Nobody Signed the Retirement Card

How it begins

Caroline Dean remembered every signature on the card because she had bought the pen.

It was silver, cost twelve pounds and vanished before anyone reimbursed her.

Now the names were vanishing too.

She searched the company directory for the first signer, a woman who had worked in procurement for eleven years. No result. The second name returned an error. The third produced a help page explaining how to report inaccurate search terms.

Caroline corrected nothing. She opened payroll.

The same three employees had never existed.

Across the office, a cheerful message announced that the merger would bring everyone closer together. She closed it before the animation finished.

Simon Marsh arrived to ask why three access cards had failed at the loading entrance. He carried them in an envelope marked RETURNED BY HAND.

'You're looking pale,' he said.

'Who gave you those?'

'Three people who work here.'

'According to whom?'

He looked at the cards, then at her screen.

Caroline took the retirement card from her drawer. She had kept it because its intended recipient never came back for the collection. Everyone assumed somebody else had delivered it.

Simon recognized the signatures. He recognized the people behind them. He could describe where they parked and which one always reported loose stair treads before someone fell.

'Where are they now?' Caroline asked.

'Outside. Waiting for me.'

She stood so quickly that her chair struck the cabinet.

Through the office window, the loading entrance looked empty. Simon's envelope contained three cards, still warm from being held.

Caroline's computer chimed. A system notice asked her to approve the routine deletion of legacy personnel entries.

Below the request was her own authorization, time-stamped nine minutes in the future.

She pulled the network cable from the wall. For once, the most important work in payroll was refusing to let a process finish.