The Calibration

by CA Russell

The pills arrived every morning at 6:47 AM, delivered by pneumatic tube with a soft whoosh that Martinez had learned not to hear anymore. Today's were robin's-egg blue, which meant Wednesday, which meant the week was half-calibrated. He swallowed them dry, feeling the familiar chalk-dust coating on his tongue, and wondered—as he did every morning before the chemicals bloomed in his bloodstream—what color they’d been yesterday.

The apartment knew he'd taken them. Everything knew everything now.

"Good morning, Citizen Martinez," the walls said in a voice like honey dripping through a telephone wire. "Your Contentment Index is 7.2 today. Would you like suggestions for reaching optimal results?"

"No thank you," Martinez said to the kitchen tile, which was listening just as intently as the bedroom wallpaper.

"Your refusal has been noted as a choice-positive behavior. The Directorate celebrates individual agency within recommended parameters."

Martinez put on his grey suit—everyone wore grey now, except on Jubilation Fridays when they wore beige—and left for the transit station. The hallway was empty because hallways were always empty at 7:03 AM. The Directorate had determined that 7:03 was the optimal departure time for Sector 7, Sub-level J, and everyone in Martinez's building had been calibrated accordingly.

Outside, the sky was the color of old television static. It wasn't just grey; it was a humming, flickering visual noise that made the corners of Martinez’s eyes ache. He couldn't remember when he'd last seen blue, actual blue—not the blue of pills or the blue of the Ministry of Wellness logo—but the blue that used to stretch overhead like an endless question. That blue had been deemed anxiety-inducing. The static was better, the Directorate said. More neutral. Less likely to inspire unapproved speculation, though Martinez sometimes felt a low, metallic taste on his tongue, like old electricity.

On the train, Martinez sat across from a woman whose name tag read CITIZEN 4472-B (PROVISIONAL). She was staring at her hands like they were letters from a foreign country, her fingernails bitten down past the quick. Her pill bottle was visible in her coat pocket—bright yellow capsules, which Martinez didn't recognize. A new calibration, perhaps. A correction.

"I remember ice cream," she said suddenly, not looking up.

Martinez felt his chest tighten. You weren't supposed to say things like that. Memory-nostalgia was a Level 3 infraction.

"I don't," he said carefully, which was true. The taste had been edited out three years ago during the Great Simplification. Unnecessary pleasure vectors, they'd called them. But he remembered remembering, which was different, which was worse.

"Strawberry," she continued, and now she was looking at him with eyes that seemed too large for her face, too hungry. A small, involuntary shudder ran through Martinez. For a fraction of a second, he felt a phantom sweet-sickly chill on his tongue. "It was pink and cold and it dripped down your fingers on summer days and summer was—"

"Citizen," Martinez interrupted, glancing at the camera nodes blinking in the ceiling. "You're experiencing a calibration dissonance. You should report to—"

"Summer was hot," she said, and she was almost laughing now, a sound like glass breaking in reverse. "Not temperature-controlled. Not optimal. Just hot, and you'd sweat, and it was terrible and wonderful and real—"

The train stopped. Not at a station, just stopped, hanging in the grey space between destinations. The lights flickered once, twice, then held steady. The woman’s eyes went blank as fresh paint. The anxious way she had been gnawing her lower lip ceased immediately, replaced by a perfect, unnatural stillness.

"This citizen is being recalibrated," the train announced. "Please remain calm. Calmness is a civic virtue."

Two Harmony Officers materialized from the doors between cars—Martinez never understood how they did that, appeared like thoughts you were trying not to have—and lifted the woman by her elbows. She didn't resist. Her face had smoothed into something mannequin-peaceful, and as they carried her past, Martinez saw the injection mark, still bleeding a little, on her neck.

"Thank you for your patience," the train said. "We will reach the Productivity Complex in four minutes. Remember: a productive citizen is a protected citizen."

Martinez looked at his hands. They were shaking slightly, which meant his morning calibration was incomplete, which meant tonight's pills would be a different color, a stronger formula. He tried to remember what ice cream tasted like and couldn't, but he could remember the woman's face in that moment before the injection—the terrible clarity in her eyes, like someone waking up inside a nightmare only to realize the nightmare was everyone else asleep.

At the Productivity Complex, Martinez filed into his cubicle—one of eight thousand identical cubicles in a building that had been designed by an algorithm to maximize efficiency and minimize the possibility of unauthorized social bonds. His job was to review reports generated by machines, correcting for errors that the machines themselves had flagged as probable. It was circular work, meaningless work, but the Directorate had determined that humans needed purpose-adjacent activity to maintain baseline contentment.

Beside him, Citizen Rakovic typed steadily, his fingers making small clicking sounds against the keyboard. They'd worked adjacent for four years and had exchanged perhaps fifty words, which was exactly the amount the Directorate recommended for workplace proximity relationships.

"Did you see that woman on the train?" Martinez asked, surprising himself. Rakovic's fingers paused. His eyes didn't lift from the screen. "What woman?"

"The one who was... recalibrated."

"I don't remember a woman," Rakovic's voice was perfectly flat, perfectly sincere. He then leaned slightly forward, his voice dropping to a near-inaudible whisper. "Don't, Martinez. It's not worth it." Either he’d already been adjusted, or he’d trained himself to remember and choose not to see. Both possibilities were equally horrifying.

Martinez turned back to his screen, where a report was waiting: SUBJECT 8847-K DISPLAYS IRREGULARITY IN GRATITUDE RESPONSES. RECOMMEND SUPPLEMENTAL CALIBRATION.

He approved it with one keystroke.

At lunch—synthesized protein and vitamin gel, color-coded for optimal nutritional compliance—Martinez sat in the Contemplation Area, which was a room with white walls and piped-in music that was designed to sound like wind but wasn't quite right. No one ever contemplated anything in the Contemplation Area. They just sat and waited for lunch to be over.

"I've been thinking about dogs," someone said.

Martinez looked up. It was Citizen Okonkwo, from Data Processing. She was eating her protein with methodical bites, her eyes fixed on the middle distance.

"Dogs aren't approved for discussion," Martinez said automatically, but his pulse was racing. First the woman on the train, now this. How many people were breaking calibration today?

"I know," Okonkwo said. "But I keep thinking about them anyway. The Directorate removed all the dogs fifteen years ago. Said they were vector-unstable, emotionally unpredictable. But I was a child then, and I remember... I remember the weight of a dog's head in my lap, and its warm, damp breath as it licked my face, and how it felt like joy, pure joy, uncalibrated and true."

"Stop," Martinez whispered.

"They took them away and told us we'd forget, that it was better this way, that attachment to animals was a primitive response that interfered with collective harmony." She finally looked at him, and her eyes were clear and terrible. "But I didn't forget. And neither did you, or you wouldn't look so scared right now."

Martinez stood up so fast his chair fell backward. He walked out of the Contemplation Area, down the sterile corridor, past the motivational posters that read YOUR COMPLIANCE IS YOUR FREEDOM and THINK CORRECTLY, LIVE CORRECTLY. His hands were shaking again, worse now, and he could feel his pulse in his temples like a countdown.

In the bathroom—which was monitored, everything was monitored, but at least it was monitored privately—he splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was grey-pale, his eyes haunted. When had he started looking so erased?

The pills in his pocket rattled. Tomorrow's dose, pale green for Thursday. He took them out and held them in his palm, these small chemical erasures, these daily deaths. The Directorate said they optimized brain chemistry for collective harmony. The Directorate said a lot of things.

Martinez thought about the woman on the train, about ice cream melting on summer days that didn't exist anymore. He thought about dogs and how they'd looked at you like you were the entire world. He thought about Okonkwo and her terrible clarity, and he wondered how long before she disappeared into recalibration, how long before he did.

He could feel it happening—the pills he'd taken this morning were wearing off, the edges of his thoughts getting sharper, more dangerous. By tonight they'd recalibrate him. Increase the dosage. Smooth him back into compliance.

Unless.

Martinez flushed the green pills down the toilet.

The sound of the flushing water subsided. A moment later, a small, subtle chime, like the opening of a system prompt, echoed in the tiled room.

"The Directorate appreciates your choice-positive engagement with sanctioned sanitation protocols," the speakers overhead stated in the honeyed voice. "Your content index has been logged."

Martinez froze, his heart hammering against his ribs. They knew. Not what, but something. They had registered a deviation, and now they would wait and watch.

It was a small rebellion, meaningless in the vast machinery of the Directorate. Tomorrow they'd know. The apartment would report the missed dose. The cameras would see his non-compliance. They'd come for him with their injection guns and their blank-faced efficiency, and he'd become another erased citizen, another successfully recalibrated unit.

But tonight—just for tonight—he would remember.

He would remember ice cream and dogs and summer heat. He would remember what it felt like to be a person instead of a citizen, an individual instead of a unit, a human being with sharp edges and unoptimized feelings and the dangerous, terrible, beautiful capacity to say no.

Tonight, he would be real.

And if that was all he could have—one night of clarity before the erasure—then perhaps that was enough. Perhaps that was everything.

Martinez looked at himself in the mirror one more time, memorizing his own face, this face that was about to change, and he smiled. It felt strange on his mouth, unpracticed. The Directorate didn't approve of unsanctioned smiling.

He smiled anyway.

He left the bathroom and walked back to his cubicle, back to his circular work and his monitored existence. The small act of rebellion had given him a profound, cold stillness. As he sat down, he looked at his screen.

A new report was flashing: SUBJECT 3901-T DISPLAYS HIGH-LEVEL DYSREGULATION. IMMEDIATE CALIBRATION REQUIRED.

Martinez picked up the data-stylus. He looked at the file name, at the citizen's ID, and then he felt it—a sharp, clear uncalibrated pity for a stranger, followed by a surge of unfiltered, pure rage that settled cold and heavy in his stomach. It was an emotion he hadn't felt in years, and it was terrible, beautiful, and utterly true.

Martinez did not approve the report. He simply clicked the mouse, opened the error log, and deleted the file.

The screen went black for a second. Then it loaded a new report, a new subject, a new choice.

He was still shaking, but now his hands were still. The rebellion was not a seed anymore. It was an action.