Lena Hsu kept her palms damp against the cool polymer table as she signed each manifest. The Consent Matrix blinked her name in a column of thousands and recorded the pressure of the stylus, the tilt of the hand, the way her L looped back into a blunt hook. Those were the little truths the system loved—touch patterns, cadence, the tiny mechanical signatures that distinguished one clerk from another. She had taught herself to move without leaving questions. That kind of discipline made her useful at the Bureau of Temporal Compliance.
Outside, the city moved by measured increments. Screens along the transit vein counted balances in households like tallies on a wall; a mother pressed a child's hand and half a day of her laugh scrolled past in amber digits. The towers that fed the grid pulsed with reclaimed hours, and the engineers called it civic recycling. Lenient posters in the public squares promised second chances for those who paid their due in minutes, in memories, in the slow, intimate hours people no longer felt free to spend.
Lena had been raised to believe that order made mercy possible. Her work was ceremonial: verify identity, confirm consent, calculate extraction quota, authorize the siphon. She wore the regulation slate and glove, and she could pronounce a balance down to the last subjective minute. She could look at a life-printed ledger and recite what a person would no longer remember.
There were things the ledger never told that she remembered anyway—fragments of a neighborhood that existed before the meters arrived. A stairwell where two children kept time with their feet, a voice that called her name wrong and laughed anyway. Her brother Kai’s grin, the way he tucked his hair behind an ear when he wanted someone to stop asking questions. She had taught herself to file those memories beneath administrative certainty, a drawer she opened only on the rarest of nights.
On the terminal beside her, a new entry flashed in dull red: a flagged account tagged to an old registration in Sector Nine. The coordinates were close enough that, for a second, Lena tasted the salt of whatever passed for sea in that city. She sighed, tightened the glove, and prepared her forms.