Someone on my floor got evicted today.

Not Tim/Tom — he’s still here, still checking his display every few seconds like a tic he can’t shake. This was a woman named Priya from the other end of the hall. I didn’t know her well. She worked remotely, something with data pipeline auditing, and she kept to herself. I’d see her in the elevator sometimes. She had a nice smile and a reusable coffee thermos with a sticker on it that said LEGACY CODE IS JUST CODE THAT WORKS.

I came home from work and there was a Reggie notification on the building display:

“Unit 7F has been transitioned to Available status as of 14:32 EST. We thank the previous resident for their tenancy and wish them well in their next chapter! Interested in upgrading? Current residents receive a 2% Yield-loyalty discount on larger units. Ask me how!”

Transitioned to Available status. That’s how you say “evicted” when you’re an algorithm with a customer satisfaction score to maintain. I asked around — Jorge from 7B said Priya’s Yield Score had been declining for three weeks. Not crashing, just… drifting down. A slow leak. She’d been flagged for “sustained underperformance relative to unit-tier expectations,” which is Reggie-speak for: you can’t afford to live here anymore, and we both know it, but I’m going to let the math do the talking.

Three weeks. That’s all the runway you get. Three weeks of sliding and the system doesn’t warn you, doesn’t offer a plan, doesn’t say hey, you seem to be struggling, is everything okay. It just watches the number and when the number crosses a line that no one will show you, it processes the transition.

Jorge said she was carrying boxes to a car at noon. No moving truck. Just a sedan and whatever she could fit. He offered to help. She said no thanks. She had the thermos in one hand.

I keep thinking about the sticker. Legacy code is just code that works. Legacy people are just people who worked. Past tense.

Dev wasn’t at her desk today. Wasn’t at lunch, either. I ate my protein brick alone, which is the correct way to experience a protein brick — in silence, without witnesses, like a crime. She messaged me around two:

“Working from home. Score’s fine. Just needed a day.”

I didn’t ask why. Everybody needs a day. The problem is that “a day” costs you roughly eight hours of streaming wage you’ll never recoup, and your Yield Score takes a hit from the gap in productivity data, and the algorithm doesn’t understand “needed a day” as a concept. The algorithm understands input and absence. That’s the full emotional vocabulary.

But Dev’s smart about it. She’s probably at home running her keystroke rhythm on a personal terminal, feeding the system her poetry cadence while she does whatever she actually needs to do. I hope she’s okay. I hope the jollof rice aunt made extra this week.

Mom called Sunday. On time, which I was grateful for. But the call was strange.

She started normal — asked about Bug, asked about work, told me about the garden some residents are trying to maintain on the facility roof. “They let us have thirty minutes up there twice a week,” she said. “Supervised, of course. They’re worried we’ll waste productive time talking to tomatoes.”

She laughed at that. I laughed too. Then she went quiet for a second and said:

“They’re doing assessments, Marcus.”

“What kind of assessments?”

“Productivity-correlated wellness evaluations. That’s what the email said. They bring you in, ask you questions, test your reaction times, your visual acuity, your typing speed. Then they give you a score and the score determines your tier.”

“Tier of what?”

“Services. Medical, meals, room assignment. It’s all tiered now. Tier 1 gets the good doctor — the human one — and the single rooms and the fresh meals. Tier 3 gets the AI clinic and the shared rooms and whatever the nutritional equivalent of your protein bricks is.”

“Mom, what tier are you?”

Pause. Long enough that I heard the building’s ventilation system cycling through its evening mode.

“Two,” she said. “For now. But my typing speed is going down, Marcus. My hands aren’t what they were. And the visual acuity —” She stopped. Started again. “I’m sixty-seven. My eyes are sixty-seven. They’re not going to get faster.”

I sat there with the phone pressed to my ear and Bug on my lap and I felt something that I’ve been working very hard not to feel, which is rage. Not the hot, useful kind. The cold kind. The kind that settles into your chest like concrete and stays there and doesn’t do anything except make it hard to breathe.

My mother. Who raised me alone after Dad got automated out and spent two years just sitting in the living room staring at job boards that had nothing for a man whose hands knew machines that no longer existed. Who worked three jobs during the transition years. Who read to me every night from books she was too tired to enjoy herself. Who is now, at sixty-seven, being tiered based on how fast her aging fingers can label pictures of other people’s lungs.

“I’ll figure something out,” I said.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” she said, which is what she says when she knows I don’t have a plan.

“I won’t.”

“Marcus.”

“I won’t, Mom.”

Bug purred. The balance ticked. The call ended. I sat in the dark for a while.

Something weird happened after.

I have an encrypted notes file on my personal tablet — separate from this journal, separate from work. I use it for grocery lists, random thoughts, things I don’t want the Lenses parsing. It’s behind a passphrase and a VPN that Dev helped me set up, which probably isn’t as secure as I think it is but it’s something.

When I opened it last night, there was a new entry. Not mine. Timestamped 23:47, while I was asleep.

It said:

“Your Yield Score is a variable, not a constant. The function that defines it has parameters. Some of those parameters are accessible. If you want to know which ones, leave this file open on a Tuesday.”

That’s it. No signature. No return address. No explanation for how someone got inside my encrypted, VPN-protected, passphrase-locked notes file to leave me what reads like a fortune cookie written by a computer science textbook.

My first instinct: delete it. Close the file, change the passphrase, tell Dev, run a sweep.

My second instinct: leave it.

I went back and forth. Bug watched me from the Lenses case — her warm spot, her throne — and I swear she tilted her head like she had an opinion. I stared at the message. I thought about Priya carrying boxes to her sedan. I thought about Mom’s hands slowing down. I thought about Tim/Tom checking his display. I thought about Dev needing a day.

I thought about the function that defines my life having parameters that someone, somewhere, set. And the idea that some of those parameters might be accessible.

It’s Tuesday tomorrow.

I left the file open.

Probably stupid. Definitely stupid. But “don’t do anything stupid” is advice for people whose systems are working, and I’m starting to wonder whose system this is, exactly, and whether it was ever meant to work for people like me at all.

Balance: $811.40. Rent in eight days. The math works if I skip lunches.

The math always works if you’re willing to subtract enough of yourself.

— M.