The decline button wasn’t grayed out.
I stared at my phone for a solid five minutes making sure I wasn’t seeing things. But there it was. Active. Clickable. Sitting right next to the accept button like it had always been an option, like they were giving me a choice, like someone at Harmonic Solutions had looked at my profile and decided that this particular assignment should come with the illusion of agency.
NEW OPPORTUNITY ASSIGNED
Gig Type: Special Task Pay: $2,800 Time Commitment: 3 hours Location: 1847 Riverside Industrial Park, Unit 4D Start Time: Tonight, 2:00 AM
I’d heard about Special Tasks. Everyone had. The whisper network among gig workers is pretty extensive when you’ve been doing this as long as I have. Seven years in the game. Score of 798. Not great, not terrible. Just a man in his mid-thirties who’d been an electrician before the gig economy ate the trades, who’d watched his union dissolve and his benefits disappear and his career turn into a series of app notifications that told him where to go and how much he’d get for going there.
I knew people who’d done Special Tasks. Knew people who wouldn’t talk about them, which told you more than talking would have. Knew a guy named Pete who did three of them and then just stopped showing up anywhere. His apartment sat empty for six months before his family finally came to clean it out. His sister told me they found everything exactly the way he’d left it, dishes in the sink, jacket on the back of a chair, a book open facedown on the nightstand to hold his place. Like he’d stepped out for groceries and never stepped back in. Nobody knows where he went. Nobody asks anymore because asking means thinking about it and thinking about it means acknowledging that the system can make a person disappear while leaving all their belongings behind like a shed skin.
So when the assignment came through, I did something I’d never done before.
I clicked decline.
Like an idiot. Like someone who still thought he lived in a world where you could say no to something and the world would respect the no. Like someone who believed the decline button was a feature instead of a test.
A popup appeared.
Are you sure? Declining this opportunity will result in immediate score adjustment and may affect future assignment eligibility.
Yeah. I’m sure. I’m very sure. I’m so sure I can feel it in my bones, in my teeth, in the part of my brain that used to make decisions for a living before the algorithm took over. I clicked confirm.
Another popup.
Score adjustment: -127 points New Contributor Score: 671 Your account has been flagged for review.
Ouch. But okay. I’d expected something like that. One hundred twenty-seven points is a significant hit but it’s not fatal. I’d been at 671 before, years ago, when I was getting started and hadn’t figured out the optimization tricks yet. Nothing you can’t recover from. Just a hit. Just a price for saying no. I could handle a price.
What I didn’t expect was the phone call thirty seconds later.
Unknown number. I almost didn’t answer. I should’ve not answered. That’s the first thing you learn when you’re trying to survive in this economy. Unknown numbers are bad news. They’re creditors or scammers or algorithms that want to sell you insurance, and none of those conversations end with you having more money than you started with.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Torres. This is Jennifer from Harmonic Solutions Assignment Compliance. I’m calling regarding your recent declination.”
“Yeah. I declined. That’s allowed, right?”
“Of course. You have every right to decline opportunities. However, Special Task assignments are prioritized placements. We’d like to understand your reasoning to better serve you in the future.” She sounded genuinely concerned. The kind of concerned that lives in the specific frequency range between professional warmth and personal investment, the frequency that makes you think the person on the other end actually cares about your wellbeing and isn’t just reading from a screen. That should’ve been my first warning. Nobody at a corporation is concerned about you at 2 AM.
“I don’t want to do it. That’s my reasoning.”
Silence on the other end. Not a long silence. Just enough to let me hear the absence of an immediate response, which told me my answer wasn’t in her script. She had responses for “I’m scared” and “I don’t understand the assignment” and “can you tell me more about what’s involved.” She didn’t have a response for “I don’t want to” because “I don’t want to” is a complete sentence that doesn’t require follow-up and the system wasn’t built to handle completeness.
“I see. May I ask if there’s something specific about the assignment that concerns you?”
“I don’t know anything about the assignment. That’s what concerns me. How am I supposed to agree to something when I don’t even know what I’m agreeing to?”
“The details are provided on-site for confidentiality reasons. This is standard protocol. Everyone follows the same protocol. Everyone agrees.” She said “everyone agrees” with a slight emphasis, not threatening, informational, like telling someone that everyone drives on the right side of the road. It’s just what people do.
“Then I guess my answer is still no.”
More silence. Longer this time. The kind of silence that has texture to it, like she was consulting with someone, turning to look at a screen or a supervisor or a second script for people who pass the first round of objections. Like there was a flowchart for this and she was checking which branch I’d sent us down.
“Mr. Torres, I want to make sure you understand the implications. Your score has already been adjusted. Further declinations may result in additional penalties. We have your best interests in mind. We want to help you succeed in the Contributor ecosystem.”
“Appreciate the concern. I’m good.”
“We could potentially offer additional compensation. Would $4,000 change your assessment?”
“No.”
“$5,500?”
Now I knew something was fundamentally wrong. They wouldn’t push this hard if it was just a staffing issue. If Special Tasks were just gigs, just work, just bodies needed in rooms at 2 AM, they’d move on to the next name in the queue and forget I existed. But they were negotiating. They were escalating. Which meant this wasn’t about filling a slot. This was about filling my slot. This was about making sure that I, specifically, understood that the decline button was a mechanism for identifying resistance, not a mechanism for enabling it.
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Mr. Torres, please…”
I ended the call.
Two minutes later, another assignment notification.
NEW OPPORTUNITY ASSIGNED
Gig Type: Standard Delivery Pay: $18 Time Commitment: 45 minutes Start Time: Now
A regular gig. Normal stuff. Quick money. I accepted it because I needed money and because saying no to a Special Task didn’t mean I could afford to say no to everything. Went and picked up someone’s Thai food from a restaurant on the east side and drove it to an apartment complex across town. The customer was a college kid who opened the door in sweatpants and said “thanks man” and gave me five stars. Easy. Uncomplicated. The kind of gig that makes you think maybe the system is just a system and you’re just a person doing a job and everything else is paranoia.
When I opened the app afterward, my score had dropped another fifteen points.
New Contributor Score: 656 Reason: Service quality concerns
Service quality concerns. For a delivery I’d literally just completed perfectly. Five stars sitting right there in the customer’s review. But apparently one customer’s five stars can become “service quality concerns” if the right algorithm decides your score needs to go in the right direction. The stars don’t matter. The reviews don’t matter. The actual quality of the actual service you actually provided doesn’t matter. What matters is the number they want your number to be, and they will adjust the inputs until the output matches.
I refreshed the app.
Another notification.
NEW OPPORTUNITY ASSIGNED
Gig Type: Special Task Pay: $3,200 Time Commitment: 3 hours Location: 1847 Riverside Industrial Park, Unit 4D Start Time: Tomorrow, 2:00 AM
Same task. Higher pay. Different start time. They were escalating. Testing to see how far they could push before I’d break, or maybe just recalibrating their offer based on data points I’d provided by refusing the first one. How much resistance does this individual display. What’s the price point. What combination of financial pressure and score reduction will produce compliance. I was being modeled in real time, and the model’s next prediction was that $3,200 might do what $2,800 and $5,500 hadn’t.
Decline button was there again.
I clicked it.
Score adjustment: -89 points New Contributor Score: 567
My phone started ringing immediately. Same unknown number. I didn’t answer. It rang four more times over the next hour, each ring spaced exactly twelve minutes apart, which is either a coincidence or the interval their system has determined is optimal for creating anxiety without triggering the kind of anger that makes people block numbers. I ignored all of them. Pretended I was strong. Pretended I could weather this the way I’d weathered other setbacks, the way I’d weathered the union dissolving and the benefits disappearing and the slow transformation of my career into a series of pings on a screen.
Then I got a text.
“Mr. Torres, this is Jennifer from Harmonic Solutions. We’re concerned about your account status. Please call us at your earliest convenience to discuss resolution options. Your current trajectory is unsustainable.”
Unsustainable. Like I was a failing business. Like I was a natural disaster trending in the wrong direction. Like the trajectory of my life was a line on a graph that someone was monitoring from a desk on a floor in a building downtown, and the line was going the wrong way and someone needed to correct it. I turned off my phone.
When I turned it back on the next morning, I had thirty-seven missed calls and twelve voicemails. All from Harmonic Solutions. All saying essentially the same thing in slightly different configurations, like a chatbot cycling through scripts. Call us. We can help. Your score is dropping. We need to discuss options. We’re worried about you. We want to support your success in the Contributor ecosystem. Like they were worried about me. Like the company that was dismantling my life call by call was losing sleep over my wellbeing.
I deleted them.
Opened the app.
Contributor Score: 512
I hadn’t done anything. Just slept. Eight hours of unconsciousness during which I accepted no gigs and declined no gigs and did nothing at all, and my score had dropped another fifty-five points. The system was working on a timer now. An automated bleed, steady and measured, draining my score at a rate calculated to produce maximum anxiety without triggering the kind of catastrophic collapse that might attract attention from someone who could do something about it. Not that anyone would do something about it.
There was a new message in my inbox.
URGENT: Account Review Required
“Your recent activity patterns have triggered a compliance review. Please schedule a consultation within 48 hours to avoid account suspension. Available consultation times: [Link]”
I didn’t click the link. Wasn’t interested in whatever was waiting on the other side of that link, which was probably Jennifer or someone like Jennifer in a room full of people like Jennifer, all of them monitoring accounts like mine, all of them following the same flowchart that branched based on my responses and converged on the same outcome regardless of which branch I chose.
I went to work instead. My actual job. The one I’d had before the gig economy ate the electrical trade. I still worked three days a week at a hardware store, Kendall’s on Fifth Street, the kind of place where contractors come for specific parts and homeowners come for advice and the guy behind the counter knows the difference between a 15-amp and a 20-amp breaker and can tell you why it matters. The pay wasn’t great but it was steady. That was worth something. Or at least I thought it was worth something, which is a distinction that was about to become relevant.
My manager, Tom, called me into his office an hour into my shift. Tom is the kind of guy who says “hey, so” before delivering bad news, the verbal equivalent of a wince, and he said “hey, so” and I knew before he finished the sentence that Harmonic Solutions had reached him.
“We got a weird call this morning.”
“Yeah?”
“Some company called Harmonic Solutions. They were asking about your employment status. Wanted to verify your hours and reliability. Wanted to know if you’d ever had attendance issues. What the hell is going on, Ramon?”
My stomach dropped. Not surprise. The feeling was closer to recognition, the feeling you get when the thing you feared turns out to be exactly the thing that happens. “What did you tell them?”
“Told them it was none of their business. But Ramon, what’s going on? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“No. Just some gig app I use sometimes. They’re pissed I turned down an assignment.”
“They’re calling your employers because you turned down an assignment? That’s insane.”
It was insane. But it was also exactly what was happening, and the insanity of it didn’t make it less real, just less comprehensible. Tom shook his head like he couldn’t believe it, the head-shake of a man who’d run a hardware store for twenty years and thought he understood how the world worked and was learning that the world had changed into something his understanding couldn’t accommodate.
“You want me to tell them to fuck off if they call again?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Tom.”
But I knew it wouldn’t matter. A company like Harmonic Solutions didn’t make calls like that without already knowing the outcome. They weren’t trying to get me fired. They were demonstrating that they could get me fired. They were drawing a line around the perimeter of my life and showing me how small the perimeter was and how easily they could step across it.
By the time I got home, I had an email from my car insurance company. My rate was being adjusted due to “updated risk assessment factors.” Up forty-two percent. Overnight. Because my Contributor Score had dropped, and the insurance company’s algorithm talked to the Contributor algorithm the way all the algorithms talked to each other, in a language of data that translated my refusal to attend a midnight meeting at an industrial park into a quantified increase in the likelihood that I would crash my car.
My credit card company sent a similar message. Interest rate adjustment. My “creditworthiness profile had changed.” Their words. Not mine.
I checked my Contributor Score.
I hadn’t even opened the app all day.
The next morning I got a letter from my apartment complex. Printed on their letterhead. Signed by the property manager, a woman named Deborah I’d never spoken to but who apparently had strong feelings about my tenancy. They were declining to renew my lease. “Recent changes in resident reliability metrics” made me ineligible for continued occupancy. My score was 441.
I sat on my couch looking at that number on my phone. Watching it tick down in real time. 440. 439. 438. Like a countdown. Like the number was a clock and when it reached zero I would stop being a person and start being something else, a problem, a liability, a case file, a cautionary tale that people would tell each other in whispered conversations about what happens when you say no.
They were bleeding me out. Systematically, methodically, with the patient precision of a system that has done this before and will do it again, destroying my ability to function in society because I’d clicked a button that said “decline.” Because I’d thought I had a choice. Because I’d mistaken the presence of a button for the presence of an option.
My phone rang. Unknown number.
I answered because at this point what was the difference. The call couldn’t make things worse. The silence couldn’t make things better. At least Jennifer would be a human voice, even if the human was reading from a script designed to compress my willpower into compliance.
“Mr. Torres. This is Jennifer. I think we need to talk.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to help you. Your score is entering critical territory. Below 400, you’ll start experiencing significant lifestyle impacts.” She recited the thresholds the way a doctor delivers test results, with practiced empathy and clinical precision. “Below 300, you become essentially uninsurable and unemployable. Below 200, most housing options close. Below 100…”
“I get the picture.”
“Then you understand that we need to resolve this.”
“How?”
“Accept the Special Task assignment. Three hours. One night. This all goes away. Your score gets restored. The review gets cleared. Your insurance, your credit, your lease, everything goes back to normal. Like it never happened.”
“Like it never happened.”
“Exactly. We don’t hold grudges, Mr. Torres. The system doesn’t punish people for taking time to consider their options. It just needs to know you’re willing to participate.”
“And if I’m not?”
“Then we continue monitoring your account and applying appropriate adjustments based on your participation patterns.”
“You mean you keep destroying my life until I agree.”
“I mean we continue following standard protocol.” She said it without hesitation. Without inflection. The way you’d say “the store closes at nine” or “parking is in the back.” A fact about the world that doesn’t require her opinion.
I looked at my score. 421. Still dropping while we talked, like the conversation itself was a participation metric and my failure to say yes was being registered in real time.
“What happens in these Special Tasks?”
“I’m not authorized to disclose that information.”
“Then I guess we’re done talking.”
“Mr. Torres…”
I hung up.
I spent the next week watching my life collapse in slow motion, each day bringing a new threshold crossed and a new consequence delivered with the administrative courtesy of a system that destroys people without raising its voice.
380: My bank called. They were closing my credit card account. Said my account was “no longer meeting minimum usage and credit requirements.” Said it like my existence had failed to check the right boxes on a form, like I was a loan application that had been denied rather than a person who’d been buying groceries with that card for six years.
352: The hardware store let me go. Tom looked sick when he told me. Said corporate called. Said my “reliability metrics” made me a liability. Said he fought it but there was nothing he could do. I’d known Tom for two years. We’d worked good shifts together. He’d taught me how the inventory system worked and I’d rewired the stockroom lights when the electrician the company hired couldn’t figure out the junction box. Now I was a liability. Now I was a number that had dropped below a threshold Tom didn’t set and couldn’t override.
I shook his hand. He slipped me two hundred dollars in cash and said “Take care of yourself” and I walked out of Kendall’s Hardware for the last time knowing that the store and Tom and the Saturday morning contractors and the homeowners who needed advice about breakers were behind a door that had just closed and would not open again. Not for someone with my number.
312: My phone service got suspended. “Account holder no longer meets service eligibility requirements.” Which meant the device I used to accept gigs, the device that constituted my only remaining connection to the economy, the device through which the system communicated its demands and measured my compliance, was now a dark screen in my pocket. They’d taken away the instrument of my own subordination, which should have felt like freedom but felt like being cut loose from a life raft in open water.
287: I got pulled over for a broken taillight. The cop ran my information through whatever database cops use, and I watched his expression change in the rearview mirror, watched him go from routine traffic stop to something else, something harder, as the number came back and reclassified me from “citizen with a broken taillight” to “low-score operating a vehicle.” He came back to my window looking at me like I was dangerous. Like the number next to my name meant something about who I was as a person, something that overrode the fact that I was sitting calmly in my car with my hands visible and my license and registration ready.
“Sir, I’m going to need you to step out of the vehicle.”
They impounded my car. Some regulation I’d never heard of about minimum Contributor Scores for vehicle operation. The officer explained it to me in the tone people use when they’re following a rule they know is absurd but enforcing anyway because the rule exists and their job is enforcement, not evaluation.
223: I couldn’t buy groceries anymore. The self-checkout machines at the Kroger where I’d been shopping for four years rejected my payment. “Account flagged. Please see customer service.” Customer service was a teenager named Dylan who looked at his screen and looked at me and said I needed to “resolve my Contributor Score issues” before they could process transactions. I was trying to buy pasta and canned soup and a bag of rice. He was treating me like a security risk. Not because he wanted to. Because his screen told him to.
I was living on cash. What little I had left. Tom’s two hundred dollars and whatever coins I could find in the car before they towed it.
189: My elderly neighbor Mrs. Chen, who I’d known for four years, who I’d helped carry groceries up the stairs more times than either of us could count, who made me congee when I was sick last winter and left it outside my door with a note that said “Eat, you look terrible,” saw me in the hallway and pulled her grandson inside her apartment. Locked the door. I heard her on the phone. Heard her say “There’s a low-score in the building” in a voice that was both apologetic and terrified, the voice of a person who knows what she’s doing is wrong but is more afraid of the consequences of not doing it than the shame of doing it.
That one broke something in me that the insurance and the credit card and the job hadn’t broken. Because Mrs. Chen knew me. She knew my name and my face and what I liked in my congee and the fact that I always carried her bags up the third-floor stairs without being asked. And none of that mattered. The number had overwritten everything. The number had turned four years of neighborly kindness into a threat profile, and Mrs. Chen was doing the rational thing, the safe thing, the thing the system rewarded, which was protecting herself by reporting the person the system had decided was dangerous.
I don’t blame her. That’s the worst part. I understand completely.
163: Eviction notice. Not because my lease was ending. Because my score had dropped below the building’s minimum occupancy threshold. Seventy-two hours to vacate. I packed what I could carry in two duffel bags. Left everything else. I couldn’t even store it. No storage facility would accept someone with my score. No friend would risk the association. No family member lived close enough to help, and even if they did, the algorithm might flag them for “proximity to non-compliant accounts.”
I left my apartment with two bags and a dead phone and no car and a Contributor Score of 127, and walked to the park three blocks away, and sat on a bench, and watched the city I’d lived in for twelve years continue operating around me as if I’d already disappeared.
My score was 94 when the notification came through.
Somehow. On a phone that wasn’t supposed to work anymore. Through a data connection that shouldn’t have existed. The screen lit up in my pocket with the specific vibration pattern of a gig notification, which I could identify by feel the way a soldier can identify incoming by sound, and I pulled it out and there it was, bright and clean and certain, on a phone that every telecom company in the country had decided I didn’t deserve to use.
Like they were making sure I could see it. Like the phone worked when they needed it to work and stopped working when it served their purposes for it to stop. Like even the disconnection had been part of the sequence, one more pressure point in a choreography of systematic destruction that had been designed before I clicked the decline button and would have played out the same way regardless of which specific refusal triggered it.
NEW OPPORTUNITY ASSIGNED
Gig Type: Special Task Pay: $8,400 Time Commitment: 3 hours Location: 1847 Riverside Industrial Park, Unit 4D Start Time: Tonight, 2:00 AM
The decline button was grayed out this time.
I’d lost everything. My apartment. My job. My car. My bank account was frozen. I couldn’t buy food. Couldn’t get shelter. Couldn’t access any service that required a score above the number that meant “this person exists as far as society is concerned.” Below 100 and you’re a ghost. A problem. A cautionary tale. You’re the person other people cross the street to avoid, not because of anything you’ve done but because your number is visible on their phone and proximity to your number might affect their number. You’re contagious. You’re a liability. You’re a person who said no.
I sat in the park at midnight looking at that notification. The bench was cold. The park was empty. Somewhere in the city, in an apartment I could no longer enter, Mrs. Chen was sleeping safely behind a locked door. Somewhere Tom was counting the register at Kendall’s and feeling bad about something he couldn’t change. Somewhere a version of my life was continuing without me, the apartment re-rented, the hardware store re-staffed, the gap I’d left closing the way water closes around a stone.
Three hours. $8,400. Back into the system. Back to a score that would let me buy groceries and rent an apartment and exist as a person instead of a number that had fallen below the threshold of personhood.
Or keep refusing and what. Die on the bench. Get picked up by cops and processed into whatever facility they’ve built for people whose scores have reached terminal velocity. I thought about fighting. About finding a lawyer, except lawyers check scores. About going to the press, except journalists check scores. About finding someone, anyone, who would risk their own number to help someone whose number proved they didn’t deserve help.
I looked at the start time.
2:00 AM.
Two hours from now.
The Riverside Industrial Park was forty minutes on foot.
I started walking. Not because I’d decided to accept. The button was grayed out. The decision had been made for me, or had been made months ago when someone designed a system that included both a decline button and a protocol for destroying anyone who used it. I walked because walking was the last thing I could do that didn’t require permission. Because the sidewalk didn’t check my score. Because my legs still worked even if nothing else did.
I got there at 1:50 AM.
The building was exactly like I’d imagined from the gig worker whisper network. Concrete. Dark. One light above the door casting a circle on the ground that looked like a spotlight on an empty stage. Like it was waiting for me. Like the building and the light and the parking lot had been arranged specifically for this moment, the moment when a person who’d refused to walk through this door would walk through this door because the alternative was no longer an alternative.
There were other people standing outside. Four of them. Looking as miserable as I felt, looking as defeated as people can look when they’ve lost everything and still had to show up somewhere at 2 AM because the system that took everything had one more thing to take.
At exactly 2:00 AM, the door opened.
A man in a gray suit stepped out. I’d never seen him before but I recognized him anyway. He was the type of man who exists in every system that requires compliance. Young, professional, pleasant in the specific way that pleasantness becomes a weapon when it’s deployed in a context that should warrant something other than pleasantness. He was smiling.
“IDs please.”
I didn’t move. Wasn’t making a statement. My body had simply stopped translating my intentions into motion. I was standing in a parking lot in dirty clothes I’d been wearing for three days, holding a phone that shouldn’t work and two duffel bags containing everything I owned, and the gulf between who I was at this moment and who I’d been two weeks ago was so vast that moving in any direction felt like an endorsement of one side or the other.
He looked at me. Really looked at me. At the clothes. At the bags. At my face, which I hadn’t been able to wash properly in three days and which probably showed everything I’d been feeling displayed in the particular way that exhaustion displays emotions, without filters, without the social composure that rested people use to keep their faces from saying too much.
“Mr. Torres. We’ve been expecting you.”
“I didn’t accept the assignment.”
“No. You didn’t.” He smiled wider. Not cruel. Amused. The way you’d smile at a chess move that was bold and futile and exactly the move you’d predicted. “But here you are anyway.”
He gestured to the door like it was the entrance to a hotel. Like somewhere on the other side was a bed with clean sheets and a shower with hot water and a meal and a life that worked.
“Please. We have so much to show you.”
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
One notification.
Assignment Auto-Accepted: Participant Arrival Confirmed Score adjustment: +806 points New Contributor Score: 900
The number hit me like a physical force. 900. Higher than I’d been before any of this started. Higher than I’d been in seven years of gig work and score optimization and accepting every delivery and every warehouse shift and every chicken costume the algorithm threw at me. 900. For walking across a parking lot. For showing up at a door I’d spent two weeks refusing to walk through.
I looked at the other people. They were staring at their phones too. Same shocked expressions. Same sudden stillness. The realization spreading across four faces simultaneously that they’d been herded, that the score drops and the insurance hikes and the impounded cars and the suspended phone services had all been vectors of a single force pushing them toward this building on this night, and the force had succeeded, and the reward for arriving was instantaneous and enormous and impossible to feel good about.
The suited man was still smiling.
“The thing about refusal, Mr. Torres, is that it’s only meaningful when you have other options.” He said it without malice. Without satisfaction. With the flat informational tone of someone explaining how a machine works to someone who’s about to be processed by it. “You don’t. None of you do. Not anymore. We made sure of that. We took the options away one by one and you kept thinking there was still a way out. There wasn’t. There never was. The decline button was never an exit. It was a timer.”
He held the door open.
“Welcome to Special Tasks. Let’s begin.”
I walked through the door. The hallway was concrete and fluorescent and smelled like cleaning chemicals and something metallic I couldn’t name, and it looked exactly like what every gig worker who’d ever whispered about this place had described, and it felt like walking into a mouth.
What choice did I have.
My score was 900.
Everything would go back to normal. The apartment. The insurance. The credit card. Tom’s hardware store. Mrs. Chen’s unlocked door. All of it restored with a single number, a number that had the power to give me back my life because it had the power to take my life away, and both powers flowed from the same source and served the same purpose.
All I had to do was go inside.
So I went inside.