The Office's corridors had the smell of clean metal and the precise absence of anything else. Fluorescent panels measured the color of the light they let through and adjusted it to the day's approved spectrum; vents breathed with the slow rhythm the monitors considered healthy. Talia moved through that ordered air with the certainty of someone who had learned to be a tool of a tool: a technician who kept things within tolerance. Her hands fit the instruments as if they had been made for them, calibrated by years of repetition. A regulator in the palm of her hand looked like a pebble carved from glass and bone, its seam a near-imperceptible seam of composite. She would open that seam, test for drift, reapply a stabilizer gel if the micro-actuators had stiffened. It was tidy work. It was necessary work, the Office said. It kept people from unraveling into extremes that the city could not contain.
Today the city's Equilibrium Signal would be synchronized at nine hundred beats. People in apartments, in transport corridors, on the public terraces would feel the same warmth at the same moment: small rises in serotonin, measured increases in pulse that the regulators translated into calm. The Office called it preservation; mothers called it mercy; others called it management. For Talia, language had shrunk to function. Instruments, checks, protocols. She signed three adjustment logs, verified two stability readouts, stamped an acknowledgement with a hand that did not tremble. A junior called the work 'preventative maintenance'; it kept the system whole, the same way a seam keeps cloth from coming apart at the stress points.
She noticed the first anomaly when a unit assigned to a low-income block returned to the depot with a burnt filament. The unit's serial tag showed disuse beyond normal degradation—an older model, evidently retrofitted instead of replaced. There were fingerprints in the sealant, a smudge that belonged to a nervous hand rather than a careful operator. She filed the incident with the mandatory detachment of precise language and moved on. There was always something to move on to.