The Office Building That Never Removes Employees From Its Records And The Night My Name Was Added To The Inventory

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Compare today at thezebra.com.

We do the searching you to the saving.

I think I'll wait inside.

Hello, I'm Wolken's stories all the time.

The lardewer here.

Let's get into it.

My hands used to tremble after midnight in that place, and if I sound older than I probably

showed.

Well, that's earned.

There's a difference in your voice, too.

Once you've heard the walls creak from behind.

Not around you like something rehearse every step you made.

I want you to imagine the kind of night I'm talking about, city steaming in the distance,

passing siren bouncing up through the glass and getting smothered by old carpeting, and

the homophorescent tubes a little too alive.

The building was called the Rookford Centre, but the original aluminum address numbers

had fallen off years ago, so the few of us left started calling it 246 after the fade

marker slotted the lobby.

I was the last one in that Tuesday, saved the cleaning crew, who never seemed real.

Flickering LED in the elevator shuttered its way from G to 9, but I punched in at 3.

It was nearly 11, and my footsteps snapped along Linoleon patched with great tape, echoing

in that hollow where half a band in building does once the work goes home.

Every closed office was striped with slats of lamp light, half the names sliding off company

directories posted on brass plates outside each door, companies you only vaguely remember,

are never heard of at all.

I should note, right up front, that nothing in that building was genuinely secure.

Whoever installed the stair or camera pointed it mostly at a blank patch of wall.

Even my office doors week 315, procurement slash facilities, had a lock that turned

them right after 8 p.m.

Then I came back from a hurried meal at the all night bakery, I saw something on my desk.

There, among free ring binders and a stuck thermal mug, was a manila folder tied up in brown

twine like a package from another decade.

It had no label, just layers of dust, and side, personnel documents, some subrittle the

dividers flaked at touch.

Each file belonged to people I never heard of.

Not maybe only for move to another branch, but names washed out of the system years before

I'd ever set for in that building.

One sheet drew my attention.

A sticky note, pale blue, written in neat block capitals that looked wrong somehow too

careful, too thickening, inventory-returned, please lock and secure.

There was no signature, no date.

The handwriting reminded me of those dry erase labels that moving crew slap on when no

one's sure what department a box belongs to.

My first instinct was to check for whoever delivered the package, but the corridor was

empty, not so much as a shadow at the frosted glass.

The only movement was a wobbly reflection of myself as I scanned the empty room behind

me no giggling prankster, no night god hustling by.

It didn't feel quiet, not exactly.

Silence should have been comfortable, the stopgap of printers and idle chitchat gun

silent was steep, but what I heard were felt was like the slow exhale of something accustomed

to being alone and now where it had a guest.

Some places have an audience, even without people.

That was when a notion clicked in my chest a dread not of ghosts, but of being seen by

the history of the place, co-trespassing them on archives that should never ever surfaced.

This isn't a confession, or a fable.

I want you to know this, that was the true beginning.

Everything that wore away at me afterwards started from that ordinary folder, resting

like a tumor on my desk as the night pressed in, waiting for me to open it again.

The past, as it turned out, doesn't just get returned, it comes back expecting you to

finish a job left and done.

There wasn't a single day, a walk through the lobby of 246 when I felt less than a

fraud.

My old title, Procurement Manager, Rookford Division, had evaporated years ago, replaced

by a temp agency's generic printout, always in the wrong font, slotted in a plastic

budgeted with grime.

The scandal I went well on it, because it was technical, and in any case trouble wears

too many faces left me clutching for a role well below my station.

Five years with no permanent work left to fur in my shoulders, and half a chip snapped

off inside my jaw.

That kind of forced humility changes routine.

I'd always come in at quarter past seven, even as a temp to find the place still wet

from hopping in the air shop with lemon disinfectant.

The building's core business is a marketing startup circling the drain, a third tier

law office full of restless interns, and a loan accounting consultant named Les sent

to only scale it and cruise these days.

My coffee never lasted till lunch, concold, and slick in a squat break area three doors

down, where I'd listen to microwave harm and wander, which bits of a collected salary

still sloshed in the pipes above.

Humbassations, when they happened, felt scattered.

A passing good morning, I think you've got my mail from Donna in marketing, or raised

eyebrows from the nightgar, victor, when he eyed my badge and saw my temp status.

Nobody greeted each other by name, just company deadlines that changed with each budget cut.

After a while, you learn to measure persons coming or going by the thickness of the mail

in their slot, or whether the pot plant at the desk had been replaced with something plastic.

That was one of the first things I noticed, wandering the upper floors on inventory check

there was always some sign of a fresh departure.

Hewbickle still stank of hand sanitizer and old lunches, but walls kept the ghosts of

posters, motivational slogans culling at the edges, a grainy folk-shot teal, but never

fully removed.

Some desks had layers of sticky notes with faded instructions, or forgotten name badges

secured by bent paperclips.

Fans of decay refused to hide.

He could spot the most recently abandoned office by the way it's paper label tollfx financial

please not, but didn't quite match the fun to the sticker below Collier Marketing,

2018-2021.

The directory beside the elevator showed three companies pending lease, but the numbers

never changed.

I saw, on loany walks, more than one badge taped to a desk, the desk itself covered with

refill requests I'd never process for lack of budget.

The building was a graveyard of little failures, made almost dignified by layers of bureaucratic

forgetfulness.

The work tension buzzed under all this.

Petty, thefts were a constant rumour missing headphones, fanished mugs, the occasional

missing laptop docking station.

The marketing team always blamed a cleaning crew.

The low-side eyed marketing.

The honest whorehouse stapler had returned with new initial scratch into the plastic.

At first, it thought it was all low stakes perkering, but there was something slightly

often the way the staffs started to certain doors, the fourth floor to be precise.

If someone mentioned it or that's stashed now, building management's problem through

and would shift, like a drop coal in mid-conversation.

It wasn't spoken of directly, only as a hurdle and inconvenience.

Off limits, you know, for health and safety, less had murmured one morning, not meeting

my gaze as he fumbled the coffee machine.

When my supervisor, a remote drone with a cliptax in his face is all only on a laggy

screen, sent the work directive it felt like theatrical punishment, complete an internal

audit, document every missing or returned item, and reconcile months of subtle discrepancies

among the tenant's records.

Responsibility, indilligence, Simon, he'd said.

Get to the root of it clear at a backlog, then we'll talk about your contract.

I could taste the promise of permanence in his voice.

I also detected boredom.

Some mornings my heart skipped, not for ambition, but anxiety.

My badge was a constant reminder.

Pressed to a glass door, it mirrored my awkward posture, a washed out version of worth

reinstated only if I didn't let the audit beat me.

I traced the shadowy digits of my temporary ID gray on Smudge Yellow and tried to ignore

how often it tripped the wrong door sensor.

I came to envy the few who managed to get out for lunch, as if staying too long gave

the building more authority over a person's story.

Instead, I ended each day alone in the glass walled supply office, reviewing transcripts

invocates that never matched the quiet to the room for comfort.

I wore the obligations of other, and I shed workers like ill-fitting hand me downs.

But none of that compared to what the folders started unlocking.

It wasn't an immediate landslide, of course.

When I started cross-checking company files, I noticed the usual paper whip disasters missing

signatures must file tax forms, a sea of outdated phone extensions.

After a week I could recite every petty infraction by heart, a box of highlight is built to marketing

a pair of ergonomic chairs charged to legal that hadn't arrived, and a stack of returned

envelope stamped to deceased that had to be a morbid error.

My desk became a migration site for boring forms and apology memos.

But the oddities began stacking.

Reports of missing items logged by 110 into the law office say it would reappear in another

space, tagged in plastic, accompanied by strange handwritten forms.

I once collected a set of computer mice from the storage closet intended for accounting

the next afternoon.

They were read in marketing's lounge on a tray, each in a sandwich bag with yellowed

inventory tickets barely legible.

Sometimes it was small, a badge from attempt named Peter K, who'd only worked two days,

or a ring of keys dated last year that nobody claimed but kept showing up in the wrong

page and hole.

Then the files started trickling in, envelopes marked archive the belonged and offset storage

surfaced in desk drawers.

Once I rifled through an inter-office mail tray and plucked out a hand address envelope,

it seal in Birken since 2012.

No one remembered requesting it.

Even the company names spelled out in Courier font predated the current list of tenants.

The Brickroom grew less social as suspicions hardened.

I lingered with my cup, nursing water instant wild on a quiz less on who had access to the

supply closet at night.

Someone's got a key, less muttered.

Complain the cleaners for this much, unless they bring back old laptops and coffee mugs

in the sly.

Donna rolled her eyes, but no one laughed.

Guild of superstition hovered on every tongue, coloured by the stories of overnight theft

and surprise returns.

Patterns emerged quickly.

At first, I shrubbed it off as mere procedural rot.

But the sticky note cap reappearing always the same block capitals, sometimes blue but

sometimes pink or yellow, written bold as a warning, inventory returned, please log

and secure.

Every three or four nights, I find some unallated item dropped on a desk that should have been

empty since winter.

None of the tenants admitted moving the items, nor did the contracted cleaners ever sign

for after-hour's inventory transfers.

The question nagged me who was doing this off the books.

The building, I realised, kept secrets inside at so cold storage, and I wanted now with

Canada's management in a place nearly abandoned by its official overseas.

Before long, I had a spreadsheet open on my office computer, the cells filling up with

each anomaly.

I started colour coding rules by year, by type of item, by tenant.

Unsettlingly, every unsolved return linked, at least impact personnel files older than

my own stint in the company.

The more I log, the more I suspected I was just a catalogue in mistakes from before my

arrival cataloging the mistakes of the disappear.

Like clockwork, each escalation found a darker echo.

I set up a rolling timeline on the largest cork board in the admin room, pushing in strings

and thumbtacks as if rehearsing a detective show.

The lines didn't make perfect sense, they won too many holes in the story, even with

colour coded tabs.

I clipped complaint forms to the edges, noticing that the earliest returns coincided with shifts

when the cleaning crew reported skip floors equipment trouble they claimed in the lock

sheets.

My first attempt at locating the source was straight forward, request evening security

camera locks.

The night guard, Victor, shrugged as he filled in a chubal barcode on his own report.

You're looking for what?

He asked blinking.

We only keep footage for three days' tops, nobody ever checks it, most of its blank

after midnight, I'll put it through if you want.

He's in different stung, but he handed me a battered USB drive anyway.

I reviewed two weeks' worth of grainy M first streams at my desk.

Most of it was nothing but the circuit of the night cleaners shadows, the drone of

a vending machine, the elevator doors stuttering open to dock floor.

But several times always between 1.30 and 2.15am, a figure emerged, slim, wearing the

kind of lanyard nobody used anymore, head bent as if reading a clipboard.

Sometimes I'd catch a flash of pale blue and a lapel, sometimes a dock fest with an

indescribable name badge.

The figure's face was impossible to pin down, always one stride ahead of the camera pan,

always half reflected off an elevator's mirror doors.

No one on our current staff wore those uniforms, and none would have access to all three floors

after ires.

Us wipe card systems simply didn't allow it.

Huzzled I began asking around.

Jeanine from the law office swore she'd noticed a never sought coming through the back

corridor after cleaning ires, definitely not one of us.

Less described someone in a blue shirt poking around accounting at 11.0pm, though his description

never quite matched Jeanine's.

Donna, ever suspicious, pointed at a microwave cup of noodles she never bought to someone's

borrowing my lunch to, if you find them, tell them I want my mug back.

I tried to overlay the report to my timeline, but all it mapped was confusion.

The figure's laminality knocked at me visible just long enough to breed a new suspicion,

always keeping to the periphery.

In two separate shots, I found the form and reflection only, standing in the elevator

while the doors barely cracked open, hail face impossible to pass, not visible in the

wider angle.

It occurred to me then that our eyes sometimes refused to process what doesn't plan.

I brought it up to the building manager, a man named Kyle, whose enthusiasm diminished steadily

with each passing week.

All building, Kyle said with a half-mile, twisting keys at his hip ring.

Gets these phantom rumors, you know it like a limb that aches after it's gone.

Most buildings, that's all.

He was non-committal, but when I pressed about the fourth floor, he less-slip, bow, storage,

management only.

No one's been up there in hell a decade.

Records say it's close for us best to survey, we pay for the square foot of genuine.

Devoted my gaze after that, fizzing himself, reading an out-of-date, fire drill poster.

Clues began clustering.

Every pathway, every mysterious return badge, each lost on the low-patrailed off at the

schematic drawing of the fourth floor.

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Just try to relax.

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I think I'll wait inside.

My audit found three dozen item anomalies in the last five years alone, but the access

locks for floor four were blank and touched for at least as long as Carl claimed.

And convinced I tried the door anyway.

The lock, a square industrial model with heavy dust packed around its seam, stuck rigidly

at my twist.

Airseeping from the edges tinged with meldue and that chalky residue of droid bleach

to stale, too chemical for ordinary neglect.

Only faint trace cuffmarks decorated the time no pie, though the real question was how

they appeared if no one should have been using the floor.

But ritual drove me further.

I stayed late a half dozen nights, sometimes half hiding in the admin office, hoping to catch

sight of whoever kept shetling artifacts like an office poltergeist.

On one especially late Friday, tenants all on gone, rain and walking the rooftop ends

I sat at my desk, the folder in plain view, watching the corridor reflected on my monitor.

Nothing.

Even the elevator thunned shept for the night.

Over the next fortnight, the office entered further.

The other tempered anxious twenty-something, whose name I can barely conjure quits suddenly,

unhappily mumbling about bad luck and creepy vibes.

I overheard the night guard muttering about numbers not adding up.

The clique of core tenants retreated to separate lunch shifts.

I was told, office submitted my third revised inventory that if I finished and cleaned up

the paperwork I'd have a serious shot of full employee contract at last.

It was somewhere on the tail end of the stretcher Tuesday when I stumbled in the most recent

security tape left running by Victor.

It captured the figure yet again, this time posing at my own cubicle, staring at the folder

on my desk.

And rising, it slid a new sticky note beneath the edge of the file, then disappeared past

the frosted glass, dissolving in a flexion like a pattern learned by rope.

The edges of the frame fuzzed and skipped at that final moment, but in that instant, I

felt exposed, a rut caught in its own corridor.

It was exasperation and a surge of private dread that drove me into the administrative

storeroom on the ground floor, the only place called in tape-shut.

I knew the right person to bribe Carol from accounting, who still had archival credentials

and a weakness for decent line.

I brought her a bottle two weeks past a safe-drinking date, and she turned a blind eye

as I ducked into the record's fault, a miniature Muslim of out-of-date ledges and microfilm

reels.

On the shelves, I found what I needed, yellow employee directories, payroll newsletters,

shoe-books of cut-out ID badge photos rubber banded by department.

Blowing dust from the cover, I flipped through 20 years of hire and file lists.

It didn't take long for a pattern to step back.

Every phantom employee each by now so faint in memory wonder if they ever existed a matched

primacing person or an acknowledged layer from nearly 10 years back.

The layer was coincided with a cost reduction drive during the financial collapse, followed

by an unavoidable bio, after which all records simply went dark.

I cross-check forms, handwritten notes, service logs the same names again and again, dropping

off auditing checklist while stranger returns started flooding back in.

It got stranger.

The building, I discovered, had at one time employed entire shadow department short-term

supplementary workers, paid in cash or off books, the job titles handwritten and code

on clandestine rosters.

They weren't official databases, the badge numbers referenced only in TXT files on disused

floppy disks I found in a manager's desk drawer.

The files were almost always incomplete no records of where they went or how the contracts

ended.

In a ruined admin vault, covered in layers of cobweb labels, I pried open a battered

plaster case of unprocessed badge photos.

My jaw locked as I scanned them, dozens of faces staring up great at the edges, named

text from now defunct departments.

With a dry mouth, I compared those old badge photos to every frame I'd captured from

the nice security tapes.

The green blurred, but the shapes, the outlines, some faces matched those in silent footage

were terrifying precision.

I set aside overlapping printouts, badge photos and security stills arranged side by side.

Names no longer in pay, faces no longer remembered yet, in the uncertain light of my desk lamp,

undeniably present, caught in the act of returning objects that should have been lost

for good.

One name appeared everywhere at Charles M, missing from Rico since 2012, was the same figure

standing in the elevator, the same name stamped on a folder found at a counting's empty desk.

I traced four other employees, Maggie Peterke, and two whose photos had half faded their

faces into synced with the dates clear.

Their forms flickered between film negatives and grainy pixelation exactly the faces, or

Neolisore, patrolling the holes at night in the digital locks.

I was left with one sentence overhead in my memory of the building manager on a casual

morning, insisting, most buildings, that's all phantom rumors.

But this wasn't just a phantom rumor.

It was a scour inflicted over years, never healed.

I sat there, she'd spread out, staring at a collage of overlapping truths, it's all

the same people still here, still working, but nobody remembers hiring or firing them.

The files, the objects, the strange returns each, as a scientist left by hands the rest

of us had already decided didn't matter anymore.

Somewhere, beyond all these records and half hauntings, the fourth floor pressed in from

above, as though waiting for a reckoning.

I found myself wondering, not for the first time what becomes of an employee building

count for Wontlecker.

Somewhere beyond all these records and half hauntings, the fourth floor pressed in from above, as

though waiting for a reckoning.

I found myself wondering, not for the first time, what becomes of an employee building

count for Wontlecker.

Those thoughts didn't vanish when I closed the file box and tipped her back into the

hole.

If anything, they grew sharper scraping at the boundaries between explanation and something

less tangible.

I walked the deserted corridor, passing the locks apply closet, and then the vending machines

humming away like nothing was a mess.

Even the air seemed charged, different to faint, in organic tang, as if the building itself

exhaled at the mention of its lost fires.

The idea of a ghost workforce sounded absurd to say aloud, anyway.

But everything I'd gathered so far pointed to a regiment playing out even after the

last page exposedly cleared.

It was as if an invisible word spun silently through the years, half glimpsed by those

unlucky enough to work the late shift.

Back at my desk, the fold on the first sticky note waited on invitation or provocation

maybe both.

My name wasn't inside yet.

Not yet.

But I found myself compulsively flipping open my own employee file, Simon Irvine, both

year fated from to my channeling, hired a date onlylessly accurate thanks to the

temp agency's clerical error.

My file, I noticed, was starting to carry the same battered look as those I discovered

for Donna or less.

A sense of being processed.

I spent the remainder of that night in a trance, moving from spreadsheet to spreadsheet

updating my color tabs and brushing thumbtacks deeper into the cookboard, securing them as

if they'd hold back whatever ripple was coming.

My mind-cycle through possibilities, a disgruntled ex-employee with keys, a bored night, garbok

straight in practical jokes, a remnant batch of cleaning staff on a private fin data.

Each explanation fell apart as they sifted through the data.

Two many dates overlapped, too many names re-emerged years after their alleged departure.

For every item lost and returned, there was a name attached to a name no one remembered

seeing go out in the first place.

A jittery determination set in.

I decided I had to get inside to fourth floor storage, no matter how much grubbiness

a rule bending it took.

Karl had already given away how little he cared his talk about his bestest and insurance

rang hollow, merely convenient burkates.

I toured with the keys lifted from a forgotten security drawer, but a new none would fit.

The older systems in this building especially the locked doors worked with physical brass

keys, each stamped with initials, not digital cards.

Undeterred, I haunted the halls after closing.

The rest of the staff had dwindled almost to nothing.

A single light illuminated accounting, where less sat one night hunched under a flickering

bulb.

He didn't see me, I paused at the foot of the stairs straining to listen.

The home of electricity, a distant, metallic clang something, or someone, moving several

flows above, out of view.

On the elevator's panel, the four button remained covered with brittle masking tape, it

said his dog ate from many curious fingers.

I removed the tape and pressed it.

The elevator car shudder, not in refusal, but in uncertainty.

For a breathless moment, it didn't move.

Then, with halting effort, it lurched upward, bypassing three with its usual word, then

jarring to a stop with such violence I gripped the rail to stay upright.

The doors remained stubbornly closed, refusing to part even a sliver.

I heard nothing but my own breathing and the faint, written a click of metal at time clock.

A beige machine?

They're going through the shaft.

I jabbed the open button, but it was no use, the fourth floor, with held at seekers,

as if the machinery recognized someone it did not wish to see.

Defeated, I retreated to my office, flashes of the building's blueprint spinning through

my mind.

Some were on 9 by 12 paper, the storage dimensions were penciled, windowless, lined by internal

walls without even a fire escape.

No security camera in the stairwell at that level, no phone extension, just a single

lion's storage and GMT use only.

I slapped poorly after that, dosing up right in my chair or on the pile of winter coats

in the supply room.

Each time I closed my eyes I saw that blurred figure, drifting into reflections, arms full

of returned folders, lips moving to pass out in instructions.

Sometimes, in the edge of sleep, I heard the phrase from the sticky notes playing back,

syllable by syllable, please log in secure.

My fingers traced the words on phantom surfaces, nails digging into laminate.

On a rain wash Saturday, I met Jeanine for coffee at the bakery across the street.

She seemed happier off-premises, sipping weak espresso and folding her arms against

the draft.

We chatted about anything but work until, inevitably, the building rose between us.

It did I ever tell you, she said, tracing her cup's room, that my friend applied to

Rick for years ago.

They hired her temp, then just, stopped scheduling her, she left her stuff in a locker

I'm for, got a collarier later from building management except no one could say who, set

her inventory was waiting, when she went back, the office didn't exist, only an empty

corridor and one bound out bulb overhead.

We let that story hang uncomfortably over our kicks.

She forced the smile and changed the subject, but I sensed she was wrestling with her own trouble

memories of the floor memories that didn't add up that foot for space with practical reason.

That weekend, home alone with exhaustion creeping into my bowens, I sorted my notes again.

Patents leaped out, the first return started within weeks of the layoffs in 2012, each

accompanied by a form letter or a badge that was put back in the wrong hands.

I found a log entry, 4-4 access for supplementary staff maintained through transition return

objects to origin.

Then three months later, a second note, close up, do not reissue.

No signature, only initials half erased by time.

I tried to trace further phone numbers on faded directors led nowhere, emails bounced,

web sitlings now redirected to bland holding pages.

It was as if the old companies erased themselves precisely and deliberately.

Yet these phantom objects and figures persisted treading the same forgotten floors.

One night, restless and sleepless, I called the only contact from the earliest days still

listed in the directories.

Hello, sorry, this is about Rookford, I'm trying to trace staff in the 2012 layoffs, did

you?

A woman answered voice-thin with surprise.

I remember, but you won't get anywhere.

Nobody remembers the ones who did the real work.

They never got proper paperwork, someone paid or not for long, but you know what they

always said.

Right, you can't fire someone you never officially hired.

Was there a manager on four?

A soft sound, maybe a laugh, maybe a hiss.

That floor wasn't for management, they kept it for holding things over.

Not just stuff, people, sometimes when you left, you didn't get to leave, just be

careful about what you were telling, some things are supposed to stay missing.

The call disconnected, leaving a hollow echo on the line.

I stared at my own notebook, the advice running louder than I'd like to admit.

I forced myself to attend to current work, desperate for routine, but the routine was broken.

Monday morning, the break room was empty, a mug missing, the catels plugged coiled neatly

in a place nobody used.

Donna asked me if I'd found her old laptop cable, I shook my head, knowing there was no

point searching the lost and found tray.

Anything truly lost seemed destined to resurface, but never where it should.

Call the manager, called an impromptu attendance meeting, his usual smile brittle.

Just reminding everyone, please report any unexplained visitors, strange packages, or anything

out of the ordinary, maintenance is doing a sweep this month I don't want rumors.

His gaze flick toward me and a caught the note of plea in his voice.

As if he, too, felt the building's concentration shift.

After he left, I heard muttered complaints.

Blaming us again, said less shaking crumbs from his paperwork.

Donna scoffed.

It's the cleaners for someone cloning badges, or, she pauls, turning the phrase over.

Maybe the place just wants his junk back.

Alone in my office with the door shot, a druid diagram of the fourth floor.

It was roughly square split by thin partition walls.

The roof racks stood along one side, according to the old blueprints, with posts now lockers

shaded in an ambiguous block.

An old annotation in pencil, for temporary department clear before Q2.

Beneath it, in a loser hand, checked badge numbers CCM for log out.

C.M.

Charles M.

The same initials, the same missing person from every photo.

I summoned the courage to ask Victor at the night guard, what he knew.

He was chewing a stale donut, eyes bag, and resigned.

Have you ever gone up to four at night?

I asked quietly, as if conspiratorial volume would make it less absurd.

He snorted.

Why would I, doors locked, alarms aren't even wired up there, nothing to steal but damp

and rats.

He shot me a sideways look.

You know, a sea lights on that floor sometimes, like from underneath, elevator will go up, come

back empty, dumb system has a mind of its own.

The old skepticism twisted between us, even Victor, for all his world weariness, didn't

want to linger on the subject.

On a whim, before leaving that night, I dusted off the set of office master keys in the

admin drawer.

Most were tacked for floors one, two pre-nin' mock four, but one key was entaged, dulled

by lack of use.

I pocketed it, telling myself it was for research.

My badge wouldn't open the stairwell to four, nor would software hacks.

So I waited one evening, letting the other floors drain out.

When nine o'clock chined, I crept up the stairwell, boots off of a rubber treads, and tagged

key trembling in my palm.

At the landing, I stopped.

The skate the door and I've been thickening.

The key slid in with a click and a grind again, not refusing, but reluctant.

My chest tightened.

When the door finally opened, the noise was somehow not loud enough.

Not nearly as loud as you'd think for a sale broken after years.

A rush of colder, milgey-laced air hit me, sharp enough to sting my nose with the

acrochemical aftertaste of ancient floor polish.

The light inside was ROM, a greenish, terminal glow filtered through a fixture shrouded by

grime.

The space stretched ahead, rose of battered shelving on one side, the opposite wall line

by battered filing cabinets.

Against the near-waltzics of seven metal desks were a raid in perfect unused form, as

afraid for some forgotten team to clock in.

I didn't cross the threshold.

I just stood at the line, listening.

There was nothing dramatic, no voices from the dark, no sudden flicker of movement only

amused a chuffle, the scuff of a gem moved somewhere deeper in the room.

A set of lockers, old and delie-painted, boar-hand-letted names, C. Malon, P. Kiri, M.

Ibed of the surnames matching the ghostly personnel files, every other label covered

in a pattern of ancient tape half-peeled, and uneasy stillness cloaked everything.

I inhaled the moisture thick against my tongue.

At last, a reason this panic drove me back to the stairwell.

I replaced the masking tape over the elevators for button, locked the storage door by road,

and retreated sweat-running footsteps echoing with too much clarity.

For days after, the ordinary will felt slightly displace, as a found-gold half-degree

off-through.

Tenants grew sharper and now distrust, the staff-break room emptied even faster.

The cleaning crew left notes in the logbook complaining of echoes from the fourth-hand

equipment moved after last years.

As for me, appointments and emails came and went, but each time I focused on a task, something

fell out of rhythm as though I'd left a job and completed and couldn't now recall

what it was.

The sticky notes started to multiply.

One afternoon, coming back from a mailbox run, I found five identical squares, all with

that urgent message inventory returned, please log and secure a pin to cost my workspace,

covering my own name-play.

That night, unable to cope with waiting anymore, I watched the latest security tape in its

entirety.

The figure was there again, unmistakably visible this time as it paused, set down a stack

of files at my desk, then turned, finally meeting the camera's eye with a stair-side direct

the frame-vibrated with static.

The face burned itself into my memory hollow-eyed, with a badge full of unreadable numbers, lips

moving as if reciting a list.

All the names matched.

Not the living, but the missing.

Layoff survivors, shout-at-empts, staff-tominated but never released.

Uncounted, unregistered yet still on the floor.

The building keeps them, I murmured to my own reflection.

And if it loses one, it finds another to replace them.

A shiver passed down my arms.

My own sticky note, the original remained stuck to my personnel folder, the ink no less

stock than the first day.

From then on, I locked the staff bathroom door behind me, even during the day, caught myself

double-checking the number of footsteps I had echoing behind.

I dreamed of numbers counting up, never down, spurred sheets that were populated with names

I never entered.

It was almost a relief when, after one especially bad night of zeros and ones, my supervisor

pinged in, progressed nearly complete, finished this week, and will finalize your permanent

badge.

All I felt, reading there, was an illogical surge of dread.

At badge, I thought, could I last the name it carries.

I've rookfurt, nothing was ever truly removed from inventory-only reassigned until the

next stood it.

I didn't want to belong here, but the building had already decided otherwise.

Every inch of those last days, a four-four was prison's grew heavier.

I'd pass the shut elevator and feel watched, like the button's tape was bandaged pressed

against a wound, easily pealed away.

The desks that had been empty gathered, new dust rings, the returned items began to pile

into the common area again more badges, the scar taped to Spencer from years ago, notes

in that forever block print.

Please log in secure.

Every reminder more insistent than the last.

It was then I realized, the odd it wasn't cleansed in the records.

It was waking them up.

After that last night with the doors refusing to open and those sticky notes breeding, I couldn't

sleep properly for days.

I'd lay on my throat but catch with sound of the building's mechanical heart beating

in my ears, phantom elevator chimes waking me at odd iters.

Each morning, newer returns had been left at reception to Kratmug from a company dissolved

in 2014, a Spyro notebook with a logo obsolete by a decade.

The pile was growing, and the rest of the staff noticed too.

Even Donna, so quick to laugh off troubles as nothing but old nerves stopped coming in

before 10am.

Let's stop speaking to me entirely, rattling through his work with headphones on, as flickering

past me when we cross paths.

Janine's lunch bought by the window now sat empty most afternoons.

No one asked about my odd it anymore but they watched me with an uneasiness I remembered

from the last days of my old division, people who knew something's wrong but weren't

studied the seams too closely.

The building's tension pressed him from every angle, like a tightening collar.

Power flickers became more common one afternoon, the overhead lights cut out every eye on the

dart, each time for less than a minute.

The only sound was the click of the old clock on the supply wall and the humreturning as

a shiver running through the floors.

When I mentioned it to Carl, he blamed voltage issues and suggested calling an electrician.

He didn't meet my eyes, didn't ask about the odd it.

I felt eyes on me constantly.

At first, I chalked it up to paranoia, but more returned to it and started showing up

directly in my space.

One evening, I unlocked my office to find an old disc calendar set to 2012, open to April

the last month before the layoffs.

The appointments were written in a steady hand, blocky and careful, the same as the notes

that had haunted my desk for weeks.

There was an entry-circle for Thursday the 19th, inventory finalisation, C.M.

Mechis went cold.

I wanted to sweep it all into a trash bag and burn it, but fear held me back.

I started changing coffee, skipping meals, each day watching my badge trembling in a reflection

by the supply room door.

My audit sheets were now a thread by map of the building's neglect.

To any outside observer, my hands looked steady, but my mind had split into two, the one

that handled paperwork and the one that catalogued each new breach in the everyday.

On a Tuesday, two days after the calendar appeared, the elevator jammed again.

The doors stuttered, caught halfway, then rolled open to reveal a room of printer paper

beside a decade's old phone.

Someone something had set these objects neatly against the back wall as if preparing for

an inspection.

The new sticky note watched me from a top-the-pile, inventory-returned, please log in secure.

I stepped inside, pried up the paper, beneath, another ID badge, named Faded Issue to a

department gun from the lease registry.

The elevator moaned as I pressed the button for the third floor.

This time, just before the door's closed, the panel flickered, a red floor glow for

a heartbeat then died.

When I reached the office, the unease had become something closer to physical pain annoying

in my stomach I tried to smother with reports and endless cross-jacking.

The returned items began to pile up in the corner.

Not even I could keep them sorted.

Names from another decade, initials I could in place, memories borrowed from the Ron era.

That week, the night's grill-out-os-creeping noises overhead, a load I hit my beat like

metal shelving being moved, sometimes accompanied by flicker and fire alarm and occasion mounted

beside the vending machine.

On Wednesday, I found the admin copper open, Carforchaaf pulled as if someone had tried to

print but had forgotten what they wanted.

The login readout was for an employee code last active eight years ago.

I printed the job.

Three blank sheets emerged except, faintly in the lower corner of each was my own name

typed in miniature, surrounded by a box in the word reserve.

I stopped telling myself it was all chance.

The audited gun rotten and I was no longer sure whose work I was finishing.

By Friday, my physical world began to slip.

Each step toward the elevators felt heavier.

The doors too long in a building's throat made me nervous, the stairwell's hum with echoes

that didn't catch up to their source.

Light bulbs failed and sequenced up the corridor.

Sometimes it seemed the hallway was stretch, just enough that my steps never matched the right

door on the first try.

And then people began to disappear.

Jeanine signed a resignation email, simple as a post-cript, couldn't sleep, place doesn't

feel right anymore, sorry.

This came in late, packed what little he had, and left without saying a word.

Donna's mug, infamous one, turned up in the brigroom, fully intact, steam rising as she

just left at seconds before.

I called her cell disconnected.

Carl's voice now became the only response to management careers.

Tenants mailboxes filled up.

The legal office is signed peeled off overnight abandoned papers scattered onto the fibrocopet.

Even Victor, the night guard, grew distant, his round shorter.

His familiar footsteps, always signaling his approach, faded into silence most evenings.

But the returns did not stop.

If anything, they became more precise.

One morning, the admin inbox was filled with objects no one could have possibly retrieved

with that deep institutional knowledge, an IT access card from 2011 about a payroll

check, even a handwritten holiday raffle ticket mine, with my name as spelled away only

in a charred temp code.

It was relentless, methodical, as if the building had begun to process its own records in my

absence.

With every new item, my sense of reality eroded a bit further.

The folders, the sticky notes, even my own files grew thicker heavier.

I slat less, ate poorly and felt the world narrow into hush, fluorescent specifics, and

smears brittle tape that's to cut a wine of the old modem someone still hadn't unplugged.

The word prominent became a curse, glaring in my inbox each day as the odd-a-tinge toward

completion.

I began to understand that the job was the process and the process wanted and end-to-end

in this building there had never been one before.

I took to calling Victor at Adios Desperate for routine.

He sounded as worn down as I felt.

He still there?

He rumble.

Don't know why, but I hear doors up on for at night, elevator calls itself sometimes,

too, and since you asked, I'm starting to see lights, nothing lasting just enough to

think someone's up and moving.

I don't bother checking anymore, ain't worth it.

His confession chilled me more than he intended.

For the first time, there was a shared sense of being both watch and enlisted.

I wondered who was recruiting him.

Even the old building manager, Carl stopped answering calls.

No electricity crew arrived, no contractor entered, despite repeated tickets.

A pattern settled over everything, a slow, inevitable transfer from active to archived.

I became obsessed.

Every return, every day.

My evenings turned into a marathon of checking and rechecking sign-out sheets, badge logs,

and outdated access lists.

I set up cameras cheap once, disguised between hanging ferns and those stupid plastic

motivation placards left over from all de-charin initiatives.

But the footage was always subtly wrong, a shadow drifting where no person belonged,

an object seeming to flicker between arrival and disappearance in adjacent friends, as

of process by moving hand just out of sight.

Desperate for human contact, I started calling the last numbers on the internal directories.

It was always bad luck, disconnected lines, lease mobile numbers, or a brief, mumbled

conversation with a retiree who barely remembered Rookford.

But one just one stayed on the line longer than the others.

He said your name was Simon.

I think I remember someone, when I temp there, you're right, I heard stories about a floor

that kept extra inventory, not just physical stuff, files, scripts.

There were records you weren't supposed to file, names you could never get to log out,

they hung around, circulating, staff just unaccounted for, hard to shake, that's all

I can say.

The woman's voice faded with static, leaving me feeling colder than before.

The next day, when I logged in, a new sticky note sat on my desktop, readin' in that same

careful, oppressive script, you miss something, inventory, and complete.

It was placed perfectly upright against my monitor, the message square within my field

of vision.

I kept my hands steady.

I didn't trust myself to speak even in thought.

I tore into the records comparing shift rosters against the strange access times.

There, woven through months of badge data, were tiny, inexplicable blips, odd IO logons

listed as temp status null or DEPT-minus-99.

On the utilities tracker, power surged at 2.14 a.m. twice the previous week for a room

with no listed circuit.

Every odd return coincided almost perfectly with a badge blip, a surge in fourth floor

activity.

Every scrap of evidence, every map timeline, all pointed back, again and again to that

locked over present fourth floor.

Every attempt to close the books only led to another opening.

I traced item after item, copying dates and file codes until my eyes run dry.

At one point, I realized with a start that half the names recorded were gone from every

digital list yet their items were still being returned, their handwriting was still there,

the presence grew in heavier with every passing night.

By now, there were so few of us left at the buildings at Co's GrooShopper.

The hum in the vents began to sound more like muffled voices reciting code snippets or

ID numbers into nations hollowed by repetition.

The elevator grew to incremental, sometimes arriving long after you'd called it, sometimes

opening before the button was pressed.

Once, I caught it with its interior lights switched over to orange, the control panel

stuttering from G to 4 and back again.

I tried to avoid the fourth floor, but the walls of my thoughts bent constantly in that

direction, like a compass needle fixed to something just out of reach.

The returned folders began to bend not only in familiar names but familiar ones mine,

and there's a few who still appeared in the building, all printed with geometric precision

annotated in a new layer of ink.

Somehow I became certain that if left and address, the building would keep cataloging

us, storing us, turning us into just another column on an audit sheet.

The time for watching passed.

An anger mix with terror drove me forward to that I'd finished this myself, but on my

own terms.

I would see the fourth floor even if I had to break it open to do so.

The final straw came on a Thursday night.

I was the last and again, crouched in my office the only light burning in three floors.

The security monitor at reception fizzed, showing static, then printing distorted footage,

the blurred, hunched figure crossing two hallways one bearing a uniform, the other entirely

featureless, locked on my office door.

The footage looped, skipping and then stopping on an image of the open fourth floor corridor,

a darkness too deep for neglect, an office chair barely visible in its heart, so what it

is if caught in the moment of being logged, tagged, and left for some future audit.

I left my own sticky note that night a message to myself stuck up on my computer, you owe

them a resolution, not paperwork, end it.

I packed my battered backpack, one flashlight, one pocket cancord out a set of copper keys,

the crowbide board from an equipment closet, and a burner foam.

I dressed in nondescript grays and left a note out for anyone who might stumble into

my office after I was gone, downstairs, if you need me, final audit, don't wait up.

I stepped into the corridor.

The building was utterly silent, as if holding it breath.

The elevator waited at the ground floor, doors half-potted in a way that made me flinch.

I pressed for and braced for nothing, but the panel lit up for the first time in months

the dirty flickering glow.

The car trembled as it rose, old cables whining and protest.

When the doors opened, I almost turned away.

The hallway was both familiar and utterly strange, long, unadorned, lined with scuffed

hasp in his dead bulbs.

The air was humid, thick with cleaning chemicals, and laced with a note of something almost

sweet, decayed like wilted flowers left too long in water.

My flashlight beam cut into the gloom, revealing old sign edge, poured tangled where names have

been forcibly peeled off.

At the end of the corridor, the storage room door hung slightly ajar, the only mark of

recent entry the scuff left by my own key last week.

The night Preston as a wedged acroba into the seam and levied quietly, feeling the catch-slip.

Inside was a tablo of the past perfectly preserved, neat banks of steel shelving, each stacked

with folders and faded coug colors, above them, ribbons of failing plastic forms to the

back, four metal desk set square, blotter pads still holding the ghost of handwritten notes.

The light inside was inserted in my torch fund-only dust, a film across everything, but

the shape of use was unmistakable.

At the back, a row of battered lockers, every door marked with names Charles M., Maggie

Peter K., are thus faded with age.

On the wall, an ancient calendar, April 2012, its final day circled over and over.

Rusted badge machines perched silent in a corner, the glass front still faintly reflective.

And then, moving to figure shifting in the dark, half glimpsed in the throat of the

flashlight.

At first, I thought it was a trick of dust, but a hand extended from the shadows, holding

a thick folder.

I froze, feeling an ancient panic rise.

The figure was real, outlined in the old staff uniform, badge pintered the breast

to see.

Malin, from the photos.

Without a word, they pressed the folder into my hand.

It was my own personal file.

I looked down my photo, high date, temp status highlighted.

But there were new notations beside my name typed in fresh, to be logged, next to secure.

The silent direction chilled me the weight of it was not metaphorical.

I saw my own signature reproduce beneath.

I tried to speak.

The words caught in a throat sticking to a question I no longer wished answered.

Behind the figure, as my eyes adjusted, others emerged.

Heads bowed, walking quietly between the lockers, following all paths between desks, holding

inventory lists, clipboards, lost items in battered file trays.

Their forms bled at the edges, half in shadow, unheard but unstoppable.

Every movement was precise, paper-sorted, objects arranged, each loved according to some

invisible script.

Figures bent at desks not ghosts, but people suspended in a relentless, pointless task.

Some looked up as they passed down the line, eyes and blinking but aware.

Their faces matched the missing names, the lost files the same blurry faces from the

night's security tapes, now solid in the clammy dark.

When I tried to step back, the eyes tracked the folder in my hand as if waiting on my

decision.

The leave figure, see, Malin, opened a battered ledger, hold it out for me.

Without thinking, I looked down.

The logs ended abruptly with a final entry marked in thick, black ink, aerovine, Simon, inventory

returned to be secured.

That was when the noise began to shuffling, the rhythmic click of badge machines, a course

of voices reciting in perfect unison, please log in secure.

A stifling pressure filled the air.

The lights above flickered in a greenish haze.

For a moment, the world shifted, and I saw every action at once, temp workers ushered

in on false promises, violin until their exits fanished, given folders instead of contracts

traded through the system until their faces faded from every directory but remembered

in un.

I staggered as the room tilted, grasping at the edge of a locker.

I saw Flash's memory of vision, I couldn't say of myself waiting in the break room for

the order to finish, report stacking, hands trembling, the word permanent flashing on

my incoming email.

I saw other faces, other hands, while merged in the endless relavers placed tasks.

I tried to run, but the way was blocked by borders moving with perfect silent coordination.

The folder in my hand grew impossibly heavy.

I forced myself to move, shivering past a desk, ducking as a locker-dose one opened behind

me.

My flashlight slipped, landing beam up, and rolling across the floor.

Split instant, the light core figures face gray, lipped moving in rhythm, eyes utterly

empty, but never wholly gone.

The mantra followed me, chorus-like, as the lights buzzed over, headed, please lock and

secure, please lock and secure.

I launched for the hallway, full-declutch-tight, side-screening from a half-fallen shelf.

Figures closed then, hands up-stretched, passing objects between the musk pads, keys, old

staff mugs, always accompanied by careful notes.

Every step fragged at me, my feet felt glued to faded linoleum, the humidity clawing at

my lungs.

I made it to the corridor, half blinded by the glare of my fallen lie.

For a moment, I saw the building's schematics overlay everything the dotted lines of forgotten

departments, arrows showing paths of circulation, signatures trailing across all these forms.

Names and accounted for, yet still present.

Behind me, the voice is grew more distant, repeating, inventory-returned, please lock and

secure.

As the stair-old or grown-shut, the pressure broke.

I set off running, all dignity forgotten, the battered folder slapping at my chest.

I didn't stop until I reached the ground floor.

My lungs burned, my hands ate from grouping the folder and the crowbar so tightly my knuckles

had gone numb.

I looked down at the file, it surfaced up my sweat, or something else.

I tried to throw it away, but it clung as if magnetized to my palm.

In the lobby, the security lights blinked in sequence.

My phone untouched throughout the ordeal, vibrated with a silent text, ordered and complete,

please return for log out.

No sender.

No punctuation.

I let the crowbar fall, the sand sharp was a bell and a quiet building.

For a moment, I thought I heard someone victor, maybe calling my name.

Or perhaps it was only the sound of the elevator car grinding it way up and down, always just

out of reach.

I pressed the folder to the front desk, weighing it down with the only returned item that

truly mattered, my badge.

I scrolled a note on the top of this exit, do not reveal.

I slipped outside, gulping down night air so cold and fresh it made my teeth ache.

Yet something from the building seemed to cling, a residue that followed with each step.

I checked my pocket.

The file was gone, but a sticky note clung to my palm, the pen marks already smear.

Gasping, as stumbled through the empty street, desperate to uppaste the rhythm of the building's

call.

Let's flickered behind me, illuminating only themselves.

The city outside refused to see the drama, refused to witness what the building kept inside.

Doors locked.

Names folded and filed away.

The only thought I could fix on, finished not the audit, but my own escape.

I forced myself to keep moving, not daring to look back.

The city hummed in the near distance, nothing left of Rookford, but the dark crown of

a supper-floor.

My badge remained engineered to the folder sitting inside, while my breath steamed in the

dawn air.

I crossed the threshold at last street to pavement, city to anonymity.

The pressure finally began to loosen at my chest.

I didn't plan to return, and I never did.

As the first glow of morning skimmed the horizon, I walked without stopping, far past the

reach of the lights from the Rookford centre, leading the folder, the audit, the endless

returns behind.

Not in my pocket, unnoticed until I emptied my coat, was a single sticky note-block

printed, inks till fresh, inventory returned, please log in secure.

I folded it so tightly it tore in my fist.

Whatever Rookford kept, it would have to do so without me.

For now I would keep walking.

That was the end of my service.

For now I would keep walking.

That sense of propulsion of necessary, almost animal-forward motion, was what saved me those

first weeks.

I got a sublifar across the river, a studio with sharp morning light and brutal silence.

The world outside sprawled out in a remarkable grey in glass, dull business blocks in no way

resembling Rookford, and I took every pain not to trace a single route back there.

Portfolios and folders vanished into boxes, no trace remained of my employment except

what lived in digitized paces, some accidental tax document.

I believed at first that the signal break in my history might rescue my sanity.

Day for day, the audit faded into a kind of fainting stain in my memory like a bad dream.

I collected job offers from agencies that promised fast-paced placement opportunities

careful, faceless work.

Those first months I would leave the apartment for interviews cloaked in a pale hope sharp

eyeed for any sign of plastic badges, anything coded or stumped with a date range.

I couldn't help but notice how each new office seemed already on the brink of its own

half-life so many ebicles too many keys, always at least one locked storm that didn't

belong to anyone.

But the relief never quite arrived.

At night, a sit-in young crapped over my ceiling, the sound of all vents would morph into

the distant form of H-Shark from Rookford, and I'd lie awake picturing the static-laced

faces from the fridge, their rounds and broken by dawn.

Sleep at last, when it came, was shallow and stained with the aftertaste of paper were

cannot of unfinished business I carried with me.

If I passed a glass door half-expecting to seed that sticky note, my reflection would

always catch a little out of true as if waiting for a name but finding a cipher.

I kept my life lean, one canvas bag, one chipmunk, few passwords, only the essentials.

In certain light I felt hopeful, but then the rituals turned me again.

I checked the salt of my mailbox rapidly.

I shredded every unfamiliar envelope, every return receipt.

I never let a single paper sit on my kitchen counter overnight.

At work, I kept a lock on my desk, and when facilities runs me at their circuit, I looked

up at the ceiling and counted to ten.

I didn't return emails from the old-tempe agency not even courtesy texts.

One day I saw a building's directory in the city, plastic lattice pressed over a tonished

plaque beside empty mail slots.

I stood staring, pulse climbing, until my vision blurred.

Some names on the list were paper still damp, with ink lay out over bends of tape from

long past tenets.

I walked quickly, promising not to look back, not to search for the full four in any stack

of blueprints.

But everywhere, whisper seen to follow always pitched a little lower, a little less substantial.

The city news mentioned for a crutch uttering tenets evicted a mass after a summer of mysterious

outages and untree-super-service delays.

Store-sweat through forums, sub in Rome with that building's wiring, or you wouldn't

catch me in there after dark.

I monitored headlines compulsively.

Some mornings, unable to stop myself, I keyed in the address and scanned every footnote

of legal lease that's called by vacancy due to unresolvable irregularities.

One line in a photo, a five door locked tight with tape, number four bleached by a failed

attempt to scrub it completely away.

I let months pass.

Sometimes, in the privacy of those two quiet weekends, I would tick out the baddest sticky

note from my move on willing to destroy it, unable to throw it away.

Inventory returned, please log and secure.

The letter seemed embossed in memory.

For nights, I considered destroying it, and then simply closed it in a drawer, unwilling

to test what nuisance or hunger it might stir.

In new temp rolls, I found myself counting the staff, telling every movement of supply

cabinets scanning for out-of-place objects.

Each shadow that pulled at the base of a stairwell or door that never opened set my heart

barking for reasons beyond sentence.

I swore off audits.

Once in a law office, someone left a half-stamped folder on my desk by accident.

No note, no name, no return.

My hands trembled until I passed it off, refusing to match colour or sent to memory.

Still, I couldn't shake the watchful sensation of feeling that old records pulse just out

of reach.

Once or twice, I caught a glimpse of a familiar face in a city crowd.

My mind lurched trying to fit it to a badge photo or the grainy frame from a security

tape.

But each time, the crowd parted, and I was left only with the crawling chill along my

skin.

The city swallowed recruit, and in its forgetting, I hoped, I might receive too.

It didn't quite work.

Paranoia is rarely so courteous.

I kept tabs on my surroundings, made sure I always had a way out.

A new habit formed each morning, after brushing my teeth, I'd count the files on my kitchen

counter, making certain nothing extra had appeared.

My new colleagues called me meticulous.

I called it survival.

Old mantras returned in dreams, always half-articulated.

Please log and secure.

Sometimes I'd wake, certain I heard the mechanical thump of a time clock or the worrying

of badge printers in the space above my head, only to find silence pressed flat as paper

against the glass.

After a year, I allowed myself to forget just a little.

Enough to let a few surfaces gather dust, enough to ignore a box of older seats in the

closet.

I placed the sticky note in a drawer beneath some safety pins and extra buttons and

tried to convince myself it had lost its power.

Let the past day box, I thought, let the records finish with me at last.

But some systems, I've learned, are designed to hold on even as their parts stop moving.

I was adjusting to that middling, ruthless life when the first shadow fell back over

my shoulder.

It came by post, as most unremarkable things do.

The envelope was plain, business, wait stock, my name handwritten neatly beside the address.

No return label, no stamp except what the city require.

I waited two days before I opened it.

I let it sit among bills combed it for barcodes or markings.

There was nothing, really no artificial urgency, just a rip at one endwilligly threatened

to fail.

On the third morning, I slit the seal and let the contents slide into my palm.

My old rookford badge landed and the can top exactly as I remembered, edges gafed my

foot or a shade grower than it should have been.

Folded tightly around the plastic was a single sticky note, the writing perfectly blocked

printed, inventory returned, please log and secure.

I held it for a long minute, unable to hold myself to breathe.

A kitchen's hum refrigerator, pipes, distant elevator from three foes, below collapse to

the pulse in my ears.

There was no from, no signature.

Only that imperative, as present and insistent as it had been the first night.

With the badge in my palm, the line between then and now warped.

I ganced toward the kitchen door and able to help myself.

Every detail of rookford leeched into the walls, mapped by some internal sense, the

humidity, the faded tape, the ticking clock that always lagged behind the eye.

I thought I was finished, but the audit never really lets you go.

A phrase echoed, unbidden, some jobs never end.

Some names never beenish.

Somewhere in the building is record war and what's left of me there's still a place

to be logged.

I am the next to be secured.

I am the next to be secured.

The badge was still cold in the hand, it's weight new and older Pwan's heavy, magnetic,

pulling and scene threads tied around my ribs.

For a minute I just listen, the room seems really ordinary.

Afternoon light pressed hazyly on dull walls, dust lifting and slow currents above my

mere stack.

Nothing to see or hear except time contorting, folding itself around that square of a

tease of paper, as of gravity and the apartment now bent toward the thing I'd held off for

so long.

I tried to set both badge and note on the counter, but my fingers hover trembling.

The words on the sticky note stared up final, instructional.

My throat worked, no sound came.

I looked at the envelope, expecting, absurdly, the name of a sender, a return address,

some clue that this was only a cruel trick or bureaucrat to kick up.

Of course there was nothing.

There never is.

The handwriting was nearly neat enough to be machine-made.

The detail shook me more than I let myself admit.

In Rookford the block letters were always human, but here the script seemed so deliberately

in human, so practiced, it was uncanny.

The countertop felt miles wide.

I slid to plastic badge over the formica the way you separate yourself from an incriminating

photograph.

Scraping some made my pulse jump familiar, too, like the noris as folders moved across

batter, desks in that other fluorescent world.

I found myself glancing at the door.

If someone stood there, waiting a career, an auditor, a figure and an old, they'd uniform

would I open it, or run.

Was this how it started for the others?

Those phantom employees that tracked until the track vanished into locked doors and ditch

flashes.

I tried my phone.

No number for human resources, no listing for building management.

The old contacts, all deadlines.

The city's information directory yielded nothing, but a disconnected mainframe number.

There was nowhere to appeal the return.

Rookford itself was already raised in bricks, scheduled for demolition, though, as every

local could tell you the process kept stalling.

A presence built in the apartment and cremental is rising humidity.

Each second stretch, air thickening with a synthetic, office-cleaning tang.

I kept the badge out of view, thinking if I didn't look directly, it might subside.

But that was wishful thinking, the kind of childish logic that assumes you're spared

by restraint.

The nut state stuck to my palm, adhesive refusing to lose its grip.

The sensation was both physical and distinctly psychological, possession-couch as assignment.

I stared at the message.

The words swam in my vision commands I'd heard, spoken, enforced, and resisted in ways

small and over, back in Rookford.

A workplace mantra mass querading is ritual.

These log insecure.

Four words that numb in completion, not release.

For a wild moment, I considered defiance.

Through both badge and note-away, it dropped them into the apartment and scinerate a shoot,

or sliced them to confetti with a handful of bank statements.

But the thought curdled.

When had that tactic worked, for any of the vanished.

I knew the stores, a badge returned, would always reappear, sometimes in an office supply-drawer,

sometimes landed with impossible accuracy atop a moving box, as if the walls themselves

had coordinated the delivery.

Memory in cities and impossible began to thicken the air.

The rituals of Rookford returned in full.

The endless inventories.

The object shuffled between desks the aura of being watched, the sick certainty that some

prod calls would never truly finish.

I shouldn't have taken the badge from the envelope.

I shouldn't have let the nose surface connect with my skin.

But regret was a bankrupt currency.

There I was, rooted, unable to move forward or retreat.

The first change is seen-minute.

My phone usually sluggish with notifications, when silent to no vibrate, no ping, just

blankness.

The fridge halved, then stopped in the midst of its cycle, leaving a soft, electric

ash.

My laptop clock shuddered, then frozen the minute of the envelope slit, 3-13pm.

The time codes from the Rookford Power Surgers, from every ordered-net badge swip in the

fourth floor.

I shuddered around through my spine.

I half-expected the overhead bulb to flicker, for some voice from an intercom non-existent

here to break the hush.

There was only the muted city sound, now moving a little farther away, as if muffled

behind layers of frosted glass.

My home had become an extra somewhere else, not the place where I lived but the place

where a process, stubborn and unfinished, had decided to resume.

My own hand answered with mechanical precision.

I reached for a pen, almost without conscious command, and found myself poised to write my

name, badge number, some string of digits.

The compulsion was sharp, familiar, rooted in a muscle memory that belonged to another

life.

Meanwhile, the inheritance of office routine overrode autonomy, complete the process, finished

the audit, restore order, were disordered, threatened to overwhelm the system.

The badge was now both artifact and token, a pasky for the next stage, whatever form

that might take.

That's when the kitchen clock ticked, not forward, but back or disolved, deliver a click,

and another, as of time itself, was retracing audits yet and complete.

Somewhere beyond the apartment walls, I sensed movement.

The scuff of souls, the brush of keys, the rustle of paperwork.

I wanted to say I imagined it, but I've learned not to kid myself when it comes to these

things.

The air pressed hard around me, the sterile chill of conference rooms at dusk, the aromatic

dread of off-brand antiseptic, the faint metallic taste that ride shotgun with a power

surge.

If I moved to the door, I knew I'd hear voices soft, procedural, reciting codes and

in broken schedules.

Figures pacing to corridor, file folders tucked under their arms, expecting to be checked

and checked out, logged, and accounted for.

They are patient, those who wait uninventory.

The clock on the wall kept retreating.

My own reflection in the grave of the micro-weave glass appeared less sharp, as if the focus

so crisp for so long had begun to degrade, along with my claim on the present.

I shoved the badge and note together in a kitchen drawer, slanted shut, drove my palm

against a wood.

The noise did nothing.

Already, the first impression slinging to flat and shadow at the first hole, a draft

that didn't match any windows opening, the sense that the records did not merely reside

in one building, but rippled through every ledger, every database, every loose badge

or incomplete file left behind.

I sat on the floor, back to the fridge, knees pressed chest.

The knowledge came in hard, precise increments, with the gentle acceptance of bureaucracy.

Brookford had closed, but its processes were intact.

The ledger could relocate as easily as moving a file.

Whatever survived of that world was hunting for completion, and I idiotically persistently

carried the imprint.

It wasn't sleep that took me, but a kind of stirring fugue, my heart rabbling a seconds

looped in an accurate sequence.

In the depths of that blankness, I heard the shuffle of more papers footsed at crossing

hell.

Protocols recited with gentle bureaucratic insistence, names spoken, not loudly, but

anarily accurate.

My isolate closed.

I saw again the fourth floor as I'd left it, the corridor lockered in filmy chemical

light, the raid lockers, the repetition of desks, the faces and partial silhouette busy

still at the audit, leaping their paths, mocking each small task and done, each misplaced

object restored.

Any mantra pressed forward, this one distinctly not my own, no audit finishes itself.

No one walks away with their record left and complete.

I came back into awareness as the refrigerator started again, the hum loud and sudden.

The city had edged closer, suns returning in ragged increments and neighbours television,

the steps of children in the hall, the screech of a bus break outside the window.

The kitchen clock ticked forward with a jerk.

My hand was calmed so tight around the badge I had to force the fingers open, the sticky

note clung to my palms as if pissed there.

I looked at myself and the micro wave glass once more.

My own eyes hungry and slept, lined with ears of deferred maintenance.

I peeled the note away, hot jerking as my skin went cold beneath it.

The message was the same, in no less shop, inventory returned.

Please log and secure.

Something shifted.

Not dramatic, no shadow crashing through the door, no surge of cold wind.

But the air in the room lightened very faintly.

I set the badge atop a stack of unpaid bills as if placing it in a foul tray on an old,

battered desk.

The room remained, but the sense of waiting we seated never gone, but not urgent.

The building's logic, a protocol that had traced me, was momentarily satisfied.

The act of acknowledgement of looking receipt had bought us day-minutes, iris days I didn't

know.

My phone vibrated suddenly, a message lighting the blank screen in a known sender, no

number.

Four words only, arranged without punctuation, log and secure.

I didn't reply.

I deleted the message, though I doubted it matter.

I glanced again at the badge, the sticky note, the open drawer.

I closed the drawer so slowly it took two full breaths.

When the refrigerator stopped, a hush fell so complete that I alert myself a tormented

half-smile.

Some cycles, even relentless ones, permit a pause not a true ending, but a stay.

I realized then the process was not about finishing the audit.

It was about making sure the audit always remained possible.

No one is ever removed from the inventory.

We just become entries under a new date placeholders for the next return.

Somewhere and some dim, off-limit room, afforded with my name nurse, it's on top of the

pile, no detach, waiting for hand's mind, or another's to move it along.

If the door buzzed, I thought I would answer, proit colonel.

But for now, I remain.

If this message finds you, reader or listener, let it be a small warning.

Never believe that a jaw bend when you step away, or that the system forgets when the lights

go out.

If ever you find something return to your desk, your mailbox, or hand to be careful how

you handle it.

Some audits do close, but only to open under another name.

Sometimes the building isn't the only thing that wants you to log and secure.

Sometimes the inventory is all that's left.

And that is the end.

Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next one.