Part Four: The Specimen Jar

Entry 28. November 12, 2034. The corner office. The sentence, finished.

Renata's summons came the second Tuesday of November, through her assistant, for end of day, and the record should understand that in nine years at Kestrel I had been to the corner office exactly four times, and that everyone summoned there learned the room the same way: glass on two sides, Sugarloaf Mountain small and blue in the west-facing pane, no visitor chairs facing the desk. You sat, if you sat, on a low couch to the side, which put the desk above your eyeline, which was the point of the couch. I did not sit. By 2034 my body budgeted such things automatically (height, angle, the theater of rooms) the way it budgeted my pulse.

She was signing things. She signed for forty seconds after I came in, which was also the couch by other means, and then she capped the pen and said: "The Program wants to nationalize you."