ALLOCATION

The first thing Alan did every morning was check how much of him was left.

He did it before he opened his eyes, the way people in other worlds might have reached for a phone. The Window was always watching anyway, so he’d decided long ago that he might as well look back.

He blinked twice, and the Window unfolded in the dark behind his eyelids, pale blue and as courteous as a bank.

ALAN: STATUS

Allocation: 0.3 units

Compression: 91%

Class: None

Skills: None

Shift change in: 00:09:12

Point three. Same as yesterday, same as the day before, same as every morning since the System had stamped it onto him. He let out a breath that was mostly relief and a little insult.

Here’s what you need to know about a unit. One unit is a whole person: enough floor to stand on, enough air that nobody else has already breathed, enough of the world’s attention that doors open when you walk up to them. One unit gets you left alone. Most people in the Stacks would have sold a kidney for one unit, if the System still let you sell them.

Alan had thirty percent of one. The System had solved the problem of him the way it solved every problem: by squeezing.

He lay still and listened to the building. The Stacks never slept. They hummed, a low, wet, collective sound made of ventilation, pipes, and eleven thousand people trying not to breathe too loudly. Somewhere above him, a child was crying in the thin, practiced way of a child who knows crying won’t help. Somewhere below, someone was frying something that had once been an egg.

Slot 4417-B was two meters long, seventy centimeters wide, and sixty high. It was a drawer, if he was being honest, and Alan always tried to be honest, because lying took up room he didn’t have. He shared it with a stranger. Alan took the night half of the bed and the stranger took the day half, and the arrangement worked because the two of them had never once been awake in it at the same time.

The pillow was still warm. That was the only evidence she existed.

She. He wasn’t even certain of that. But the slot always smelled faintly of orange peel and machine oil when he woke, she folded the blanket in thirds, and once, years ago, he’d surfaced just as the shift horn blew and heard someone humming in the dark. It wasn’t a song, exactly. It was the shape of a song with the tune taken out, like a coat on a hook.

Rule number one of the slot: you leave before the other person arrives. Rule number two: you don’t touch their things. There was no rule number three, because there’d never been anything else to say.

He had nine minutes. He spent two of them staring at the ceiling, because that was the one luxury the Stacks hadn’t figured out how to charge for.

Alan slid out feet-first, the way you had to, and dropped into the corridor. His knees popped. A woman in the next slot pulled her curtain shut, not out of rudeness but because there was a limit to how many people a person could look at in one morning.

The Stacks went up forever and down for longer. That was the first thing outsiders never understood, assuming outsiders existed. It wasn’t a building so much as a stratum, a vertical slab of human life with ladders bolted to its face and walkways welded between its rungs. It was eleven hundred levels high, every level was packed with drawers, every drawer held a person, and every person was doing sums.

That was the thing about living at the bottom of the Allocation: you always knew your number, and you always knew everyone else’s, because the System printed it above their heads in a soft grey glow whether they wanted it to or not.

He passed a man with 0.6. A girl with 0.4, whose number flickered, which meant she was sick and hadn’t told anyone. A pair of brothers sharing a single 0.9 between them like a coat. The farther down he climbed toward Ward 9, the dimmer the numbers grew and the thicker the compression, until the walkways were so narrow that people turned sideways to pass each other and said sorry in advance, out of habit, to the air.

Nobody looked at his number. People at the bottom did that as a kindness.

He took the long ladder down, fourteen levels of it, and with every rung the air grew denser and more metallic. By Level 212 it tasted like a mouthful of pennies. His mother had lived there for six years.

“There he is,” Ruth said without looking up. “My boy, my sunshine, my late-for-everything.”

She was sitting on the edge of her drawer with a scrap of grey fabric across her lap, her needle moving in tiny, tireless stitches. Ruth had been a seamstress before the Allocation, back when people still talked about before. Now she mended whatever the Ward put in front of her, for whatever the Ward could spare. Her number floated above her head at a steady, unremarkable 0.8. A lot of people would have called that rich.

“I’m not late,” Alan said. “I’m precisely on time. The time is just very bad.”

“Mm.” She bit off a thread. “Did you eat?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying.”

“Yes.”

She laughed, and it was a real laugh, which was why he’d come. He pulled the little parcel out of his jacket, one ration brick, slightly crushed, and she unwrapped it and broke it in half with an expression that told him she knew exactly how many meals he’d skipped to carry it this far. She pressed the bigger half into his hand. He pressed it back. They did this every morning, a quiet fight with only one acceptable ending.

“Eat,” she said.

He ate. It tasted like wet cardboard that had been told a story about chicken.

They sat for a while. There was a kind of peace in her corner of the Stacks: the hum of needle and thread, the slow drip from the pipe overhead that someone had patiently trained into a bucket. Ruth told him about the neighbor who’d tried to bribe the Ward Warden with a dress and had accidentally given her the wrong size. She told him about the little girl down the row who’d learned to whistle. She told him he needed a haircut. Alan said he’d get one, which was a wildly optimistic thing to say about a haircut.

Then she looked up, smiling, and said, “Now. Your name is...”

And stopped.

It was a small stop, the kind of pause you’d miss if you weren’t watching: half a second in which her mouth stayed open and her eyes went somewhere else. It wasn’t the soft, embarrassed hunt for a word that he’d seen a hundred times when she was tired. Her face went smooth, like a lake after something has slipped beneath the surface.

“...Alan,” she finished.

She said it carefully, the way you read an unfamiliar name off a card held at arm’s length. She was right, of course. It was his name. But it didn’t sound like something she knew. It sounded like something she’d been told.

“Mom?”

“Hm?” The smile came back so quickly it was almost convincing. “Sorry, sweetheart. Long night. Too much thread, not enough sleep.” She reached up and patted his cheek, and her hand was warm, and her hand was hers, and he decided, because he was twenty-two and tired and she was his mother, that he had imagined it.

He was a very good liar. He’d had practice.

“You should rest,” he said.

“I should do a lot of things.” She picked up the needle again. “Go on. You’ll miss your shift.”

He stood. He kissed the top of her head, which smelled like soap and old wool and something underneath that he couldn’t name. He told himself it was the metal in the air.

Halfway to the ladder, he stopped.

He didn’t know why. There was no sound, no flicker, no warning. Just the feeling you get when you’re crossing a road and realize, half a second too late, that the engine noise you’ve been hearing has been growing louder.

The Window opened without being asked.

It had never done that before.

The pale blue was gone. The light flooding his vision turned the cold, clinical red of an operating room, and the same soft, courteous voice that had been telling him how small he was for twenty-two years said, quietly, inside his head:

AUDIT NOTICE:

Subject: Alan (0.3 units)

Flag: Allocation irregularity detected

Classification: Pending

Hearing in: 9 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes

Warning: Your continued existence is under audit.

Alan stood very still in the corridor, one hand on the cold rung of the ladder, while the people around him squeezed past with their little grey numbers and their sideways apologies. Below him, in the dark, he heard his mother start to hum.

It was the shape of a song, with the tune taken out.

Nine days.

He had lived his whole life at point three of everything. He’d never once stopped to wonder what happened when you ran out of decimals.