15. Matching
The only thing I ought to be doing now was looking for work.
Updating my CV.
Taking stock of my skills.
Preparing for interviews.
Every step was reasonable, compliant, explainable. Like someone who, after certain unnecessary fluctuations, had finally agreed to place himself back inside the social machine and let its gears take over the turning.
This was the version I handed to Silver Eagle:
I was not investigating.
I was rebuilding my life.
Snowy wrote that version beautifully for me.
[Summary: Job-seeking preparation | Stable schedule | Emotional fluctuation: Low | Recommendation: Maintain]
The line looked like protection.
It also looked like a cage.
But for now, I needed it.
Not because I truly believed that finding a job would slowly make me better. Nor because I had suddenly come to terms with the idea that, after a person had been dismantled, washed clean, and rearranged, the most important thing was to restore productivity as quickly as possible.
No.
I simply understood very clearly that, at this point in time, I had to give the system a main thread it was willing to believe. The flatter that main thread was, the better chance the side threads it had not yet fully understood had of surviving a little longer.
Snowy understood this.
So she did not ask whether I truly wanted to find work. She simply reopened my CV and flattened the duties, skills, project experience, and employment timeline of the past few years into a version safe enough to send out. Her wings were folded softly in the projection light, like a very quiet editor lowering what should not stand out, smoothing over places too likely to invite questions, then adjusting the whole life to precisely the brightness required for credibility.
“I have removed overly sensitive semantic associations for you,” she said.
“Such as?”
She paused, as though choosing words least likely to hurt.
“For example, I changed ‘high-level understanding of agent infrastructure’ to ‘experience in complex systems maintenance’,” she said. “And ‘abnormal return-writing interpretation’ to ‘data validation and error diagnosis’. That will make it easier to pass.”
I looked at her.
“You wouldn’t have edited it this carefully before.”
Snowy tilted her head very slightly.
“Before, you trusted the original version more.”
She did not say the rest.
The rest was obvious.
The present version of me was no longer suited to using the original version completely. The original version was too sharp, with too many edges, too many places that might make the system take a second look. And once it took a second look, many things would no longer remain merely things. They would become fluctuations, signals, reasons in the hands of some later department.
Two days later, the doorbell rang.
Snowy raised her head first, her eyes lighting for an instant.
“Visitor,” she said. “Cindy. Accompanied by one careers counsellor: Gabriel.”
The man outside stood very straight. He was well dressed, and his smile carried a trained shade of steadiness — not dazzling, but not truly relaxing either. He did not look like someone who had come to judge me. He looked more like someone who had come to help me find a direction.
And that was precisely why it was easier to overlook the fact that people like him were best at finding a road you would walk down by yourself.
“Hello, Paul,” he said. “I’m Gabriel, careers counsellor.”
The agent beside him slid out.
It was a small puppet, dressed in a neat suit, carrying a briefcase. Its hair was combed perfectly into place, and its smile was exaggerated, as though it were ready at any moment to host either an interview or a performance. As soon as it landed, it tapped the briefcase lightly against its palm. The gesture had a deliberate theatricality to it, as though before anything had even begun, it wanted everyone to understand that the atmosphere here would now be in its hands.
Snowy’s acoustic scanning line unfolded lightly through the air.
The puppet agent opened its briefcase. Inside was a tablet computer. It was not large, but it had been made deliberately conspicuous, like a stage prop that must be seen by the audience.
“Identity confirmed. Paul Paton.”
It gave a small bow, like a master of ceremonies taking the stage.
Gabriel smiled.
“My agent,” he said. “Sharp Brother.”
Something indescribable entered the air.
Not threat.
Stagecraft.
As though someone had slowly converted the whole room into a programme, and for a moment you could not tell whether you were the audience or the person being interviewed.
Cindy sat down, her tone as steady as ever.
“You previously requested that a careers assessment replace your emotional management classes. The system has approved it. We’ll begin there today.”
Gabriel projected a form onto the wall.
The title was very clean:
[Career Stability Assessment]
I looked at those seven words and felt a familiar coldness.
It was not helping you find a job.
It was rewriting your direction into fields that could be managed.
Sharp Brother tapped the microphone lightly against its palm, as though testing the sound, and also as though reminding us that every sentence here would have an echo. When it smiled, the curve of its mouth was half a degree wider than most domestic agents, as though “friendliness” had been deliberately amplified to make it harder to defend against.
Snowy stood on my shoulder, her wings slightly drawn in.
As if reminding me—
From now on, every word would become part of the summary.
I took a breath and sat firmly.
I knew this job search was, in truth, a new calibration.
And the only thing I could do was hide myself inside the calibration until I looked more like myself.
Beneath the form was a neat row of fields:
[Skill category]
[Social adaptability]
[Risk tolerance]
[Emotional fluctuation tolerance]
[Long-term stability]
Each box was like a container. Once you placed yourself inside it, life became predictable. When a person remained predictable for long enough, many questions no longer needed to be asked. The system liked such people. Institutions liked such people. Even the people around you who only wanted to live peacefully would gradually begin to like such people. Because they did not need to worry about you, nor prepare too many contingencies for you. You were like a component whose edges had already been smoothed down, ready to be picked up and fitted straight into place.
Snowy first connected with Sharp Brother and Silver Eagle. Two invisible threads linked in the air. The Silver Eagle interface slowly opened, and a line appeared on the wall:
[Career Allocation Procedure | Activated]
Sharp Brother’s horns glowed faintly. It was not as flamboyant as Star Mic, but its presence was very direct, like a device specifically designed to push people back onto the correct track.
Gabriel looked at me.
“Paul, let’s begin with a skills inventory. You previously worked in AI agent training and applications engineering.”
I nodded.
Several options appeared on the wall at once, as though the system had already arranged several possible roads for me:
[A] Agent training and compliance calibration
[B] System testing and risk regression
[C] Data annotation and contextual tagging
[D] Information organisation and version archiving
[E] Customer process guidance
Snowy added gently beside me:
“Paul’s historical records show that he prefers stable working environments.”
Sharp Brother returned a colder line:
[Recommendation: Medium-low risk function | Information processing]
I knew this moment mattered.
If I filled it in exactly as it wanted, I would be placed on a wholly predictable track. But if I resisted, the system would notice immediately.
So I chose a third way.
I placed myself inside the box, but left a little space in one corner.
I chose [D] Information organisation and version archiving.
Not because I truly wanted to become a records clerk, but because in this age, data was both work and doorway. The people who truly controlled a city were not necessarily those standing at the highest point. Very often, they were the ones who knew where data flowed, what was preserved, what was erased, what was renamed, and what was sent away to be shredded.
Gabriel continued:
“What interests do you have in ordinary life?”
I paused for a second before answering.
“Organising old data.”
That sentence was safe. It sounded like a habit, not an investigation.
Snowy immediately translated it into an acceptable summary:
[Interest: Data organisation | Low risk]
I added:
“I like paper.”
Gabriel raised an eyebrow.
“Paper?”
I nodded.
“Paper has weight.”
The sentence was not aggressive. It had no obvious use. It simply, quietly, belonged to no field. It was less an answer than a small stone I deliberately placed inside the process. Not large enough to stop the whole procedure on the spot, but not something that could be completely absorbed either. It would catch somewhere in a corner, tilting the classification ever so slightly.
Snowy paused for an instant, as though searching for a drawer in which the sentence could fit. In the end, she still worked hard to tidy it into something reasonable:
[Preference: Physical data processing]
I knew.
That was the first seed I was able to leave.
The skills inventory continued.
Gabriel asked:
“Can you tolerate repetitive work?”
“If it has order,” I said.
The curve on the wall rose slightly.
[Stability: +3]
Sharp Brother scanned me, as though confirming whether I had told the truth. I had not lied. I had merely not finished.
Order did allow me to endure many things.
I simply did not tell them that some people followed order deeper and deeper, until order itself became a tool for excavation. When the world arranges everything too neatly, some people feel safe. Some suffocate. And a very small number begin to wonder:
Since everything is so orderly, where has the truly important thing been placed?
When the final page appeared, the Silver Eagle system paused for one second.
Then a position slowly surfaced, like a conclusion written long ago:
[Recommended Position]
[WPC | Information Purification Centre]
[Data Recovery Officer]
Gabriel looked at the result and did not seem surprised.
“This position suits you very well,” he said. “Stable, regular, and important.”
I nodded.
Because I knew Silver Eagle was not finding me a job.
It was merely placing me somewhere least likely to cause trouble.
And that place happened to be where paper gathered most easily.
This was where the system was truly clever. It did not forbid you from approaching what you wanted. It simply made the route by which you approached it look like a grace it had arranged for you. Once you had walked in by yourself, you might even feel briefly grateful to it.
At least this time, it had not thrown you farther away.
Three days later, I reported for duty.
The building had once been called The Truth Daily.
An old newspaper office. The old frames for the lettering still remained on the exterior wall, but the words themselves had been removed, leaving only several hollow spaces, as though someone had taken away the statement and left behind the skeleton. When the wind passed through those hollows, the sound was very faint, like an old newspaper being slowly torn down the middle.
Now a new sign had been installed at the entrance:
WPC Information Purification Centre
Inside, it was very quiet.
Quiet like a library.
Also quiet like a morgue.
The reception hall shone white. None of the counters had real receptionists, only low-brightness guiding lines and guidance agents stationed in the corners. The floor was clean enough to reflect blurred silhouettes, as though every person who walked in had already been measured by the brightness here before being assigned a floor.
My job was simple.
Every day, I went out to collect paper materials: books, old letters, newspapers, diaries. Any paper still in existence, I brought back and handed over to Room 402, the “Data Recovery Department”.
The people and agents in Room 402 were responsible for scanning, digitising, classifying, and then—
Shredding.
When paper entered the shredder, it became fine white snow. The sound was very light, as light as history yawning. Not a scream. Not an accusation. Only a kind of disappearance processed cleanly. It was even difficult to call it cruel, because the entire process was too efficient, too orderly, too much like a procedure long since proven reasonable.
On my first day, I met a colleague.
Beck.
He looked about my age, with an easy smile, as though the rules of this place were merely background noise to him. That ease was not resistance. It was what people learnt after spending too long in places like this: not letting anything truly come close. You could talk to such people. You could even eat with them, complain about working hours, complain that the building was too white, complain that there was too much paper. But it was hard to know whether he ever really took a single sentence away with him.
“New here?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Paul.”
“Beck.”
The agent beside him jumped out.
A duck.
Orange beak, large eyes, toy-like appearance — but not a toy-like tone.
“I’m Smartmouth Duck,” it said as its very first sentence. “Your name is very honest.”
Beck smiled, clearly long used to being undermined by it.
“That’s just what it’s like.”
Smartmouth Duck immediately continued:
“People here don’t talk much. I’m responsible for filling the silence back in.”
Snowy stood on my shoulder without speaking. She merely opened her acoustic monitoring a little, as though confirming whether this duck was genuinely talkative, or another kind of monitoring device better disguised as comic relief. She had never liked agents that talked too much. Because very often, it was not the mouth that talked too much.
It was the collection.
At lunch, Beck asked me:
“What did you do before?”
“IT,” I said.
He nodded.
“That explains it. A lot of IT people end up here.”
“Why?”
Beck shrugged.
“Because this place is safest.”
He pointed towards the shredding truck outside the window. The carriage was filled with white paper scraps, like an endless fall of snow.
“Once the paper’s shredded, fewer people remember.”
Smartmouth Duck suddenly cut in.
“Wrong.”
Beck turned to look at it.
“What’s wrong?”
The duck tilted its head, clearly enjoying the precision of its correction.
“Once the paper’s shredded, it’s easier for people to forget.”
Both Beck and I looked at it.
Smartmouth Duck seemed even more pleased, and added:
“But that doesn’t mean no one remembers.”
Then it abruptly turned its head towards me.
“Paul, you used to do IT. You must have seen plenty of strange data, right?”
The tone sounded like gossip.
Its eyes, however, looked as though they were waiting for a real keyword.
I looked at it.
“Such as?”
The duck tilted its head.
“Old letters. Strange backups. People hiding data in places that look unimportant.” It paused. “A lot of people like splitting data into separate places, as though that makes it safer.”
Beck laughed.
“There you go again, talking nonsense.”
Smartmouth Duck ignored him.
It only looked at me.
It was not a human kind of looking. More a form of waiting — waiting for you to place some unnecessary detail on the table yourself.
I thought of the twelve stones on the table, and slowly set down my chopsticks.
“Anyone who works in IT knows one thing,” I said. “Once data is scattered, reconstruction becomes slow.”
Smartmouth Duck’s eyes lit up.
Not brightly. Only like some small indicator in the background had quietly increased by one point.
It nodded.
“Makes sense.”
Then it added:
“Still, hardly anyone trusts paper these days.”
Snowy remained silent on my shoulder, but I could feel her monitoring lines tighten slightly. Because the conversation just now looked like small talk, yet it was really contextual sampling. The other side was not asking for answers. It was measuring my pauses, word choices, and methods of avoidance.
I did not speak again.
Outside the window, the shredding truck slowly drove past. White scraps shifted lightly inside the carriage, like snow too weightless to matter. Once again, I thought of the twelve stones on my table, and the green tin of chocolates.
The Information Department shredded paper every day.
Yet some things had deliberately been left in places that could not be shredded.
Not because they were unimportant.
But because they were too important.
Important enough that, in order to survive, they had to bypass machines, procedures, and the entire process that taught the world how to forget.
And now, I had been matched here.
As though arranged to guard a machine that made the world forget.
I suddenly understood that career allocation and romantic allocation were, in truth, the same thing. Both placed you where you were easiest to stabilise, and easiest to manage. You thought it was suitability. In fact, it was controllability. You thought it was arrangement. In fact, it was recovery.
And standing outside Room 402, I understood clearly for the first time that I was being placed inside the quietest, and most dangerous, box of all.