Zero Drift - Chapter 1

Chapter One Do not report to general formation. The single line of instruction broke her expectations. She had planned on fitting in. She had arrived early enough to be invisible by the time the others filled in around her within the intake hall. The hall was quieter than four hundred people should have made it. She noted this before anything else: the absence of the dull escalation she'd expected, conversations held at a register that didn't carry, people claiming space without friction or impatience. What a space communicated about the organisms in it was information; this one said these people have waited before. They knew the process would move when it moved and not before, and they were conserving something in the meantime. She ran a slow scan of the entry points without moving her head. Two doors behind the processing desks, one propped open and one sealed. The entry she'd come through, behind her and to the right. A corridor mouth at the far left that foot traffic was avoiding, which suggested either a dead end or something administrative. The propped door was the working one. She had what she needed and looked at the...