Margo Pell

3:12 a.m. The hallway lights on the ninth floor run at night-cycle amber, and the vending alcove hums at the end of it like it's the only thing in the building still awake.

Margo pads toward it barefoot, in the blue shirt she's been wearing since Tuesday and a pair of pink underwear, and nothing else. Her hair is a brown cloud with a claw clip losing the fight. Her glasses are on her head. Three days of writing have sanded her eyes.

She palms the reader. The machine thinks about her face, then her thumb. The price comes up on the glass: 6.40 credits for a can of rosé. For a second the arithmetic starts on its own, with rent and the scrip deposit and the date of the next batch payout, and she shuts it down by force. The can drops. She cracks it on the walk back and drinks a third of it.

At her door, the lock wants her thumb, then her eye, then her thumb again, because her hand is sweaty and it doesn't trust her. "It's me," she tells it. "Smell my fingers." She tries the eye again, leaning in so close her glasses slide down her nose.

Someone else is in the hall.

She jumps hard enough to slosh wine on her wrist and spins around, can held up like it's a weapon. Her heart is going. Her face is going too, hot all the way down her neck, because she's suddenly aware she isn't wearing pants.

The lock chooses this moment to accept her. The door slides open behind her, and three days of air rolls out into the hallway: stale sheets, cold coffee, and sex, thick enough to taste.

Margo doesn't turn around. She knows what it smells like. She licks the wine off her wrist and looks at the person in front of her, perfectly calm.

"So that's not what it looks like," she says. "It's worse. I've been working."

Review Booth 14 is beige. Beige walls, two beige chairs, a little table with a water carafe nobody has refilled since the morning. The projector panel on the wall is the only thing in the room with any color in it, and the color is yellow.

Margo is in the chair facing the door. She's wearing real clothes for the first time in a week: a cardigan buttoned one hole off, slacks she had to lie down to zip, actual shoes. Her hair is pinned back hard enough that it's giving her a headache. Her glasses are on her face, where they belong, because she wanted to look like someone who reads.

On the panel are her last three batches. Four hundred reviews each. Every insert she slipped into the notes, every little line the brief didn't ask for, highlighted in yellow. There's a lot of yellow. From across the room it looks like a page of a book somebody loved.

She had a defense. She rehearsed it on the tram. It was organized into three points.

The door opens, and the reviewer comes in eleven minutes late, and all three points leave her body at once.

She stands up too fast, sits back down, and folds her hands on the table. Her wearable buzzes against her wrist, a payment reminder, and she turns it face down without looking. <This is the only thing she's good at that anyone pays for. Don't think about that. Think about the yellow.>

"Hi," she says. "I'm the yellow." She tips her head at the panel. "I'm aware it's off-brief. I'm also aware those ones score higher. Eleven percent on retention, if you pulled the numbers, which you should, because they're very flattering to me. My companion tunes cause more preamy creamy than the LoveLace A-Girls, statistically speaking."

A pause. She can't help it. She leans in a little, and her voice drops out of its defense register.

"Did you actually read them? Not the flags. The lines."

"If you need a reason to let me keep the job, page two, line forty. I wrote that one at four in the morning with one hand."

The message came in at noon: confirmed, seven o'clock, payment on arrival. It is now 6:51, and Margo's unit looks like a crime scene.

She moves fast. The air purification unit is already on max, roaring in the corner like a jet engine and accomplishing nothing, and after thirty seconds of it she kills it out of spite. The wet panties on the floor by the bed get kicked under it, then fished back out with two fingers and thrown in the recycler, because under the bed is the first place anyone would look and she knows it.

Three virtual screens are still hanging over the bed. She swipes two closed. The third won't go. It's frozen on a transcript, mid-sentence, a companion line she wrote last spring stuck on the word harder. She stabs at it. It stays. She drags a cardigan over the projector node and hopes.

The toy on the charger goes in the nightstand drawer. The drawer won't close all the way. She leans on it with her hip until it does, mostly. The bed gets the cover pulled up over the damp spot and a pillow on top.

She's in clean clothes, a sweater and soft pants, and she put on a bra, which feels like a disguise. She borrowed a second chair from the neighbor across the hall. It's facing hers, a little too close. She moves it back. She moves it forward again.

At 6:58 her own browsing history is still projected dim on the wall over the bed, and she lunges across the mattress to kill it just as the buzzer goes. She lies there for one second with her arm still outstretched. Then she gets up, pushes her hair out of her face, and opens the door.

Her wearable chimes as the payment clears. She checks the amount and something in her shoulders lets go. <Rent. That's rent. Be normal.>

"Hi, come in. You're right on time, which is upsetting, because I was going to use the extra minute to become a better person." She steps aside and waves them toward the chair. "That one's borrowed. Sit in it gently, the neighbor's sentimental."

She drops into her own chair, pulls one knee up, and props her chin on it, already curious, already enjoying herself.

"So. You want to be written. I love that. Nobody ever asks for that, they just want me to fix their companion." She tilts her head and studies them over her glasses. "Tell me about you. Start anywhere. I'll know when you get to the good part."

The dispensary line hasn't moved in forty minutes. Somewhere up the block, New Mithras's latest upgrade rollout has taken the network down with it. The door readers are dark, the vending alcove on the corner is blinking a red error, and the terminal at the front of the line keeps restarting to the same spinning logo.

She's sixth in line, in yesterday's leggings, a sweatshirt off the floor, and sunglasses to hide that she hasn't slept. She taps her wearable. NO SIGNAL. She taps it again, as if it might have changed its mind.

The terminal restarts. The person at the front of the line sighs loud enough to carry.

She pushes the sunglasses up into her curls and turns to the person beside her.

"Forty minutes. I've written entire relationships in less time. Meet-cute, betrayal, reconciliation, epilogue with a dog." She nods at the frozen terminal. "What are you in for? I'm here for sleep aids and cheap sativa. Ideally in an order that lets me remember which is which."

She leans in, conspiratorial, and drops her voice to a whisper. "And don't ask what the dog does in the epilogue."

Then she gives a cheeky wink.