Gatekeepers Short: The Agency, Part 2

Note: This story is a continuation of a larger series. Here is the complete list of sections.

Steve ran back to Crumb, frantically pushing people and tables in his way to the side. He stormed into the office, yelling his question at his superior. “Crumb! What the hell is this?!”

Crumb failed to look up, as if he couldn’t hear Steve yelling at him. Eventually, Steve knocked with mocking politeness on the door frame to grab his attention.

“Yes, Mr. Lyon? Was there something else?”

“This… Auto-Correct System… does it apply to only emails? Or… can it affect other things?”

Crumb furrowed his brow as he looked through Lyon, momentarily confused at the question. “Lyon… the System wasn’t made by our company.”

Crumb stood up and walked to peer out the window of his corner office. “Everything and anything is under the System… your entire life is safe guarded by it.”

Steve was dumbfounded. “What… what do you mean?”

“I mean our society is incapable of making mistakes. It’s why we allow those who are not yet even teenagers, like yourself, to hold jobs, and why we never have any murders or crime… people are unable to commit atrocities. The System corrects them. In real time.”

Steve grew more erratic. “But I’m not committing atrocities. I’m just trying to… be myself! I want my words to be heard as they are spoken, not run through a filter! I don’t care if it just fixes my mistakes, but that’s not all it’s doing!”

Crumb frowned as he turned back to Lyon, who realized even those words had likely been mangled and restructured as he was growing more frantic. “Lyon, I’m not sure I understand what you want from me, but if you are interested in suggesting changes to the Auto-Correct System, then you can go speak with its maintainers at the Agency. I’m not sure if they will listen to anything you say, though. Like I said, the System has been running at near perfection for a long time, so there is very little room for improvement.”

Steve was speechless. Earlier that day he was wondering what he would get for lunch. But he remembered several times when going to the cafeteria only to find they had sold out of what he had planned to get, so he would pick something else that was available. Now he realized even that part of his life had likely already been decided for him, by an entirely hidden system. “Mr. Crumb… I need to take the rest of the day off.”

Crumb nodded almost dismissively. “Not a problem. Take all the time you need.”

Steve walked back to his home, head spinning at how easily he had gotten time off. He had never asked before, but he thought it required a formal request being submitted ahead of time, not simply given whenever asked for. But if the system could correct all his mistakes without skipping a beat, it only stood to reason that it could simply do his job for him. Why did they even need him to do his job then? What was the point to any of it?

As Steve got to his plain white house on the side of the pristinely clean street, he was greeted by a horrendous sight. The entire building was in flames.

He tried to rush in, but with the overwhelming heat of the flames he couldn’t even get within the doorway. He could only watch as his home burned to the ground, everything he had ever owned inside. No firefighters showed up, even passers by didn’t even look at the raging inferno. After all that remained was ashes, Steve walked into the midst. It was all gone. Then, the pile of ashes faded away.

Steve stood in his living room. His largely unfurnished kitchen was in perfect order, and the few other pieces of furniture he did own were in their usual spots. The clutter of his other belongings sat where he remembered them being before the fire. Everything was back to normal. He looked around more, seeing if anything was different or damaged. But nothing was; it was as if his house had never burned down at all.

“It seems your house was a victim of one of our rare glitches. Or it may have been you were targeted for immediate removal. Hard to say at this point, really.” A man wearing a black suit with a white shirt and somehow an even blacker tie stood in the doorway, looking ominously at Lyon through his reflective glasses. His head was shaved, and his whole appearance gave off an air of stoic authority. “I’ve been informed you left your job without proper notice today. That is why I’m here. Is there something troubling you, Mr. Lyon?”

Steve backed away from the mysterious man slowly. “N… no… I’m fine… I just… I need to go. Now.”

Steve frantically ran past the man, who he easily pushed to the side as he ran like he was made of nothing. He ran as fast and as far as he could, out of the city and into the country. He stopped when he ran out of energy, breathing heavily. After he caught his breath, he looked up to see he was not in the country. He was standing in a gray windowless room with two chairs on either side of a metal table, one occupied by the man who had greeted him at his previously destroyed home.

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