May Season Studio Archives
by Gintare O.
PRECEDING FILES
Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation
Onboarding / 07 / The Loading Dock
Onboarding / 08 / The Tech Bar
Onboarding / 11 / Reality Alignment
The work was familiar.
She had spent four years describing objects. She had spent four years filling in fields and signing forms. She had spent four years being good at it. What Reality Alignment asked of her was not, in shape, different from what her old queue had asked. The vocabulary was different. The templates were different. The forms had slightly heavier paper. The cadence was reliable.
She processed twelve to fifteen audit orders a day.
An audit order was a document. It described a small change to a public artifact. Sometimes a sentence to be added to a press release. Sometimes a photograph to be reframed so that the corner of an object was clipped. Sometimes a memory cluster to be softened, which meant reducing the emotional weight of a specific set of associations in a specific set of people. She did not know the mechanism by which memory clusters were softened. She knew the form.
Each audit order had a description field, a rationale field, and a checkbox at the bottom. The description field described the change. The rationale field explained why the change was being made. The checkbox confirmed that the description was accurate.
She checked the boxes.
She signed the forms.
She moved to the next one.
Karen had taught her, years ago, to file fast. Not carelessly. Fast. To trust her training and move through the queue without lingering on any one item. To trust that if a description was wrong, review above her would catch it. Karen had used the phrase review above her many times. Genny had never asked what she meant by it.
She understood now.
She was fast. Twelve to fifteen was the higher end of the daily volume anyone on her team achieved. Her coworkers, whom she was still learning the names of, were pleasant. Half of them were not quite people. She was pretty sure at least two of them had noticed her noticing this and had chosen not to comment.
An audit order came through Tuesday morning that concerned a press release from three years ago. The press release had described a merger between two companies Genny had heard of. The audit order asked her to add one sentence to the release, in a specific spot, describing the merger’s benefits to a third company Genny had not heard of. She looked at the third company’s public profile. It was a small firm in Wisconsin. The audit order did not explain why the sentence needed to be there. The audit order did not need to explain. Her job was to describe the change.
She described the change.
She checked the box.
She signed the form.
The next one was a memory cluster.
A memory cluster order came with an attached list of subjects. The list on this order had eleven names. The memories being softened were around a summer camp in northern Minnesota. The cluster described a specific evening at the camp, a game of some kind, and a specific person who had been present that evening. Reducing the emotional weight of the cluster meant reducing what the eleven subjects would remember, if asked, about that evening.
The subjects were, according to the list, all currently in their fifties.
Genny read the audit order twice.
Then she described the change.
Then she checked the box.
Then she signed the form.
She moved to the next one.
She had access to the corridor now.
The corridor was a hallway at the north end of the third floor, past a door that had, in her old life, been marked STAFF ONLY and had been locked. It was no longer locked to her badge. She had noticed this on her second day in Reality Alignment, when she had walked past the door and it had chirped, once, and then held.
She had pushed it open.
Inside the corridor were doors. There were seven of them. Some had names. Some had numbers. Some had nothing on the outside. She had been told, during a brief orientation session with a woman she had not been introduced to but had understood to be a training resource, that she had access to two of the seven doors and would gain access to others over time based on tenure and performance. She had been shown, briefly, the room behind one of them.
The room contained a mirror.
The mirror was full length. It was framed in something that looked like brass and was probably not brass. It hung on the wall opposite the door. The room was otherwise empty.
The training resource had asked her to look into the mirror.
She had looked.
The reflection had been her. Older by some amount. Late thirties. Tired. Wearing the kind of clothes Genny wore, in a slightly different palette. The Genny in the mirror had been sitting at a desk. The desk had files stacked to the side. The Genny in the mirror had looked up when Genny had looked in. They had looked at each other.
The Genny in the mirror had looked trapped.
The training resource had explained, in the way people explain things they have explained many times, that the mirror showed a five-year projection of the employee’s career, based on current performance and satisfaction inputs. She had said the mirror was for personal development. She had said Genny was welcome to visit it whenever she liked.
Genny had thanked her.
She had not gone back for two weeks.
She went back on a Thursday.
She badged into the corridor. She went to the room. She opened the door. She looked into the mirror.
The Genny in the mirror was older. Late thirties. Wearing a nicer sweater than the one Genny had on. She was standing at the same kind of desk. There were fewer files stacked to the side. Her posture was excellent.
She looked up when Genny looked in.
She smiled.
She looked satisfied.
She looked, Genny thought, at peace with what she was doing.
Genny stood in the room for a full minute looking at the reflection. The reflection looked back. The reflection did not fidget. The reflection was calm.
She stepped back out of the room. She closed the door. She stood in the corridor with her hand on the doorknob for a long time before she walked back to her cube.
She thought about it for the rest of the day.
The trapped version of herself had been unsettling. It had been the version she would have expected to see. It had matched what she was afraid of.
The satisfied version was worse.
It was worse because it meant that in five years she was going to be a person who did this work well and did not mind it. It meant she was going to be a person who read audit orders like the one about the summer camp in Minnesota and would file them fast, and would not check the third box in her queue with any different weight than the first, and would be, in five years, satisfied.
The trapped version had been herself in a trap.
The satisfied version was herself who had come to like the trap.
She did not visit the mirror again that week.
The quarterly all-hands was on a Wednesday.
It was held in the auditorium on the ground floor. All employees were expected to attend. Genny had come to work Wednesday morning at 7:58 with the expectation that she would attend the all-hands the way she had for four years.
She sat about halfway back on the left side. The auditorium was maybe eighty percent full.
The CEO spoke. Then the head of communications. Then somebody from HR whom Genny had never seen before but who introduced herself as being on Christina’s team. Christina was in the front row. She did not turn around.
Three rows ahead of Genny, on the aisle, was Frank.
She recognized him from the back of his head first. Frank had a specific way his neck met his collar. He had a specific hairline. She knew the shape of his shoulders from four years of walking past his cube.
The shoulders were sitting differently.
Frank had always slouched slightly. He had leaned to the right. He had held a pen in his left hand and clicked it, in a pattern he was not aware of, when he was not writing. She had known this without ever wanting to notice it.
The Frank three rows ahead of her was not slouching. He was sitting with excellent posture. His shoulders were level. He was not holding a pen.
The presentations ended. The lights came up. People started standing up and shuffling out.
She got up. She moved into the aisle. She walked forward three rows and put her hand on his shoulder.
He turned.
His face was Frank’s face. His eyes were Frank’s eyes. His hairline was Frank’s hairline.
“Yes, ma’am?”
He said it warmly. He said it pleasantly. He said it in a tone he had never used at his cube.
“Hi Frank. It’s me. Genny.”
He smiled. It was a genuine smile.
“Nice to meet you. Enjoy your afternoon.”
He turned back around and moved with the crowd toward the exit.
She stood in the aisle for a moment.
Then she followed him out with the rest.
She walked back to her cube.
There was a small folded card on her keyboard.
Cream paper. Oxblood ink.
She knew the paper before she picked it up.
She picked it up. She unfolded it.
The handwriting inside was the handwriting from everything else. It was the same hand that had been on the invitation card. It was the same hand that had been on the folder Elaine had slid across the table. It was the same hand that had been on the Elaine card. It had never been anyone else’s hand. Christina’s handwritten note was not, therefore, Christina’s.
Two words.
You’re settling in well.
She put the note in her drawer, next to the notebook, on top of the folder from Elaine she had also not opened.
She closed the drawer.
She sat down.
She opened her audit queue.
There were three new orders waiting.
She got to work.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
at may season studio, the development mirror is available to all reality alignment staff as a personal development resource. the projection is based on current performance and satisfaction inputs. employees find it encouraging.
written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The audit orders go out. The results are documented in other departments.
Begin with:
Compliance Notice: Narrative Drift Detected - what the company does when the record and the event stop matching
The Company That Regulates Reality - the work Genny is now doing, described by the company itself
The Retirement of Dennis Call - another long tenure, and how it ended
Part thirteen arrives next Friday.
I think Frank looked in the mirror too often. I hope Genny stays away from it! I think this is the creepiest thing yet, although that thing that almost wrapped the engineer was pretty scary.
I feel like I look in that mirror every time I try to close my eyes and end up laying awake deep into the night. The fear of being happy with the tragic is what makes me feel like my cynicism is an armor of a sort. A really depressing armor. Hang in there Genny!