is just a job. Intake and completion processing. The paperwork doesn’t care what time it was generated. The system does the thinking. I do the typing.
I keep telling myself that.
I keep scanning IDs.
I keep escorting people to rooms.
And I keep hearing the voices from inside, asking questions I’ve started answering in my head without meaning to.
Please describe your earliest memory.
My grandmother’s kitchen. She was folding tamales. Marcus was there.
Do you feel like yourself?
I don’t know anymore. I think so. Why wouldn’t I?
How many times have you been here?
Every night. Three times a week. For two weeks. For what feels like longer than that.
I don’t answer out loud. I just stand outside and wait. It’s what I’m paid to do.