Few enjoyed visiting the Bureau of Temporal Accounting. Its offices were grey and its clerks greyer. The Bureau once sat against the Forgotten Cliffs in the middle of the Wailing Plains, but now occupied an unremarkable, squat, brutalist construction in the Junction’s mid-levels, identical to the concrete abominations that surrounded it. The newly constructed Bureau was built in the late eighties when budget cuts required that they move from the elegant marble fortress from which it had operated for centuries. Overnight, the winding labyrinthine hallways, hidden altars, and arcane libraries had given way to a fluorescent-lit, beige-carpeted assemblage of corporate cubicles and sterile multipurpose rooms. The changes, management assured employees, would better serve the Bureau’s mission to manage, monitor, and catalog the memories of the living.
Most of the 324 employees at the Bureau were quite happy with the new building. Since the move, work had become quicker and more efficient. It was much easier to process paperwork when you didn’t have to backtrack down ten kilometers of twisting stone corridors to get documents signed in triplicate.
Walter disagreed. He missed the twisting spires and ornate reliefs of the old building. They gave the job a feeling of higher purpose. True, you had to be careful not to fall into the infinite abyss on the 32nd floor, but Walter had always thought that feature an elegant way of separating unskilled new hires from ones capable of minding their step. Most of all, Walter missed the view from the top of the east wing, where he would enjoy a sandwich while watching the dry, unending expanse of the Wailing Plains. The new lunchroom had no windows, and he spent his breaks staring at undecorated drywall as he munched on his cheese sandwich.
Still, aesthetic concerns were nothing compared to the computational challenges that attended the end of the twentieth century. Given the delicate nature of sorting through human memories, the Bureau’s staff were not as dramatically impacted as other parts of the Backend by the transition to automation, but that didn’t mean they were completely free of IT problems.
Walter had been hired back in the parchment-and-blood days, and if he had known he would be around to see the digitalization of his duties, he probably would have taken a post in emotional distillation or orbital binding—something a safe distance from the flickering plastic monolith that now consumed his days.
“It’s incredibly simple,” the IT specialist had explained, clicking her way across the screen at a speed that seemed to Walter obscene.
Walter smiled politely and nodded, hoping she would mistake his agreeability with competence and go away. This strategy worked in the short term. She praised Walter for how quickly he grasped the fundamentals and left to help another member of the Bureau’s old guard. A week later, however, Walter regretted his earlier impatience when he was confronted with the fact that he no longer had any idea how to perform the basic duties of his job. He spent his days randomly clicking on boxes while holding the manual in hand and trying to parse its bewildering phrases. He did not know what terms like browser or word processor meant, and words he thought he knew turned out to mean something else entirely. According to the manual, scrolling simply moved the contents of the screen up and down and had nothing to do with the Bureau’s ancient and forbidden parchments.
Walter wanted nothing more than a return to his old job, his old building, his old peace of mind. He felt like a demon adrift without a paddle. All he could see were waves, and he longed for stable land. Eternity shouldn’t be this changeable.
A little over a year after the move to full digitalization, Walter was caught up in his now routine bout of panicked boredom when he noticed something in the new allocation software. He was supposed to be giving final approval to the computer’s analysis of human memories—a humiliating task that seemed to Walter akin to a child prodigy asking their music instructor if they’d done a good job after composing their first symphony.
Today, however, Walter found himself unable to offer validation. There was a strange message: “Memory Allocation Error.” What the Hell did that mean? He clicked the button marked Accept and hoped it would go away, but it just popped right back up.
He looked at the name at the top of the form: Maxwell Munin. There did not appear to be anything special or interesting in the human’s case file. In fact, there did not seem to be much of a life there at all, but the program would not allow Walter to proceed. No matter what he did, he received the same message.
He was about to call the IT specialist when he noticed a small button labeled Automate at the bottom of the screen. He recognized this word, but he wondered if it could be that simple. He hesitated for a moment and then clicked it. The program arouse from its slumber, filling in box after box with fresh memories at a dizzying speed. The error message did not disappear, but underneath it, the program continued its work. He dragged the box containing the error message to the bottom of his screen and pushed it out of sight.
Walter felt a shock of lightning. At last, a minor victory. He was rather pleased with himself. Perhaps he would master this new machine after all. He glanced down at his watch. If things kept up like this, he might even get to his sandwich early.
*
Walter had gone home hoping that everything would take care of itself overnight, but when he turned on his monitor the next morning, he could see the tip of the same error message waiting for him at the bottom corner of the screen. The program behind it no longer moved. He shook the mouse, but the cursor remained fixed in place. After tapping randomly on the keyboard without result, he unplugged the monitor, picked up a random stack of papers, and flipped through them, pretending he was hard at work.
For several hours, Walter kept his head down and tried his best to look busy and unconcerned, but he remained aware of the tumult overtaking the office. Everyone was running about in a panic, shouting things about files and crashes and the end times. Things hadn’t been this bad since that leprechaun over in AP got caught embezzling company funds.
Walter’s closest friend, Baku the Dream-Eater, ran past with a box in hand but stopped when he saw Walter at his desk. Normally he would be up for a chat, but his friend’s chirpy optimism was unwelcome at this moment.
“Hey, Walt. Looks like someone didn’t get much sleep.” Baku the Dream-Eater said, laughing his normal machine-gun laugh. The cackle gave Walter a full view of his friend’s teeth and gums. When Walter said nothing, his friend continued, “I guess you noticed the System’s down.”
“The accounting system?” Walter asked.
“No, the System-system, everything.”
“That can’t be right.”
“They’re saying something fried Central Processing. Hate to be the creature that messed up, right?”
Another laugh. It was like he was desperately gasping for air. Walter had never noticed how annoying and unnecessary that laugh was.
“How can the whole System be down?” Walter asked.
“Nobody’s sure.”
“But it has nothing to do with us, right?”
Baku the Dream-Eater shrugged. “Who knows? I got in this morning, and there wasn’t a single dream waiting for me. They’re saying we might have to do this the old-fashioned way if they can’t figure out the source of the problem. In the meantime, we’re all supposed to carry one of these.”
He produced a small black box and put it in Walter’s hand.
“No,” Walter said.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Not the pagers. I thought we were done with these. It was the one upside of the computer.”
“Sorry. It’s a pain, I know. If someone pages you, call them back over the private administrative network phone.”
“I hate talking on the phone. I don’t know what to say. I always imagine the person on the other end rolling their eyes.”
“I feel the same way, but we don’t really have a tone of options. Nothing else is working.”
Walter looked at the chunky, long-abandoned phone sitting next to the computer monitor with disgust and then down at the pager.
“And the beeping . . .” he whined.
“I know.”
“And that annoying little pulse . . .”
“I get it, trust me. Look, I gotta go, To be honest, without the dream-parsing software, I’ve forgotten how to do my job. I need to go look busy before someone asks me to do some work.”
His friend laughed one last time and left Walter alone at his desk.
If the System was down, maybe he would be OK. Maybe everything would have to be reset and there would be no record of where the problem had originated.
Beep.
The machine in Walter’s hand sounded. He thought about turning it off but knew from experience that it just led to questions about why he was too busy to check his messages. Best to let a few pile up and deal with them all at once. He slid the pager across his desk and returned to staring blankly at the sheets of paper in front of him.
As the day wore on, his hope for a return to normalcy diminished. There were murmurs of a meeting. Of course, there was going to be a meeting. One by one, everyone would have to recount what they knew, and he would either have to lie or come clean. Either way, he imagined the consequences extended far beyond firing. Perhaps they would reverse the prohibition on corporal punishment and bring one of the old iron maidens out of mothballs just for him.
He wondered if there was still time to fix the problem. He was smart, and this was his job, after all. Why shouldn’t he be able to figure it out? He turned the monitor back on and got the user manual out, flipping through the book until he found the troubleshooting section. His mind slid over the indecipherable phrases. He looked from the page to the monitor, the monitor to the page, and promptly gave up. It had been a stupid idea. Walter couldn’t even check his email without doing preparatory research.
Beep.
There used to be a way to turn the sound off without triggering the vibration. How had he done that? He couldn’t remember. He slid the pager further across his desk and buried it under a stack of binders.
It was almost lunch. Lunch would make everything better. He could get away from the suspicious eyes of his coworkers. He knew they knew he knew something. At least nobody had called him into the head office. Not yet. It was only a matter of time until someone connected the dots.
Beep.
He got up to take an early lunch. Could he leave the pager behind? Probably best not to risk it. It was all hands on deck at the minute, and the continued beeping in his absence might invite questions about why he wasn’t staying on top of his job. He gritted his teeth and shoved the box into his pocket. He kept his head down and slunk out of the office.
Walter was anxious, and things got bad when he was anxious. His mind got iffy. Paranoia was descending, and he knew what came next. If he could just stay focused, maybe it wouldn’t happen like usual.
Beep.
The sound of the pager shattered his calm.
Stupid.
An intrusive thoughts, the first of many, no doubt. He had worked so hard to live with them and accept them, and gradually they had melted away, but he knew that the endless cycling repetitions and improper suggestions were about to return. He passed another demon in the hall. She smiled politely and looked away.
They’re laughing at you.
Walter gritted his teeth and ascended the stairs. He struggled to remember what he was supposed to do in this situation. Something about labeling. Yes, he needed to create distance between himself and the thoughts by labeling them. He took a moment to acknowledge that the criticisms were out of his control. They were not inherently good or bad. They just were, and they would pass. Next came the counting. In as he climbed the first stair, out on the second. Pay attention to the breathing and not the thoughts.
Beep.
You’re a fool.
Beep.
They’re about to find out.
Beep.
It’ll be the end of you.
Beep.
He should have left the pager back at his desk. It wasn’t helping. The lighting of the bureau buzzed like locusts as he trudged up the long stairs to the break room. The walls of the hallway threatened to swallow him alive. He clutched the paper bag that contained his sandwich to his chest. Every door seemed to house a potential threat, but, at last, he reached his destination.
He opened the door and flicked on the light.
“You’ve been found out.”
This time, the voice did not come from inside his head. It belonged to a robot vacuum cleaner perched on the table and flanked by a large green Caretaker and a pale, thin human.
Beep.
Walter screamed. In a panic, he hurled the pager with all his might against the intruders. It soared over the frog’s head and hit the wall, where it finally went silent.
