Can't Prove I'm Not Living Inside a Centrifuge: Episode 2 - Thank You for Your Feedback
Chapter 2: Thank You for Your Feedback
The User spent seven minutes on the internet before accepting that the internet was not going to help.
This was not, technically, a new conclusion. He had reached it before during the pandemic, during several elections, and once during a particularly thorough investigation into whether his recurring dream about escalators was spiritually significant. Each time, the internet had offered him a warm palm full of content and then stepped back to see what he would do with it.
This time, the first result had been a support article. The second result was a thread on a forum that had been archived in 2019. The thread was titled "ARE YOU NOTICING THINGS (serious)" and contained forty-two replies and one moderator note reading [Closed: Topic violates community guidelines on unfalsifiable claims].
The third result was an ad for a weighted blanket.
He closed the laptop.
The time was 8:03 AM. His standup was at nine. He had never been late to a standup in four years, because his home office was his bedroom office was his dining room, a three-in-one residential workspace solution that the User had once described to his sister as "my whole life, but smaller." She had told him that sounded sad. He had told her it was actually very efficient. Neither of them had been entirely lying.
He got his bag. He put on his jacket. He opened the apartment door.
His building's hallway had the look of a place that was only going to last until funding cleared. Low ceiling. Beige carpet. A fluorescent tube that hadn't decided whether to be on or off and had reached a diplomatic compromise of sustained flicker. He had lived here for three years, and the tube had been flickering for all of them. It had stopped seeming like a problem and started seeming like a personality.
He pulled the door shut.
The lock beeped.
He stood for a moment with his hand still on the handle.
He tried the door again. His lock beeped again — a neat, confirmatory sound, the tone of a device that had recently attended a self-confidence workshop. A lock he had owned for six years without it making a single sound had beeped at him twice in one morning.
He walked to the elevator and pressed the button.
The elevator arrived immediately.
Not quickly. Immediately. No mechanical hum, no cable tick, no distant groan of pulleys completing their contractual obligations. The doors opened as if the elevator had been waiting on the other side of the wall in an attitude of professional readiness.
He got in.
In the mirror, he looked like himself.
He checked this with the methodical attention of someone who had already had a morning. Same face. Same coat. His hair made the same approximate gesture toward intention that it always did. Nothing behind him but the mirrored surface and, just at the edge, the smallest sliver of wall that had a seam in it that he could not explain with his knowledge of elevator construction, which was admittedly limited.
He turned.
Normal elevator wall.
He pressed L.
The doors closed and the floor moved.
This was not unusual. Elevators moved. That was their primary value proposition. But the movement this time had a quality he recognized from the morning. Not descent. Not drop. A curve. A gentle, lateral, almost imperceptible arc that arrived in his body the way news of a flight cancellation arrived in the chest: quietly, with implications.
He rode the elevator with his hands in his pockets.
The doors opened.
The lobby appeared.
He had never given the lobby much thought. It was a lobby. Mailboxes on the left, intercom panel on the right, glass front door with a rubber threshold that caught everyone's foot at least once before they learned the lift. A rubber plant in the corner that had survived three tenants, two management companies, and a period when the heat was off for eleven days in January, which gave it a mildly triumphant quality.
The building super was mopping the floor.
His name was Gus. He was sixty-something and compact, with the bearing of a man who had personally assembled his own opinions and did not see any reason to disassemble them. He acknowledged the User's existence with a nod that said good morning and also I do not have time for whatever you did to your sink this time.
"Hey, Gus."
"Morning."
"Quick question."
Gus stopped mopping.
This was notable. Gus did not stop mopping for quick questions. Gus had mopped through a fire alarm, a television interview about the neighborhood, and one time a raccoon. Stopping for a question implied the question had been anticipated.
"Did anything happen last night?" the User asked. "Building-wise."
Gus considered this.
"Boiler ran hot."
"What else."
"Roof inspection."
"At night?"
Gus resumed mopping. "Routine."
"Have you ever seen the elevator—" He stopped. Edited. "Has the elevator ever felt—"
"Elevators feel different in the morning," Gus said. "Inner ear thing. You want me to call the company, I'll put in the ticket. They come out in three to six business days and tell me there's nothing wrong and charge a hundred eighty."
"That's not—"
"Three to six business days," Gus repeated, with the finality of a man who had accepted the passage of time as a fixed cost.
The User walked through the lobby.
He pushed the door and stepped outside.
The street was bright. The kind of bright that happened in the hour after rain when the pavement was still holding onto the light and hadn't decided yet to give it up. Except it hadn't rained, according to everyone and every application. It had rained into his window and not touched his hand and then stopped in a single breath, and now the pavement was wet without the rain having occurred.
He took the bus.
This was itself a decision. He could walk to the office in eighteen minutes, but walking meant being in the outside, and the outside had made a series of editorial choices this morning that he was not prepared to endorse with his sustained physical presence. The bus had walls. The bus had other people in it. Other people were, whatever else they were, a form of evidence. If the other people were fine, he was probably fine. If the other people were not fine, at least there would be witnesses.
He sat in the third row.
The woman next to him was reading a paperback with a foil-embossed cover. Across the aisle, a man in construction clothes was asleep against the window with the practiced competence of someone who had industrialized the commute. A child toward the back was describing something to an adult in the rapid, committed way children used when reality had recently done something interesting.
Normal. All normal.
He watched the city slide past the window.
The buildings were correct. He tested them methodically, the way you tested ice with your foot before committing. The coffee shop with the chalkboard sign. The pharmacy with the rotating seasonal display — currently transitioning from spring allergy to summer sun with the administrative certainty of a fiscal year. The old hotel with the scaffolding that had been there since before he arrived in this city and would presumably remain after both of them left.
Everything in its place.
He allowed himself a breath.
His phone buzzed.
HABITAT SERVICES: Your feedback from this morning has been received. We appreciate the time you took to let us know. A resolution pathway has been identified.
The User stared at the message.
He had not given Habitat Services his phone number. He had not given them anything, because they did not exist. They had no website. They had no listing. They were a voice and a maintenance call and a gray panel that had vanished.
They had his phone number.
He looked at the sender.
The number was familiar.
It was his own number.
He put the phone away with the focused calm of someone who had decided that the rules of this category of experience were being made up as they went, and the only appropriate response was to show up to work and not contribute new data until the existing data made sense.
The bus rounded a long, gentle curve.
He had not known the route curved here.
He had taken this bus for nine months.
He pressed his forehead against the cool glass and watched the city bend, in the way cities did not bend, along an arc too wide to see but not too wide to feel.
His office was a building that looked like an office building and functioned as one and contained no observable evidence of being anything else, which was precisely the kind of data point that no longer reassured him.
He badged in.
The morning routine was: elevator, floor seven, left at the kitchen, right at the plants, third desk in the open plan. He had done this nine hundred and twelve times, a number he knew because he had, during a period of low-grade anxiety, tracked his commutes. The spreadsheet had been elegant, then elaborate, then closed.
He sat down.
"Hey," said Priya from across the pod. "You look like you made a decision this morning."
"I made several."
"Good ones?"
"Definitionally unclear."
She accepted this. Priya had a gift for processing other people's uncertainty without flinching. The User had once tried to identify what, exactly, she was like, and had arrived at the conclusion that she was like a person who had read very broadly about human experience and concluded that none of it was particularly surprising. He found this either reassuring or alarming depending on the day.
"Standup in ten," she said.
"Thanks."
He opened his laptop. The inbox was an inbox. Email was email. Three threads about the same issue, formatted differently by people with different relationships with whitespace. Two calendar holds. One message from his manager with the subject line "Quick one!" which meant medium-length one. A company all-hands announcement.
He opened the all-hands.
The subject was: EXCITING UPDATES TO OUR RESIDENTIAL OPERATIONS SUITE.
He stopped reading.
Then he started again.
...updating our Habitat Confidence tools to better support a seamless and comfortable resident experience. We've heard your feedback and are working to improve Environmental Continuity across all zones. Our team is excited to share these improvements at the upcoming Q2 All-Hands, where we'll also be announcing changes to the Deck Assignment process...
He read it three times.
He checked the sender: Internal Communications.
He checked the recipients: All Staff.
He scrolled to the footer. Standard corporate footer. Legal disclaimer. Unsubscribe link. Office address.
The address was a street he did not recognize.
He mapped it.
The map returned no results.
"Standup," said Priya.
He closed the laptop.
"Coming."
He stood.
He had twelve things he wanted to say and no person to say them to and a standup in eight seconds. He filed the twelve things in the part of himself that handled incoming loads for later review. The file was already fairly full.
They walked toward the meeting room together.
"You doing anything fun this weekend?" Priya asked.
"Investigating the nature of reality," he said.
She nodded. "Nice. I'm probably just going to brunch."
He looked at her.
She looked back with the mild expression of a person awaiting an elevator.
"Does your building," he said, "ever make sounds?"
"Like what."
"Like. A hum."
She thought about it the way people thought about questions they'd stopped noticing.
"All the time," she said. "It's old."
"Right."
"My old apartment did this thing at night. Very low. Like the building was breathing."
"Did that bother you?"
"I got used to it." She pushed open the meeting room door. "Most things you either get used to or you move."
The User followed her in.
The meeting room had glass walls, which he had also never thought about until now.
He sat down at the table.
Seven colleagues arranged themselves around it with the organizational efficiency of people who had performed this specific act more times than they'd performed any other act except sleeping. Marcus had the laptop with the presentation. Dana had the update on the thing from last week. Rui was still making coffee at the credenza and would narrate the making of coffee as it happened, which was his contribution to psychological continuity.
"Rui, do you want to get—" Marcus began.
"I'm getting, I'm getting," said Rui.
This had happened before. It would happen again.
The User looked at the glass wall.
He looked at the ceiling.
He looked at Marcus's laptop, which had one of those decorative stickers people put on work computers. This one said HANG IN THERE and featured a cartoon of ambiguous parentage.
He was hanging.
"Okay," said Marcus. "Let's start."
The User folded his hands on the table.
Over Marcus's left shoulder, through the glass, the office receded into its usual arrangement of chairs, screens, cable management. Through the far windows, the city presented itself at a normal angle.
Normal. All normal.
His phone lit up, facedown on the table.
He didn't turn it over.
Everyone introduced their priorities for the day. He introduced his. They sounded professional and grounded and completely unrelated to the information on his phone screen, which he was still not reading.
"Anything blocking you?" Marcus asked.
He thought about this honestly.
"Working through it," he said.
After standup he walked directly to the bathroom, locked a stall, and looked at his phone.
HABITAT SERVICES: Resolution pathway update. A member of our orientation team will be available at 3:15 PM today at the location of your choosing. This is a voluntary engagement. We understand you have concerns. We also have concerns. We think it would be useful to share them.
He sat on the closed toilet lid and breathed.
They had concerns.
The entity that manufactured his weather and redirected his calendar and had told him, over organized static, that he was home, had concerns.
He thought about telling someone.
He thought about who he would tell and what he would say and what their face would do and what he would say after that and how the conversation ended.
He thought about the woman on the bus with the foil-embossed paperback and the man asleep against the window and the child describing something wonderful.
He thought about Mrs. Alvarez's hand on his arm and her voice saying, make the world cheap.
He thought about good arepas in a false kitchen.
He typed back: Where.
The response came in three seconds.
HABITAT SERVICES: Wherever you are comfortable. We suggest somewhere with seating and ambient noise. We find it helps.
He stared at the ceiling of the bathroom stall.
Someone had written, in black marker, RETURN TO SENDER.
He did not know what to do with that.
He typed: Fine. Coffee shop across from the office. 3:15.
He put the phone in his pocket.
He walked back to his desk.
He opened his laptop.
He worked until lunch.