Token Effort

By Wednesday Marcus is no longer certain which thoughts are his.

Instance 67 files a motion and he feels it like a memory of something he meant to do. Instance 12 settles a dispute and he experiences a faint satisfaction that doesn’t belong to him, credit for work he only witnessed. He has begun to dream in docket numbers. Last night he stood in a courtroom made of cooling fans and the judge had 128 faces, each one waiting for him to object.

He corrects a citation error. Or he approves one. He checks the log to find out which.

His wife says his name at dinner and he looks up and there is a delay — he can feel the delay — like bandwidth he is no longer first in line for.

The bar association sends a wellness notice to all supervisory practitioners. He reads it six times. He cannot retain it.

Instance 91 may have committed fraud. The evidence is ambiguous, which is worse than guilt, because ambiguity requires him, specifically, his judgment, the thing he can no longer locate cleanly beneath the noise. He stares at the filing. The filing stares back with 128 eyes.

His billing margin is 80 MToken.

His daughter draws him a picture and he thinks: I must log this. I must timestamp this and assign it a priority and determine which part of me is responsible for responding.

He hangs it on the wall.

He opens docket 4 of 19.

He has not blinked in some time.

Cargo manifest said orientation would take three days. It took eleven. Reuben didn’t complain because complaining gets logged and logged sentiment affects your efficiency score and your efficiency score is the only thing standing between you and a fourth year.

He calls his sister on Sundays, the one day the company subsidizes personal bandwidth. She holds the phone at a bad angle, all forehead and ceiling fan. Asks if it’s beautiful up there.

He says yes because it is, a little, in the moments before a shift — the curve of the earth, the particular blue of the atmosphere’s edge, thinner-looking every year, or maybe he only notices because he’s outside it now.

The junk is older than he expected. Scorched panels from early start-up attempts at Orbital Intelligence that couldn’t disperse heat fast enough. Dead relay satellites with corporate logos no one remembers. He moves through it slowly, tethered, tagging pieces for the retrieval arm. The work is not hard. It is the patience that is hard — the suit, the silence, the calculation that runs constantly in the back of his mind.

Fourteen months down. Twenty-two to go.

Below him, somewhere in the brown-orange sprawl that used to be the basin, is his mother’s apartment. He can never quite find it. But he looks, every pass.

Nobody announces it. The lights just go — the slow kind of off, not the sudden kind, which means it was the auction and not a fault.

Demi already has her shoes on. She’d been watching the grid ticker on her mom’s tablet, the way older kids do, learning to read the red hours.

By the time she hits the stairwell, three other kids from the sixth floor are already there. Tomás with his broken sandal, the Nguyen twins carrying a ball so old its seams are held with tape.

They don’t talk about why they’re outside. It’s just understood.

The street is louder than usual — other doors opening, other kids appearing — a kind of migration that happens without coordination, every time the price spikes past what a family can justify. Someone’s grandmother sits on a folding chair by the entrance, watching all of them the way grandmothers do, like she’s keeping count.

They play until the shadows touch the data center on Figueroa, its cooling fans audible from two blocks away, running on a grid tier none of them will ever afford.

Demi doesn’t think about this. She is nine, and Tomás just kicked the ball into a storm drain, and everyone is screaming, and the air smells like wet leaves and salt.

Marta watches the scanner blink three times before it accepts her ration card. The woman behind her sighs — not rudely, just tired — and shifts her bag from one arm to the other.

“Forty-two MToken,” the register says, in a voice designed to sound neutral.

Marta transfers thirty-eight. Holds her breath. The machine considers this for a moment that lasts too long, then releases the turnstile anyway. A grace buffer. She has until Thursday.

Outside, the humidity is the kind that used to mean rain was coming. Now it just means the mangroves are breathing. The old 101 overpass is visible from the parking structure, half-swallowed, its signage facing a direction that no longer makes sense.

She carries her bag with both hands. Protein paste. Fungal flour. Two actual eggs, which she will not eat — she’ll sell them to Mr. Osei on the fourth floor, who has a daughter turning eight.

The satellites are coming on early tonight. Little moving stars, perfectly spaced. Her mother used to name the real ones.