Chapter 04 — 127.0.0.1

At 6:21, Alan sat in the document alcove outside North Services and tried to decide which absence mattered first.

The identity window had passed her.

Bell’s access incident flag was still open somewhere under his name.

The Friday coverage request was still looking for someone to take work the system had stopped assigning to her.

And West Mercer’s resident portal was waiting for proof before it would let her renew the apartment she had cleaned before leaving home.

The alcove held two public terminals, a scanner with its lid tied shut by a length of gray cord, and a wall phone mounted between a brochure rack and a box of disposable masks. Someone had left a half-empty bottle of orange soda under one of the chairs. The carpet smelled damp around it.

Across from Alan, the woman in the brown coat stood with her temporary badge in one hand and her phone in the other. She had taken the street bus after Exit E, made it to East Annex too late for intake, and had been told to call a staffing number before anyone could tell her whether she still had the day’s placement.

She had not said much since arriving.

Now she held the phone away from her ear.

“They keep asking for the ticket number,” she said.

“Which ticket?”

“The one I was supposed to get when I checked in.”

Alan looked at her.

“I didn’t check in,” the woman said.

The temporary badge clicked once against her phone.

“I know,” Alan said.

The call had gone dead. She pressed redial. Nothing happened.

A clerk at the far desk was helping an older man scan a benefits letter. The clerk had one finger on the page to keep it flat under the lid. The man kept saying, “That’s not the right year,” and the clerk kept saying, “I understand.”

Alan opened the resident portal.

The upload button was still there. She tapped it.

EMPLOYMENT VERIFICATION REQUIRED

Below it, a smaller link:

REQUEST EXTENSION

She selected it.

The form asked for a case number, a verified employer, and a contact method.

Alan entered the payroll case number from the yellow routing slip. She entered Metroline. The name turned gray as soon as she typed it.

EMPLOYER STATUS: UNRESOLVED

The contact field opened.

EXTERNAL VERIFICATION REQUEST

Alan stared at the words.

External meant another desk, another person, another surface the portal could make answer for her. The portal did not ask what had happened. It asked where the answer could be attached.

Bell could verify she had entered the building. The woman in brown could verify she had been at Exit E. The payroll clerk could verify that she had been standing at the window with paper in her hand.

Any of them could make one part of the morning visible.

None of them could make it true.

The wall phone began to ring.

The woman in brown looked at it, then at Alan.

“Is that for you?”

“It doesn’t have a number.”

“It’s ringing.”

Alan crossed the alcove and picked up the receiver.

There was no dial tone.

For the first second, she heard only a fine electrical hiss.

On the second, her right back tooth began to ache.

The pain was not sharp. It was the dull pressure of biting down on something harder than food, except she was not biting anything. She loosened her jaw. The hiss continued.

The wall phone’s small display came alive.

EXTERNAL CONNECTION REQUEST

A progress bar appeared beneath it.

RECONSTRUCTION WINDOW: 00:00:06

Alan held the receiver away from her ear.

The woman’s thumb stopped over her phone screen.

“What is that?” she asked.

Alan did not answer.

The hiss changed.

It thickened, then separated.

A door latch releasing.

A pen rolling across a counter.

A wet tire passing through a gutter.

Bell saying, from somewhere no distance could explain: “You sure?”

Alan’s own voice, quieter: “No.”

There was another sound under it.

A pause too small to count as speech.

A sleeve or cuff brushing fabric, close enough to belong to her body and wrong enough that her hand checked itself against the side of the chair. Her hand was there. She had not lifted it.

The sounds lasted six seconds.

Then the phone went silent.

The display cleared.

ROUTE RESOLVED

127.0.0.1 / 接 / INTERFACE

Below it, in plain black letters:

LOCALHOST

LOCAL CORE: 接

Alan looked toward the terminal.

Her resident portal had closed. In its place was a white panel with one line:

CONNECT TO YOURSELF FIRST

She had seen numbers like that only in repair menus and stray instructions, where a machine used its own address because no farther one could be trusted. It pointed nowhere beyond the alcove: not to Bell, Metroline, West Mercer, or the woman whose name she did not know. The request had returned to the hand holding the receiver.

The woman in brown watched her face.

“Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

The pressure in her right back tooth deepened.

The wall phone gave one short tone.

A new set of options appeared.

HOLD CONNECTION

PULL VERIFIED PARTY

LISTEN

The first two buttons were already gray.

Alan touched neither.

The third option opened by itself.

NO HOLD

NO PULL

LISTEN FIRST

Hold would keep someone on the line until the portal learned how to use her. Pull would drag a verified person into a record that had not asked permission. Listen gave Alan no solution. It left the connection open and the other two choices gray.

The woman in brown stepped closer, but not close enough to see the screen.

“I need to make a call,” she said. “If I don’t call them, they’ll mark me as a no-show.”

Alan lowered the receiver.

“I know.”

“I’m not asking you to fix it.”

“I know.”

The woman looked at the terminal, then at Alan’s folder full of papers.

“You can use my name if it helps.”

Alan’s hand tightened around the receiver.

The woman held out her name like another document.

If she entered the woman’s name, it would confirm that they had been together from Exit E to East Annex. The resident portal could send an extension request with a verified associated party. Payroll might accept it as contact evidence. The transit event would have a passenger. Bell’s report would have a chain.

The woman would have a record attached to an incident she had not caused.

Alan would have a cleaner morning.

The line on the terminal did not change.

CONNECT TO YOURSELF FIRST

No one else’s name could complete that instruction for her.

“No,” Alan said.

The woman blinked.

“You don’t even know my name.”

“Exactly.”

The woman let the badge fall against her bag. Its blank back struck the zipper pull.

“You think that protects me?”

“I don’t know what putting your name in there would do.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No.” Alan looked at the gray buttons. “It isn’t.”

The older man at the scanner coughed. The clerk asked him to sign the bottom line. Someone pushed a cart past the alcove, its bad wheel clicking at every seam in the floor.

The wall phone still held the connection open.

It did not ring. It did not speak. It waited.

The woman in brown took the receiver from Alan’s hand.

“Can I use this?”

Alan looked at the display.

The words NO HOLD and NO PULL had disappeared. The normal keypad was back.

“Yes,” she said.

The woman dialed the staffing number from memory.

This time the phone rang.

While she waited, Alan moved to the public terminal and opened the extension form again. The external verification field was blank. There was no longer any way to select Bell, the woman in brown, or any other person who had crossed her path.

The only visible option was:

SELF-ATTESTATION

Below it:

SUBMISSION MAY NOT PRESERVE ELIGIBILITY

Alan read the line.

Then she selected it.

The form opened a text box.

DESCRIBE THE DELAY.

She typed:

I was present for my assigned shift. The system recorded an end time before a start time. I have requested review.

The cursor waited.

She stopped there.

She attached the payroll printout, the routing slip, and the transit incident sheet.

The scanner took each page slowly. When it finished the third, it made a soft mechanical sound like a throat clearing.

On the wall phone, the woman in brown had finally reached someone.

“No,” she was saying. “I did not miss intake. I was delayed at the station.”

She listened.

“No, I don’t have a ticket number because I never got to check in.”

Another pause.

“My name is-”

The call cut off.

She looked at the receiver.

The phone display had gone black.

Alan’s terminal made a sound.

It was not an alert. The printer below the scanner clicked once.

A narrow receipt emerged from the slot below the scanner.

Alan pulled it free.

There was no extension confirmation.

No case number.

Only three lines:

LOCAL REQUEST: RECEIVED

REMOTE SAVE: PENDING

RETURN PATH: 127.0.0.1 / 接 / INTERFACE

The woman in brown looked over.

“Is that yours?”

Alan folded the receipt down the middle.

“I don’t know.”

The woman picked up her bag. The temporary badge turned against the strap, showing only its blank back again.

“I’m going upstairs,” she said. “Maybe somebody will let me stand outside the room until they decide what I am.”

Alan stood too.

“Wait. What’s your name?”

The woman paused at the alcove entrance.

The woman turned fully toward Alan.

“Not part of your report,” she said.

Then she walked toward the elevators.

Alan did not follow.

The wall phone was quiet. The terminal had returned to the resident portal. The upload button was gone.

In its place, the page showed a small gray message:

REQUEST SAVED LOCALLY

No date. No confirmation number. No indication that West Mercer would ever see it.

Alan put the receipt beside the other papers in her folder.

For six seconds, something had tried to reach outward.

The connection had folded back to her.

It had refused the easiest source.

Before she could decide what to call that, the wall phone rang again.