Calibration Day

They had taught Nia to listen to the city as if it were a machine, a network of steady signals whose fluctuations demanded immediate smoothing so pipes did not burst and schedules did not collapse. Her instructors had reduced feeling to a taxonomy she could hold in her palm: calibrated ranges, corrective pulses, latency limits. There was comfort in that clarity; numbers never lied and numbers did not grieve. She walked through population blocks in the soft hours between ration deliveries, her unit clipped to her belt like a religious icon that measured what could be tolerated. The calibrator band at her temple traced the atomized rise and fall of private atmospheres and sent back anonymous telemetry to the Bureau; her work was invisible, the least visible of all the municipal tasks that kept the city from splitting along its seams. In the early years, they told citizens recalibration was a kindness, a mechanism to preserve families and the fragile remains of industry. Now, after seasons of near-starvation and the long winter quarantines, most people had come to rely on the evenness as if it were air. Nia had perfected the ritual of entry, the polite announcements, the discreet checks under cushions and behind light fittings. She learned how to read a home by the faint thermography of a child’s breath or a partner’s suppressed rise in tone. Her training made the invisible measurable and her hands moved with the calm certainty of someone who had never been allowed to make a scene.