She counted on the way to the pantry: sixty-three steps. On the way back: seventy-seven.
She stood at her cubicle and looked down the length of floor seven and it looked exactly right — the standard dimensions of a corporate floor, the standard spacing of the cubicle rows, the standard distance from where she stood to the far wall where the pantry door was.
She walked to the pantry again, counting. Sixty-two. Walked back. Seventy-nine.
The floor was longer on the return trip. By a consistent margin — not the same number of steps, but always longer, always more than she had covered going. Something between the going and the returning was different. The floor was not the same floor in both directions.
She sat at her desk and opened a new document. She listed what she knew: consistent measurement going, inconsistent measurement returning. The difference was not large but was reproducible. She needed a baseline. She needed to measure the floor during the day, before the shift started, to establish whether the discrepancy was in the going or the returning.
She could not do this because the shift started at eleven and she was not in the building at any other time. She filed this problem under: unsolvable with current data. Continue gathering.
Rajan arrived at eleven fifty-eight. He sat down. He logged in. He looked at her for a moment.
