FICTION: The Afternoon (Mosaic Entry)

The air in the office was dry. The air conditioner ensured that humidity stayed at a constant rate. The sun beamed in from the western window, afternoon sun trying to burn down glass and steel. It never won. A few more years of warming activity, and it might expand some bolts beyond their tolerances due to thermal expansion.

What would happen after that would be up to the whims of gravity and other material forces that would interact with the complex symphony of engineering that held the thing together. The floor seemed sturdy, at least.

She looked at across at what people had termed to be the situation room. Unlike the rest of the rooms, this one was not full of screens with cascading consoles of text scrolling by at whatever speed the governing hypervisor ran along at. The situation room had walls made of text scrawled on multi-coloured sheets of paper. Each paper seemed to have been written by a different hand, and it was hard to ascertain the uniqueness of each note.

There was meant to be an order to the colour, but in the warm light relentlessly streaming in through the window, it looked like a rainbow. Red dominated the walls, the highest priority. If everything is a priority, nothing is. She walked toward the glass doored room.

A red light glowed at the wall, and her security tag at her hip hummed out an unseen, unheard radio frequency as it received a small jolt of electricity from the access panel. A beep was heard, and the door began to slide back with the motive force of an unseen actuator.

She entered. She sat at the table in the middle of the room, on one of four chairs. There were a few more notes added to the room since her last entry. She started to read them from her seated perspective, and they were all the same problems, written in different ways.

The truth, she realised, was that the notes did not describe problems, they described the symptoms. She reached for one of the pieces of paper in the middle of the table. She, like so many others, selected the red one. She wrote in black pen.

It doesn't fucking work.

This note summarised the ocean of others that rippled gently in the air conditioned breeze in the room. The air was still dry. Her professional demeanour faltered for a moment. The dry air, the paper that could so easily erupt into a blaze, given the correct spark, was a fragile, impermanent
system of documentation that belied the complexity of the unfolding tragedy.

Not a tragedy for me. She would get paid all the same. But for now, she was surrounded entirely by the tinderbox of symptoms and perceived problems. Time to do some work, she thought, looking to the empty, mesh waste paper basket that sat on the table in front of her.

She crumpled her note, and threw it in. She already knew it didn't work, she now had to try and figure out why.