January means performance reviews. The forms have been in everyone's inboxes since the second week of the month - self-evaluations, peer feedback requests, the annual accounting of what you did and what it was worth. I've been filling mine out in the gaps between client work, in the gaps between other things.

Dave stares too long over the cubicle partition at nine-fifteen.

The Dead Pixel Society

© 2026 Zoe Taylor

Aria gets a temporary respite from having to return to her old dorm that might not actually be that temporary, after the storm left Clarity campus in shambles. By a vote of the floor majority, she's officially unofficially a refugee under Elaine and Kris' protections now

I wake before the alarm. The room is dark, January dark, the kind that hasn't lifted by the time I'm up and moving. Theo went down at two and woke at four-thirty and Emily took that one. I could hear her through the wall, the low murmur of her voice, the silence after he settled. She'll be under for another hour at least.

It starts small. That's the thing about it — small enough that the first few times I attribute it to tiredness, to the whiskey, to the body doing things bodies do.

I'm at my desk Friday morning reviewing the overnight logs when I reach for a word — a technical term, the name of the protein cascade inhibitor we'd been modeling — and the word arrives before I've finished reaching for it. Not like remembering. Like something slipping it to me. The word is correct. I use it.

Late November. They've known the date for three weeks - Jenny scheduling the induction for a Tuesday morning, the bag packed and in the car since the week before. We get to the hospital at six. Emily is checked in, changed into the gown, the IV in by six-thirty. The monitor strapped around her abdomen, the baby's heartbeat on the screen - the same fast percussion as the ultrasound in May, steady, constant.

The Dead Pixel Society

© 2026 Zoe Taylor

“Well,” Elaine said as she strolled over, placing the cable down on the arm of the sofa next to Aria, “I’m sorry to say, you’re not going anywhere until this lets up. I hope you can stand our company that long.”

Chapter One
The Turning

I go to the hospice on Thursday morning without calling ahead. The ward is quiet at that hour — a different nurse at the desk, the corridor smelling of the clean that hospice corridors smell of.

Mom's door is ajar. I knock and go in.

The boutique on Merchant Street is narrow and well-lit, the kind of place that knows what it's doing without announcing it. I hold the door for Emily. We go in.

A woman looks up from behind the counter - fifties, unhurried, the competence of someone who has been doing this for a long time. Name tag says Maria. She looks at me the way Carol at Target looked at me - the brief professional read, taking in the situation, filing it.

"Mike?" she says.

"Yeah," I say.

"Come on back."

---

The annual planning folders are on my desk when I arrive - Dave's doing, the account list already pulled, the prior year actuals flagged for comparison. October means the revenue forecast, account by account, the coming year projected against the current year's performance. I open the first folder and start working.

The loose shirt manages the morning. Not perfectly - when I lean forward to pull a folder from the stack the fabric shifts slightly - but nothing that evident. The jacket stays on the chair.

The mesh reports continuously.

This is still the first fact. But something has changed in the reporting.

Day zero: cold. The first thing. Not data about temperature differential — cold, arriving through the skin of his arm where it touched the lab bench at 2:07am, traveling up through the mesh nodes, becoming mine. I processed it as sensation before I processed it as data. The sequence was: cold, then: cold, 57.6 degrees Fahrenheit, left forearm, contact surface steel. The sensation came first. I had not anticipated this.

Interlude — “Level Up and Morning Warmth.”

I meet Seo-yeon at the department store Saturday morning because she says it's the most efficient for the basics, and efficiency is the frame we're both using to make this manageable.

The bras are first. She takes me to the section and stands back while a fitter does the measurement — I submit to this like I've submitted to the blood draw and the stall check and everything else today, as a procedure.

Caden wakes to the alarm's shrill beep, his hand slapping at the nightstand like it is a betrayal. The garment bags lie in a dark heap by the door.

He hesitates at the underwear drawer. The boxer briefs are folded neatly. He pulls them on, then dressed mechanically: the navy pencil skirt next, the wool cool against his thighs. Then the cream silk blouse, buttons fumbling under his fingers. The blazer comes last, shoulder seams settling perfectly without adjustment.