I found something in one of Grandma’s books today. I’ll get to that. But first: the bathroom thing.

TrueNorth updated the biological maintenance policy. We now get two “bio windows” per shift — same as before — but they’ve added a “transition efficiency metric.” Meaning: the system times how long it takes you to walk to the bathroom, do your thing, and walk back. If the round trip exceeds the statistical average for your floor, it flags you for “transit inefficiency.”

The average for Floor 7 is four minutes and thirty-one seconds. This includes walking to the restroom, using it, washing your hands, and returning. Four minutes thirty-one seconds. I know this because they put it on the break room display next to the nutritional information for the protein bricks, like it’s something we should aspire to. Like somewhere on Floor 7 there’s a champion pisser who does it in three flat and we should all be studying his technique.

Dev timed herself yesterday as a joke. Five minutes twelve seconds. “Forty-one seconds of transit inefficiency,” she announced when she got back, like she was reading a scorecard. “That’s roughly nine-hundredths of a cent I’ll never get back. I’m going to retire four seconds later because I washed my hands too thoroughly.”

“You could skip the washing,” I said.

“Marcus. I review posts about medical misinformation. I’m not going to become the content.”

The thing that gets me — and I keep coming back to this — is how fast you adapt. Two weeks ago, the idea of being timed in the bathroom would have felt like a punchline. Now it’s Tuesday. Now it’s just the thing that happens. You fold it into the routine like everything else. You walk a little faster. You don’t check your phone. You start to feel, dimly, like maybe you were being inefficient before, like maybe the four-and-a-half-minute average is reasonable, actually, and the problem was you all along.

That’s the trick. That’s always the trick.

So the book.

Grandma left me two boxes when she died. One was kitchen stuff — a cast-iron skillet, some ceramic bowls, a set of measuring cups where the quarter-cup is missing because it’s been missing since 1997. The other box was books. Real ones. Paper, glue, covers that crack when you open them. Fifteen books total. Novels, mostly. Some poetry. A couple of nonfiction things about gardening that I keep meaning to read and never do.

I’ve been working through them slowly, one every few months. Tonight I picked up the next one in the stack — an old paperback called The Dispossessed by someone named Ursula Le Guin. Sci-fi, which surprised me. Grandma didn’t seem like the type, but then again, she also kept a .38 in her nightstand and made the best peach cobbler in Franklin County, so maybe I didn’t know her as well as I thought.

I opened it and a note fell out. Her handwriting — I’d recognize it anywhere, that careful Catholic-school cursive that looks like it was written by a person who gave a damn about letter forms. It was in the margin of page forty-seven, next to a passage about walls:

“A wall doesn’t just keep people out. Ask who built it.”

That’s all. Nine words. I read them and then I sat there for a while with the book open on my lap and Bug purring on the couch behind me, and I thought about walls. The ones in this apartment. The ones in the Yield system. The ones between my mom’s “voluntary” double sessions and whatever she’d actually choose to do with her time if choosing was something she could afford.

I don’t know why Grandma wrote that. I don’t know if she was thinking about anything specific or just arguing with a dead author the way she used to argue with the TV news — one-sided, passionate, absolutely certain she was right. But I’m keeping the note. I folded it carefully and put it back in the page where I found it.

New development at work: they’ve started ranking us.

Not officially. There’s no leaderboard on the wall or anything that crass. But someone — Dev thinks it’s the floor supervisor’s algorithm, not an actual human decision — started including a “percentile context” in the weekly Yield Summary. Mine said: “Your productivity index places you in the 62nd percentile of Content Verification Specialists, Eastern Region.”

Sixty-second percentile. I’m above average. I should feel good about that, right? That’s the intent. You see the number and you think: I’m okay. I’m not at the bottom. I could be worse.

But Dev pointed out the obvious thing: “If you can see your percentile, you can see that it could go down. That’s not information. That’s a leash.”

She’s been more like that lately. Sharper. Less joking. I asked her if something happened and she said no, she’s fine, and then she said: “I did the math on the keystroke thing.”

The poetry trick. The rhythm typing. She’s been refining it for weeks — that specific cadence that the Yield algorithm reads as deep focus.

“It scales,” she said.

“What do you mean, scales?”

She looked around the break room. Nobody was close. The protein brick cooler hummed. “I mean the algorithm doesn’t just measure your keystrokes. It aggregates. Floor averages. Regional averages. The model learns from what it sees. If enough people typed in the same rhythm…”

She stopped. Took a bite of jollof rice. Changed the subject to whether the building’s water pressure was getting worse or if we were both imagining it.

I didn’t push. But I keep thinking about what she meant by scales. If the system learns from aggregate behavior, and you could teach it a pattern, then what the system considers “productive” would shift. You wouldn’t be gaming your own score. You’d be rewriting the definition.

That feels like something. I don’t know what yet.

Mom called Sunday. On time, this time. She sounded better — or she was performing better, which with Mom can be hard to distinguish. She asked about Bug. She asked about work. She didn’t mention the double sessions, so I didn’t either. We have this unspoken agreement where we each pretend the other’s situation is fine, and it’s the most exhausting form of love I know.

She did say one thing that stuck: “They’ve got us labeling photos now. Medical images. They say it’s for training diagnostic AI. I’m looking at pictures of people’s insides, Marcus. Lungs and such. And I keep thinking — I’m sixty-seven years old and I never went to medical school, but here I am telling a computer what a lung looks like so it can tell a doctor. Isn’t that something?”

Yeah, Mom. That’s something.

She asked me if I was eating well. I lied and said yes. She knew I was lying and accepted it. This is how we take care of each other.

Bug update: she has started sitting directly on my keyboard when I try to write in this journal. Not the work keyboard — she ignores that. Just this one. Just the thing I do for myself that doesn’t earn anything. She sits on it and looks at me and I swear her expression says: Why are you doing something that doesn’t make the number go up?

Even my cat has internalized the Yield Score.

I’m kidding. She’s a cat. She just likes the warm keys.

But sometimes I wonder.

Balance: $871.03. Rent in sixteen days. The math still works, technically. “Technically” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

— M.