May Season Studio Archives
by Gintare O.
PRECEDING FILES:
Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation
She sat with the notebook on the counter until it was dark outside.
She did not open it. She did not touch it. She sat with a glass of wine she had opened and had not planned to open and looked at the notebook and thought about what she had seen.
She had seen a delivery truck without markings drive onto the MSS campus at 2:14 PM on a Saturday. She had seen an emblem she recognized from somewhere she was still not letting herself place. She had run into a coworker who had asked her about a Friday nobody should have known she had been thinking about, and who had said one word about her staying home, and had gone.
Both of these were separate events. She was trying to keep them separate. The problem was that they had happened on the same afternoon, in the same three-block radius, in the same hour of her life, which meant they were connected, which meant something had chosen for them to happen in sequence.
She had not known that MSS did anything on weekends. She had not thought about it. She had assumed the campus was closed the way an office is closed. Which was to say the way she had assumed everything.
She was going to have to see.
She was not going to have to see tonight.
She poured out the wine. She went to bed.
Sunday she drove out to the campus at 10:00 AM.
She had thought about the timing. If a truck had gone in at 2:14 Saturday, another might not come until later Sunday, but she did not know the pattern. She had picked 10:00 because it was the earliest time she could imagine anything happening and the latest time she could still be back home for lunch and pretend she had done something else with her morning.
She did not drive onto the campus. She drove to the forest preserve across from the campus entrance, which was the same lot she had pulled into Saturday afternoon. She parked at the far end, past the trailhead sign, where her car would not be visible from the MSS drive.
She had a book with her, which she had brought so she could look like she was reading if anyone came by. She had a coffee she had bought at the gas station on the way. She had her phone. She had the notebook, because the notebook was in her bag, and she had stopped taking it out of her bag.
She sat and watched the campus.
The MSS building was five stories tall. It sat at the back of a large lot with parking on three sides and a long service drive around the back. She could see the front of the building and the west side and, at an angle, the back where the loading dock was. She could not see the loading dock itself. She could see the driveway that led to it.
For the first thirty minutes nothing happened.
At 10:34 a car she did not recognize turned into the campus drive. A silver sedan. It went around the building to the back. She could not see where it stopped.
At 10:52 a plain white truck turned in. Same shape as the one from Saturday. She could not tell from her distance whether it had the same emblem. It also went to the back.
At 11:07 another truck. Different color. Dark green. It went to the back.
At 11:24 the silver sedan came back out. It turned onto Route 53 and drove north.
At 11:41 another silver sedan turned in. Different plate. Same model. It went around to the back.
She was watching a rhythm. It was steady. It was managed.
She sat with her book on the seat next to her, unopened.
She needed a better view.
She waited until 12:15, when there had been no activity for twenty minutes, and drove up the service drive on the far side of the property. This was a public road. It ran between the MSS campus and the forest preserve on the other side. It was, on a Sunday, empty.
She drove slowly. She kept her eyes forward. She was not looking for anything. She was, if anyone had asked, cutting through to another road on the far side.
Halfway down the service drive she reached the point where the back of the MSS building was closest. The loading dock was on this side, at ground level, with the bay doors facing out toward the drive. There was a low chain link fence between the drive and the campus. It had signs on it. Authorized personnel only.
The bay doors were open.
She slowed. She did not stop.
There were four people at the loading dock. They were unloading boxes from a truck. It was the same shape truck she had followed on Saturday. It might have been the same truck.
The four people were not wearing anything that suggested a job. No uniforms. No name tags. No high-visibility vests, no coveralls, no hard hats. They wore what people wore on a Saturday afternoon. One had a fleece pullover. One had a hoodie. One wore jeans and a plain t-shirt. One wore a corduroy button-down like a person going to brunch.
They were unloading small boxes. The boxes were the same size and shape as the one that had come to her cube. Cream colored. Sealed with a strip of tape that was the color of oxblood ink.
There were a lot of them.
The person in the corduroy button-down looked up.
He did not have Genny’s angle at first. He was facing the truck, moving a box off the tailgate. He turned his head as she was passing, at the exact wrong moment, and their eyes met through her windshield.
He did not move.
He did not call anyone. He did not put down the box. He did not gesture to the others. He held the box against his chest and he watched her drive past.
She looked away.
She kept driving. She did not speed up. She reached the end of the service drive at the north end of the property and turned right, and got onto the frontage road, and got onto Route 53, and went home.
When she was two miles from her apartment she checked the rearview mirror.
Nothing was there.
She sat at the kitchen counter with the notebook open in front of her.
She turned to the page where she had written the SKU. It was still there. She had circled the word CARD underneath it. Below that she now wrote, in careful letters: emblem. 12:34 PM Sunday. Loading dock. Four people. He saw me.
Then she thought about it.
Then she added, on a new line: cream boxes. Same as the one Karen took.
She looked at the page.
She thought about the card that had appeared and disappeared and appeared. She thought about a piece of paper that could not be relied on to stay where she had put it.
She got her phone. She held it above the page. She took a photograph.
She checked the photograph. The page was clear in the frame. The SKU was legible. The words she had added were legible. She had timestamps and the visible circle around CARD.
She opened her drive on her phone and moved the photograph into a folder she named, uncreatively, notes. She checked that the file had synced. It had.
She thought about writing everything down on a text file too, but decided against. Text files were searchable. Photographs of handwriting were harder to know about at a glance.
She closed the notebook. She put it back in her bag.
She poured a glass of water and stood by the kitchen window and drank it slowly.
She had four events. The card. The parking lot. Frank’s descriptions. The loading dock. She had a name that had asked her about Friday. She had an emblem she still had not placed. She had a coworker who had been treated pleasantly by Karen, which was in the same category of anomaly as the rest, even though she had not been prepared to say so out loud until now.
She was, she recognized, keeping a file.
She was a person who kept files. She had spent four years being paid to keep files. She was going to see this one through.
She went to bed at 11:00. She slept, mostly.
Monday morning she came in at 7:58.
Karen was at her cube. Dale was at his cube. Blake was in the break room. The floor was doing what it was doing.
She set her bag down. She sat. She turned on her laptop.
She opened her personal drive in the browser. She had her phone photo backed up there. She wanted to have the file open in a second tab so she could reference the SKU while she checked Ledger.
She opened the folder called notes.
The folder was empty.
She refreshed. She scrolled. She checked the trash. She checked the recently deleted queue.
There was nothing.
She got her phone out. She opened the photo library. She scrolled to Sunday afternoon.
There was no photograph of the notebook page. There was a photograph of her sitting in her car that she had taken by accident when she had been trying to lock the screen, at 11:53 Sunday. There was a photograph of a leaf she had taken Saturday morning during the errand loop. There was nothing between them.
She checked her recents. Her recents were empty for Sunday between 11:53 and Monday morning. Her phone had, apparently, not taken any photograph Sunday afternoon.
She opened her drive again. She went to activity history. Activity history was blank for Sunday.
She was not, according to her phone, according to her drive, according to the digital record of her Sunday, someone who had taken a photograph Sunday afternoon.
She put the phone face down on her desk.
She got out the notebook.
She opened it to the page where she had written the SKU.
The SKU was still there. The word CARD was still circled. The words she had added Sunday night were still there. Emblem. 12:34 PM Sunday. Loading dock. Four people. He saw me. Cream boxes. Same as the one Karen took.
The notebook remembered. The phone did not.
She closed the notebook. She put it in the drawer.
She started her queue.
At 10:15 Dale walked past her cube on his way to the printer. He nodded at her. She nodded back.
She sat at her desk. She did her queue. She was slower than usual. She kept opening the drive folder to see if it would come back, which she knew was not a thing that would happen but which she did anyway.
At 2:00 she opened Ledger.
She navigated to Frank’s queue. It had thirty-two flags. Last Monday it had had thirty-seven. She scrolled through them. There were no items with the RA prefix. No coffee mugs. No wristwatches. No picture frames. No scarves. No stationery description. No comment thread from Karen about anything above her.
She checked her viewing history in Ledger for the previous Monday. It showed the queues she had worked on that day. It did not show Frank’s queue.
She sat with this.
She thought about how a photograph could be gone. She thought about a folder being gone. She thought about her recents showing she had never taken a picture at all.
The phone was hers. The personal drive was hers. MSS did not touch them. She was not going to walk into IT and ask a stranger to find a photograph she had taken of her own notebook.
But Ledger was the company’s. Ledger was a system IT touched. She could ask a question about Ledger.
The Tech Bar was in the basement.
She had not been down there in a year.
She would go tomorrow.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
at may season studio, digital records are maintained to a high standard of accuracy. records are periodically reconciled against the operational record. discrepancies are resolved in favor of accuracy.
written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Genny is keeping a file. So is the company.
Begin with:
The Standing Order - another loading dock, another delivery logged by hand, and why paper is used
Compliance Notice: Narrative Drift Detected - what the company calls it when the record and the event stop matching
The Digging Team - the people who arrive in ordinary clothes to move things
Part eight arrives next Friday.
It’s funny how personal the phone is and intimate. Erasing stuff from it feels more intrusive than a robber. For once, I actually look forward to seeing what happens when someone talks to IT.
This is becoming quite frightening for Genny. Where is she finding the nerve to keep pushing?