I process about forty Special Task assignments per day.
Been doing this job for seventeen months. Started right after I graduated because the pay was decent and the benefits were good and nobody else was offering either of those things to a twenty-three-year-old with a communications degree and a Contributor Score that was barely holding above 700. My score stays locked at 875 now, which is high enough to keep my life comfortable but not so high that anyone asks how I got there. That’s the balance you learn to maintain at this company. Stay useful but forgettable. Be the kind of employee who processes his workload and goes home and doesn’t leave fingerprints on anything sensitive.
The company is called Harmonic Solutions.
We have seventeen floors in a downtown office building that looks like every other downtown office building, glass and steel and a lobby with abstract art that nobody looks at and a security desk staffed by a guy named Morris who knows everyone’s name and nothing about what happens above the fourth floor. I work on floor nine. Data Processing and Assignment Coordination.
Sounds impressive until you realize it just means I sit in a cubicle and click buttons all day, hour after hour, reviewing lists the algorithm has already compiled and approving assignments the system has already decided to make. I am the human signature on an automated process. The warm body between the machine and the legal requirement that says a person has to review these things.
My job is simple. The algorithm generates candidate lists for Special Tasks based on behavioral patterns, geographic clustering, and psychological profile assessments. I review the lists. Make sure there are no obvious errors, which there never are because the algorithm doesn’t make obvious errors. Click approve. The assignments go out into the world and people’s phones buzz at 2 AM and I never think about what happens after the buzzing.
I don’t know what the Special Tasks actually are.
That’s above my clearance level. Which is something people say here the way people at normal jobs say “that’s not my department.” It’s not evasion. It’s structure.
The building is organized so that no one person knows the whole picture. Floor seven handles facility logistics. Floor eleven does participant profiling. Floor thirteen is locked and nobody I’ve asked knows what happens there. Each floor is a piece of something larger, and the pieces are shaped so they don’t fit together unless you have a blueprint nobody on my floor has ever seen.
I asked about it once during training. My supervisor, a woman named Patricia who always wore the same gray cardigan and kept a candy dish full of butterscotch on her desk, smiled and said “You’re matching people to opportunities. That’s all you need to know.” She said it like she was doing me a favor. Like knowing more would be a burden I should be grateful to avoid. And I believed her, for a while, the way you believe anything when you’re new and the coffee is free and the paychecks clear and nobody’s asking you to do anything that feels wrong.
The thing about this job is you start noticing patterns whether you want to or not. Your brain does it automatically, the same way it finds faces in clouds and rhythms in static. It’s not a choice. It’s a compulsion that wears the mask of curiosity, and by the time you realize you’re doing it, you’ve already seen too much to go back to not seeing it.
At first it’s just numbers. Columns in a spreadsheet.
You approve a cluster assignment for Unit 7B. Four people. Two observers, two participants. The algorithm has already determined optimal matching based on relationship proximity and psychological compatibility scores, which are numbers I can see but can’t interpret, like reading sheet music when you don’t play an instrument. You click approve. Move to the next one. Your hands get sore from clicking. You eat lunch at your desk and click some more. The rhythm of it becomes meditative, almost peaceful, the way any repetitive task becomes peaceful once you’ve stopped thinking about what the task means.
But after a few months, you start recognizing names.
Not because you’re supposed to. The system doesn’t show you assignment history. It’s designed that way on purpose, so each approval feels isolated, discrete, a single action with no context. That’s what makes it worse. You’re not supposed to notice patterns. But your brain notices anyway, the way it notices the same car parked on your street three days in a row or the same stranger at the same coffee shop every morning. Especially when you’re trying not to notice. Trying not to notice is the thing that makes you notice hardest.
I started keeping a notebook. Nothing official. Just a small Moleskine I kept in my desk drawer. Probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, and I once tried to impress a girl by doing a backflip off a dock in college. I can’t do backflips. The dock was six feet high. I landed on my back and spent the rest of the party lying on the shore trying to remember how lungs work. The notebook was worse than the backflip because the backflip only hurt me.
I’d write down names when I saw them come up multiple times. Not every time. Just when something about the recurrence felt off, when the timing was too regular or the unit assignment was too consistent or the algorithm’s selection criteria seemed to be narrowing toward a specific person rather than drawing from a pool.
Timothy Poland appeared in my queue six times between March and May. Always as a participant. Never an observer. Always at Riverside Industrial Park. Always on Saturday nights. I started wondering why. What made him special. What combination of behavioral patterns and psychological profile scores had caused the algorithm to select him six times in three months while other people in my queue appeared once and never again.
Then he stopped appearing entirely.
I checked the system. Pulled up his profile out of curiosity, the curiosity that kills cats and data processors and anyone else who mistakes the desire to know for the right to know.
Status: Inactive.
No other details. No explanation. No forwarding address. Just a single word that meant Timothy Poland had stopped existing as far as Harmonic Solutions was concerned, and since Harmonic Solutions was connected to the Contributor Score system which was connected to every other system in the country, “inactive” effectively meant he’d stopped existing as far as everything was concerned.
I looked up five other repeat names from my notebook. Three were Inactive. Two still showed Active but hadn’t appeared in any assignments for over a month. Off the roster. Gone from the queue. Still technically alive in the system but functionally absent, like accounts that haven’t been closed but haven’t logged in.
I told myself it didn’t mean anything. People move. People leave the gig economy. People’s circumstances change. Perfectly normal explanations for perfectly normal things.
Perfectly normal things don’t usually make your stomach hurt while you’re eating a turkey sandwich at your desk at 1:30 in the afternoon on a Tuesday.
Then I started noticing the geographic clustering.
Most Special Tasks happen at the same handful of locations. The Riverside Industrial Park has at least fifteen units that get used regularly. Units 3A, 4D, 7B, 9C, and 12A appear in my queue so often they feel like addresses I’ve memorized, like a friend’s house or the post office. There’s a warehouse district on the east side with three active facilities. An office complex downtown that’s supposedly “under renovation” but has been under renovation for the entire seventeen months I’ve worked here, which is a long renovation for a building that never seems to have any construction equipment near it.
I pulled up the property records during my lunch break. Used my personal laptop, not the work system, because I’m not completely stupid, just stupid enough to be pulling property records in the break room of the company I’m investigating. The properties were all owned by shell companies. Different names, different states of incorporation, but the same registered agent, an attorney’s office in Wilmington, Delaware, because of course it was Delaware. Everything that wants to be invisible gets funneled through Delaware. It’s like the state’s entire economy is built on being the place where other economies hide their secrets.
I traced it back three layers before I hit a wall. The furthest I got was a holding company called Recursive Development Group, which owned six of the shell companies which owned the properties which housed the facilities where the Special Tasks took place. Recursive Development Group had no website. No press releases. No employees listed on LinkedIn. No public filings beyond the minimum required to maintain its corporate status. A company that apparently owned half the industrial real estate in the city and didn’t have so much as a homepage. Designed specifically to be unfindable by someone with exactly my level of access and exactly my amount of time, which made me wonder whether the wall I’d hit was a real wall or a wall that had been placed there specifically for people like me to hit.
I should’ve stopped there.
I didn’t.
Last week I stayed late. Told Patricia I wanted to catch up on backlog. She seemed pleased, the way she always seems pleased when someone demonstrates initiative, which I’m now fairly certain is not pleasure but a specific kind of attention, the attention of someone marking a data point on a timeline they’ve been tracking longer than you’ve been aware you were on it.
After everyone left, I used my credentials to access the archive system. It’s technically allowed. Nobody ever does it because there’s no reason to. Once assignments are completed and processed, they just sit in the database as historical data for quarterly reports that nobody reads. I read one once out of boredom. Wished I hadn’t. Columns of numbers that resolved, if you stared at them long enough, into a picture of something I didn’t have the clearance to name.
I started pulling completed Special Task files at random. Looking for patterns. Looking for anything that organized the noise into signal.
Found them immediately. Which means either I’m smarter than the people who designed the system, which I’m not, or the patterns were there to be found by someone looking for them, which is a possibility that should have made me stop and didn’t.
Every completed task had participant feedback forms attached. Standard evaluation stuff. “Rate your experience on a scale of 1 to 10.” “Did you feel safe during the session.” “Would you recommend this opportunity to others.” Strange questions for a mandatory midnight gig in a concrete building, but the strangeness wasn’t the point. The response rates were the point.
First assignment: 100 percent response rate. Every single participant filled out their form like good citizens doing their paperwork.
Second assignment: 100 percent again. Perfect compliance.
Third assignment: 91 percent. A small crack.
Fourth assignment: 73 percent.
Fifth assignment: 52 percent.
Sixth assignment: 12 percent.
After the sixth task, response rates dropped to near zero. Not gradually. Not in the gentle decline of people losing interest. A cliff. Out of every hundred people who did their first Special Task, every single one of them responded to the feedback form. By the time those same people hit task six, almost none of them responded to anything ever again. Not a form. Not a gig notification. Not a customer service inquiry. They just went silent, like radios switching off one by one across a darkening map.
I pulled individual profiles. Cross-referenced completion dates with feedback submissions. Built a timeline on a spreadsheet I saved to a USB drive I kept in my pocket, not on the work system, because by this point I’d graduated from “curious” to “paranoid” and paranoid people save their work to removable media.
People who did one Special Task always submitted feedback.
People who did two almost always submitted feedback.
By task four, half of them had stopped responding to anything. App notifications. Regular gig assignments. Customer service calls. They just vanished from the digital world, their accounts still active but their activity flatlined, like hospital monitors displaying a steady line where a pulse used to be.
By task six, they were functionally gone. Status: Inactive. The word that meant Timothy Poland and all the others had crossed some threshold that the system tracked and I couldn’t see.
I sat at my desk at 11 PM looking at spreadsheet after spreadsheet of people who’d stopped existing in any meaningful way after their sixth Special Task. Hundreds of them. The building was empty. The fluorescent lights were doing their midnight thing, buzzing slightly louder than during the day, as if the building itself was running on reduced power and the lights were compensating. My hands were shaking. Not dramatically. Just a tremor in my fingers that made the cursor jump when I tried to scroll.
Then I found something that made the tremor worse.
My own name was in the system.
Not in the assignment queue. In a different database. One I’d never seen before, one I definitely didn’t have clearance for, but the archive system apparently didn’t enforce clearance restrictions at 11 PM on a Tuesday when the building was empty, which was either a security flaw or an invitation, and I no longer trusted my ability to distinguish between the two.
I clicked on my name.
Employee Profile: David Walsh. Department: Data Processing and Assignment Coordination. Clearance Level: 3. Assignment Eligibility: Tier 2. Recommended Progression Timeline: Month 12-14. Optimal Unit Assignment: 9C.
There was more. Pages of it. Psychological evaluation data from assessments I’d never taken, or never remembered taking, which in this building might be the same thing. Behavioral pattern analysis generated from my work computer usage, my mouse movements, my typing cadence, the duration of my pauses between clicks. Screenshots of my browser history, including the property record searches I’d done on my personal laptop in the break room, which meant the break room had cameras or my personal laptop had been compromised or both. A compatibility matrix showing my connections to other employees and to gig workers in the system, lines drawn between my name and dozens of others, a social map I hadn’t consented to being part of but had apparently been part of since the day I was hired.
At the bottom, in formatting that felt louder than the rest: Preparation Status: 87% Complete.
I heard footsteps in the hallway.
I closed everything. Cleared the browser. Shut down the monitor. My heart was doing something that probably warranted medical attention, the kind of rapid irregular rhythm that your body produces when it’s trying to decide between fight and flight and is leaning heavily toward a third option, which is freeze and hope the predator loses interest.
Patricia appeared in the doorway. Still wearing that gray cardigan even though it was almost midnight. The butterscotch was absent but the warmth wasn’t. She leaned against the doorframe the way she always did, casual, unhurried, the posture of someone who has all the time in the world because she already knows how this conversation ends.
“David. I thought you’d gone home.”
“Just finishing up. Heading out now.”
She came into my cubicle. Stood close enough that I could smell the same vaguely floral perfume she always wore, close enough that if she glanced at my monitor she’d see it was off, which was not the state of a monitor being actively used for backlog processing. Close enough that the warmth she projected, the maternal, butterscotch, “good work today hon” warmth that made her the most liked supervisor on the ninth floor, felt like something else entirely. Like a light being shone in a specific direction for a specific purpose.
“You’ve been doing excellent work lately. Really excellent. We’ve noticed.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that.”
“How are you feeling about your position here. Satisfied? Challenged?”
“It’s good. Yeah. I’m learning a lot.” The words came out the way words come out when you’re performing normalcy for an audience of one who already knows you’re performing.
She paused. Looked at my desk. Looked at the drawer where I kept the Moleskine. I watched her eyes track to that specific drawer and hold for a half-second longer than random scanning would require, and in that half-second I understood that she knew about the notebook the way she knew about the browser history and the property records and the late nights and the spreadsheets, the way the building knew everything that happened inside it because the building was the system and the system was the building and I had been working inside it for seventeen months thinking I was separate from it.
“You know, opportunities for advancement come up regularly. For people who show initiative. People who can be trusted with more responsibility. The kind of work that requires discretion.” She said “discretion” the way normal supervisors say “teamwork,” like it was a professional virtue to be cultivated rather than a warning to be heeded. “The kind of work that requires you to understand how things really function here.”
“I appreciate that,” I said again, because my vocabulary had contracted to approximately four phrases and “I appreciate that” was the safest one.
“You’d be a strong candidate for that kind of work. When the time comes.”
“When would that be.”
She smiled. The same smile from training. The smile that said knowing more would be a burden. Except now the smile said something additional, something that had always been there and I hadn’t been able to read until tonight: the burden is already yours. You just haven’t felt the weight yet.
“Soon. Another month or two. We’ll let you know.” She straightened up from the doorframe. “We always know when someone’s ready.”
She left. Her footsteps receded down the hallway toward the elevator. I waited five minutes. Then I grabbed the Moleskine from the drawer and walked to my car and drove home and sat in my apartment for three hours trying to decide what to do with the information that my employer had been preparing me, for seventeen months, to become a participant in the thing I’d been processing.
Preparation Status: 87% Complete.
I could quit. Walk away tonight. Let my score drop from 875 to whatever it drops to when you leave Harmonic Solutions, because the score is locked by the company and unlocking it means the algorithm recalculates based on whatever criteria it uses, and without the employment stability and the clearance-level bonus and whatever other invisible factors are inflating my number, the recalculation would not be kind.
But I keep thinking about the spreadsheets. The hundreds of names. The response rates that dropped to zero after task six. All those people who used to check their phones and go to work and eat lunch and have opinions about things and are now just a word in a database. Inactive. The same word that will be next to my name if Preparation Status reaches 100% and I’m sitting in a chair in Unit 9C answering questions under bright lights while someone on the ninth floor clicks approve on my assignment without thinking about what it means.
Timothy Poland was on task six when he went Inactive.
I pulled up the participant list for his final assignment, the Unit 7B session from last month. Four people total. Timothy Poland. James Park. Jennifer Kim. Robert Vasquez.
Wait.
I looked at the second name again.
James Park.
That’s me. That’s my legal name. David is what I go by, what I put on my resume, what Patricia calls me. But my birth name, the name on my driver’s license and my Social Security card and apparently my Special Task participant profile, is James Park.
But I’ve never done a Special Task. I work here. I process the assignments. I sit in the cubicle and click approve and go home. That’s the whole point of being on the inside. That’s why I took this job. Not consciously, not as a strategy, but in the way that you choose the side of the street that has the lights on when you’re walking at night. I chose to be the one processing rather than the one being processed.
I checked the date on the file. Three weeks ago. Tuesday night.
I was here that Tuesday. I remember being at work. I remember Patricia saying goodnight at 5:30. Then I remember being home, eating leftover pad thai, watching something on my laptop. The middle part is just gone. Not foggy. Not unclear. Gone. Like someone cut a scene out of a movie and spliced the remaining footage together so smoothly you’d never notice the seam unless you went looking for it.
But I am looking now. I can’t stop looking. That’s the thing about this job. It teaches your brain to find patterns, and once your brain knows how to find patterns, it finds them everywhere, including in the gaps of your own memory where patterns shouldn’t exist.
I checked my bank account. There’s a deposit from three weeks ago. $2,400. I’d assumed it was my regular paycheck, which comes from a payroll company with a generic name that I’d never questioned. But my regular paycheck is $2,100.
Three hundred extra dollars. Or a $2,400 payment that happened to land on the same day as something else that I also can’t remember.
My phone just buzzed.
NEW OPPORTUNITY ASSIGNED
Gig Type: Special Task Pay: $3,600 Time Commitment: 4 hours Location: 1847 Riverside Industrial Park, Unit 9C Start Time: Tomorrow, 2:00 AM
Unit 9C. The unit from my employee profile. My optimal assignment. The room they’d been building me toward for seventeen months, since before I noticed the patterns, since before the notebook, since before the late nights and the archive system and the spreadsheets full of people who stopped existing. They’d known I would end up here. The Preparation Status wasn’t tracking whether I was ready for the task. It was tracking how close I was to discovering that the task had already started.
I’m looking at my Moleskine. At all the names I’ve written down. All the people who disappeared after task six. Timothy Poland. James Park.
I’m on task two. Maybe. Or task three if the gaps in my memory contain assignments I don’t remember. And honestly, how would I know. If they can take a Tuesday night from me without leaving a mark, without even leaving the feeling of absence, what else have they taken. What other gaps are there in my timeline that I’ve smoothed over the way the brain smooths over a blind spot in your vision, filling the hole with an assumption so seamless you never know the hole was there.
Patricia said I’d be ready in a month or two. Task four or five if they’re spacing them every few weeks. Then task six. Then Inactive. Then a data processor on the ninth floor clicks through my file without thinking twice about it and moves on to the next name in the queue.
I should quit. Right now. Tonight. Delete the app. Let the score collapse. Figure out how to live outside the system, the way people used to live before a number determined whether you deserved food and shelter and the basic acknowledgment of your existence. People did that. People used to just live.
But I’m looking at the notification on my phone. $3,600. Four hours. Unit 9C.
My rent is due next week.
And I keep thinking maybe if I go, I’ll understand. Maybe I’ll see what happens in the rooms. Maybe I’ll find Timothy Poland. Maybe I’ll find all of them, all the names in my notebook, all the Inactive accounts, and understanding what happened to them will give me something I can use. Maybe knowledge is protection. Maybe seeing the mechanism from the inside of the inside will make it less terrifying than seeing it from the outside of the inside, which is where I’ve been for seventeen months and which has been terrifying enough.
Or maybe I’ll just become another Inactive account. Another name in a spreadsheet that some other data processor will scroll past at 1:30 PM on a Tuesday, eating a turkey sandwich, not thinking about what the word means.
The decline button is grayed out.
It’s always been grayed out. I just never noticed before.