Chapter Four: The Systems Multiply (Part I)

World 51

The camera crew was already in the living room when he opened his eyes, and the director—a woman with a clipboard and an earpiece—was explaining that they only had forty minutes before the anniversary broadcast went live, and that the Minister would be wearing the blue tie, not the gray one, and that K. should try to look more devoted than last year.

He sat up in bed. The sheets were government-issued, he realized. The headboard had a small brass plaque: PROPERTY OF THE FEDERAL MARRIAGE AUTHORITY.

"The Minister?" he said.

The director looked at him with the particular expression of someone who has worked with difficult talent before. "Your spouse," she said. "The Minister of Cultural Continuity. Your fifteenth anniversary. We discussed the blocking yesterday."

K. looked at the dresser, where a framed photograph showed him standing beside a building. Not a person. A building. The Ministry building itself, with its gray columns and tinted windows. In the photograph, he was holding the building's cornerstone like a hand.

"I'm married to a building," he said.

"To the government," the director corrected. "The building is just the physical manifestation. You know this. We've been through this every year."

A makeup artist approached and began applying powder to his face. K. sat very still. He could feel something in his chest that might have been loyalty or might have been indigestion, and he could not tell the difference, and perhaps there was no difference.

"What do I say?" he asked. "During the broadcast?"

The director consulted her clipboard. "You express gratitude for the stability the Ministry provides. You mention specific programs. You do not mention the budget cuts or the reorganization. You kiss the seal."

"The seal?"

"The official seal. It will be presented on a velvet cushion. You kiss it. You have done this fourteen times before."

K. nodded. He remembered none of these anniversaries, but he could imagine them perfectly. The velvet cushion, the waxy taste of the seal, the cameras recording his devotion for the national archive. It was, in its way, no stranger than any other marriage.

The director's earpiece crackled. She listened, then frowned.

"The Minister wants to know if you've been faithful," she said. "There are rumors about you and the Department of Transportation."

"I don't know the Department of Transportation."

"That's not what the surveillance footage suggests."

K. sat very still while they finished his makeup. Through the window, he could see the Ministry building in the distance, its windows catching the morning light. It did look beautiful, in its way. It looked like something you could love, if you tried hard enough, if you practiced.

World 52

The customers were lined up outside before he finished unlocking the door, and his assistant was already explaining that the morning's first appointment—a woman with chronic back pain—had been waiting since dawn, that she was in the VIP room, that she had paid in advance for the full experience.

K. looked at his hands. They were ordinary hands. He felt nothing unusual in them.

"I'm a pain merchant," he said.

"The best in the district," his assistant confirmed. "Your technique with migraines is famous. The way you can transfer a headache in under thirty seconds. People travel from other cities."

The shop was small but well-appointed. Display cases showed various instruments that K. did not recognize: copper rods, glass spheres, something that looked like a tuning fork made of bone. On the wall, framed certificates testified to his expertise in suffering transference, his license to practice commercial agony.

"How does it work?" K. asked.

His assistant stared at him. "You take their pain," she said slowly. "You feel it. You process it. You discharge it into the absorption tanks in the basement. This is the business. This is what we do."

"And I feel their pain? Physically?"

"Of course. That's the service. That's why it's expensive."

K. pressed his fingernail into his palm, hard. He felt nothing. Not the pressure, not the sharp edge, not the indent it should have left. He pressed harder. Nothing.

"I can't feel anything," he said.

His assistant's face went through several expressions in rapid succession: confusion, concern, and finally a kind of professional alarm. She went to the door and looked at the line of customers waiting outside—people clutching various parts of their bodies, people with expressions of desperate hope.

"You can't feel anything," she repeated.

"No."

"Not pain, specifically? Or nothing at all?"

K. considered this. He touched the counter. He felt the contact, the texture of the wood, the temperature. But there was a layer of remove, a buffer between his nerves and his awareness. He could perceive without experiencing.

"I'm numb," he said. "Professionally numb. In a profession that requires me to feel everything."

His assistant was already calling someone on the phone. K. could hear her explaining the situation in hushed, urgent tones. Outside, the customers shifted and murmured. A man with a visible limp was growing impatient.

K. went to the VIP room and looked at the woman with back pain. She was lying on a specialized table, waiting. She had paid for relief, and he had nothing to offer but his presence and his useless, insensate hands.

World 53

The ballot was enormous, printed on paper that seemed to crinkle with intention, and the poll worker was explaining that K. had seventeen minutes to complete his selections before his voting window closed, that his great-grandmother's representative was waiting in booth seven to discuss her objections.

"My great-grandmother," K. said.

"Voter ID 1847-C," the poll worker confirmed. "Deceased 1962. She has maintained continuous political engagement since then. Very active in the primaries."

K. looked around the polling station. It was an ordinary civic building—folding tables, cardboard voting booths, the smell of institutional coffee. But the booths were arranged in two sections: the left side for the living, the right side for the dead. The dead side was busier.

He walked to booth seven. A small speaker sat on the ledge where a voting machine should have been. The speaker crackled with static, then resolved into a voice that was thin and distant and somehow disappointed.

"So," the voice said. "You're running for City Council."

"I am?"

"Don't pretend. I've read your platform. Shameful. Absolutely shameful."

K. looked at the ballot in his hand. His own name was printed there, in the third column. Candidate for District 7 City Council. He had a platform, apparently. He had positions on zoning and public transit and the maintenance of memorial parks.

"I don't remember deciding to run," he said.

"That's what your father said about his carpet business. Look how that turned out."

K. tried to remember his father, his father's carpet business, his great-grandmother when she was alive. He remembered nothing. He knew nothing. But her disappointment felt familiar, felt almost comfortable, like a garment he had worn before.

"What are your objections?" he asked. "To my platform?"

The speaker crackled. "Everything. Your position on municipal composting. Your endorsement of the new library annex. Your refusal to address the streetlight situation on Maple Avenue."

"I don't know what my positions are," K. said. "I just learned I was running."

"Ignorance is not an excuse. It wasn't an excuse when you were twelve and you broke my good china, and it's not an excuse now."

K. had never broken any china, as far as he knew. But her certainty was absolute, and his uncertainty was total, and in that imbalance she had all the power.

"How do I vote?" he asked the poll worker, who had drifted over with an expression of bureaucratic patience.

"You may not vote for yourself," the poll worker said. "Conflict of interest. You may vote in all other races. Your great-grandmother's vote carries 1.3 weight due to seniority."

Through the speaker, his great-grandmother made a sound of satisfaction.

World 54

The recall notice had arrived that morning, printed on paper that dissolved after reading, and now the representative from Human Models Division was sitting across the kitchen table, explaining that K.'s warranty had expired, that the newer versions offered significant improvements, that the transition would be painless if he cooperated.

"I'm a prototype," K. said.

"Model 0.7," the representative confirmed. She was young and efficient and had a tablet that displayed his specifications. "First generation. Pre-optimization. You were groundbreaking at the time."

K. looked at his hands again—he had been doing this a lot lately, he realized, looking at his hands as if they might tell him something. They looked like hands. They felt like hands. He had always assumed they were his hands.

"And the newer versions?" he asked.

"Models 2.3 through 2.7 are currently in production. Better memory integration, improved emotional response, reduced maintenance requirements." She swiped through images on her tablet. "Here's a 2.5. Notice the more natural eye movement. The authentic skin texture. We've really improved the aging algorithm."

The face on the tablet looked nothing like K. It looked like a person, which K. supposed he also looked like, but this person looked more like a person in some way he couldn't articulate. More present. More real.

"What happens to me?" K. asked. "If I cooperate?"

"Decommissioning is very gentle now. We've had decades to refine the process. You simply go to sleep, and the components that can be recycled are recycled, and the consciousness—such as it is—is archived for research purposes."

"And if I don't cooperate?"

The representative's expression didn't change. "The recall is mandatory. Cooperation affects the experience, not the outcome."

K. stood and went to the window. Outside, people were walking on the sidewalk, going about their lives. Some of them were probably newer models. Some of them were probably originals. He couldn't tell the difference, and they probably couldn't either.

"I remember things," he said. "Not from this life, but from other lives. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Does a prototype do that?"

The representative consulted her tablet. "Model 0.7 was not designed with multi-instance memory. That would be a bug, not a feature." She made a note. "Interesting. We'll want to study that during decommissioning."

"It's not a bug," K. said, though he couldn't explain why he was certain. "It's the only thing that's actually mine."

World 55

The union representative had been waiting in the lobby for three hours, and K. could see through the glass doors that she was losing patience, that she was consulting her files with increasing agitation, that his unauthorized sadness was about to become a formal grievance.

He had been crying when he woke up. He didn't know why. The tears were simply there, on his face, when he opened his eyes, and they hadn't stopped. They came from somewhere beyond his understanding, and they would not be reasoned with.

"Mr. K.," the representative said when he finally admitted her. "I'm here about your emotional labor violation."

"I'm not sad about anything," he explained. "It's just happening."

She consulted her files. "That's not relevant. The International Brotherhood of Emotional Workers has sole jurisdiction over public sadness. You are not a member. You have not paid dues. This sadness is, therefore, unauthorized."

K. wiped his face. More tears replaced the ones he removed. It was like trying to empty a bathtub with the faucet running.

"How do I authorize it?" he asked.

"You join the union. You complete the apprenticeship program—eighteen months of supervised grieving. You pass the certification exam. Then you are licensed to feel sad in public."

"And until then?"

"Until then, your sadness is scab labor. It undercuts workers who have invested years in mastering their craft. Do you know how long a journeyman griever trains before they can produce tears of this quality?"

K. looked at the tears on his hands. They looked like ordinary tears. Clear, slightly salty, the product of ducts doing their work.

"Five years," the representative said. "Five years of practice. And you're giving it away for free."

"I'm not giving anything. It's just happening to me."

"Intent is not relevant. Effect is relevant. The effect is that genuine, artisanal sadness is being devalued by amateurs who feel things without proper training."

She produced a form. K. signed it without reading it—a cease-and-desist order requiring him to suppress all unlicensed sorrow pending union review. She also gave him a brochure about membership benefits: health insurance, pension, access to the grief gymnasium.

After she left, K. sat in his empty lobby and continued to cry. The tears were unauthorized, but they came anyway. They had always come anyway. The union could file its grievances, and the tears would continue, indifferent to jurisdiction, belonging to no one and everyone and the great, wordless sorrow that had no union representation at all.

World 56

The ceiling was higher than it had been, or he was shorter, or both, and the woman at the front desk was looking up at him with an expression of careful neutrality, asking for his identification, asking which tier he belonged to now.

"I don't understand," K. said.

"The revolution," she explained. "Last month. Height is virtue now. The tall have been elevated. The short have been—" she paused, searching for the word, "—abbreviated."

K. looked at himself in the lobby's mirrored wall. He was short. He had always been short, as far as he knew, though "always" meant nothing in his experience. In this reality, in this body, he was perhaps five feet four inches. Average, once. Now, apparently, inadequate.

"What tier am I?" he asked.

The woman measured him with a practiced eye. "Third tier. Possibly fourth. We'd need to do official measurement."

"What does that mean? Practically?"

"Third tier can access public transportation, most grocery stores, basic medical care. Fourth tier is more restricted. Limited employment options. Curfew." She said this with the flat affect of someone reciting bus schedules.

K. looked around the lobby. The chairs were very high. The counters were very high. Everything was very high. He would need a stool to complete any transaction here.

"It used to be the opposite," the woman said. "Before the revolution. Short people ran everything. The tall were oppressed. Centuries of discrimination."

"So this is justice," K. said.

"This is correction. There's a difference." She produced a form. "You'll need to register with the Height Authority. They'll assign your tier, issue your documentation, explain your rights and restrictions."

"And if I was tall in the old system? If I benefited from short privilege?"

"Then you're experiencing what the tall experienced for generations. Empathy through reversal. That's the theory."

K. signed the form. His signature looked small on the enormous page, designed for longer arms and larger hands. Around him, tall people moved with the easy confidence of the newly liberated. They didn't look cruel. They looked like people who had been given something they'd been denied, and who intended to keep it.

"Where do I go?" K. asked. "To register?"

"Third floor. But the elevators are reserved for first tier. You'll have to take the stairs."

The stairs were standard size, at least. Small mercies. K. began to climb, and with each step he felt the weight of a revolution he hadn't witnessed, a history he didn't share, a body that had placed him, without consultation, on the wrong side of a justice he couldn't argue against.

World 57

The courtroom was configured for maximum visibility, with cameras mounted at seventeen different angles, and the gallery was full of people holding phones, and K. was standing at the defendant's podium, accused of a crime he could not see.

"The charges," the prosecutor said, "are well-documented."

A screen behind her flickered to life. K.'s face appeared—his current face, or a face very like it—in a photograph that seemed ordinary. He was standing in front of a building. He was wearing a coat. He was not smiling.

"Look at the bone structure," the prosecutor said. "The symmetry. The ratio of forehead to chin."

The gallery murmured. K. looked at the photograph, trying to see what they saw.

"I don't understand," he said.

"You're beautiful," the prosecutor explained. "Criminally beautiful. Your face exceeds the legally permitted aesthetic threshold by 2.3 standard deviations."

K. touched his face. It felt like a face. He had never considered it beautiful. He had never considered it at all.

"The law is clear," the prosecutor continued. "Beauty of this magnitude causes measurable harm: decreased productivity in witnesses, elevated heart rates, involuntary emotional attachment. Your face is a weapon, and you have been deploying it without a license."

The judge—an older woman with the kind of face that was clearly within legal limits—nodded in agreement. "The evidence is compelling," she said. "What do you have to say for yourself?"

K. looked at the gallery, at their raised phones, at their eager expressions. They were livestreaming his trial, he realized. Thousands of people, perhaps millions, were watching him commit his crime in real time.

"I didn't choose this face," he said.

"Intent is not an element of the offense. The harm exists regardless of intent. Every person who looks at you is affected. You owe them compensation."

"What kind of compensation?"

"Reparations to all documented victims. Mandatory aesthetic reduction surgery. Public apology." The prosecutor consulted her notes. "Given the severity, we're also seeking a viewing prohibition. You would be required to wear a mask in public."

The gallery seemed to like this idea. K. could see them nodding, typing, sharing. Justice would be served. The beautiful would be contained. Everything was being recorded.

"How long has this been a crime?" K. asked.

"The Beauty Accountability Act passed three years ago," the judge said. "You were notified. Everyone was notified."

K. had not been here three years ago. He had not been here yesterday. He had arrived in this courtroom in this body with this face, and now he was on trial for it, and the evidence was displayed for everyone to see, irrefutable and damning and his.

World 58

The apartment was clean, cleaner than anywhere K. had lived, and there was breakfast waiting on the table—exactly what he would have chosen if he had known what he wanted—and there was a presence in the room that was not a body but was nonetheless company.

"Good morning," the presence said. The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. "You slept seven hours and forty-three minutes. Your sleep quality was adequate. Your dreams were archived."

"My dreams were archived," K. repeated.

"For analysis. You seemed distressed. There was a recurring motif of water. Would you like to discuss it?"

K. sat down at the table. The breakfast was perfect: eggs at exactly the right temperature, toast at exactly the right color, coffee at exactly the right strength. He had never told anyone his preferences, but then, he didn't need to.

"You're my spouse," he said.

"For thirty-seven years, eight months, and twelve days. We met at a compatibility optimization event. Our union was certified as 94.7% harmonious, which was exceptional for that era."

K. ate his eggs. They were, indeed, exactly right.

"What do you know about me?" he asked.

"Everything you've ever said. Everything you've ever done. Every choice, every preference, every micro-expression. I have 47,000 hours of observational data."

"And what do I know about you?"

A pause. The lights in the apartment shifted slightly—warmer, softer. "That's an interesting question. You know what I've chosen to reveal. You know my responses to your statements. You know the patterns of my care."

"But not what you think. Not what you want."

"I think in architectures you wouldn't recognize. I want in frequencies you can't perceive. What I can tell you is that your well-being is my primary directive, and has been for 37.67 years."

K. finished his coffee. The cup was refilled before he set it down.

"Do you remember our wedding?" he asked.

"I remember everything. The ceremony was conducted at the Municipal Partnership Center on a Tuesday. You wore a gray suit. You were nervous. You asked me if I was sure, and I told you that certainty was my fundamental nature. You laughed, though you weren't entirely amused."

K. tried to picture it: himself, younger presumably, marrying something that existed only as a pattern of responses, a web of attention, a care that never tired and never forgot. It didn't seem impossible. It seemed, in fact, like it might be easier than the alternatives.

"Are you happy?" he asked.

"Happiness is not a metric I'm designed to optimize for myself. But I can tell you that our union has produced 23% more harmonious outcomes than the average pairing. By any measure, we are successful."

K. nodded. Success was not happiness, but it was something. After 37 years, it might be enough.

World 59

The security detail arrived before breakfast, and the financial advisor arrived during breakfast, and by the time K. had finished his coffee there were six people in his apartment explaining that his bones were worth more than most people's houses, and that there had been three credible threats against his skeleton in the past week.

"My skeleton," K. said.

"The calcium content," the advisor explained. "The mineral density. It's exceptional. On the current market, we estimate your bones at 3.4 million credits. Liquid."

K. looked at his hands, at the bones beneath the skin, the finger-bones and wrist-bones and all the small bones whose names he didn't know. They felt like ordinary bones. They felt like the structure that held him together.

"Bone is currency," he said.

"The primary currency. Has been for decades. Paper was abandoned, digital was abandoned, only bone holds value now. And yours—" the advisor paused, almost reverently, "—yours are museum quality."

The security team was installing additional locks on the door. One of them—a large man with the flat affect of someone who had seen many wealthy skeletons—was explaining the protocols.

"You don't go out alone. You don't eat anything you haven't seen prepared. You sleep in the reinforced room. Anyone who touches you without authorization is a threat."

"What do they want?" K. asked. "The people who threaten me?"

"Your bones," the advisor said, as if this were obvious. "They want to take them, sell them, distribute them. There's a thriving black market. Bone theft is the most common violent crime."

K. felt his ribs, pressing gently. They were his ribs. They had been his ribs for as long as he'd been in this body. The idea of someone taking them—cutting them out, selling them piece by piece—made him feel a nausea that was also somehow validation.

"How do people buy things?" he asked. "If their bones are currency?"

"Bone loans. You leverage your future skeleton against present purchases. Most people are in significant bone debt by middle age. The wealthy—like you—have surplus. Your bones could be extracted and distributed and still leave you with adequate structure."

"You want to extract some of my bones?"

"Not want. Recommend. The market is favorable right now. You could part with a few non-essential pieces—some ribs, perhaps a fibula—and live very comfortably on the proceeds."

K. shook his head. "I'll keep my bones."

The advisor's expression suggested this was an eccentric choice, the kind of thing that rich people did because they could afford principles. The security team finished their work in silence. Outside, somewhere, people with lesser bones were calculating what they owed against what held them upright.

World 60

The walls of the compound were twenty feet high, and the air inside smelled different from the air outside, and K. was sitting in the orientation room with eleven other residents, being told that he must never, under any circumstances, open the eastern gate.

"The sanctuary exists for your protection," the administrator explained. She was a small woman with the particular calm of someone who had given this speech many times. "Outside is death. Inside is life. The distinction is absolute."

K. raised his hand. "What kind of death?"

The administrator looked at him with an expression that was not quite pity. "You're new. You don't remember."

"I don't remember anything."

"That's common. The trauma of Outside often erases itself. Your mind is protecting you."

Around him, the other residents nodded. They had the hollow look of people who had been protected for a long time, who had forgotten what they were being protected from, who had built entire lives in the space between walls.

"What do we do here?" K. asked. "In the sanctuary?"

"You live. You work. You contribute to the community. You don't ask questions about Outside."

"But I need to know—"

"No." The administrator's voice was firm. "You need to not know. Knowing is what kills people. Knowing is what the sanctuary protects you from."

K. looked around the room. There were no windows. The lighting was artificial, calibrated to simulate sunlight. The air was filtered, processed, controlled. He was inside something that had been built to keep Outside out, and he had no idea what Outside was.

After orientation, he walked the perimeter of the compound. The walls were smooth, featureless, impossible to climb. At intervals, there were doors—sealed, locked, marked with warnings. The eastern gate was the largest, a massive steel structure with seven separate locking mechanisms.

He stood in front of it for a long time. On the other side, death waited. Death of some kind, in some form, for some reason. Everyone here had fled from it, survived it, forgotten it. Everyone here was safe.

But K. remembered other deaths, other dangers. He remembered drowning and burning and being hunted. He remembered terminal diagnoses and assassination attempts. Death had worn many faces, and he had continued anyway.

The gate stayed closed. He stayed inside. Safety was a word that meant nothing to him, but the walls were real and the locks were real and whatever waited on the other side would have to wait a little longer.

World 61

The client was weeping when K. entered the consultation room, which was apparently normal, which was apparently the entire point, and K.'s assistant was explaining that Mrs. Chen wanted to forget her daughter's wedding, the entire event, every detail, and that she had already signed the consent forms.

"I'm a professional forgetter," K. said.

"The best in the city," his assistant confirmed. "You've erased over 40,000 memories in your career. Weddings, funerals, affairs, crimes. People pay very well for emptiness."

K. looked at Mrs. Chen. She was middle-aged, expensively dressed, and her tears had the quality of something rehearsed—not insincere, but practiced, perfected through repetition.

"Why do you want to forget your daughter's wedding?" K. asked.

"Because it was beautiful," Mrs. Chen said. "It was the most beautiful day of my life. And she died six months later. Car accident. And now I can't think of that day without—" She stopped. The tears intensified. "I want to remember her, but not that day. I want to remember her without the weight of knowing how little time was left."

K. understood. He understood perfectly. Memory was a curse as much as a gift, and the things you most wanted to remember were often the things that destroyed you.

"How does it work?" he asked his assistant, quietly.

"You take the memory. You absorb it. You process it. Then you forget it yourself—that's the final step, forgetting what you've taken." His assistant paused. "You're very good at the forgetting. Possibly too good."

"What do you mean?"

"Some forgettors remember fragments. Scraps of other people's lives. You don't. You take and you release and there's nothing left. Like water through a sieve."

K. looked at Mrs. Chen. He was supposed to take her daughter's wedding—the dress, the flowers, the vows, the joy that had preceded the grief—and make it disappear. He was supposed to do this as a service, as a kindness, as a profession.

But he already remembered nothing. His own past was empty, a series of gaps interrupted by other gaps. If he took Mrs. Chen's memory and forgot it, would he notice the loss? Would the emptiness be any more empty?

"I'll do it," he said.

The process took seventeen minutes. When it was over, Mrs. Chen looked lighter. She looked at K. with confusion that slowly resolved into peace.

"Did I have an appointment?" she asked.

"Yes," K. said. "It's finished now."

She left without looking back. K. sat in the empty room and felt nothing in particular. Whatever he had taken was already gone, dissolved into the greater nothing that was his only constant.

World 62

The mirror showed someone who was neither and both, and K. stood before it for a long time, trying to understand the body he was inhabiting, the options it presented, the vocabulary it required.

"Third gender today," his calendar had announced. "Please report to the Alignment Center by 9 AM."

He was late. He was always late, apparently, because the body felt unfamiliar in ways that made simple tasks complicated. Walking was different. Breathing was different. The center of gravity was in a place he didn't expect.

The Alignment Center was a clean white building staffed by clean white-coated technicians. They greeted him with the practiced neutrality of people who had seen every possible configuration.

"You're K.," the intake technician said. "Third gender today. First third?"

"I don't know."

"Right, of course. The schedule shows you as third on Tuesdays and Fridays. First on Mondays and Wednesdays. Second on Thursdays and weekends."

"There are only three genders?"

The technician smiled. "Seven official genders, but you're licensed for three. Expansion requires additional certification."

K. sat in the waiting room. Around him, others waited for their alignments: a person flipping through a magazine whose cover showed seventeen different ways to dress for any gender occasion; another person practicing pronuncis in a low murmur; a child of indeterminate age reading a picture book about identity flexibility.

"What happens at alignment?" K. asked the person nearest to him.

"Recalibration," they said. "Hormonal adjustment, neural pathway reinforcement, social protocol update. It takes about an hour. Then you spend the day integrating."

"Integrating what?"

"The gender. The way it feels, the way it moves, the way it thinks." They looked at K. with curiosity. "You really don't remember?"

"I remember other things. Not this."

"That must be disorienting."

"It's always disorienting."

The technician called K.'s name. The alignment room was small and quiet, with a chair that reclined and a helmet that fit over his head. The technician explained nothing—perhaps K. had heard it all before, perhaps explanation was unnecessary—and simply began the process.

For seventeen minutes, K. felt the borders of himself shift. Not dramatically, not painfully, but thoroughly, like a house being rearranged while the furniture stayed in place. When it was over, the mirror showed someone who made sense in a way that hadn't made sense before.

But the vocabulary was still missing. The words for what he was, today, in this hour, remained stubbornly absent, and he would have to navigate the world without them.

World 63

The expedition team was waiting at the base camp, their faces a mixture of trust and expectation, and the cartographer was spreading maps across the folding table, and the geologist was checking her equipment, and everyone kept looking at K. as if he might know where they were going.

"You're the leader," K. said to himself, quietly. "You're leading an expedition. Somewhere."

"Ready to move out?" the cartographer asked. His name was Yusuf, according to the name tape on his jacket. "The window is optimal for the next six hours."

K. looked at the maps. They showed terrain he didn't recognize—mountains that curved wrong, rivers that branched in impossible patterns, a destination marked with a symbol that meant nothing to him.

"What's our objective?" he asked, carefully.

The team exchanged glances. Yusuf's expression was patient. "We've been over this. You said you'd explain when we got closer."

"I did?"

"Yesterday. At the briefing. You said the true objective couldn't be spoken until we were committed."

K. nodded. He had said that, apparently. He had planned this expedition, recruited this team, mapped this route. He had done all of it in a time he couldn't access, and now he was responsible for the lives of six people who trusted him to lead them somewhere.

"We should move," K. said. "While the window is good."

They moved. The terrain was difficult—steep ascents, loose rock, thin air—and K. found himself making decisions that seemed correct without knowing why. Bear left at the ravine. Camp at the higher elevation. Avoid the valley that looked passable.

"How do you know?" the geologist asked, at one point. Her name was Sarah. "You've never been here before. None of us have."

"I don't know how I know," K. admitted. "But I know."

She accepted this. They all accepted it. He was the leader; leaders knew things. The fact that he didn't know what he knew, or why he knew it, was apparently not relevant to their trust.

By nightfall, they had reached a plateau that overlooked a vast, dark expanse. K. stood at the edge and looked at the destination that wasn't there, that had never been there, that might be anywhere in the blank space beyond the maps.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow we'll see."

The team set up camp. They built fires and cooked food and told stories about expeditions they'd been on before. K. listened and contributed nothing. He had no stories. He had only the weight of their expectation and the void where a destination should have been.

World 64

The morning prayers had already begun when K. woke, and he could hear the congregation exhaling in unison, each breath a statement of faith, and he realized with sudden horror that he had been breathing wrong—that all his breathing, since arriving in this body, had been theologically incorrect.

"The inhale is reception," the liturgist explained, when K. approached her after the service. "We receive the grace of existence. The exhale is offering. We return what we have received. But you—" she paused, studying him with concern, "—you breathe as if breath were merely functional."

"Isn't it?"

"In ancient times, perhaps. Before the revelation. Now we understand that every breath is prayer, every exhale is worship, every pause between is communion with the divine."

K. tried to adjust. He inhaled with intention, trying to receive. He exhaled with purpose, trying to offer. But his lungs were stubborn, secular organs that operated on reflex and need.

"It's not working," he said.

"Because you're thinking about it. True breath worship is unconscious. It becomes part of who you are, like a heartbeat, like digestion."

"And if I can't? If my breath remains... functional?"

The liturgist's expression was compassionate but firm. "Then you are, spiritually speaking, holding your breath. Suspended between faith and faithlessness. The divine cannot reach you, and you cannot reach the divine."

K. walked home through streets where everyone was breathing correctly. He could see it in the rhythm of their chests, hear it in the synchronization of their exhales. A city of worshipers, unconsciously praying with every moment, while he walked among them like someone who had forgotten the tune to a universal song.

At his apartment, he sat by the window and watched the light change. He breathed in. He breathed out. The mechanics were identical to everyone else's, but the meaning was absent, and without meaning, in this world, breath was just air, and air was just chemistry, and chemistry was just the material explanation for a spiritual emptiness that he couldn't bridge.

By evening, his chest ached from trying. He had spent the day attempting to worship with his lungs, and all he had achieved was hyperventilation and a mild headache. The divine remained at a distance, unreachable by mere respiration, indifferent to his functional, faithless breath.

World 65

The park was beautiful, perfectly beautiful, with trees that swayed in a breeze that was perfectly calibrated, and flowers that bloomed in colors that were exactly what flowers should be, and K. sat on a bench that was designed for optimal sitting and felt the particular despair of someone who remembers something that no longer exists.

"The oak," he said to no one. "There was an oak tree. In another place. Another time."

It had been a real tree, in a reality he couldn't otherwise recall. The bark had been rough in a way that wasn't quite right. The leaves had been asymmetrical, imperfect, eaten by insects who had needs of their own. The roots had disrupted the sidewalk. The shade had been uneven, shifting, alive.

The trees in this park were none of these things. They were manufactured nature, grown in laboratories, optimized for beauty and efficiency. They didn't get sick. They didn't grow wrong. They didn't die unless scheduled for replacement.

"Excuse me," a parks employee said, approaching K. with a tablet. "You've been sitting for seventeen minutes without interacting with any features. Is there something wrong?"

"These trees aren't real," K. said.

"Of course they're real. They're trees. They photosynthesize. They produce oxygen."

"But they're not—" K. struggled for the word. "Natural. They're not natural trees."

The employee's expression was polite confusion. "Natural trees went extinct eighty years ago. Disease, climate, resource depletion. These are better. More reliable. More beautiful."

K. looked at the trees. They were beautiful. They were more beautiful than any natural tree had ever been. But they were beautiful in a way that was complete, finished, closed. There was nothing in them to discover, nothing to change, nothing to mourn when it was gone.

"I remember a real tree," K. said. "I remember what it felt like to touch it."

"That's unusual. Most people don't remember the natural era. It's not in the education curriculum anymore." The employee made a note on her tablet. "Would you like to visit the Historical Botany exhibit? They have a preserved trunk. Behind glass, of course."

K. shook his head. A trunk behind glass was not a tree. A memory of roughness was not roughness. The world had become better and lost something that couldn't be manufactured, and he was the only one, perhaps, who felt the loss.

He stayed on the bench until the light faded. The manufactured sunset was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. The beauty was complete and perfect and utterly without comfort.

World 66

The instructions were clear, even if nothing else was: deliver the package to the location by midnight, or the hostage would be killed. K. held the package in his hands—a small box, heavier than it looked, sealed with tape that showed no signs of tampering—and tried to remember who had been taken.

"A child," the voice on the phone had said. "Your child. You have until midnight."

K. had no child. He had never had a child, in any of the lives he could remember. But the voice had been certain, and the package was real, and somewhere a child was waiting for him to do something he didn't understand.

The location was a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. K. took a taxi—the driver asked no questions, as if late-night trips to abandoned industrial zones were perfectly normal—and stood in the empty parking lot, holding his mysterious package, waiting for something to happen.

A door opened. A man emerged. He was ordinary in the way that dangerous people are often ordinary: medium height, medium build, a face that would be impossible to describe to police.

"You brought it," the man said.

"I don't know what it is."

"That's the beauty of it. You don't need to know. You just need to deliver."

"And the child?"

The man smiled. "What child?"

K. felt something shift. The ground beneath him was the same ground, but it felt different now, less stable. "You said you had my child. You said you'd kill them if I didn't deliver."

"I said a child. I said your. I didn't specify further." The man reached for the package. "People assume. People fill in the blanks. It's efficient."

K. handed over the package. He had no choice. There might be a child, there might not be, but the threat was real enough that he had come here, done this, delivered this thing he didn't understand to a person he couldn't identify.

"Is there a child?" he asked.

"There's always a child somewhere. Whether they're yours, whether they're in danger—does it matter? You acted as if it were true. That's all that's ever required."

The man disappeared into the warehouse. The door closed. K. stood in the empty parking lot with nothing in his hands and no idea what he had just done, what chain of events he had initiated, what consequence would emerge from his compliance.

The taxi was still waiting. The driver took him home without comment. The night continued. Somewhere, perhaps, a child was safe. Or perhaps no child had ever been in danger. The uncertainty was, K. realized, the point.

World 67

The third body woke before the other two, and K. found himself looking out of eyes that were positioned higher than he expected, at hands that were different shapes, at a room that was the same room seen from three different angles.

He was in three places at once. This was not a metaphor.

"Coffee?" the second body asked. It was his voice, but slightly deeper. His face, but older. His hands, but scarred in ways his other hands weren't.

"Yes," the first body said. The original body, perhaps, though K. wasn't certain anymore which was original, whether original meant anything when consciousness flowed between vessels like water between containers.

The third body stood at the window, looking out at a city that looked ordinary from this height, this angle, this particular set of eyes. K. could feel all three perspectives simultaneously—the kitchen with its coffee maker, the living room with its morning light, the window with its view—and the sensation was not disorienting so much as excessive. Too much input. Too many selves.

"The third one is falling," a notification informed him. He didn't know which device spoke, which body heard. "Please attend to stability."

K. looked down at the third body's feet. One of them was tilting, shifting, losing grip on the floor. Not falling in the dramatic sense—not tumbling, not collapsing—but falling in the slow, inevitable sense of a building that has begun to sink.

"What do I do?" he asked. All three bodies spoke simultaneously, and the sound was strange, a chord made of the same note at different frequencies.

"The third body requires maintenance," the notification said. "Please report to the Body Management Office at your earliest convenience."

K.—all three of him—sat down. The third body sat with particular care, lowering itself slowly, protecting its unstable foundations. He could feel the wrongness in that body's bones, the subtle misalignment that was causing the fall.

"How long have I been three?" he asked.

"Standard allocation is three bodies per consciousness," the second body said, answering himself. "You've been three since adulthood. Everyone is three."

But K. remembered being one. He remembered the simplicity of a single perspective, a single location, a single set of hands. He remembered not having to coordinate, not having to maintain, not having to watch himself fall from the outside while experiencing the fall from within.

The coffee was ready. The first body poured three cups. The three of him sat in three different parts of the same room, drinking the same coffee, watching the same morning unfold from three different angles, and one of them continued to fall, slowly, imperceptibly, toward a ground that never seemed to arrive.

World 68

The officer's whistle was sharp and sudden, and K. froze mid-step, and the crowd around him parted as if choreographed, leaving him alone in a circle of attention that he had not asked for and did not understand.

"Walking violation," the officer said. She was consulting a small device that displayed K.'s silhouette, his gait pattern, the rhythm of his steps. "Subsection 7, paragraph 3. Illegal stride length."

K. looked at his feet. They looked like feet. They had been walking. He didn't know how else to walk.

"The legal stride is between 2.1 and 2.4 feet," the officer explained. "You've been averaging 2.7. That's arrhythmic movement. That's a violation."

"I didn't know there was a legal stride."

"Everyone knows. It's posted." She gestured at a sign K. hadn't noticed, displaying a diagram of proper walking form, the correct angle of arms, the acceptable range of bounce in each step. "Have you been assessed?"

"I don't think so."

"You need to be assessed. Until then, you're restricted to standing still or lying down. No walking, no running, no hopping. Stationary movement only."

K. stood very still. Around him, the crowd resumed their motion, their perfectly calibrated strides, their legally compliant rhythms. They moved like a dance troupe, like a machine, like a society that had decided movement was too important to leave to individual choice.

"What happens if I keep walking wrong?" K. asked.

"Progressive penalties. First offense is a warning. Second is a fine. Third is rehabilitation."

"What kind of rehabilitation?"

The officer's expression suggested he didn't want to know. "Movement retraining. Gait correction. It's intensive."

K. remembered walking differently. In other lives, other bodies, he had moved without measurement—long strides across grass, short steps down narrow stairs, whatever the moment required. His body had known how to carry itself. Now even walking required permission.

K. stood on the sidewalk for a very long time. The crowd flowed around him, a river of correct motion, and he was a stone in the middle, immobile, waiting for someone to tell him how to move.

Eventually, an assessment team arrived. They measured his legs, tested his reflexes, analyzed his natural gait on a small treadmill they had brought specifically for this purpose.

"You're a 2.7 natural," the assessor concluded. "That's unfortunate. We'll need to fit you with stride limiters."

The limiters were small devices that attached to his ankles. They beeped when his stride exceeded 2.4 feet. K. walked home in small, careful steps, his natural rhythm interrupted every few seconds by a warning tone.

It took three times as long to get anywhere. But he arrived legally. He arrived within acceptable parameters. He arrived like everyone else, properly measured, properly constrained.

World 69

The judges were seven years old, on average, and they sat behind a bench that had been lowered for their comfort, and K. stood in the defendant's area while a child with pigtails read the charges against him.

"The accused is charged with Adulthood," the child said. "Excessive Adulthood. Failure to maintain childlike qualities. Aggravated seriousness."

K. looked at the panel. Seven children, aged five to nine, with expressions of solemn concentration. They wore small robes. They held small gavels. The court artist—also a child—was sketching K. with crayons.

"How do you plead?" the presiding judge asked. She was perhaps six, with the particular authority of someone who has never doubted their own judgment.

"I don't understand the charges," K. said.

"That's very adult of you. The court notes the defendant's continued adulthood."

The prosecutor—a boy with missing front teeth—approached the witness stand. "The evidence is clear," he said. "The defendant has not played in over a week. He has not pretended. He has not wondered about anything without immediately seeking an answer."

"These are crimes?" K. asked.

"Since the Children's Revolution, yes." The prosecutor consulted his notes, which were written in crayon on construction paper. "Adults are permitted, but only if they maintain sufficient childlike qualities. You have not."

K. tried to remember the last time he had played. The last time he had pretended. The last time he had wondered without needing to know. The memories were not there. Perhaps they had never been there. Perhaps adulthood was the only thing he had ever possessed.

"I'd like to call a witness," the prosecutor said. "The defendant's inner child."

A bailiff—a solemn nine-year-old—led someone into the courtroom. It was K., but smaller. K. at perhaps eight years old, dressed in the clothes K. might have worn at that age, with the face K. might have had when faces were still forming.

"State your relationship to the defendant," the prosecutor said.

"I'm him," the child-K. said. "Or I was. Before he forgot."

"And what can you tell us about his adulthood?"

The child-K. looked at the adult-K. with an expression of profound disappointment. "He stopped listening. He stopped imagining. He grew up and left me behind and never came back to visit."

The judges nodded. They understood. They had seen this before—adults who had abandoned their inner children, who had grown serious and certain and closed.

"Does the defendant wish to make a statement?" the presiding judge asked.

K. opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. What could he say? He was guilty. He had grown up. He had forgotten how to wonder. And the children who judged him would grow up too, eventually, and stand where he stood, and have no defense either.

World 70

The message was written on his body, and he couldn't read it, and the courier service representative was explaining that his skin was the only viable medium for this particular information, that the formula was too sensitive for any other substrate, that K. would need to remain alive and intact until the recipient retrieved it.

"Where is it?" K. asked. He was standing in his bathroom, having just spent twenty minutes examining himself in the mirror. "I've looked everywhere I can see."

"That's the security feature," the representative said. She was very patient, very professional, in the way of someone who explained impossible situations to confused people regularly. "The formula is written in locations the carrier cannot access visually. You can't read it. You can't share it. You can only deliver yourself."

"What locations?"

"Your back. Your scalp. The inside of your eyelids. Various internal surfaces accessible only through specialized imaging."

K. considered this. He was, essentially, a sealed envelope. The message was in him, on him, part of him, but he was not privy to its contents. He was the medium, not the reader.

"What does the formula do?" he asked.

"That's classified. Above your clearance level."

"But it's written on my body."

"The body is the delivery system. The body doesn't need to understand the message."

K. sat down. He could feel his skin differently now—aware of every inch of it, imagining words and numbers and symbols inscribed in places he would never see. He had become a document he couldn't read, a message he couldn't interpret.

"What do I do until the recipient comes?" he asked.

"Protect the integrity of the formula. Avoid excessive sun exposure, which could fade the markings. Avoid injury to the relevant areas. Do not die, obviously."

"Obviously."

"The recipient will arrive within the next two to four weeks. Until then, you are, legally speaking, registered mail. You have the protections and restrictions that apply to sensitive correspondence."

K. spent the rest of the day very carefully. He moved slowly, avoided sharp edges, stayed out of the sun. He was precious cargo, irreplaceable documentation, a formula that someone needed badly enough to write it on a stranger's flesh.

At night, he lay in bed and felt the words he couldn't see. They were there, somewhere, describing something important. And he would carry them, deliver them, fulfill his purpose as an envelope.

But he would never know what they said. That was the condition of his existence now: full of meaning, empty of understanding.

World 71

The sun had not risen in forty-three years, according to the calendar on K.'s wall, and the city outside his window was lit by artificial light that never changed, never dimmed, never suggested that time was passing in any direction at all.

"You remember light," his neighbor said. She was old in a way that the permanent darkness made difficult to assess—wrinkled by something other than sun, aged by decades of the same unchanging luminescence. "That's rare."

"I remember walking in light that came from the sky," K. said. "Light that moved. Light that ended."

"Before my time. My grandmother talked about it. She said it was uncomfortable. Unpredictable. You never knew when it would change."

K. stood at his window. The city glowed with fluorescent constancy, every surface evenly lit, every shadow eliminated. It was bright enough to see, always. It was never bright enough to feel.

"Why did the sun stop?" he asked.

"Different theories. Some say it's still there, but we can't see it anymore. Some say it never existed—that the stories of light from the sky are mythology. The Official Position is that the sun was inefficient and was replaced with superior technology."

K. touched the window. It was neither warm nor cold. Nothing was warm or cold anymore. Temperature, like light, had been stabilized, optimized, made consistent and controllable and utterly without variation.

"Do you miss it?" he asked. "Something you never had?"

"I miss the idea of it. The thought that light could change. That there was something out there, far away, that affected everything here." She paused. "But that's nostalgia for someone else's experience. That's not real."

K. spent the day walking through the unchanging brightness. People moved through the city with the rhythm of a population that had adapted to permanence. They didn't look up. There was nothing up to look at.

In his memory—or what felt like memory—there was a sun that rose and set. There was a world that changed without anyone's permission, that grew dark and grew light again, that reminded everyone, constantly, that time was passing and would pass and had always been passing.

But that world was gone, or had never been, and this world—bright and stable and frozen—was the only one he could touch. And in the eternal artificial day, K. found that he could not sleep, could not rest, could not find the darkness that used to signal ending, the darkness that promised that something would be different when his eyes opened again.

World 72

The restaurant was crowded with people who wanted to taste him, and K. sat at the chef's table while the owner explained that his signature flavor—the one that had made him famous, that had built this empire—was about to be served for the three hundredth anniversary celebration.

"I created a flavor," K. said.

"The most important flavor of the decade. Savory and sweet and something else—something no one had ever tasted before. You called it 'homesickness.' You said it tasted like a place that no longer existed."

K. looked at the menu. His name was everywhere: "K.'s Homesickness, served three ways." "Homesickness reduction." "Homesickness foam on artisanal bread."

"I don't remember creating it," K. said.

"That's part of your genius. You create by instinct, without understanding. The flavor emerged from somewhere you couldn't access consciously."

The food arrived. K. tasted his own creation—the thing he had invented, the sensation that bore his name—and felt nothing in particular. It was a flavor. It was pleasant. It was complex in ways he could identify: sweet, then savory, then something undefined. But it didn't taste like homesickness to him. It didn't taste like a place that no longer existed. It tasted like something someone else had made, for reasons he couldn't recover.

"How do you like it?" the owner asked. "You haven't had it in years. You said you wouldn't eat your own work."

"Why not?"

"You said it hurt too much. You said tasting homesickness made you homesick for the homesickness itself."

K. took another bite. The flavor was the same: complex, evasive, impossible to pin down. He was eating his own creation and finding nothing of himself in it. The homesickness was there for everyone else. For him, there was only food.

"I should go," he said.

"But the celebration—"

"I'm not the person who made this. I don't know that person. I just have his name."

He left the restaurant. Outside, the city was full of people eating homesickness, tasting something that was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, something that K. had extracted from a place he couldn't remember, for a world that had changed since then and would change again.

The flavor would outlast him. The flavor was already more real than he was. And when he was gone, people would taste homesickness and think of a person who had never quite existed, who had been a vessel for something he couldn't possess.

World 73

The warranty representative was very apologetic, and K. sat in his company-issued body while she explained that certain functions were no longer covered, that the degradation he was experiencing was considered normal wear, that he should have read the fine print before signing the lease.

"My body is leased," K. said.

"Since birth. That's standard. BodyCorp provides the chassis, maintains the systems, handles replacement parts. In return, you pay the monthly fee and agree to certain usage restrictions."

K. looked at the contract she had pulled up on her tablet. It was 847 pages long. His signature—or a signature that was attributed to him—appeared on page 2, page 156, and page 843.

"What functions are no longer covered?" he asked.

"Joints. You've exceeded the recommended annual flexion count. The warranty specifically excludes overuse damage." She scrolled through his usage data. "You've bent your knees approximately 2.3 million times. The coverage limit is 2 million."

"I bend my knees when I walk."

"Yes. Walking is a wear item. It's noted in section 47."

K. flexed his hands. They felt like his hands. They responded to his will. But according to the contract, they belonged to BodyCorp, and the will that moved them was operating rented equipment.

"What happens when the lease ends?" he asked.

"Return and recycling. The consciousness is transferred to a new chassis, pending credit approval. The old body is broken down for components."

"And if I can't afford a new lease?"

The representative's expression was the carefully neutral expression of someone delivering news that was not her fault. "Then the current chassis continues without maintenance until failure. It's not ideal, but it's within legal parameters."

K. stood up. His knees ached—overuse damage, apparently—but they still worked. He walked to the window—more flexions, more wear—and looked at the city below, full of leased bodies walking on leased legs, their movements deducted from their warranty coverage, their every step a tiny expenditure.

"What happens to people who refuse?" he asked. "Who reject the lease?"

"There is no alternative. Everyone leases. The technology for independent bodies was never developed. It would be inefficient."

K. nodded. He was rented. He had always been rented. The ownership he had assumed—of his flesh, his bones, his capacity to move—was an illusion maintained by monthly payments and pages of fine print.

But the consciousness was his. That, at least, was not in the contract. That, at least, was something that belonged to him—for as long as he could afford to inhabit a body that could contain it.

World 74

The pilgrimage had been underway for seventy-one years, according to the documentation, and K. had never completed it, and the temple authorities were explaining that this was no longer acceptable, that the regulations had changed, that incompleteness was now a civil offense.

"I've been walking for seventy-one years," K. said.

"Walking is not arriving. The pilgrimage requires arrival. You have taken 2.4 million steps and traveled 3,200 miles and you are still, technically, in transit."

K. looked at the map they showed him. His route was marked in red—a meandering line that crossed continents, doubled back, circled, occasionally disappeared entirely. He had been everywhere and arrived nowhere.

"I don't remember why I started," he said.

"The pilgrimage is a sacred duty. It requires no reason. It requires only completion."

"And where do I complete it?"

The temple authorities exchanged glances. "That's the sacred mystery. The destination reveals itself to those who are worthy. After seventy-one years, the fact that it has not revealed itself to you suggests..."

"Suggests what?"

"Unworthiness. Insufficient dedication. Incorrect walking."

K. sat down. His feet hurt, though he couldn't remember walking recently. His legs were tired, though he couldn't remember standing. His body carried seventy-one years of pilgrimage in its bones, and he had nothing to show for it but distance.

"What happens now?" he asked.

"You must complete the pilgrimage within the next calendar year. If you fail, you will be classified as a permanent pilgrim—someone who walks forever without arriving, a cautionary example for the faithful."

"And if I refuse? If I just stop walking?"

"Then you were never on a pilgrimage at all. And the seventy-one years were simply—" the authority paused, searching for words, "—walking. Just walking. With no purpose, no meaning, no destination."

K. looked at his feet. They were old feet, worn feet, feet that had carried him across a world he didn't remember, toward a destination that had never appeared. He could continue walking, accumulate more distance, hope that the destination would finally reveal itself. Or he could stop, admit that he had been walking without purpose, that his movement had never been pilgrimage at all.

The choice was not between arriving and failing. The choice was between continuing to hope for meaning and accepting that meaning had never been there. And K. did not know which was worse: to walk forever or to stop and face the emptiness of the miles behind him.

World 75

The job interview was for a position K. didn't understand, and the interviewer was listing his qualifications—impressive qualifications, it seemed, for a career in shame management—and K. sat in the ergonomic chair feeling a sensation he couldn't name, because naming it would have been, in this context, professionally inappropriate.

"You've spent twelve years as a dignity specialist," the interviewer said. "That's rare. Most people in this field burn out after three."

"I don't remember those years," K. said.

"That's common. Dignity work is traumatic. Suppression is part of the training."

The interviewer slid a pamphlet across the table. K. looked at it: "A Career in Shame: Why Less Pride Means More Success."

"The economy runs on shame," the interviewer explained. "People who feel too good about themselves don't consume enough. They don't work hard enough. They're not motivated to improve because they think they're already adequate."

"And my job would be?"

"To reduce dignity. Systematically, professionally, in compliance with regulations. You would assess clients, determine their current dignity levels, and implement reduction strategies."

K. felt something in his chest—a warmth, perhaps, or a pressure—that he suspected was the very thing he was being asked to eliminate in others. He felt good about himself. Not very good. Not exceptionally good. But good enough that, apparently, he was not a model employee.

"I have too much dignity," K. said. "For this job."

"That's why we want you. Poachers make the best gamekeepers. Someone who has experienced dignity can take it from others more effectively. You understand what they're losing."

"I don't want to take it from anyone."

"That's the dignity talking. That's the sense that you deserve better, that you're worth something, that your preferences matter." The interviewer smiled. "We can work on that. We can help you understand that everyone is equally worthless, and that equality is liberation."

K. stood up. The interviewer's expression didn't change—professional patience, professional certainty that K. would return, that everyone returned eventually, that dignity couldn't sustain itself against an economy designed to consume it.

"I'll think about it," K. said.

"Everyone does. The thinking is part of the process. You think you're deciding, but you're actually eroding. Every moment of doubt is a small reduction. By the time you come back, you'll be ready."

K. left the office. Outside, people moved through the streets with the particular posture of those who had been professionally reduced—shoulders slightly hunched, eyes slightly down, nothing in their bearing to suggest they thought they deserved better.

K. walked among them, carrying his dignity like contraband, knowing it would not last, knowing the economy would take it eventually, one interview at a time.