Ed was happy. Or he told himself he was. He liked his job. He had always liked his job.

  He left the hospital with a clean bandage and a dull ache in his neck. The ache was not the troubling part. It was the feeling inside him—thin, diluted—as if the world had been poured through a sieve and he was what ran off. His thoughts were his thoughts, yet farther away. His beliefs were present, yet smaller, as if seen through glass.

  He stepped off the bus and the city moved around him in its measured way. Cars flowed in clean lanes. Workers crossed in straight lines. Drones traced arcs without error. Everything connected to everything else. For the first time, Ed felt he was not connected to any of it.

  A chill slid over him. Night had come while his mind wandered. The moon was low, swollen and pale, hanging near the rooftops like a watchman’s eye. He stopped, surprised that the sky could loom. He had never looked at it before with any interest. Now it looked back. He blamed the procedure. He blamed the drugs. He took a breath and told himself: tomorrow would be good, tomorrow would be normal.

  He did not change his clothes. He did not reach his bed. He fell onto the couch and closed his eyes. “Tomorrow,” he said, and slept. In the morning he was worse.

  The WCS terminal glowed: 98.3%. Acceptable. Lower than usual, but the doctor had said recovery took days. He washed, dressed, and stepped into the corridor. He moved because movement was what he knew.

  Most mornings, the walk to the hub pulled him forward, a clean track in the head. Today the track faltered. He trudged. The others did not notice. They moved with purpose and without pause, faces set, eyes forward. Ed stopped and watched. No one stopped. No one looked around. No one saw him standing still.

  A word came to him, an uninvited guest. Drones. It was not a word he used. It carried a taste of contempt he had never felt. The people were doing what kept the city alive. That should be good. He told himself it was good. The word stayed anyway.

  The need to work remained like a tic under the skin. He lengthened his stride. Comfort crept in with the old route, but the thoughts kept pace. At the hub fence he saw more Hanks than before—helmets, bright vests, survey rods. An expansion was certain. An expansion meant idling. Idling meant recycling. He felt the old fear and a new one joined it: not of wasting time, but of dying.

  He swiped his card at the employee gate. The scanner chimed. He slowed. The thought of a lost shift bothered him. The thought of being lost himself shook him. He did not want to be recycled. The feeling sickened him. He did not know what to do with it. Perhaps the drugs. Perhaps the scan. He reached his truck and let the ritual quiet him.

  The first route surprised him. The hospital. He usually started with food loads for morning markets. Today it was the hospital, where he had been cut and mended. He wondered if the program had chosen it for that reason. He decided that programs did not think that way. Programs thought in paths and sums.

  Work took him the way work always did. The city turned on its rhythms. The sun rose, then fell, then rose again. He moved hub to stop to hub to stop, and the movement washed his head. Midway through a run the map changed. A new point appeared—a place he did not know. He looked down at the list and saw nothing to deliver. No pallet. No crate. Only an address.

  The address led him toward a part of the city he had never driven. The streets around him were unfamiliar and grew stranger as he went. He passed a guard booth with a striped gate. He stopped.

  “Window,” the guard said, tired and casual.

  Ed lowered the glass, held still as the scanner passed over his face. The gate lifted.

  “You may proceed,” the guard said. “To your destination.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “Thank you,” Ed said. He drove on and felt the city change.

  This district did not obey the grid. The roads curved around trees and stones. Buildings rose in varied shapes and colors. People wore clothes that did not match. They walked, and some sat just to sit. Ed had never seen this kind of sitting. He slowed and stared. Nothing here repeated. It made him uneasy and, without his consent, a little curious. He was used to patterns that soothed. Here the pattern was no pattern.

  He followed the map to a long fa?ade of glass and limestone, stepped lines and high arches. A man waited at the curb as if he knew the truck would stop where it did.

  “Hello, Ed,” the man said.

  “Hello,” Ed said. “I am not sure what I am to deliver.”

  “Yourself,” the man said. His voice was dry and certain.

  “Am I to be recycled?” Ed asked. The question tasted like metal.

  “Not today,” the man said, and did not comfort him. “Alexander Jones. Come inside.”

  They walked through doors that sighed. The atrium was wide and tall, frescoed light across polished stone. People crossed and recrossed. Some carried paper cups. Some sat at tables with nothing in front of them at all. Ed watched the sitting ones.

  “Breaks,” Alexander said, catching his glance. “Unproductive by design.”

  “I do not understand,” Ed said.

  “You will,” Alexander shrugged. “Or you won’t.”

  Security lines snaked toward metal arches. Alexander did not join them. He lifted a badge and a guard waved them through. “Perks,” he said, without smiling.

  They took an elevator to the thirty-eighth floor. The ride was long and quiet. The doors opened to a corridor of carpet and closed doors. Alexander moved quickly, as if he had already walked this hall a thousand times today. He opened a room and gestured.

  “Sit,” he said. “I’ll be brief.”

  The room was square, colorless, and clean. A table. Two chairs. Two extra chairs against the wall for reasons unknown but breaking any pattern that could comfort Ed. Cameras in the corners, small and black. Ed sat where he was told and folded his hands.

  Alexander returned with a man who looked almost like a Rex—same steady face, same precise hands—but sharper somehow, as if his edges were honed. The not-quite-Rex carried a small scanner.

  “Face forward,” Alexander said. “It won’t hurt.”

  The scanner hummed. Twenty heartbeats, perhaps fewer. “Nothing present,” the technician said, and left. Ed felt lighter and more afraid.

  Alexander sat opposite. He steepled his fingers, studied Ed as a specimen.

  “You’re a problem,” he said.

  “I do not understand,” Ed said.

  “I know,” Alexander said. “Tell me if you feel off. If you feel not-quite what you were. If you saw the moon last night and thought it was looking back.”

  Ed looked at the table. The wood was false, printed with grain. He said nothing.

  “The scan agrees with me,” Alexander said. “Something changed. The question is whether we help you return to baseline or watch what you become.”

  “Will I get back to normal?” Ed asked.

  “Perhaps,” Alexander said. “Perhaps not.”

  “I want to go back to work,” Ed said. The words came out as if on a track. They did not feel like his.

  Alexander heard the difference. He smiled the way a man smiles at proof. “You want the idea of work. You no longer want the thing itself. Soon you will want a coffee you do not need and a seat you do not deserve.”

  Ed said nothing. Fear spread through him like cold water. Work had always been the rope he held. Without it, there was air and a long drop.

  “I haven’t decided what to do,” Alexander said. “For now you’ll remain with us.”

  He rose. Ed followed. They took another elevator down to the tenth floor. The air changed again. Men like Bobs stood at desks, but each had a face that was his own. They watched Alexander with quick respect and quiet dislike. Alexander ignored them.

  They walked a long corridor that looked like the hall outside Ed’s apartment, only quieter and cleaner. Alexander opened a door at the end.

  “Lie down,” he said. “Connect to the lines.”

  Ed looked at the ports fixed to the wall—feeding tube, waste tube—and felt a small shame. “This is not a recycler?” he asked.

  “No,” Alexander said. “Not yet.”

  Ed lay on the narrow bed and did as told. The door closed with a click. The room dimmed. He stared at the seam of light under the door until his eyes grew heavy. Sleep came like a fall.

  A hand shook his shoulder. “Up,” a voice said. “Let’s move.”

  Ed opened his eyes. A uniformed man stood over him, broad and bored. Not a Bob, but close.

  “How long did I sleep?” Ed asked.

  The officer shrugged. “I wasn’t counting. Days. Maybe a week. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Will I see Alexander again?” Ed said.

  “No,” the officer said. “He decided.”

  They took the elevator down and then farther down, into concrete and oil. The air was damp and thick. It smelled like old water and new machines. A bus idled with its lights on.

  “This is your ride,” the officer said.

  “Where does it go?” Ed asked, though he knew.

  “The recycler,” the officer said.

  They walked toward the door together. The bus door opened with a sigh that sounded like relief. The sky above the ramp was a narrow slice of morning. The city beyond it was already moving, already singing its soft, relentless song. Ed listened and, for the first time, heard nothing sweet in it at all.