The shift started. The calls came in. Meera put on her headset and became, as training had prepared her to become, a professional named "Mia" with a slight accent softening and a script in front of her and an ability to hold two things simultaneously: the actual human on the other end of the line and the system in which they were both operating.
It was fine work. Not interesting, but fine. The callers were ordinary Americans with ordinary problems — a confused elderly man about his insurance, a frustrated woman about a software update, a very patient man named Gerald who had been holding for twenty minutes and received this gracefully because Gerald, Meera decided, had decided long ago that patience was the correct response to a world that was not built to serve him efficiently.
At eleven fifty-five, the cubicle to her right clicked. She looked. A man had sat down — fifty-something, thin, with the specific grey of someone who had been awake through more nights than could be easily counted. He put on his headset without looking at her. He logged into his system with the speed of someone who had done it ten thousand times. He was going to start taking calls in approximately ninety seconds, she estimated.
He looked sideways at her for one moment. His eyes were the most alert thing about him — the rest of him was tired in the way that people who had been somewhere for too long were tired, but his eyes were watching with the attention of someone for whom paying attention was not optional.
"New?" he said.
"First night," she said.
"Rajan." He did not extend a hand — both of them had headsets on, it would have been awkward. Just the name, and then he turned back to his monitor.
"Meera," she said.
He nodded once. Then, very quietly, so that only she could hear it: "Don't work past three."
Her call indicator lit up. She pressed accept. "Thank you for calling TechAssist, this is Mia, how can I help you today?" The voice on the other end was American, mid-Western, a man named David with a printer problem, and she engaged with it fully and professionally and in the back of her mind filed Rajan's comment the way she filed all information she didn't yet have context for: labeled, stored, retrievable.
At midnight, she went to get chai. She walked the length of floor seven toward the pantry at the far end. It was sixty-three steps. She counted them, the habit of a person who converted the world into manageable data. Sixty-three steps on the way. She got her chai. She walked back.
Eighty-one steps.
She stopped. Looked at the floor — the standard office carpet, corporate grey, slightly worn at the path people walked most often. The cubicle rows on either side, the monitors glowing, the low murmur of voices in headsets.
She counted again on the way to her seat. Seventy-four steps.
She sat down. She put her headset on. She took her next call. A woman named Patricia who needed help resetting her banking password.
