May Season Studio Archives

by Gintare O.

PRECEDING FILES

Onboarding / 01 / The Smell

Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation

Onboarding / 03 / Parking Lot

Onboarding / 04 / Frank

Onboarding / 05 / The Catalog

Onboarding / 06 / Good

Onboarding / 07 / The Loading Dock

Onboarding / 08 / The Tech Bar

Onboarding / 09 / The Card

Onboarding / 10 / Elaine

Onboarding / 11 / Reality Alignment

Onboarding / 12 / The Work

Monday’s stack was twelve.

She was in the conference room where she had done her first twelve, three weeks ago. The room was familiar now. She had been assigned to it. She had a permanent placard on the door. It read Reality Alignment — Reviewer 7. Reviewer 6 had a placard on the door across from hers. Genny had never seen Reviewer 6. She did not know whether the person who worked in there was a person.

The twelve orders were stacked on the table when she came in at 7:58.

She sat down. She took her coffee. She set her notebook to her right, closed, on the desk. She had stopped opening her notebook at work. She had, over the last three weeks, stopped needing to. The audit queue had a rhythm. Her hand had a rhythm to match. She could sign twelve orders and get back to her cube by lunch and use the afternoon for review-above-her follow-up, which was a category of work she had, only recently, started doing.

The first order was a photograph. A group photograph from a company event. The audit order asked her to reframe the photograph so that a specific person was slightly less centered. Standard. She wrote the description. She checked the box. She signed the form. Nineteen seconds. She was pleased with the pace.

She moved to the next one.

The second was a press release. A single word to be replaced with a slightly different one. She did it in twelve seconds.

The third was a memory cluster. Nineteen subjects. A neighborhood block party in Aurora. She did it in forty seconds because the subject list took longer to read.

The fourth was a photograph.

The fifth was a paragraph in a magazine article that no longer needed to reference a particular initiative by name.

The sixth was a webpage.

The seventh was a set of yearbook photographs.

The eighth was a processing order.

She signed it in nineteen seconds.

She moved to the next one.

The ninth was a press release. The tenth was a photograph. The eleventh was a memory cluster. The twelfth was a small edit to a company’s About page.

By 11:15 she had all twelve done.

She stacked the forms on the far side of the table. She stood up. She took her coffee mug, which was cold, and left the conference room.

She was pleased with the morning. She thought about telling somebody about her pace and then remembered that there was nobody at MSS she would tell such a thing to.

She went to her cube.

At 2:41 an email came in from Christina. Subject: quick note. Body: Good work today. No signature.

Genny read the email. She read it twice. It was normal. It was the kind of email a manager sent when things were going well. It was the kind of email Karen had never once sent her, in four years. She had never received a note like it. She noticed she was pleased. She noticed she was pleased and then noticed that she had noticed, and sat with that for a while.

She marked it read.

She got back to work.

At 5:04 she left.

She drove home. She made dinner. It was a simple dinner, roasted vegetables and rice, because it was Monday and Monday was the day she made simple food. She sat at the counter to eat. She watched twenty minutes of a show she had been meaning to finish. She did not do anything else. Monday was the day she did not do anything else.

Her phone rang at 6:47.

She looked at it. The name on the screen was Mom.

She picked up.

“Hi Mom.”

“Hi sweetheart, just wanted to check in.”

Her mother’s voice was normal. It was her mother’s voice. The greeting was the greeting her mother had used with her every phone call for years.

There was a pause.

It was not a long pause. It was slightly longer than a normal pause.

“I’m sorry, dear. I’m calling from a number my daughter saved. What’s your name.”

Her mother’s voice was still normal. Kind. Slightly apologetic. Waiting to be corrected.

Genny said her name.

She said it slowly. She said it because she wanted her mother to hear it.

Her mother said, “Of course, of course,” in the specific voice she used for telemarketers she did not want to be rude to. She said it warmly. She said it professionally. She said it as though she had never met Genny in her life.

They talked for another minute. Her mother asked if this was about the church directory. Genny said no. Her mother asked if this was about a survey. Genny said no. Genny asked if her father was there. Her mother said her husband was at the hardware store. Her mother did not correct that with a name.

Genny asked how she was.

Her mother said she was well. She said the weather had been beautiful this weekend. She said she had put in some bulbs.

Genny said that was nice.

Her mother said, “Well, I don’t want to keep you, dear. Was there something I could do for you?”

Genny said no. She said she was sorry to have bothered her.

Her mother said, “Not at all. Have a nice evening, honey.”

The call ended at a normal length.

Genny sat at the counter with the phone in her hand for a long time.

She did not cry.

She did not do anything for a while.

She thought about her mother in the kitchen two hours away, putting the phone back on its cradle, walking back to the sink or the plant she had been watering. She thought about her mother telling her father, when he came back from the hardware store, that somebody had called earlier. It must have been a wrong number.

She thought about the fact that her mother had said her husband. Not John. Not your father. Her husband.

She got up.

She went to the drawer next to the refrigerator where she kept the notebook. She took the notebook out. She opened it to the last written page. She turned back through the pages, looking for the copies she had made of the audit orders. She kept copies of everything now. Karen had taught her that too. Not officially. Just as a habit.

She turned to today’s page.

The forms she had duplicated for herself in her notebook were listed in order. Photograph. Press release. Memory cluster. Photograph. Article paragraph. Webpage. Yearbook photographs. Processing order. Press release. Photograph. Memory cluster. About page.

She stopped at the eighth one.

Processing order.

She read it.

The processing order had a full name at the top, in careful printing. Her name. Her full name. First, middle, last. Spelled correctly. It had a date. Today’s date. It had a rationale field she had filled in with two sentences she did not remember writing. She read the sentences. They were in her own handwriting. They were unremarkable sentences. They described the processing as routine and consistent with the subjects’ status as retired non-affiliates.

It had two subjects listed.

The subjects were her parents.

Their names. Their address. Their date of birth. Their marriage date. Their affiliation with any subject: parent of employee.

The checkbox at the bottom was checked.

The signature was hers.

She had signed it in nineteen seconds.

She turned around.

The envelope was on the counter.

The envelope that had been sealed, in the notebook, tucked against the back cover, addressed to her parents. She had left it in the notebook that morning. She had not opened it. She had not touched it in weeks.

It was open.

The flap was folded back. The contents were partially visible. She walked to the counter. She reached for the envelope. She stopped. She did not want to touch it. She looked at it from where she was standing.

Inside was a card.

Cream paper. Oxblood ink.

An emblem at the top. Small. The same emblem she had seen on the truck at the coffee shop, months ago. The same emblem she had recognized without being able to say where from.

She sat down at the table so she could see the card straight on.

The text was formal. An announcement.

It announced her arrival by name. Her full name. First, middle, last. It listed her mother and father by name. It gave the date. The weight. The length. The town.

It was her birth announcement.

Not a birth announcement. Not the one her parents had sent thirty-two years ago from a hospital in a town two hours away to a small mailing list of relatives and friends.

Her birth announcement. The one MSS had.

The one that mattered.

She looked at the emblem. She had, three months ago, in her car at the coffee shop lot, not been able to place it. She could place it now. She had been looking at MSS’s own emblem for months without knowing that was what she was looking at. She had seen it on the loading dock truck. On the fake calendar app that had been on her phone once. Pressed into the corner of the Elaine card, when she had looked at it just now. On this envelope. In the corner of every audit order she had ever signed.

She had, apparently, been signing MSS’s emblem her whole time at MSS. She had just been calling it a corporate branding element and moving on.

She sat down at the kitchen table.

She got the Elaine card out of the notebook. She held it in her hand. It said, still, in oxblood ink, one word. Elaine.

She had not, in the weeks since Christina had slid the card across the table, thought about how she would call a number that was not on the card.

She thought about it now.

She looked at her phone. She opened the phone app. She looked at the recent calls list. Her mother’s call was at the top. Below it were a few earlier calls she did not need to think about.

She held the card up next to the phone.

She thought Elaine.

She pressed the phone against her ear.

The phone rang.

It rang twice.

Elaine picked up.

“Genny.”

“Hi.”

There was a pause on Elaine’s side. It was not a long pause. It was the pause of a person who was giving another person the room to say what they had called to say.

“I signed a processing order.”

“I know.”

“My mother doesn’t know who I am.”

“I know.”

“What did I do.”

“You worked a stack of orders. You did what your training told you to do. You filed fast. You moved on. It is exactly what was expected of you.”

Genny sat with that.

She sat with it for a while.

Elaine did not fill the silence.

Finally Genny said, “What happens next.”

“Nothing tonight. You should get some sleep. There will be more orders tomorrow. We have arranged for a different stack to be waiting for you. It will be easier than today’s. You will move through it. In two or three days it will feel routine again. That is how this works.”

Genny closed her eyes.

She opened them.

“I want to go back.”

“To what.”

“To before I signed the order.”

“That is not something we can do.”

“Can I fix it.”

“There is no fix for a processing order that has been executed. There is only the next order.”

Genny said, “I need to talk to my parents.”

“You can call them any time you like. They will answer. They will be kind to you. They will not know you.”

Genny said nothing.

Elaine said, “You have been carrying this alone. You do not have to. You are one of us now. This is what we do. It is what your parents raised you to do, whether they knew it or not. They logged you here at your birth. They knew, at some level, and they let you find your way to us. This part is difficult. It will pass.”

Genny said, “Please.”

Elaine did not respond immediately.

Then she said, gently, “I know.”

Then she said, “We’ll start with the next order tomorrow.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, processing orders are reviewed for accuracy, not for relationship. a reviewer is not expected to recognize a name. the form does not ask.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

That is the end of Genny's file. The archive continues.

Begin with:

Start Here: A Reading Guide to May Season Studio - the map, for anyone who came in through this series

The Lunch Hour - the surface team, before any of this, on an ordinary afternoon

The Company That Regulates Reality - the premise, stated by the company, now that you know what it costs

Nothing gets retired. The archive only grows.

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May Season Studio

ONBOARDING / 13 / THE ORDER