Julian — Company Offices and the Civic District, en route

Julian found out at 14:23, which was eleven minutes after the notice was distributed and nine minutes after it had been flagged by the monitoring layer on his work terminal as a personal communication requiring attention. He had been in the middle of a systems diagnostic. He finished it first, because the flagging system did not indicate urgency, and because finishing a task before attending to a personal communication was what the optimization protocols expected of a Category 3 technical associate in good standing.

The notice was three paragraphs.

He read it twice. Then he stood up from his terminal and crossed the floor to his section lead’s optimization agent — a column unit installed in the corner, accessible to any associate who needed administrative approval.

“I need to request emergency personal leave,” he said. “My wife and daughter have been detained.”

The agent’s response time was 0.4 seconds. “Personal leave for non-scheduled absences requires supervisor approval and will result in a productivity variance notation. The current approval threshold for your section is Category 2 emergency or above. Household detainment of non-primary earner dependents qualifies as Category 3. Approval is conditional.”

“Conditional on what?”

“A credit offset for the disruption to your section’s output metric. The offset for a half-day absence at your productivity tier is 14 credits.”

Julian had 211 credits. Fourteen was not nothing.

“Approved,” he said.

“Your leave has been logged. Your return is expected by 09:00 tomorrow.”

He was already moving toward the elevator.

—

On the platform he opened the Claims Portal and submitted an inquiry. The portal confirmed receipt and assigned him a case number. Average response time: 18 to 36 hours. He put his terminal in his pocket.

He had tried the facility’s direct contact line three times on the way down. The recorded response was the same each time: the facility did not maintain a public communication channel. All inquiries through the Claims Portal.

The transit system was not designed for urgency. He had always known this in the abstract. He knew it now in the specific: the hover-rail ran its route; the platform moved at its scheduled interval; the connecting transfer at Central Exchange required a seven-minute wait that he spent at the platform edge not looking at his terminal because there was nothing on his terminal that would help him. He tried once more to reach a person. Any person. A supervisor, a duty officer, an intake associate. The numbers that existed in public records connected to systems that forwarded to portals that assigned case numbers with 18 to 36 hour response times.

He thought about Simone.

She would be frightened. She would be trying not to show it, which would make her seem uncooperative, which was the worst thing you could seem in an intake facility. He knew this not because he had ever been detained but because he worked adjacent to the infrastructure that ran the facilities, and the processing logs he had encountered at the margins of his work were full of notations like resistance indicator and compliance deficit attached to people who were, as far as he could read, simply upset.

Simone was going to be very upset. And she was going to do her absolute best to conceal it, and it was not going to be enough, because the biometrics logged what the face tried not to show.

He could not think about Nina. Every time he moved toward it he stopped himself, the way you stop yourself from looking directly at something bright. He would get there first. Then he could think about Nina.

The Exchange was crowded — the afternoon peak, bodies moving in all directions through the transfer hall, drones stitching overhead in their delivery corridors, the ambient audio of a city operating at capacity. He moved with the crowd. He kept his face at the pace of someone going somewhere ordinary. He did not run, because running drew the ambient monitoring toward you, and being flagged right now would cost him time he did not have.

His heart was doing something it did not usually do and he was aware of it with the clinical detachment of someone who understood that awareness was all he could offer it.

Six stops to the civic district. Twelve minutes on foot to the precinct.

He had been trying to reach someone for two hours.

When the rail reached his stop he stepped off with the crowd and turned south and walked at the pace of someone going somewhere ordinary and did not run.