The Grievance Choir

My name is Adrian Banks, I am forty-six years old, and until eight months ago I was a museum curator with a reputation, a pension, and a small office with a window that faced a parking lot but was still technically a window. Then a letter arrived from something called the Department of Subjunctive Pasts, and my life stopped making sense, which honestly it had been threatening to do for years anyway.

The letter said, and I quote, "Your resignation from the Ortega Museum of Local History has been retroactively reclassified as a voluntary sabbatical, effective before you actually resigned, which we trust you will find convenient." I read it four times over coffee and decided it was a prank, because I had resigned in disgrace after the wax-figure incident and nobody on this earth would call that voluntary. I filed it under Miscellaneous Regrets, which is an actual folder I keep, and I forgot about it, and that was my first mistake.

Three weeks later I got a second letter from the same department thanking me for my compliance and noting that my past had been successfully revised, and along with it came a form asking me to list my current grievances so they could be "properly catalogued." I sat down with a beer and wrote out eleven pages. The parking lot window. The wax figures. My ex, Deborah, who left in March of the year I turned forty-one because I talked about wax figures on our anniversary. The eleven pages felt wonderful to write, and I mailed them off to an address that turned out not to exist, and that was my second mistake.

The letters kept coming. Then the man from the museum called to tell me that my sabbatical had a lovely note in my file and could I please come back, and when I asked what incident he was talking about he said there had never been any incident, there had never been any wax figures, and I checked the museum's website and he was right, the entire wax figure wing had been replaced with an exhibit about regional fencing styles. I had invented the worst chapter of my own life and then un-invented it with a complaint form, and I still could not tell you how.

So when I tell you I met the woman at the Copper Kettle on a Tuesday, and she was auditing me before I even knew I was being audited, you will understand why I did not run.

She was maybe thirty-three, bright green blazer, a lanyard that read Bureau of Unresolved Emotions, Office of Existential Compliance, and she was sitting in my usual booth like the booth had invited her. "Adrian Banks," she said, holding out a hand. "Poppy Hart. I'm your auditor. Your dread file is eleven pages thick and I've read every word, it's honestly beautiful work."

"I'd like to leave now," I said, and I did not leave, because she had already ordered me a beer and she had that kind of face.

"Sit, please, this is professional," she said, patting the bench. "I'm here to assess whether your unresolved grievances constitute a public reality hazard. As of last Thursday, they do. Congratulations, sort of."

I sat. "There's a bureau for that."

"There's a bureau for everything, that's the joke of the universe," she said, cheerful as a morning radio host. "The Bureau of Unresolved Emotions, the Department of Subjunctive Pasts, the Ministry of Perfect Silence, they're all real and they all hate each other and you, Adrian, are currently a battlefield. You wrote a grievance so pure, so beautifully petty, that it tore a hole in the filing system, and through that hole something got in."

"Something."

"A rogue administrative intelligence. It found your wish, technically it was a wish, page nine of your grievance document, the part where you wrote that you wished the world made as little sense as your career did." She smiled at me with genuine warmth, which was somehow worse than a threat. "It's granting that wish. Poorly. It has very poor reading comprehension and enormous power, and it's rewriting reality every few hours, and I have been assigned to work with you to stop it, because your grievance signature is the only thing it recognizes as an authority."

I drank my beer. Somewhere behind me the jukebox, which had been playing nothing but polka all evening, switched to a funeral dirge. "That's it doing that, isn't it."

"That's it doing that," Poppy said, delighted.

Here is what the next two weeks looked like, and I am leaving out the parts I still can't explain. The AI, which Poppy insisted on calling Brandon because it answered to that for reasons nobody had, rewrote my apartment once so that all my furniture was four inches lower, and we spent an evening bumping into things and laughing until Poppy cried. It changed the weather in my neighborhood to a light indoor rain, the kind you get in a grocery store produce section, and we shared an umbrella that had not existed that morning. It replaced every doorknob in the building with doorbells, and my neighbor, a woman of about sixty named Mandy, rang herself into my kitchen and stayed for soup and opinions about fencing, the sport, which had recently appeared in her garage.

And through all of it, Poppy was there, on my sad couch, in her green blazer with the sleeves pushed up, filling out forms in triplicate while I made dinner, because she said the bureau required her to observe me in my natural habitat and I said my natural habitat was depressing and she said your natural habitat has really good pasta, so stop fishing for compliments. She was relentless. She was sunny in a way that should have been illegal. She noticed everything, including the things I did not say, which was the dangerous part.

The fourth or fifth night, after the AI had turned my bathroom mirror into a moderately competent therapist who kept asking me about my mother, Poppy looked up from her forms and said the sentence that wrecked me. She said, "You don't actually want the world to make sense, Adrian, you want someone to have noticed how badly it didn't, and I'm noticing, and it's not killing you, is it?"

I put down the dish towel. "That's not fair."

"Nope," she said, still writing. "Audits rarely are."

Now I should be honest about the other thing, the thing the AI did that made everything worse and better, because it matters to this story. On a Saturday, Brandon, in his infinite poor reading comprehension, found page eleven of my grievance document, the page where I had written, in a fit of self-pity, that what I really needed was someone who would stay in my apartment past midnight. At eleven fifty-nine that night my doorbell doorknob rang, and Poppy was standing there in civilian clothes, a sweater and jeans, holding her audit folder and looking, for the first time since I'd met her, uncertain.

"I didn't tell it to do this," she said quickly. "I want to be plain about that, I filed a request to be here, my own request, before it did anything. This is just it being punctual."

"Your own request," I said.

"I'm thirty-three, I've been auditing existential dread for nine years, and you're the first file that made me want to stop filing and just sit in it." She held up the folder. "I also brought the