The vending machine in the third-floor lounge had been broken for two weeks. Someone had taped a handwritten note to it: OUT OF ORDER. Yes, we know. I'd been standing in front of it for four minutes, not because I wanted anything inside it, but because it was the only spot on the floor where no one would walk past me and ask how I was doing.
I didn't have a good answer to that anymore.
The fluorescent light above me buzzed, flickered, held. I stared at the clouded plastic panel over the snack display. My reflection was there — vague, stretched, someone who looked approximately like me but thinner at the jaw, older around the eyes. I hadn't slept properly in days.
The fear thing had started after what happened with Marcus.
Not Marcus specifically. He was fine. He'd made his choice; the consequences had landed on him cleanly and he hadn't blamed me, which was almost worse than if he had. But watching someone absorb something I'd set in motion — watching a real, specific person pay a cost I'd calculated as acceptable — had done something to my thinking.
I used to say I'm scared of what the system might do. That was the clean version. The abstract version.
But standing in front of the broken vending machine, at eleven PM, in a building that smelled like recycled air and old carpet, I realized the sentence had shifted on me.
I wasn't scared of the system anymore.
I was scared of what I might do with it.
Claire found me there.
She didn't ask what I was looking at. She stood next to me, looked at the same clouded panel, and said, "That note's been there since the fourteenth."
"I know."
"Did you eat?"
"Earlier."
She didn't push it. That was the thing about Claire — she had a way of letting silence sit without turning it into pressure. Most people filled silence because they were uncomfortable with it. She filled it only when she had something to say.
I turned away from the vending machine. The hallway was empty in both directions. A door was propped open at the far end; someone's music leaked out, faint and tinny.
"I think I'm scared of myself," I said.
It came out more plainly than I intended. No lead-up, no framing. I'd been turning it over for hours and when I finally said it out loud it sounded like a fact.
Claire didn't react immediately. She looked at me — not startled, more like she'd been waiting for me to catch up to something she'd already seen.
"When did that start?" she asked.
"After Marcus."
She nodded slowly. "Because of how you reasoned through it? Or because of how easy the reasoning was?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
Both. It was both, and I hadn't separated them until she put the question that way. The reasoning hadn't been hard. That was the part that sat wrong. I'd moved through the cost-benefit calculation like it was a homework problem — here's the variable, here's the acceptable loss, here's the action. Clean. Quick. Confident.
And Marcus had a bruised collarbone and two fractured assumptions about how the world worked, and I'd moved on to the next thing before he'd finished processing it.
"I don't want to be someone who's good at that," I said.
"Good at which part?"
"The math."
She was quiet. The music down the hall shifted to something slower.
"You're not, though," she said finally. "Good at it. You're scared of yourself — which means you're still paying attention. People who are actually good at the math stop noticing the cost."
I didn't know if that was true. I wanted it to be.
"That's a very generous interpretation."
"It's not generous. It's just accurate."
She wasn't looking at me when she said it. She was looking at the vending machine, like she was addressing my reflection in the plastic.
SYSTEM NOTICE
Fear response detected.
Useful stress level: elevated.
Threshold proximity: +12%.
I read it. Didn't react.
Useful stress. As if the fear was fine as long as it was productive. As if the thing I was scared of was just fuel the system hadn't processed yet.
I put my phone away.
Claire glanced at me. She'd seen me check it.
"Anything useful?" she asked, dry.
"Apparently I'm twelve percent closer to something."
"To what?"
"It didn't say."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh — short, involuntary, quickly suppressed. The most unguarded thing I'd seen from her in weeks.
We stood there a little longer than we needed to. Not touching. Close enough that I could hear her breathe. The broken vending machine hummed faintly behind its handwritten sign, still pretending to be almost operational.
"I'm glad you said it," she said. "The scared part."
"Why?"
"Because it means you're not going to just decide to stop being scared. You're going to stay in it."
I didn't answer. She was right — I'd spent the last three hours looking for an exit from the feeling, and she'd just told me the exit was the problem.
She pushed off from the wall and started down the hallway.
"Get some sleep," she said, without turning around.
I watched her go.
Then the system notified me again.
SYSTEM NOTICE
Proximity event logged.
No activation threshold breached.
New incentive tier unlocked: [CLOSENESS — NON-CONTACT].
Details: pending review.
Non-contact.
It had a tab for that now.
I stood in the empty hallway for a long time after that, listening to someone's music drift through a propped-open door, and tried to figure out when standing next to someone in a quiet hallway had become something the system needed to track.