Chapter 4: Letters from a Dead Man

The correspondence had begun, as most of mine with Marcus Vell did, with something he technically didn't need to say.

He'd sent the first message eleven days into his induction — a Thursday, I remember, because I was in the middle of an argument with FRIDAY about whether the crossword I'd been doing was classified as recreational or productivity-adjacent for the purposes of the building's ambient wellness metrics, which are a real thing and a source of ongoing private irritation. The email arrived while FRIDAY was explaining, with the patience of a system that has never been wrong about anything, that sitting still and thinking did not constitute exercise.

The subject line was: *On the persistence of physical evidence in institutions that prefer not to find it.*